The Fox Gallery
A long house –
the fox gallery you called
its upper storey, because
you could look down to see
(and did) the way a fox would
cross the field beyond
and you could follow out, window
to window, the fox’s way
the whole length of the meadow
parallel with the restraining line
of wall and pane, or as far
as that could follow the sense of all
those windings. Do you remember
the morning I woke you with the cry
Fox fox and the animal
came on – not from side
to side, but straight
at the house and we craned
to see more and more, the most
we could of it and then
watched it sheer off deterred
by habitation, and saw
how utterly the two worlds were
disparate, as that perfect
ideogram for agility
and liquefaction flowed
away from us rhythmical
and flickering and
that flare was final.
To be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant
across the thin
façade, the galleried-
with-membrane head:
narrowing, to take
the eye-dividing
declivity where
the beginning beak
prepares for flight
in a still-
perfect salience:
here, your glass
needs must stay
steady and your gross
needle re-tip
itself with reticence
but be
as searching as the sea
that picked and pared
this head yet spared
its frail acuity.
Oppositions
debate with Mallarmé
for Octavio Paz
The poet must rescue etymology from among the footnotes, thus moving up into the body of the text, ‘cipher: the Sanskrit word sunya derived from the root svi, to swell.’
To cipher is to turn the thought word into flesh. And hence ‘the body of the text’ derives its substance.
The master who disappeared, taking with him into the echochamber the ptyx which the Styx must replenish, has left the room so empty you would take it for fullness.
Solitude charges the house. If all is mist beyond it, the island of daily objects within becomes clarified.
Mistlines flow slowly in, filling the land’s declivity that lay unseen until that indistinctness had acknowledged them.
If the skull is a memento mori, it is also a room, whose contained space is wordlessly resonant with the steps that might cross it, to command the vista out of its empty eyes.
Nakedness can appear as the vestment of space that separates four walls, the flesh as certain then and as transitory as the world it shares.
The mind is a hunter of forms, binding itself, in a world that must decay, to present substance.
Skull and shell, both are helmeted, both reconcile vacancy with its opposite. Abolis bibelots d’inanité sonore. Intimate presences of silent plenitude.
‘Oppositions’ replies to one of Mallarmé’s most famous sonnets, ‘Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx’, whose ‘ptyx’ is explained as being a sea shell.
Skullshapes
Skulls. Finalities. They emerge towards new beginnings from undergrowth. Along with stones, fossils, flint keel-scrapers and spoke-shaves, along with bowls of clay pipes heel-stamped with their makers’ marks, comes the rural detritus of cattle skulls brought home by children. They are moss-stained, filthy with soil. Washing them of their mottlings, the hand grows conscious of weight, weight sharp with jaggednesses. Suspend them from a nail and one feels the bone-clumsiness go out of them: there is weight still in their vertical pull downwards from the nail, but there is also a hanging fragility. The two qualities fuse and the brush translates this fusion as wit, where leg-like appendages conclude the skulls’ dangling mass.
Shadow explores them. It sockets the eye-holes with black. It reaches like fingers into the places one cannot see. Skulls are a keen instance of this duality of the visible: it borders what the eye cannot make out, it transcends itself with the suggestion of all that is there beside what lies within the eyes’ possession: it cannot be possessed. Flooded with light, the skull is at once manifest surface and labyrinth of recesses. Shadow reaches down out of this world of helmeted cavities and declares it.
One sees. But not merely the passive mirrorings of the retinal mosaic – nor, like Ruskin’s blind man struck suddenly by vision, without memory or conception. The senses, reminded by other seeings, bring to bear on the act of vision their pattern of images; they give point and place to an otherwise naked and homeless impression. It is the mind sees. But what it sees consists not solely of that by which it is confronted grasped in the light of that which it remembers. It sees possibility.
The skulls of birds, hard to the touch, are delicate to the eye. Egg-like in the round of the skull itself and as if the spherical shape were the result of an act like glass-blowing, they resist the eyes’ imaginings with the blade of the beak which no lyrical admiration can attenuate to frailty.
The skull of nature is recess and volume. The skull of art – of possibility – is recess, volume and also lines – lines of containment, lines of extension. In seeing, one already extends the retinal impression, searchingly and instantaneously. Brush and pen extend the search beyond the instant, touch discloses a future. Volume, knived across by the challenge of a line, the raggedness of flaking bone countered by ruled, triangular facets, a cowskull opens a visionary field, a play of universals.
The Chances of Rhyme
The chances of rhyme are like the chances of meeting –
In the finding fortuitous, but once found, binding:
They say, they signify and they succeed, where to succeed
Means not success, but a way forward
If unmapped, a literal, not a royal succession;
Though royal (it may be) is the adjective or region
That we, nature’s royalty, are led into.
Yes. We are led, though we seem to lead
Through a fair forest, an Arden (a rhyme
For Eden) – breeding ground for beasts
Not bestial, but loyal and legendary, which is more
Than nature’s are. Yet why should we speak
Of art, of life, as if the one were all form
And the other all Sturm-und-Drang? And I think
Too, we should confine to Crewe or to Mow
Cop, all those who confuse the fortuitousness
Of art with something to be met with only
At extremity’s brink, reducing thus
Rhyme to a kind of rope’s end, a glimpsed grass
To be snatched at as we plunge past it –
Nostalgic, after all, for a hope deferred.
To take chances, as to make rhymes
Is human, but between chance and impenitence
(A half-rhyme) come dance, vigilance
And circumstance (meaning all that is there
Besides you, when you are there). And between
Rest-in-peace and precipice,
Inertia and perversion, come the varieties
Increase, lease, re-lease (in both
Senses); and immersion, conversion – of inert
Mass, that is, into energies to combat confusion.
Let rhyme be my conclusion.
Written on Water (1972)
On Water
‘Furrow’ is inexact:
no ship could be
converted to a plough
travelling this vitreous ebony:
seal it in sea-caves and
you cannot still it:
image on image bends
where half-lights fill it
with illegible depths
and lucid passages,
bestiary of stones,
book without pages:
and yet it confers
as much as it denies:
we are orphaned and fathered
by such solid vacancies:
Stone Speech
Crowding this beach
are milkstones, white
teardrops; flints
edged out of flinthood
into smoothness chafe
against grainy ovals,
pitted pieces, nosestones,
stoppers and saddles;
veins of orange
inlay black beads:
chalk-swaddled babyshapes,
tiny fists, facestones
and facestone’s brother
skullstone, roundheads
pierced by a single eye,
purple finds, all
rubbing shoulders:
a mob of grindings,
groundlings, scatterings
from a million necklaces
mined under sea-hills, the pebbles
are as various as the people.
Variation on Paz
Hay que… soñar hacia dentro y tambien hacia afuera
We must dream inwards, and we must dream
Outwards too, until – the dream’s ground
Bound no longer by the dream – we feel
Behind us the sea’s force, and the blind
Keel strikes gravel, grinding
Towards a beach where, eye by eye,
The incorruptible stones are our witnessess
And we wake to what is dream and what is real
Judged by the sun and the impartial sky.
The Compact: At Volterra
The crack in the stone, the black filament
Reaching into the rockface unmasks
More history than Etruria or Rome
Bequeathed this place. The ramparted town
Has long outlived all that; for what
Are Caesar or Scipio beside
The incursion of the slow abyss, the daily
Tribute the dry fields provide
Trickling down? There is a compact
To undo the spot, between the unhurried sun
Edging beyond this scene, and the moon,
Risen already, that has stained
Through with its pallor the remaining light:
Unreal, that clarity of lips and wrinkles
Where shadow investigates each fold,
Scaling the cliff to the silhouetted stronghold.
Civic and close-packed, the streets
Cannot ignore this tale of unshorable earth
At the town brink; furrow, gully,
And sandslide guide down
Each seeping rivulet only to deepen
The cavities of thirst, dry out
The cenozoic skeleton, appearing, powdering away,
Uncovering the chapped clay beneath it.
There is a compact between the cooling earth
And every labyrinthine fault that mines it –
The thousand mouths whose language
Is siftings, whisperings, rumours of downfall
That might, in a momentary unison,
Silence all, tearing the roots of sound out
With a single roar: but the cicadas
Chafe on, grapevine entwines the pergola
Gripping beyond itself. A sole farm
Eyes space emptily. Those
Who abandoned it still wire
Their vines between lopped willows:
Their terraces, fondling the soil together,
Till up to the drop that which they stand to lose:
Refusing to give ground before they must,
They pit their patience against the dust’s vacuity.
The crack in the stone, the black filament
Rooting itself in dreams, all live
At a truce, refuted, terracing; as if
Unreasoned care were its own and our
Sufficient reason, to repair the night’s derisions,
Repay the day’s delight, here where the pebbles
Of half-ripe grapes abide their season,
Their fostering leaves outlined by unminding sky.
Ariadne and the Minotaur
When Theseus went down
she stood alone surrounded
by the sense of what finality it was
she entered now: the hot rocks offered her
neither resistance nor escape, but ran
viscous with the image of betrayal:
the pitted and unimaginable face
the minotaur haunted her with
kept forming there
along the seams and discolorations
and in the diamond sweat
of mica: the sword and thread
had been hers to give, and she
had given them, to this easer of destinies:
if she had gone
alone out of the sun and down where he
had threaded the way for her,
if she had gone
winding the ammonite of space
to where at the cold heart
from the dark stone the bestial warmth
would rise to meet her
unarmed in acquiescence, unprepared
her spindle of packthread… her fingers felt now
for the image in the sunlit rock, and her ears
at the shock of touch took up a cry
out of the labyrinth
into their own, a groaning
that filled the stone mouth
hollowly: between the lips of stone
appeared he whom she had sent
to go where her unspeakable
intent unspoken had been to go
herself, and heaved unlabyrinthed at her feet
their mutual completed crime –
a put-by destiny, a dying
look that sought her
out of eyes the light extinguished,
eyes she should have led
herself to light: and the rays
that turned to emptiness in them
filling the whole of space with loss,
a waste of irrefutable sunlight spread
from Crete to Naxos.
‘Ariadne and the Minotaur’ was suggested initially by Picasso’s series of drawings. It ignores as they do the question of the actual kinship between Ariadne and the Minotaur. Perhaps she, too, was unaware of it.
Hawks
Hawks hovering, calling to each other
Across the air, seem swung
Too high on the risen wind
For the earth-clung contact of our world:
And yet we share with them that sense
The season is bringing in, of all
The lengthening light is promising to exact
From the obduracy of March. The pair,
After their kind are lovers and their cries
Such as lovers alone exchange, and we
Though we cannot tell what it is they say,
Caught up into their calling, are in their sway,
And ride where we cannot climb the steep
And altering air, breathing the sweetness
Of our own excess, till we are kinned
By space we never thought to enter
On capable wings to such reaches of desire.
Autumn Piece
Baffled
by the choreography of the season
the eye could not
with certainty see
whether it was wind
stripping the leaves or
the leaves were struggling to be free:
They came at you
in decaying spirals
plucked flung and regathered by the same
force that was twisting
the scarves of the vapour trails
dragging all certainties out of course:
As the car resisted
it
you felt it in either hand
commanding car, tree, sky,
master of chances,
and at a curve was a red
board said ‘Danger’:
I thought it said dancer.
Event
Nothing is happening
Nothing
A waterdrop
Soundlessly shatters
A gossamer gives
Against this unused space
A bird
Might thoughtlessly try its voice
But no bird does
On the trodden ground
Footsteps
Are themselves more pulse than sound
At the return
A little drunk
On air
Aware that
Nothing
Is happening
The Way In and Other Poems (1974)
The Way In
The needle-point’s swaying reminder
Teeters at thirty, and the flexed foot
Keeps it there. Kerb-side signs
For demolitions and new detours,
A propped pub, a corner lopped, all
Bridle the pressures that guide the needle.
I thought I knew this place, this face
A little worn, a little homely.
But the look that shadows softened
And the light could grace, keeps flowing away from me
In daily change; its features, rendered down,
Collapse expressionless, and the entire town
Sways in the fume of the pyre. Even the new
And mannerless high risers tilt and wobble
Behind the deformations of acrid heat –
A century’s lath and rafters. Bulldozers
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 5