1.
And therefore as fact
After the wind dropped
People gathered
Say that they assembled
As a body of persons
Say perhaps that they were intimate
Against the land
Pictured
The way it lay
Walked through and drawn
As context
After the context
Laid out against the language
Left no option
People came.
Let’s call it walking
Towards the sun
With the sun and
Against the sun
Establishing a rhythm
As part of the process
In which the language
Might be thought to fold back
So that in talking
The terms return
And come back therefore
To the geography
The geography
To include Dartford
The geography to include
Gravesend.
To include people
Occupying ground
Laid out and present
As particulars
Named perhaps
As part of the process
In which the magpie
Chatters back
As a kind of resolution
Observed as sound
Extrapolated out
In the name of politics
Carried
As people walk
Laid out against the sun
Across an ancient track.
As perhaps the morning sets out
And therefore the question forms
In walking
Since this is a dynamic
As the river widens
People watching the postindustrial
Fall into view
Articulating
The way things go
Held out
Against the old dichotomy
Of sky set out against water
Establishing the landscape
As the ground curves back
As a kind of setting
Where people start
Or given perhaps
As the basis
Of an understanding
Taken
Under advisement
That walking is the last act.
Or if not final maybe
Taken back
The way a person
Registers experience
Witness perhaps
As part of the process
And then periodically
Taking stock
As the narrative
Draws back ground
And each time it is told
The geography alters
Adjusted again
Towards the horizon
As if in walking
They might not stop.
As if the way that people came
Or the way perhaps they
Carried their belongings
As the day lengthened
Towards a geography
No longer conceivable as map
Just people
Against the ground
Establishing terms
Against the discourse
Watchful
Where the bodies
Against the language
Drop.
2.
Let me clarify
This is a local action
Like the morning
In which the bird song
Illuminates
The sky
Situated
Against the light
And setting out
A whole arrangement
Of people
Registered present
Establishing a discourse
The way the landscape lies.
To constellate the terms
I mean that people
Constitute
The terms
Since it is plain
In the present moment
That to walk
Is to act
Unfold
What people know
Strung out clear
Across the new geography
Witness against the border
Drawing the language
Back.
To a bearing
We might sustain
Written into the principle
Of movement
I name Rashid in this context
I name Kam
Visibly eloquent
Against the light
And for all the world
Walking
Plainly
By way of evidence
Carrying the argument with them.
That a), people walk
Which is how the emphasis falls
In demonstration
Each step
A kind of guidance
So that the language
Might know the way
Not as discourse exactly
Just as fact
As a person steps up
Before the world.
But b), that standing
Was suddenly subject
To recognition.
So that a person
Rendered vulnerable
Say for instance walking across a field
Or in a city
Conscious exclusively
That the narrative had changed
Darkened
Out of sight
Picking up just
Minimal possessions
Visible
In outline
Standing where the discourse
Ends.
Pictured
At the edge
Stationed
Where we calculate
Belonging
So that we woke one morning
Against the tree line
Only to find our horizon
Had been reset
The whole argument
Laid out as space
And persons figured
In isolation
Stipulated
Outside the language.
It was for this
That people walked.
That they gathered
And then
We slept
And the way the morning
Becomes an intention
Startled
Against the horizon
People followed each other
Across the plain
Out with
Not so much
Think of it like
Gathering to dance
Movement
Following movement
Different
Same.
3.
It comes back to an assertion:
That a person present
Carries an entitlement
Before the law
Laid down
Against the ground
Breathing openly
And softly
Sleeping
Among persons
Till the morning
Sounds.
Witness
The walk
Laid out evenly
Against the landscape
Articulated
Like a syntax
That would begin to form
Trees
Lined up against the light
People openly
And softly
Poised
Like a proposition
Undeniable
Before the law.
Rendered present
Simply as fact
Like saying
“These trees are amazing”
Linked intricately
Against an environment
Laid out equally
Against the light
Which walking
I think maybe we understand
This person brave
And surely beautiful
Conditioned
By the earth’s dependency
Bearing geography
As political fact.
I think we recognize
This fact.
Maybe the way
A landscape
Registers its impression.
The way a person
Resting intermittently
Breathes heavily
Against the ground
Intimately even
As we start out
Leaving only the trees
Behind us
Exemplary of nothing
Only the way
A context sounds.
That people
Piece into place
Figure out
A network of prepositions
That one day
Somebody
Might stand before the law
In the entirety of what they know
Call it
Degree zero
Testify
Uninterrupted
To the magnitude of their condition.
Towards which we angle against the land.
Standing by the coast in its impossible delicacy.
Witnessing
As water and sand
Give way
The ground
On which we sleep
People dreaming again
Towards tomorrow
All those
Complicated possibilities
That only people
Keep.
4.
Which is where perhaps
As such
With people recognized
As such
In the oldest action
Which we might call walking
People in solidarity
Along an ancient track
Structured
By the act
Which as the frequency leveled
We knew as listening
The language
As it is spoken
Called back.
I say it quietly
Knowing that only you
Will listen
Inward with the process
Surely for long enough
Intimate with the grounds
That only a complex
Of qualities
Susceptible always to alteration
Approximates a person
As such
Like love
Which varies
Both in its degree
As in its intensity
I call on Seth
In his magnificent eloquence
To teach us about love
Patience
Folded through a life
Articulated plainly and with dignity
Broken sometimes
Against the language
Even as it is uttered
Called back.
So that to walk
With stories
Is to come back to the geography
The ground
A person rests on
Arched backwards towards the sky
Co-ordinated
Not by love
But by memories of necessity
Communicated against the language
The way the landscape lies.
With people situated
As such
And therefore qualified
As such
Intimating
As part of the process
A context equal to the scale
Or say the depth
Or say the extent
Or say just the physical intensity
Of a geography underwritten
By a person’s claim.
Pictured as a curve back towards the sun.
And pictured as people walking
Towards the sun.
Grounded
In their solidarity
By an ancient track
As the terms are underscored
Written down as stones thereby
And rocks
People
Moving forwards
Carrying the language
Back.
5.
But this is not a proposition
The rocks seal
Nothing
However sweetly
In the sunshine
A person leans back
From the Latin
To persuade
As in soote
Svadu
Echoed sweetly
Against the language
The walk
Is an act.
Physically disposed
Since what we have here is
Figures in a Landscape
Occupied as part of the process not
With where the franchise stops
Just following a line
Which in its disposition today
Constitutes an argument
Visible from the city
Dropping from the ridge
As it approaches the coast.
Capable of myth
But this is not mythography
No predecession
Completing a sequence
Situating a person
Where they come to stand
Just bearings
In the middle of an act
Taken with the person
You happened to stand next to
Picturing
The possibilities
Plainly visible in relation to the land.
And therefore figured
In relation to a walk
And therefore figuring the landscape
In relation to a walk
Which is to say a person
Rendered present among persons
Figuring their relation
As a collective act
As in a frequency
Folded out toward the sound
In all its complexity
Unmistakable as bird song
People
Set out openly against the discourse
Picturing a language
Rendered capable of tact.
And sometimes equally laid out.
And not in any particular sequence.
Intervening
As part of the process
Each one following
As the names come through
Some voice
Calling people back
Bearing almost exactly perhaps
The emphasis necessary
Sweetly
With respect
What is it
That you do
Walk Song was first published by Equipage, Cambridge, UK in 2018, and is reprinted here by kind permission.
David Herd’s collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012), Outwith (Bookthug 2012), and Through (Carcanet, 2016). He has given readings and lectures in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, India, Italy, Poland, the USA and the UK, and his poems, essays and reviews have been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers. He is the author of John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000), Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature (2007), and the editor of Contemporary Olson (2015). His recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Detention Unlocked, Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax, PN Review and the TLS. He is a co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales and Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent.