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Swimming Chenango Lake

Page 5

by Charles Tomlinson


  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

 

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