They consent to submission,
The debris of captivity
Still clinging there
Unnoticed behind those backs:
‘But we submit’ – the tenor
Unambiguous in that stride
Of even confidence –
‘Giving and not conceding
Your premises. Work
Is necessary, therefore –’
(With an unsevered motion
Holding the pauses
Between stride and stride)
‘We will be useful
But we will not be swift: now
Follow us for your improvement
And at our pace.’ This calm
Bred from this strength, and the reality
Broaching no such discussion,
The man will follow, each
As the other’s servant
Content to remain content.
How Still the Hawk
How still the hawk
Hangs innocent above
Its native wood:
Distance, that purifies the act
Of all intent, has graced
Intent with beauty.
Beauty must lie
As innocence must harm
Whose end (sited,
Held) is naked
Like the map it cowers on.
And the doom drops:
Plummet of peace
To him who does not share
The nearness and the need,
The shrivelled circle
Of magnetic fear.
Glass Grain
The glare goes down. The metal of a molten pane
Cast on the wall with red light burning through,
Holds in its firm, disordered square, the shifting strands
The glass conceals, till (splitting sun) it dances
Lanterns in lanes of light its own streaked image.
Like combed-down hair. Like weathered wood, where
Line, running with, crowds on line and swaying
Rounding each knot, yet still keeps keen
The perfect parallel. Like… in likes, what do we look for?
Distinctions? That, but not that in sum. Think of the fugue’s theme:
After inversions and divisions, doors
That no keys can open, cornered conceits
Apprehensions, all ways of knowledge past,
Eden comes round again, the motive dips
Back to its shapely self, its naked nature
Clothed by comparison alone – related. We ask
No less, watching suggestions that a beam selects
From wood, from water, from a muslin-weave,
Swerving across our window, on our wall
(Transparency teased out) the grain of glass.
Tramontana at Lerici
Today, should you let fall a glass it would
Disintegrate, played off with such keenness
Against the cold’s resonance (the sounds
Hard, separate and distinct, dropping away
In a diminishing cadence) that you might swear
This was the imitation of glass falling.
Leaf-dapples sharpen. Emboldened by this clarity
The minds of artificers would turn prismatic,
Running on lace perforated in crisp wafers
That could cut like steel. Constitutions,
Drafted under this fecund chill, would be annulled
For the strictness of their equity, the moderation of their pity.
At evening, one is alarmed by such definition
In as many lost greens as one will give glances to recover,
As many again which the landscape
Absorbing into the steady dusk, condenses
From aquamarine to that slow indigo-pitch
Where the light and twilight abandon themselves.
And the chill grows. In this air
Unfit for politicians and romantics
Dark hardens from blue, effacing the windows:
A tangible block, it will be no accessory
To that which does not concern it. One is ignored
By so much cold suspended in so much night.
Paring the Apple
There are portraits and still-lifes.
And there is paring the apple.
And then? Paring it slowly,
From under cool-yellow
Cold-white emerging. And …?
The spring of concentric peel
Unwinding off white,
The blade hidden, dividing.
There are portraits and still-lifes
And the first, because ‘human’
Does not excel the second, and
Neither is less weighted
With a human gesture, than paring the apple
With a human stillness.
The cool blade
Severs between coolness, apple-rind
Compelling a recognition.
More Foreign Cities
Nobody wants any more poems about foreign cities…
(From a recent disquisition on poetics)
Not forgetting Ko-jen, that
Musical city (it has
Few buildings and annexes
Space by combating silence),
There is Fiordiligi, its sun-changes
Against walls of transparent stone
Unsettling all preconception – a city
For architects (they are taught
By casting their nets
Into those moving shoals); and there is
Kairouan, whose lit space
So slides into and fits
The stone masses, one would doubt
Which was the more solid
Unless, folding back
Gold segments out of the white
Pith globe of a quartered orange,
One may learn perhaps
To read such perspectives. At Luna
There is a city of bridges, where
Even the inhabitants are mindful
Of a shared privilege: a bridge
Does not exist for its own sake.
It commands vacancy.
A Meditation on John Constable
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?
John Constable, The History of Landscape Painting
He replied to his own question, and with the unmannered
Exactness of art; enriched his premises
By confirming his practice: the labour of observation
In face of meteorological fact. Clouds
Followed by others, temper the sun in passing
Over and off it. Massed darks
Blotting it back, scattered and mellowed shafts
Break damply out of them, until the source
Unmasks, floods its retreating bank
With raw fire. One perceives (though scarcely)
The remnant clouds trailing across it
In rags, and thinned to a gauze.
But the next will dam it. They loom past
And narrow its blaze. It shrinks to a crescent
Crushed out, a still lengthening ooze
As the mass thickens, though cannot exclude
Its silvered-yellow. The eclipse is sudden,
Seen first on the darkening grass, then complete
In a covered sky.
Facts. And what are they?
He admired accidents, because governed by laws,
Representing them (since the illusion was not his end)
As governed by feeling. The end is our approval
Freely accorded, the illusion persuading us
That it exists as a human image. Caught
By a wavering sun, or under a wind
Which moistening among the outlines of banked foliage
Prepares to dissolve them, it must grow constant;
Though there,
ruffling and parted, the disturbed
Trees let through the distance, like white fog
Into their broken ranks. It must persuade
And with a constancy, not to be swept back
To reveal what it half-conceals. Art is itself
Once we accept it. The day veers. He would have judged
Exactly in such a light, that strides down
Over the quick stains of cloud-shadows
Expunged now, by its conflagration of colour.
A descriptive painter? If delight
Describes, which wrings from the brush
The errors of a mind, so tempered,
It can forgo all pathos; for what he saw
Discovered what he was, and the hand – unswayed
By the dictation of a single sense –
Bodied the accurate and total knowledge
In a calligraphy of present pleasure. Art
Is complete when it is human. It is human
Once the looped pigments, the pin-heads of light
Securing space under their deft restrictions
Convince, as the index of a possible passion,
As the adequate gauge, both of the passion
And its object. The artist lies
For the improvement of truth. Believe him.
Farewell to Van Gogh
The quiet deepens. You will not persuade
One leaf of the accomplished, steady, darkening
Chestnut-tower to displace itself
With more of violence than the air supplies
When, gathering dusk, the pond brims evenly
And we must be content with stillness.
Unhastening, daylight withdraws from us its shapes
Into their central calm. Stone by stone
Your rhetoric is dispersed until the earth
Becomes once more the earth, the leaves
A sharp partition against cooling blue.
Farewell, and for your instructive frenzy
Gratitude. The world does not end tonight
And the fruit that we shall pick tomorrow
Await us, weighing the unstripped bough.
Cézanne at Aix
And the mountain: each day
Immobile like fruit. Unlike, also
– Because irreducible, because
Neither a component of the delicious
And therefore questionable,
Nor distracted (as the sitter)
By his own pose and, therefore,
Doubly to be questioned: it is not
Posed. It is. Untaught
Unalterable, a stone bridgehead
To that which is tangible
Because unfelt before. There
In its weathered weight
Its silence silences, a presence
Which does not present itself.
At Holwell Farm
It is a quality of air, a temperate sharpness
Causes an autumn fire to burn compact,
To cast from a shapely and unrifted core
Its steady brightness. A kindred flame
Gathers within the stone, and such a season
Fosters, then frees it in a single glow:
Pears by the wall and stone as ripe as pears
Under the shell-hood’s cornice; the door’s
Bright oak, the windows’ slim-cut frames
Are of an equal whiteness. Crude stone
By a canopy of shell, each complements
In opposition, each is bound
Into a pattern of utilities – this farm
Also a house, this house a dwelling.
Rooted in more than earth, to dwell
Is to discern the Eden image, to grasp
In a given place and guard it well
Shielded in stone. Whether piety
Be natural, is neither the poet’s
Nor the builder’s story, but a quality of air,
Such as surrounds and shapes an autumn fire
Bringing these sharp disparities to bear.
Civilities of Lamplight
Without excess (no galaxies
Gauds, illiterate exclamations)
It betokens haven,
An ordering, the darkness held
But not dismissed. One man
Alone with his single light
Wading obscurity refines the instance,
Hollows the hedge-bound track, a sealed
Furrow on dark, closing behind him.
Fire in a Dark Landscape
And where it falls, a quality
Not of the night, but of the mind
As when, on the moonlit roofs,
A counterfeit snow
Whitely deceives us. And yet…
It is the meeting, of light
With dark, challenges the memory
To reveal itself, in an unfamiliar form,
As here: red branches
Into a transparency
In liquid motion, the winds’
Chimera of silk, twisting
Thickened with amber shadows,
A quality, not of the mind
But of fire on darkness.
A Peopled Landscape (1963)
Winter-Piece
You wake, all windows blind – embattled sprays
grained on the medieval glass.
Gates snap like gunshot
as you handle them. Five-barred fragility
sets flying fifteen rooks who go together
silently ravenous above this winter-piece
that will not feed them. They alight
beyond, scavenging, missing everything
but the bladed atmosphere, the white resistance.
Ruts with iron flanges track
through a hard decay
where you discern once more
oak-leaf by hawthorn, for the frost
rewhets their edges. In a perfect web
blanched along each spoke
and circle of its woven wheel,
the spider hangs, grasp unbroken
and death-masked in cold. Returning
you see the house glint-out behind
its holed and ragged glaze,
frost-fronds all streaming.
The Farmer’s Wife: At Fostons Ash
Scent
from the apple-loft!
I smelt it and I saw
in thought
behind the oak
that cupboards all your wine
the store in maturation
webbed
and waiting.
There
we paused in talk,
the labyrinth of lofts
above us and the stair
beneath, bound
for a labyrinth of cellars.
Everywhere
as darkness
leaned and loomed
the light was crossing it
or travelled through
the doors you opened
into rooms that view
your hens and herds,
your cider-orchard.
Proud
you were
displaying these
inheritances
to an eye
as pleased as yours
and as familiar almost
with them. Mine
had known,
had grown into the ways
that regulate such riches
and had seen
your husband’s mother’s day
and you had done
no violence to that recollection,
proving it
by present fact.
Distrust
that poet who must symbolize
your stair into
an analogue
of what was never there.
Fact
has its proper plenitude
that only time and tact
will show, renew.
It is enough
those steps should be
no more than what they were, tha
t your
hospitable table
overlook the cowshed.
A just geography
completes itself
with such relations, where
beauty and stability can be
each other’s equal.
But building is
a biding also
and I saw
one lack
among your store of blessings.
You had come
late into marriage
and your childlessness
was palpable
as we surveyed
the kitchen, where four unheraldic
sheep-dogs kept the floor
and seemed to want
their complement of children.
Not desolateness
changed the scene I left,
the house
manning its hill,
the gabled bulk
still riding there
as though it could
command the crops
upwards
out of willing land;
and yet
it was as if
a doubt
within my mood
troubled the rock of its ancestral certitude.
The Hand at Callow Hill Farm
Silence. The man defined
The quality, ate at his separate table
Silent, not because silence was enjoined
But was his nature. It shut him round
Even at outdoor tasks, his speech
Following upon a pause, as though
A hesitance to comply had checked it –
Yet comply he did, and willingly:
Pause and silence: both
Were essential graces, a reticence
Of the blood, whose calm concealed
The tutelary of that upland field.
The Picture of J.T. in a Prospect of Stone
What should one
wish a child
and that, one’s own
emerging
from between
the stone lips
of a sheep-stile
that divides
village graves
and village green?
– Wish her
the constancy of stone.
– But stone
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 2