Returned to this: to river, town and plain,
Walked in the fields and knew what power he’d lost,
The cost to him of that metropolis where
He must come back to rule and Robespierre.
Not yet. This contrary perfection he
Must taste into a life he has no time
To live, a lingered, snatched maturity
Before he catches in the waterchime
The measure and the chain a death began,
And fate that loves the symmetry of rhyme
Will spring the trap whose teeth must have a man.
Casarola
for Attilio Bertolucci
Cliffs come sheering down into woodland here:
The trees – they are chestnuts – spread to a further drop
Where an arm of water rushes through unseen
Still lost in leaves: you can hear it
Squandering its way towards the mill
A path crossing a hillslope and a bridge
Leads to at last: the stones lie there
Idle beside it: they were cut from the cliff
And the same stone rises in wall and roof
Not of the mill alone, but of shed on shed
Whose mossed tiles like a city of the dead
Grow green in the wood. There are no dead here
And the living no longer come
In October to crop the trees: the chestnuts
Dropping, feed the roots they rose from:
A rough shrine sanctifies the purposes
These doors once opened to, a desolation
Of still-perfect masonry. There is a beauty
In this abandonment: there would be more
In the slow activity of smoke
Seeping at roof and lintel; out of each low
Unwindowed room rising to fill
Full with essences the winter wood
As the racked crop dried. Waste
Is our way. An old man
Has been gathering mushrooms. He pauses
To show his spoil, plumped by a soil
Whose sweet flour goes unmilled:
Rapid and unintelligible, he thinks we follow
As we feel for his invitations to yes and no:
Perhaps it’s the mushrooms he’s telling over
Or this place that shaped his dialect, and where nature
Daily takes the distinctness from that signature
Men had left there in stone and wood,
Among waning villages, above the cities of the plain.
The Faring
That day, the house was so much a ship
Clasped by the wind, the whole sky
Piling its cloud-wrack past,
To be sure you were on dry land
You must go out and stand in that stream
Of air: the entire world out there
Was travelling too: in each gap the tides
Of space felt for the earth’s ship sides:
Over fields, new-turned, the cry
And scattered constellations of the gulls
Were messengers from that unending sea, the sky:
White on brown, a double lambency
Pulsed, played where the birds, intent
On nothing more than the ploughland’s nourishment,
Brought the immeasurable in: wing on wing
Taking new lustres from the turning year
Above seasonable fields, they tacked and climbed
With a planet’s travelling, rhymed here with elsewhere
In the sea-salt freshnesses of tint and air.
A Night at the Opera
When the old servant reveals she is the mother
Of the young count whose elder brother
Has betrayed him, the heroine, disguised
As the Duke’s own equerry, sings Or’
Che sono, pale from the wound she has received
In the first act. The entire court
Realize what has in fact occurred and wordlessly
The waltz song is to be heard now
In the full orchestra. And we, too,
Recall that meeting of Marietta with the count
Outside the cloister in Toledo. She faints:
Her doublet being undone, they find
She still has on the hair-shirt
Worn ever since she was a nun
In Spain. So her secret is plainly out
And Boccaleone (blind valet
To the Duke) confesses it is he (Or’ son’io)
Who overheard the plot to kidnap the dead
Count Bellafonte, to burn by night
The high camp of the gipsy king
Alfiero, and by this stratagem quite prevent
The union of both pairs of lovers.
Now the whole cast packs the stage
Raging in chorus round the quartet – led
By Alfiero (having shed his late disguise)
And Boccaleone (shock has restored his eyes):
Marietta, at the first note from the count
(Long thought dead, but finally revealed
As Alfiero), rouses herself, her life
Hanging by a thread of song, and the Duke,
Descending from his carriage to join in,
Dispenses pardon, punishment and marriage.
Exeunt to the Grand March, Marietta
(Though feebly) marching, too, for this
Is the ‘Paris’ version where we miss
The ultimate dénouement when at the command
Of the heroine (Pura non son’) Bellafonte marries
The daughter of the gipsy king and
Mushrooms
for Jon and Jill
Eyeing the grass for mushrooms, you will find
A stone or stain, a dandelion puff
Deceive your eyes – their colour is enough
To plump the image out to mushroom size
And lead you through illusion to a rind
That’s true – flint, fleck or feather. With no haste
Scent-out the earthy musk, the firm moist white,
And, played-with rather than deluded, waste
None of the sleights of seeing: taste the sight
You gaze unsure of – a resemblance, too,
Is real and all its likes and links stay true
To the weft of seeing. You, to begin with,
May be taken in, taken beyond, that is,
This place of chiaroscuro that seemed clear,
For realer than a myth of clarities
Are the meanings that you read and are not there:
Soon, in the twilight coolness, you will come
To the circle that you seek and, one by one,
Stooping into their fragrance, break and gather,
Your way a winding where the rest lead on
Like stepping stones across a grass of water.
The Gap
It could be that you are driving by.
You do not need the whole of an eye
To command the thing: the edge
Of a merely desultory look
Will take it in – it is a gap
(No more) where you’d expect to see
A field-gate, and there well may be
But it is flung wide, and the land so lies
All you see is space – that, and the wall
That climbs up to the spot two ways
To embrace absence, frame skies:
Why does one welcome the gateless gap?
As an image to be filled with the meaning
It doesn’t yet have? As a confine gone?
A saving grace in so much certainty of stone?
Reason can follow reason, one by one.
But the moment itself, abrupt
With the pure surprise of seeing,
Will outlast all after-knowledge and its map –
Even, and perhaps most then, should the unseen
Gate swing-to across that gap.
In Arden
This is the for
est of Arden…
Arden is not Eden, but Eden’s rhyme:
Time spent in Arden is time at risk
And place, also: for Arden lies under threat:
Ownership will get what it can for Arden’s trees:
No acreage of green-belt complacencies
Can keep Macadam out: Eden lies guarded:
Pardonable Adam, denied its gate,
Walks the grass in a less-than-Eden light
And whiteness that shines from a stone burns with his fate:
Sun is tautening the field’s edge shadowline
Along the wood beyond: but the contraries
Of this place are contrarily unclear:
A haze beats back the summer sheen
Into a chiaroscuro of the heat:
The down on the seeded grass that beards
Each rise where it meets with sky,
Ripples a gentle fume: a fine
Incense, smelling of hay smokes by:
Adam in Arden tastes its replenishings:
Through its dense heats the depths of Arden’s springs
Convey echoic waters – voices
Of the place that rises through this place
Overflowing, as it brims its surfaces
In runes and hidden rhymes, in chords and keys
Where Adam, Eden, Arden run together
And time itself must beat to the cadence of this river.
The Shaft
for Guy Davenport
The shaft seemed like a place of sacrifice:
You climbed where spoil heaps from the hill
Spilled out into a wood, the slate
Tinkling underfoot like shards, and then
You bent to enter: a passageway:
Cervix of stone: the tick of waterdrops,
A clear clepsydra: and squeezing through
Emerged into cathedral space, held-up
By a single rocksheaf, a gerbe
Buttressing-back the roof. The shaft
Opened beneath it, all its levels
Lost in a hundred feet of water.
Those miners – dust, beards, mattocks –
They photographed seventy years ago,
Might well have gone to ground here, pharaohs
Awaiting excavation, their drowned equipment
Laid-out beside them. All you could see
Was rock reflections tunneling the floor
That water covered, a vertical unfathomed,
A vertigo that dropped through centuries
To the first who broke into these fells:
The shaft was not a place to stare into
Or not for long: the adit you entered by
Filtered a leaf-light, a phosphorescence,
Doubled by water to a tremulous fire
And signalling you back to the moist door
Into whose darkness you had turned aside
Out of the sun of an unfinished summer.
Translating the Birds
The buzzard’s two-note cry falls plaintively,
And, like a seabird’s, hesitates between
A mewing, a regret, a plangent plea,
Or so we must translate it who have never
Hung with the buzzard or above the sea.
It veers a haughty circle with sun-caught breast:
The small birds are all consternation now,
And do not linger to admire the sight,
The flash of empery that solar fire
Lends to the predatory ease of flight.
The small birds have all taken to the trees,
Their eyes alert, their garrulousness gone:
Beauty does not stir them, realists to a man,
They know what awe’s exacted by a king,
They know that now is not the time to sing.
They’ll find their way back into song once more
Who’ve only sung in metaphor and we
Will credit them with arias, minstrelsy,
And, eager always for the intelligible,
Instruct those throats what meaning they must tell.
But supply pulsing, wings against the air,
With yelp that bids the silence of small birds,
Now it is the buzzard owns the sky
Thrusting itself beyond the clasp of words,
Word to dance with, dally and outfly.
The Flood (1981)
Snow Signs
They say it is waiting for more, the snow
Shrunk up to the shadow-line of walls
In an arctic smouldering, an unclean salt,
And will not go until the frost returns
Sharpening the stars, and the fresh snow falls
Piling its drifts in scallops, furls. I say
Snow has left its own white geometry
To measure out for the eye the way
The land may lie where a too cursory reading
Discovers only dip and incline leading
To incline, dip, and misses the fortuitous
Full variety a hillside spreads for us:
It is written here in sign and exclamation,
Touched-in contour and chalk-followed fold,
Lines and circles finding their completion
In figures less certain, figures that yet take hold
On features that would stay hidden but for them:
Walking, we waken these at every turn,
Waken ourselves, so that our walking seems
To rouse some massive sleeper out of winter dreams
Whose stretching startles the whole land into life,
As if it were us the cold, keen signs were seeking
To pleasure and remeasure, repossess
With a sense in the gathered coldness of heat and height.
Well, if it’s for more the snow is waiting
To claim back into disguisal overnight,
As though it were promising a protection
From all it has transfigured, scored and bared,
Now we shall know the force of what resurrection
Outwaits the simplification of the snow.
Their Voices Rang
Their voices rang
through the winter trees:
they were speaking and yet it seemed they sang,
the trunks a hall of victory.
And what is that and where?
Though we come to it rarely,
the sense of all that we might be
conjures the place from air.
Is it the mind, then?
It is the mind received,
assumed into a season
forestial in the absence of all leaves.
Their voices rang
through the winter trees and time
catching the cadence of that song
forgot itself in them.
For Miriam
I
I climbed to your high village through the snow,
Stepping and slipping over lost terrain:
Wind having stripped a dead field of its white
Had piled the height beyond: I saw no way
But hung there wrapped in breath, my body beating:
Edging the drift, trying it for depth,
Touch taught the body how to go
Through straitest places. Nothing too steep
Or narrow now, once mind and muscle
Learned to dance their balancings, combined
Against the misdirections of the snow.
And soon the ground I gained delivered me
Before your smokeless house, and still
I failed to read that sign. Through cutting air
Two hawks patrolled the reaches of the day,
Black silhouettes against the sheen
That blinded me. How should I know
The cold which tempered that blue steel
Claimed you already, for you were old.
II
Mindful of your death, I hear the leap
At life in the resurrexit of Bruckner’s mass:
For, there, your hope towers whole:
Within a body one cannot see, it climbs
That spaceless space, the ear’s
Chief mystery and mind’s, that probes to know
What sense might feel, could it outgo
Its own destruction, spiralling tireless
Like these sounds. To walk would be enough
And top that rise behind your house
Where the land lies sheer to Wales,
And Severn’s crescent empties and refills
Flashing its sign inland, its pulse
Of light that shimmers off the Atlantic:
For too long, age had kept you from that sight
And now it beats within my eye, its pressure
A reply to the vein’s own music
Here, where with flight-lines interlinking
That sink only to twine and hover the higher,
A circling of hawks recalls to us our chains
And snow remaining hardens above your grave.
III
You wanted a witness that the body
Time now taught you to distrust
Had once been good. ‘My face,’ you said –
And the Shulamite stirred in decembering flesh
As embers fitfully relit – ‘My face
Was never beautiful, but my hair
(It reached then to my knees) was beautiful.’
We met for conversation, not conversion,
For you were that creature Johnson bridled at –
A woman preacher. With age, your heresies
Had so multiplied that even I
A pagan, pleaded for poetry forgone:
You thought the telling-over of God’s names
Three-fold banality, for what you sought
Was single, not (and the flame was in your cheek)
‘A nursery rhyme, a jingle for theologians.’
And the incarnation? That, too, required
All of the rhetoric that I could bring
To its defence. The frozen ground
Opened to receive you a slot in snow,
Re-froze, and months unborn now wait
To take you into the earthdark disincarnate.
IV
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 7