The Porch Light
Birchwood ankle-deep in leafy mulch:
borrowed green of a buried can of Grolsch,
all living streams iced over or departed;
wrecks of chestnuts echoing, empty-hearted,
hollow victories woodpeckers tap
on trunks picked open for a place to sleep.
The breeze’s whistling summons and refines
itself to a buzzard’s wheep beyond the pines,
where arrowheads of geese above the farm
lock onto, lose their target and reform.
Eggbox hills that line the far horizon
draw a ribbon out of slowly rising
tracks that circle straggling round the village
millponds, quarries, setts, a gateless gate-lodge
keeping nothing in or out. A dipper
breasts the Don and wades in deep and deeper;
a porch light glimpsed among trees might be my house.
The path wants feet, it will not matter whose.
Whose woods these are I couldn’t claim to know,
the way I go all ways, on in back through.
There’s an intriguing mix of precise placing and displacement in this poem from David Wheatley’s most recent collection, The President of Planet Earth. At a first reading, you might configure into it the Irish poet’s own relocations, perhaps the move from from England to Scotland, but the emphasis is clearly not on identifying that porch light as home. Wheatley, in his freedom of intellectual movement, inherits a multitude of settings and directions; this poem is interested in the ways location, literal and metaphorical, can be kept open – “a gateless gate-lodge/ keeping nothing in or out.”
Paradoxically, the elasticity extends to the form, where closure is somehow held off, and the certainty of metre and rhyme is faintly blurred by the leisurely accumulation of visual detail. Initially, these details are enlisted to summon wintriness and dereliction, perhaps with a political edge in the reference to Yeats’s Easter, 1916 in line three. (“Hearts with one purpose alone/ Through summer and winter seem/ Enchanted to a stone/ To trouble the living stream”.
Wheatley’s end rhymes and para-rhymes may evoke pathos (departed/ empty-hearted), comedy (mulch/Grolsch), or follow an evocative mutation like that of “horizon” into “slowly rising”. Not least of its music is provided by the birds observed or overheard. The woodpeckers are first heard tapping empty chestnut cases; then, in a wonderfully attentive act of listening: “[T]the breeze’s whistling summons and refines / itself to a buzzard’s wheep…” That wheep, happily not italicised, is a note picked up in the “dipper / deep / deeper” triad later on.
The River Don in the poem is probably this Scottish one, though a quiet Russian echo is unavoidable, with the title of Wheatley’s collection coming from the poet Velimir Khlebnikov. The Russian Futurist had a grand vision of harmonious existence among the species; it might be that The Porch Light provides a small map of such a place.
Frost’s “road not taken” casts a shadow, but in Wheatley’s pastoral all roads, “all ways” seem possible. The poem’s final list of sturdily monosyllabic prepositions (“on in back through”) might even be a reminder of Keats’s advice to poets, to make a home in doubts and uncertainties. There is a sense that the poet has reached the unidentifiable place where poems begin.
