Poems

There was a great elm in Drummer Evans’ garden.
Half of his house it kept in daylight shadow; all summer
A chaffinch sang in its highest branches, swinging
In an invisible cage its music was so local.
Drummer dribbled it crumbs from his fingers
As he sat on a log, his back to the elm trunk,
One slow leg straight before him, and his yellow hand,
His fingers, playing intricate patterns on his other knee.
He was small, his eyes looked upward always.
His lace was mild and ivory, composed and smooth.
He wore a black suit and a very wide hat and he called
All women Mrs. Jones, because it was easier.
I went to him Tuesdays and Saturdays, for lessons.

My kettle-drum set on its three-legged stand,
He would flick its resonance with a finger and say,
“Now boy, two with each hand, away you go; and
Don’t let the drumstick tamp.” Tamp was a word for bounce,
We always used it. Away I’d go, two with each hand,
Back of the wrists to the skin, sticks held lightly,
And clumsily double beat with each hack fist,
Tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, until that unskilled knock
Snarled in my tired arms and stuttered out.
I don’t remember getting any better, but he’d nod,
Still for a while his drumming hand, and smile,
And say, “Again.”
When I could play no more he’d take the sticks
And give to my stubborn drum a pliant eloquence.
I’d leave then. The bird was nearly always singing.
It never rained in Drummer Evans’ garden.

Because I knew that I would never make
On an echoing hull those perfect measures
Heard in my head as I marched at the head of armies
Or rattling between the beat of my running heels,
I left the Drummer.
It was an idle sun
Recalled his garden, and an unclaimed bird
Singing from a thorn his tame bird’s song
That brought the old man back,
Martial hands parading and muttering.
I went by the river’s edge and stone bridge
To his thundering cottage.

For the air for half a mile was rhythmical thunder.
Roll after roll of exact, reverberant challenge,
The flames of history unfurled their names from my books,
Agincourt, Malplaquet, Waterloo, Corunna,
And I reached at a gasp the Drummer’s beleaguered garden.

Ringed by standing friends at the rim of his anger,
He stood strapped for war from the fury of their kindness,
Striking his sharp refusal of all pity
The women offered. “Come on,” they called,
“Ah, come on Mr. Evans.”
But he swept them away with the glory of his drumfire,
Hands flying high in volleys of retaliation.
The tree held its sunlight like a flag of honor
And helpless, uniformed men spoke out to him softly;
But his side-drum returned defiance for this old man
Whose proud skill told us he was Drummer Evans,
No common mister to be hauled to the Poorhouse.

He would open the loft early
And his soft-voiced flock
Turned in the morning
Like a bird with a hundred wings.

On workless days he would sing
Freely, and girls in neighboring
Backyards applauded him
With joined choruses and the frankness of their smiles.

At evening he would signal in his pigeons.
When I began to whistle I learned this call;
A ladder of falling notes across the bars as the birds
Folded themselves home.

We spent our boyhoods throwing him insults
And stones, but they bounced off his round dignity.
Later we spoke to him with careful, adolescent seriousness
While our friends tied “Little Demons” to his coattails.

He leaped through the Police Station doorway
Yelling “Jesus!” at every explosion.
His face was Jamaican black.
We avoided him if we were alone.

One of the Dowlais boys, home from the Irish Guards,
Brought with him an exotic Chinese wife.
Harry was appalled. “Foreigners,” he said,
“Bloody foreigners in our country!”

His father had drunk away many acres
And a whole flock of mountain sheep.
He had been tall, red-bearded, strong as legend,
Ridden to market on a pony much too small,

But John Williams was deliberately not like this.
Mild and silver from his youth,
He had refused even to grow very much.
At fourteen I was inches over his eighty years.

The day he was eighty we leaned on his gate
And he told me of his fading eyes.
There was a signpost on the horizon opposite
He could scarcely see. Staring at that far

Mountain-edge, I could see only the dissolving
Motes of the air. But he had turned away.
“When you are old,” he said, “when you are old
You know where all the fingerposts are.”