John Gohorry
'Lost'
“Some things are truly lost...” (Richard Wilbur, The Mind Reader)
That Summer we were lost to the whole world
but our open-air, camp-fire selves. An orchard
fruited with early damsons, and the fields
were cram-full of potatoes, so it was easy
to live off the land and to supplement
our stolen pickings with rabbits or fish
from the unsupervised backwaters. Hours on end
we lay on the ledgering bank, our lines low,
while in deep pools where the current circled
bream nudged and tormented us; hours on end
we tended our traps by the burrow holes
and runs in the meadow grass, then as dusk came
made fire with birch twigs to cook what we had caught
and what we had gathered. We watched the late glow
of the embers until cold stiffened our backs,
then wrapped ourselves in our small tent, and slept.
Between times, we exercised, daydreamed, read,
wrote verses. We made spears from brushwood staves,
and hurled them great distances, read Sophocles,
Hopkins, Jung, wrote philosophical lines
from the collective unconscious, eulogies
of the dappled woods, elegies for felled trees.
Or we lay in the sun, and I did not share thoughts
of a girl that might come riding from somewhere
on a motorbike stolen from helmeted bad boys,
my skinny scarecrow straight out of Baudelaire
lit with cheap rings, and a crown of crow’s feathers
tight round her naked brows. The river was cold
where we swam after hunting, the bed’s silt soft
and dark underfoot. On the surface, at eye level,
flies danced, circled, drowned in pools of despair.
I had a knife at that time with an eight-inch blade
that curved and then came to a point. The handle
was moulded to fit the palm, and a cross-piece
kept fingers and thumb protected. The knife slept
at my hip in a sheath held safe by a press-stud
looping over the cross-piece, but all day I used it.
The handle stunned fish, the blade sharpened spears,
fencing stakes, pencils, cut string, tyrant knots, withies.
Its point speared food from the fire, from the pans,
the flat of the blade carried flesh, fruit and tubers
to my mouth, past the edge of my hunger. I could send
the knife flying in cartwheels, bury the point
chest-high in a beech board at ten yard, or throw it
time after time, no more than a blade’s length outside
your stretched foot, until you could stretch no further.
Home from work, forty years later, I search my house
for the knife as I search my mind for the old days.
It’s not in the loft, garage, or cellar, not among
boxes of old manuscripts, wardrobes of old clothes.
If I look for ever, I know I won’t find it.