Swimming Chenango Lake

by Charles Tomlinson

  flanked at either end

  by rampant rockets

  torpedoing moonwards. Again

  on either side,

  an artificial vine

  twines down: it is tied

  to rails in the aisle

  and, along it, flower –

  are they nasturtiums? They are

  pink like the bathing dresses

  of the cut-out belles

  it passes in descending,

  their petals are pleated

  like the green

  of the fringed curtain that borders the windshield:

  they are lilies

  of the field of Mexico,

  plastic godsend,

  last flourish

  of that first Fiat from sister goddesses

  and (yes)

  the end…

  Weeper in Jalisco

  A circle of saints, all

  hacked, mauled, bound,

  bleed in a wooden frieze

  under the gloom of the central

  dome of gold. They

  are in paradise now

  and we are not –

  baroque feet gone

  funnelling up, a blood-

  bought, early resurrection

  leaving us this

  tableau of wounds, the crack

  in the universe sealed

  behind their flying backs.

  We are here, and a woman

  sprawls and wails to them

  there, the gold screen

  glistening, hemming her

  under, till her keening

  fills the stone ear

  of the whole, hollow sanctum

  and she is the voice

  those wounds cry through

  unappeasably bleeding where

  her prone back shoulders

  the price and weight

  of forfeited paradise.

  Small Action Poem

  for Robert and Bobbie Creeley

  To arrive

  unexpectedly

  from nowhere:

  then:

  having done

  what it was

  one came for,

  to depart.

  The door

  is open now

  that before

  was neither

  open

  nor was it there.

  It is like

  Chopin

  shaking

  music from the fingers,

  making that

  in which

  all is either

  technique

  heightened to sorcery

  or nothing but notes.

  To arrive

  unexpectedly

  at somewhere

  and the final

  chord, the final

  word.

  The Way of a World (1969)

  Prometheus

  Summer thunder darkens, and its climbing

  Cumuli, disowning our scale in the zenith,

  Electrify this music: the evening is falling apart.

  Castles-in-air; on earth: green, livid fire.

  The radio simmers with static to the strains

  Of this mock last-day of nature and of art.

  We have lived through apocalypse too long:

  Scriabin’s dinosaurs! Trombones for the transformation

  That arrived by train at the Finland Station,

  To bury its hatchet after thirty years in the brain

  Of Trotsky. Alexander Nikolayevitch, the events

  Were less merciful than your mob of instruments.

  Too many drowning voices cram this waveband.

  I set Lenin’s face by yours –

  Yours, the fanatic ego of eccentricity against

  The systematic son of a schools inspector

  Tyutchev on desk – for the strong man reads

  Poets as the antisemite pleads: ‘A Jew was my friend.’

  Cymballed firesweeps. Prometheus came down

  In more than orchestral flame and Kerensky fled

  Before it. The babel of continents gnaws now

  And tears at the silk of those harmonies that seemed

  So dangerous once. You dreamed an end

  Where the rose of the world would go out like a close in music.

  Population drags the partitions down

  And we are a single town of warring suburbs:

  I cannot hear such music for its consequence:

  Each sense was to have been reborn

  Out of a storm of perfumes and light

  To a white world, an in-the-beginning.

  In the beginning, the strong man reigns:

  Trotsky, was it not then you brought yourself

  To judgement and to execution, when you forgot

  Where terror rules, justice turns arbitrary?

  Chromatic Prometheus, myth of fire,

  It is history topples you in the zenith.

  Blok, too, wrote The Scythians

  Who should have known: he who howls

  With the whirlwind, with the whirlwind goes down.

  In this, was Lenin guiltier than you

  When, out of a merciless patience grew

  The daily prose such poetry prepares for?

  Scriabin, Blok, men of extremes,

  History treads out the music of your dreams

  Through blood, and cannot close like this

  In the perfection of anabasis. It stops. The trees

  Continue raining though the rain has ceased

  In a cooled world of incessant codas:

  Hard edges of the houses press

  On the after-music senses, and refuse to burn,

  Where an ice cream van circulates the estate

  Playing Greensleeves, and at the city’s

  Stale new frontier even ugliness

  Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.

  ‘Prometheus’ refers to the tone-poem by Scriabin and to his hope of transforming the world by music and rite.

  Eden

  I have seen Eden. It is a light of place

  As much as the place itself; not a face

  Only, but the expression on that face: the gift

  Of forms constellates cliff and stones:

  The wind is hurrying the clouds past,

  And the clouds as they flee, ravelling-out

  Shadow a salute where the thorn’s barb

  Catches the tossed, unroving sack

  That echoes their flight. And the same

  Wind stirs in the thicket of the lines

  In Eden’s wood, the radial avenues

  Of light there, copious enough

  To draft a city from. Eden

  Is given one, and the clairvoyant gift

  Withdrawn, ‘Tell us’, we say

  ‘The way to Eden,’ but lost in the meagre

  Streets of our dispossession, where

  Shall we turn, when shall we put down

  This insurrection of sorry roofs? Despair

  Of Eden is given, too: we earn

  Neither its loss nor having. There is no

  Bridge but the thread of patience, no way

  But the will to wish back Eden, this leaning

  To stand against the persuasions of a wind

  That rings with its meaninglessness where it sang its meaning.

  Assassin

  ‘The rattle in Trotsky’s throat and his wild boar’s moans’

  Piedra de Sol, Octavio Paz

  Blood I foresaw. I had put by

  The distractions of the retina, the eye

  That like a child must be fed and comforted

  With patterns, recognitions. The room

  Had shrunk to a paperweight of glass and he

  To the centre and prisoner of its transparency.

  He rasped pages. I knew too well

  The details of that head. I wiped

  Clean the glance and saw

  Only his vulnerableness. Under my quivering

  There was an ease, save f
or that starched insistence

  While paper snapped and crackled as in October air.

  Sound drove out sight. We inhabited together

  One placeless cell. I must put down

  This rage of the ear for discrimination, its absurd

  Dwelling on ripples, liquidities, fact

  Fastening on the nerve gigantic paper burrs.

  The gate of history is straiter than eye’s or ear’s.

  In imagination, I had driven the spike

  Down and through. The skull had sagged in its blood.

  The grip, the glance – stained but firm –

  Held all at its proper distance and now hold

  This autumnal hallucination of white leaves

  From burying purpose in a storm of sibilance.

  I strike. I am the future and my blow

  Will have it now. If lightning froze

  It would hover as here, the room

  Riding in the crest of the moment’s wave,

  In the deed’s time, the deed’s transfiguration

  And as if that wave would never again recede.

  The blood wells. Prepared for this

  This I can bear. But papers

  Snow to the ground with a whispered roar:

  The voice, cleaving their crescendo, is his

  Voice, and his the animal cry

  That has me then by the roots of the hair.

  Fleshed in that sound, objects betray me,

  Objects are my judge: the table and its shadow,

  Desk and chair, the ground a pressure

  Telling me where it is that I stand

  Before wall and window-light:

  Mesh of the curtain, wood, metal, flesh:

  A dying body that refuses death,

  He lurches against me in his warmth and weight,

  As if my arm’s length blow

  Had transmitted and spent its strength

  Through blood and bone; and I, spectred,

  The body that rose against me were my own.

  Woven from the hair of that bent head,

  The thread that I had grasped unlabyrinthed all –

  Tightrope of history and necessity –

  But the weight of a world unsteadies my feet

  And I fall into the lime and contaminations

  Of contingency; into hands, looks, time.

  Against Extremity

  Let there be treaties, bridges,

  Chords under the hands, to be spanned

  Sustained: extremity hates a given good

  Or a good gained. That girl who took

  Her life almost, then wrote a book

  To exorcize and to exhibit the sin,

  Praises a friend there for the end she made

  And each of them becomes a heroine.

  The time is in love with endings. The time’s

  Spoiled children threaten what they will do,

  And those they cannot shake by petulance

  They’ll bribe out of their wits by show.

  Against extremity, let there be

  Such treaties as only time itself

  Can ratify, a bond and test

  Of sequential days, and like the full

  Moon slowly given to the night,

  A possession that is not to be possessed.

  The Way of a World

  Having mislaid it, and then

  Found again in a changed mind

  The image of a gull the autumn gust

  Had pulled upwards and past

  The window I watched from, I recovered too

  The ash-key, borne-by whirling

  On the same surge of air, like an animate thing:

  The scene was there again: the bird,

  The seed, the windlines drawn in the sidelong

  Sweep of leaves and branches that only

  The black and supple boughs restrained –

  All would have joined in the weightless anarchy

  Of air, but for that counterpoise. All rose

  Clear in the memory now, though memory did not choose

  Or value it first: it came

  With its worth and, like those tree-tips,

  Fine as dishevelling hair, but steadied

  And masted as they are, that worth

  Outlasted its lost time, when

  The cross-currents had carried it under.

  In all these evanescences of daily air,

  It is the shapes of change, and not the bare

  Glancing vibrations, that vein and branch

  Through the moving textures: we grasp

  The way of a world in the seed, the gull

  Swayed toiling against the two

  Gravities that root and uproot the trees.

  Descartes and the Stove

  Thrusting its armoury of hot delight,

  Its negroid belly at him, how the whole

  Contraption threatened to melt him

  Into recognition. Outside, the snow

  Starkened all that snow was not –

  The boughs’ nerve-net, angles and gables

  Denting the brilliant hoods of it. The foot-print

  He had left on entering, had turned

  To a firm dull gloss, and the chill

  Lined it with a fur of frost. Now

  The last blaze of day was changing

  All white to yellow, filling

  With bluish shade the slots and spoors

  Where, once again, badger and fox would wind

  Through the phosphorescence. All leaned

  Into that frigid burning, corded tight

  By the lightlines as the slow sun drew

  Away and down. The shadow, now,

  Defined no longer: it filled, then overflowed

  Each fault in snow, dragged everything

  Into its own anonymity of blue

  Becoming black. The great mind

  Sat with his back to the unreasoning wind

  And doubted, doubted at his ear

  The patter of ash and, beyond, the snow-bound farms,

  Flora of flame and iron contingency

  And the moist reciprocation of his palms.

  On the Principle of Blowclocks

  Three-way poem

  The static forces

  not a ball of silver

  of a solid body

  but a ball of air

  and its material strength

  whose globed sheernesses

  derive from

  shine with a twofold glitter:

  not the quantity of mass:

  once with the dew and once

  an engineer would instance

  with the constituent bright threads

  rails or T beams, say

  of all its spokes

  four planes constructed to

  in a tense surface

  contain the same volume as

  in a solid cloud of stars

  four tons of mass

  A reading of ‘On the Principle of Blowclocks’ should include (a) the italicized lines, (b) the unitalicized, (c) the whole as printed.

  Words for the Madrigalist

  Look with the ears, said Orazio Vecchi,

  Trusting to music, willing to be led

  Voluntarily blind through its complete

  Landscape of the emotion, feeling beneath the feet

  Of the mind’s heart, the land fall, the height

  Re-form: Look with the ears – they are all

  Looking with the eyes, missing the way:

  So, waiting for sleep, I look

  With the ears at the confused clear sounds

  As each replenished tributary unwinds

  Its audible direction, and dividing

  The branchwork of chime and counterchime

  Runs the river’s thick and drumming stem:

  Loud with their madrigal of limestone beds

  Where nothing sleeps, they all

  Give back – not the tune the listener calls

  But the measure of what he is

&n
bsp; In the hard, sweet music of his lack,

  The unpremeditated consonances: and the words

  Return it to you over the ground-

  Bass of their syllables, Orazio Vecchi:

  Hear with the eyes as you catch the current of their sounds.

  Arroyo Hondo

  Twice I’d tried

  to pass the

  bastard outside

  of Arroyo Hondo:

  each time, the same

  thing: out he

  came in a

  wobbling glide

  in that beat-up

  pick-up, his

  head bent

  in affable accompaniment,

  jawing at

  the guy who sat

  beside him: the third

  time (ready

  for him) I

  cut out wide,

  flung him

  a passing look as I

  made it: we almost

  made it together

  he and I: the same

  thing, out he

  came, all crippled speed

  unheeding: I could not

  retreat and what

  did I see? I

  saw them

  playing at cards

  on the driving seat.

  A Sense of Distance

  The door is shut.

  The red rider

  no longer crosses the canyon floor

  under a thousand feet of air.

  The glance that fell

  on him, is shafting

  a deeper well:

  the boughs of the oak are roaring

  inside the acorn shell.

  The hoofbeats – silent, then –

  are sounding now

  that ride

  dividing a later distance.

  For I am in England,

  and the mind’s embrace

  catches-up this English

  and that horizonless desert space

  into its own, and the three there

  concentrically fill a single sphere.

  And it seems as if a wind

  had flung wide a door

  above an abyss, where all

  the kingdoms of possibilities shone

  like sandgrains crystalline in the mind’s own sun.