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Swimming Chenango Lake

Page 2

by Charles Tomlinson


  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

 

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