Bluestone by James Lasdun

Author:James Lasdun
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713874
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

HOPS

When the drunk at the bar of the Royal Oak

glared into my face,

gripping his pint like a hand grenade

from which he’d just taken the pin,

and told me what he told me,

the pang I felt

was like the split that goes on riving

all the way down the trunk

from one sound blow to the wedge,

as though it had been there forever, waiting.

That was the last time I felt at home

in a country pub, therefore England;

that, for me, being England—

that badger-set gloom

with its little church organ of bottles and pumps,

where a dim light from the sconce lamps

tools the unfakeable ease

on figures who belong there,

simply, set on their stools like chessmen,

as calmly set in their ways,

while over the burrowy stalings of pipe-smoke, yeast,

ancestral piss from the Gents

flares the bitter, freshening smell of hops,

feudal and vital; the inexhaustible gold dust

of the true Anglican host.

I worked on the neighboring farm one summer,

hop-picking with a crew of Gypsies.

The twelve-acre pole-and-wire trellises,

diagrammatic in spring,

had spurted their vines:

ten thousand living maypoles

in a haze of hop dust.

We hacked our way down the rows,

bundling tangled armfuls

into the stripping and sorting machines.

The clustering bracts

were sticky as flypaper:

little papery pouches of yellow snuff.

We stuffed them into burlap sacks,

then hauled them off to the ovens.

Two weeks into the season

the head-dazing, sour-gold smell

was in us like our own spoor;

we moved through the drifts of late summer

sweating it like the musk of hop gods.

We were the gods of that place if anyone was—

the stubble-gold shire streaming through us;

in sleep, crashed out under oak trees,

our sticky hands still sorting

the gold-filled, bunched, shrunken heads—

Albion juju;

I was full of it then:

Malory, Holinshed,

King John’s sunk ducats

sifting from gold to sand

to hop pollen …

I’m exorcising it now

with a backwoods ghost-fragrance

of birch beer and applejack

on a barn porch under black locusts

where thumb-sized hummingbirds

zoom through the crimson bee-balm

and whenever I move my pen

a fountain of goldfinches

splashes out of the bushes.

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