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Swimming Chenango Lake

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by Charles Tomlinson




  CHARLES TOMLINSON

  Swimming Chenango Lake

  SELECTED POEMS

  edited by David Morley

  Dedication

  to Brenda Tomlinson

  When you wrote to tell of your arrival,

  It was midnight, you said, and knew

  In wishing me Goodnight that I

  Would have been long abed. And that was true.

  I was dreaming your way for you, my dear,

  Freed of the mist that followed the snow here,

  And yet it followed you (within my dream, at least)

  Nor could I close my dreaming eye

  To the thought of further snow

  Widening the landscape as it sought

  The planes and ledges of your moorland drive.

  I saw a scene climb up around you

  That whiteness had marked out and multiplied

  With a thousand touches beyond the green

  And calculable expectations summer in such a place

  Might breed in one. My eye took in

  Close-to, among the vastnesses you passed unharmed,

  The shapes the frozen haze hung on the furze

  Like scattered necklaces the frost had caught

  Half-unthreaded in their fall. It must have been

  The firm prints of your midnight pen

  Over my fantasia of snow, told you were safe,

  Turning the threats from near and far

  To images of beauty we might share

  As we shared my dream that now

  Flowed to the guiding motion of your hand,

  As though through the silence of propitious dark

  It had reached out to touch me across sleeping England.

  from ‘Winter Journey’, The Return (1987)

  Acknowledgements

  The editor thanks Anne Ashworth, Ian Brinton, John Greening, Peter Larkin, Michael Schmidt, Justine and Juliet Tomlinson, and William Wootton for their contributions to the realisation of this book. The largest debt of gratitude is to Brenda Tomlinson, without whom it would not exist.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  to Brenda Tomlinson

  Acknowledgements

  SELECTED POEMS

  Prologue

  Swimming Chenango Lake

  Relations and Contraries (1951)

  Poem

  The Necklace (1955, 1966)

  Aesthetic

  Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting

  Sea Change

  The Art of Poetry

  Fiascherino

  Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960)

  The Atlantic

  Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole

  How Still the Hawk

  Glass Grain

  Tramontana at Lerici

  Paring the Apple

  More Foreign Cities

  A Meditation on John Constable

  Farewell to Van Gogh

  Cézanne at Aix

  At Holwell Farm

  Civilities of Lamplight

  Fire in a Dark Landscape

  A Peopled Landscape (1963)

  Winter-Piece

  The Farmer’s Wife: At Fostons Ash

  The Hand at Callow Hill Farm

  The Picture of J.T. in a Prospect of Stone

  Up at La Serra

  Head Hewn with an Axe

  American Scenes and Other Poems (1966)

  The Snow Fences

  A Given Grace

  Arizona Desert

  Arroyo Seco

  Ute Mountain

  Maine Winter

  The Well

  On a Mexican Straw Christ

  The Oaxaca Bus

  Weeper in Jalisco

  Small Action Poem

  The Way of a World (1969)

  Prometheus

  Eden

  Assassin

  Against Extremity

  The Way of a World

  Descartes and the Stove

  On the Principle of Blowclocks

  Words for the Madrigalist

  Arroyo Hondo

  A Sense of Distance

  The Fox Gallery

  To be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant

  Oppositions

  Skullshapes

  The Chances of Rhyme

  Written on Water (1972)

  On Water

  Stone Speech

  Variation on Paz

  The Compact: At Volterra

  Ariadne and the Minotaur

  Hawks

  Autumn Piece

  Event

  The Way In and Other Poems (1974)

  The Way In

  At Stoke

  The Marl Pits

  Class

  The Rich

  After a Death

  Hyphens

  Hill Walk

  The Shaft (1978)

  Charlotte Corday

  Marat Dead

  For Danton

  Casarola

  The Faring

  A Night at the Opera

  Mushrooms

  The Gap

  In Arden

  The Shaft

  Translating the Birds

  The Flood (1981)

  Snow Signs

  Their Voices Rang

  For Miriam

  Hay

  Under the Bridge

  San Fruttuoso

  Above Carrara

  Fireflies

  Instead of an Essay

  The Littleton Whale

  The Flood

  Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984)

  Above Manhattan

  All Afternoon

  At the Trade Center

  To Ivor Gurney

  Black Brook

  Poem for my Father

  The Beech

  Night Fishers

  The Sound of Time

  The Return (1987)

  In the Borghese Gardens

  In San Clemente

  The Return

  Catacomb

  In Memory of George Oppen

  At Huexotla

  A Rose for Janet

  Ararat

  Annunciations (1989)

  Annunciation

  The Plaza

  The House in the Quarry

  At the Autumn Equinox

  The Butterflies

  Chance

  The Door in the Wall (1992)

  Paris in Sixty-Nine

  Blaubeuren

  The Door in the Wall

  Geese Going South

  Picking Mushrooms by Moonlight

  Jubilation (1995)

  Down from Colonnata

  Jubilación

  The Shadow

  Walks

  The Vineyard above the Sea (1999)

  The Vineyard Above the Sea

  Drawing Down the Moon

  The First Death

  In Memoriam Ángel Crespo (1926–1995)

  By Night

  Skywriting (2003)

  Skywriting

  Death of a Poet

  Cotswold Journey

  If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper

  Cracks in the Universe (2006)

  Above the City

  Bread and Stone

  A Rose from Fronteira

  The Holy Man

  Eden

  Epilogue

  The Door

  Afterword by David Morley

  About the Author

  Carcanet Classics include

  Copyright

  Selected Poems

  Prologue

  Swimming Chenango Lake

  Winter will bar the swimmer soon.

  He reads the water’s autumnal hesitations

  A wealth
of ways: it is jarred,

  It is astir already despite its steadiness,

  Where the first leaves at the first

  Tremor of the morning air have dropped

  Anticipating him, launching their imprints

  Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles.

  There is a geometry of water, for this

  Squares off the clouds’ redundances

  And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere

  All angles and elongations: every tree

  Appears a cypress as it stretches there

  And every bush that shows the season,

  A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not

  A fantasia of distorting forms, but each

  Liquid variation answerable to the theme

  It makes away from, plays before:

  It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow.

  But he has looked long enough, and now

  Body must recall the eye to its dependence

  As he scissors the waterscape apart

  And sways it to tatters. Its coldness

  Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp,

  For to swim is also to take hold

  On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace

  And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.

  He reaches in-and-through to that space

  The body is heir to, making a where

  In water, a possession to be relinquished

  Willingly at each stroke. The image he has torn

  Flows-to behind him, healing itself,

  Lifting and lengthening, splayed like the feathers

  Down an immense wing whose darkening spread

  Shadows his solitariness: alone, he is unnamed

  By this baptism, where only Chenango bears a name

  In a lost language he begins to construe –

  A speech of densities and derisions, of half-

  Replies to the questions his body must frame

  Frogwise across the all but penetrable element.

  Human, he fronts it and, human, he draws back

  From the interior cold, the mercilessness

  That yet shows a kind of mercy sustaining him.

  The last sun of the year is drying his skin

  Above a surface a mere mosaic of tiny shatterings,

  Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing obsidian

  The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping.

  from The Way of a World (1969)

  Relations and Contraries (1951)

  Poem

  Wakening with the window over fields

  To the coin-clear harness-jingle as a float

  Clips by, and each succeeding hoof fall, now remote,

  Breaks clean and frost-sharp on the unstopped ear.

  The hooves describe an arabesque on space,

  A dotted line in sound that falls and rises

  As the cart goes by, recedes, turns to retrace

  Its way back through the unawakened village.

  And space vibrates, enlarges with the sound;

  Though space is soundless, yet creates

  From very soundlessness a ground

  To counterstress the lilting hoof fall as it breaks.

  The Necklace (1955, 1966)

  Aesthetic

  Reality is to be sought, not in concrete,

  But in space made articulate:

  The shore, for instance,

  Spreading between wall and wall;

  The sea-voice

  Tearing the silence from the silence.

  Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting

  I

  Warm flute on the cold snow

  Lays amber in sound.

  II

  Against brushed cymbal

  Grounds yellow on green,

  Amber on tinkling ice.

  III

  The sage beneath the waterfall

  Numbers the blessing of a flute;

  Water lets down

  Exploding silk.

  IV

  The hiss of raffia,

  The thin string scraped with the back of the bow

  Are not more bat-like

  Than the gusty bamboos

  Against a flute.

  V

  Pine-scent

  In snow-clearness

  Is not more exactly counterpointed

  Than the creak of trodden snow

  Against a flute.

  VI

  The outline of the water-dragon

  Is not embroidered with so intricate a thread

  As that with which the flute

  Defines the tangible borders of a mood.

  VII

  The flute in summer makes streams of ice:

  In winter it grows hospitable.

  VIII

  In mist, also, a flute is cold

  Beside a flute in snow.

  IX

  Degrees of comparison

  Go with differing conditions:

  Sunlight mellows lichens,

  Whereas snow mellows the flute.

  Sea Change

  To define the sea –

  We change our opinions

  With the changing light.

  Light struggles with colour:

  A quincunx

  Of five stones, a white

  Opal threatened by emeralds.

  The sea is uneasy marble.

  The sea is green silk.

  The sea is blue mud, churned

  By the insistence of wind.

  Beneath dawn a sardonyx may be cut from it

  In white layers laced with a carnelian orange,

  A leek- or apple-green chalcedony

  Hewn in the cold light.

  Illustration is white wine

  Floating in a saucer of ground glass

  On a pedestal of cut glass:

  A static instance, therefore untrue.

  The Art of Poetry

  At first, the mind feels bruised.

  The light makes white holes through the black foliage

  Or mist hides everything that is not itself.

  But how shall one say so? –

  The fact being, that when the truth is not good enough

  We exaggerate. Proportions

  Matter. It is difficult to get them right.

  There must be nothing

  Superfluous, nothing which is not elegant

  And nothing which is if it is merely that.

  This green twilight has violet borders.

  Yellow butterflies

  Nervously transferring themselves

  From scarlet to bronze flowers

  Disappear as the evening appears.

  Fiascherino

  Over an ash-fawn beach fronting a sea which keeps

  Rolling and unrolling, lifting

  The green fringes from submerged rocks

  On its way in, and, on its way out

  Dropping them again, the light

  Squanders itself, a saffron morning

  Advances among foam and stones, sticks

  Clotted with black naphtha

  And frayed to the newly carved

  Fresh white of chicken flesh.

  One leans from the cliff-top. Height

  Distances like an inverted glass; the shore

  Is diminished but concentrated, jewelled

  With the clarity of warm colours

  That, seen more nearly, would dissipate

  Into masses. The map-like interplay

  Of sea-light against shadow

  And the mottled close-up of wet rocks

  Drying themselves in the hot air

  Are lost to us. Content with our portion,

  Where, we ask ourselves, is the end of all this

  Variety that follows us? Glare

  Pierces muslin; its broken rays

  Hovering in trembling filaments

  Glance on the ceiling with no more substance

  Than a bee’s wing. Thickening, theser />
  Hang down over the pink walls

  In green bars, and, flickering between them,

  A moving fan of two colours,

  The sea unrolls and rolls itself into the low room.

  Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960)

  The Atlantic

  Launched into an opposing wind, hangs

  Grappled beneath the onrush,

  And there, lifts, curling in spume,

  Unlocks, drops from that hold

  Over and shoreward. The beach receives it,

  A whitening line, collapsing

  Powdering-off down its broken length;

  Then, curded, shallow, heavy

  With clustering bubbles, it nears

  In a slow sheet that must climb

  Relinquishing its power, upward

  Across tilted sand. Unravelled now

  And the shore, under its lucid pane,

  Clear to the sight, it is spent:

  The sun rocks there, as the netted ripple

  Into whose skeins the motion threads it

  Glances athwart a bed, honeycombed

  By heaving stones. Neither survives the instant

  But is caught back, and leaves, like the after-image

  Released from the floor of a now different mind,

  A quick gold, dyeing the uncovering beach

  With sunglaze. That which we were,

  Confronted by all that we are not,

  Grasps in subservience its replenishment.

  Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole

  The heads, impenetrable

  And the slow bulk

  Soundless and stooping,

  A white darkness – burdened

  Only by sun, and not

  By the matchwood yoke –

  They groove in ease

  The meadow through which they pace

  Tractable. It is as if

  Fresh from the escape,

 

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