‘Somebody Calls You!’

Awake like a rifle-shot! I lunge for light, Only to surface in the uncontoured dawn, A web of darkness watered with faint grey. Curt scraps of bird-song rinse my face like spray. But all I hear are three violent words: ‘Somebody calls you!’ Who, I cannot tell, Though the whole house hums with it, like a great bell Resonating over the crochets of the birds.

I swing round. No, she lies there, slight with sleep, Her dreamless breathing steady as a tide; Across the landing, through the open doors, Bundling my gown about me hurriedly, Barefoot (high summer warms the darkened floors) . . . The lesser image of her mother lies Opulent with smallness. It is not her that cries ‘ I am calling, I am calling yoir!’ Who is that I?

The pets?-Small female, big adopted son, Timid half-stray that sleeps beneath my desk, Each rears its head, purrs sagely, sleeps again; And I still sizzle with wakefulness: a grotesque, A dreadful vehemence, calling ‘ You-you-you !’ Is the house burning? I sniff . . . only the flowers, (Giant primroses that sheen the deep warm hours). The street? . . . an asphalt void: dawn is turning it blue.

And 1 stand in the colourless volumes of the house Baffled. Still, still, the signal flares, Envelopes, consumes me. Vast and pendulous, It globes its significance out of the ferocious air, Until I fathom its coming . . . a tide that veers And masses in slow flow across the whole Ocean haunting about our daily bowl Where dawn is dissolving its glassy frontiers.

Some man or woman, how-ling through the night, Half-crazed but radiant with grief, fear or pain, Spurted out, it may be, their great need, so as to make This fiery swoop, down on a sleeping man, Crackling him, thus Jack-in-thebox, awake: But helplessly . . . a lonely jet of fire Jumbling and wandering, wild of its course, among A city’s million curtained sleepers, strung Along their streets like birds along a wire.

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Yet in its unguided and baffled pigeoning Lay the clear authenticity of fist light, And the first man. And as the first light poured Tenuously, about that arriving wing, Thresholds were falling, communications restored. The web was of men, too, watered with faint grey Of cloud-like powers, haunting the edges of day: Mysterious openings, a richness of empty air, A younger world, resurrecting into my own.

Back in my bed, in the slow swim upward of dawn, Suddenly the signal checked; and as I lay, I was snuffed out, as if by a great hand Gentle as the roof: a cavatina of sleep Placid as a broad field of matured corn. TO what desperate creature, that uttered that agonized call Down a hospital corridor, wave-dashed shore, prison wall, Suddenly what strait was crossed, door found,--child born?

JOHN HOLLOWAY

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