Swimming Chenango Lake

  Now rivers ran where the streams once were.

  Daily, we heard the distance lessening

  Between house and water-course. But floods

  Occur only along the further plains and we

  Had weathered the like of this before

  – The like, but not the equal, as we saw,

  Watching it lap the enclosure wall,

  Then topping it, begin to pile across

  And drop with a splash like clapping hands

  And spread. It took in the garden

  Bed by bed, finding a level to its liking.

  The house-wall, fronting it, was blind

  And therefore safe: it was the doors

  On the other side unnerved my mind

  – They and the deepening night. I dragged

  Sacks, full of a mush of soil

  Dug in the rain, and bagged each threshold.

  Spade in hand, why should I not make

  Channels to guide the water back

  Into the river, before my barricade

  Proved how weak it was? So I began

  Feeling my way into the moonless rain,

  Hacking a direction. It was then as though

  A series of sluices had been freed to overflow

  All the land beneath them: it was the dark I dug

  Not soil. The sludge melted away from one

  And would not take the form of a trench.

  This work led nowhere, with no bed

  To the flood, no end to its sources and resources

  To grow and to go wherever it would

  Taking one with it. It was the sound

  Struck more terror than the groundlessness I trod,

  The filth fleeing my spade – though that, too,

  Carried its image inward of the dissolution

  Such sound orchestrates – a day

  Without reprieve, a swealing away

  Past shape and self. I went inside.

  Our ark of stone seemed warm within

  And welcoming, yet echoed like a cave

  To the risen river whose tide already

  Pressed close against the further side

  Of the unwindowed wall. There was work to do

  Here better than digging mud – snatching

  And carrying such objects as the flood

  Might seep into, putting a stair

  Between the world of books and water.

  The mind, once it has learned to fear

  Each midnight eventuality,

  Can scarcely seize on what is already there:

  It was the feet first knew

  The element weariness had wandered through

  Eyeless and unreasoning. Awakened eyes

  Told that the soil-sacked door

  Still held, but saw then, without looking,

  Water had tried stone and found it wanting:

  Wall fountained a hundred jets:

  Floor lay awash, an invitation

  To water to follow it deriding door

  On door until it occupied the entire house.

  We bailed through an open window, brushing

  And bucketing with a mindless fervour

  As though four hands could somehow find

  Strength to keep pace, then oversway

  The easy redundance of a mill-race. I say

  That night diminished my trust in stone –

  As porous as a sponge, where once I’d seen

  The image of a constancy, a ground for the play

  And fluency of light. That night diminished

  Yet did not quite betray my trust.

  For the walls held. As we tried to sleep,

  And sometimes did, we knew that the flood

  Rivered ten feet beneath us. And so we hung

  Between a dream of fear and the very thing.

  Water-lights coursed the brain and sound

  Turned it to the tympanum of an ear. When I rose

  The rain had ceased. Full morning

  Floated and raced with water through the house,

  Dancing in whorls on every ceiling

  As I advanced. Sheer foolishness

  It seemed to pause and praise the shimmer

  And yet I did and called you down

  To share this vertigo of sunbeams everywhere,

  As if no surface were safe from swaying

  And the very stone were as malleable as clay.

  Primeval light undated the day

  Back into origin, washed past stain

  And staleness, to a beginning glimmer

  That stilled one’s beating ear to sound

  Until the flood-water seemed to stream

  With no more burden than the gleam itself.

  Light stilled the mind, then showed it what to do

  Where the work of an hour or two could

  Hack a bank-side down, let through

  The stream and thus stem half the force

  That carried its weight and water out of course.

  Strength spent, we returned. By night

  The house was safe once more, but cold within.

  The voice of waters burrowed one’s dream

  Of ending in a wreck of walls:

  We were still here, with too much to begin

  That work might make half-good.

  We waited upon the weather’s mercies

  And the December stars frosted above the flood.

  Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984)

  Above Manhattan

  Up in the air

  among the Iroquois: no:

  they are not born

  with a head for heights:

  their girder-going

  is a learned, at last

  a learnèd thing

  as sure as instinct:

  beneath them

  they can see in print

  the newssheet of the city

  with a single rent where three

  columns, clipped out of it,

  show the Park was planted:

  webbed and cradled

  by the catenary

  distances of bridge on bridge

  the place is as real

  as something imaginary:

  but from where they are

  one must read with care:

  for to put

  one foot wrong

  is to drop

  more than a glance

  and though

  this closeness and that distance

  make dancing difficult a dance

  it is that the mind is led

  above Manhattan

  The Iroquois were employed in high construction work.

  All Afternoon

  All afternoon the shadows have been building

  A city of their own within the streets,

  Carefully correcting the perspectives

  With dark diagonals, and paring back

  Sidewalks into catwalks, strips of bright

  Companionways, as if it were a ship

  This counter-city. But the leaning, black

  Enjambements like ladders for assault

  Scale the façades and tie them to the earth,

  Confounding fire-escapes already meshed

  In slatted ambiguities. You touch

  The sliding shapes to find which place is which

  And grime a finger with the ash of time

  That blows through both, the shadow in the shade

  And in the light, that scours each thoroughfare

  To pit the walls, rise out of yard and stairwell

  And tarnish the Chrysler’s Aztec pinnacle.

  At the Trade Center

  Paused at the more than Brocken summit,

  Hand outstretched to touch and cover

  The falling height beneath, I watch

  Between the nakedness of fingers – light

  On each knuckled promontory of flesh

  And shadows tremulous between the gaps –

  The map of land, the map of air:

  Rivers both sides o
f this island

  Tug the gaze askance from the grid of streets

  To the sea- and bird-ways, the expanse

  That drinks the reverberation of these energies.

  What can a hand bring back into a view

  No rule of thumb made possible? It spans

  The given rigours and the generous remissions

  Of ocean, of the ferryings to-and-fro

  Between the harbour and the islands. As you climb

  The more you see of waters and of marsh

  Where, angle-poised, the heron

  Stands within earshot of this city

  Back to the horizon, studying its pool.

  The horizon is where we are:

  The Bridge is small from this new vantage,

  The view in space become a view in time:

  Climbing we see an older city’s fall –

  The waterfront is down: the clerks are hived

  Window on window where the town began

  And spread. I spread my fingers

  And the traffic runs between. The elevator grounds

  Us back to streets where in the cracks

  Between immeasurable buildings beggars

  From their domains of dust and paper-bags

  Hold out one hand deep in the traffic sounds.

  To Ivor Gurney

  Driving north, I catch the hillshapes, Gurney,

  Whose drops and rises – Cotswold and Malvern

  In their cantilena above the plains –

  Sustained your melody: your melody sustains

  Them, now – Edens that lay

  Either side of this interminable roadway.

  You would recognize them still, but the lanes

  Of lights that fill the lowlands, brim

  To the Severn and glow into the heights.

  You can regain the gate: the angel with the sword

  Illuminates the paths to let you see

  That night is never to be restored

  To Eden and England spangled in bright chains.

  Black Brook

  Black Brook is brown. It travels

  With the hillside in it – an upside-down

  Horizon above a brackened slope – until

  It drops and then: rags and a rush of foam

  Whiten the peat-stained stream

  That keeps changing note and singing

  The song of its shingle, its shallowness or its falls.

  I pace a parallel track to that of the water:

  It must be the light of a moorland winter

  Let them say that black was fair name

  For such a stream, making it mirror

  Solely the granite and the grey

  As no doubt it can. But look! Black Brook

  Has its horizon back, and a blue

  Inverted sky dyeing it through to a bed

  Of dazzling sand, an ore of gravel

  It has washed out beneath rock and rowan

  As it came here homing down

  To the valley it brightens belying its name.

  Poem for my Father

  I bring to countryside my father’s sense

  Of an exile ended when he fished his way

  Along the stained canal and out between

  The first farms, the uninterrupted green,

  To find once more the Suffolk he had known

  Before the Somme. Yet there was not one tree

  Unconscious of that name and aftermath

  Nor is there now. For everything we see

  Teaches the time that we are living in,

  Whose piecemeal speech the vocables of Eden

  Pace in reminder of the full perfection,

  As oaks above these waters keep their gold

  Against the autumn long past other trees

  Poised between paradise and history.

  The Beech

  Blizzards have brought down the beech tree

  That, through twenty years, had served

  As landmark or as limit to our walk:

  We sat among its roots when buds

  Fruitlike in their profusion tipped the twigs –

  A galaxy of black against a sky that soon

  Leaf-layers would shut back. The naked tree

  Commanded, manned the space before it

  And beyond, dark lightnings of its branches

  Played above the winter desolation:

  It seemed their charge had set the grass alight

  As a low sun shot its fire into the valley

  Splitting the shadows open. Today that sun

  Shows you the place uncitadelled,

  A wrecked town centred by no spire,

  Scattered and splintered wide. At night

  As the wind comes feeling for those boughs

  There is nothing now in the dark of an answering strength,

  No form to confront and to attest

  The amplitude of dawning spaces as when

  The tower rebuilt itself out of the mist each morning.

  Night Fishers

  After the autumn storms, we chose a night

  To fish the bay. The catch

  I scarcely recollect. It was the climb,

  The grasp at slipping rock unnerved

  All thought, thrust out of time

  And into now the sharp original fear

  That mastered me then. I do not think

  I ever looked so far down into space

  As through the clefts we over-leapt:

  Beams of our torches given back

  Off walls and water in each rift

  Crossed and recrossed one another, so the mind

  Recalling them, still seems to move

  Inside a hollow diamond that the dark

  As shadows shift, threatens to unfacet:

  It was no jewel, it was the flesh would shatter.

  And yet it did not. Somehow we arrived

  And crouched there in the cool. The night

  Save for the whispered water under-cliff,

  The hiss of falling casts, lay round

  Thick with silence. It seemed

  A sky spread out beneath us, constellations

  Swimming into view wherever fish

  Lit up its dark with phosphor. A thousand

  Points of light mapped the expanse

  And depth, and yet the cliff-top height

  Hinted no pull of vertigo along

  Its sudden edge: through diaphanous waters

  The radium in the flowing pitchblende glowed

  Holding both mind and eye

  Encompassed by a stir of scattered lambency:

  And unalarmed, I could forget

  As night-bound we fished on unharmed,

  The terrors of the way we’d come, put by

  The terrors of return past fault and fall,

  Watching this calm firmament of the sea.

  The Sound of Time

  When the clock-tick fades

  out of the ear you

  can listen to time

  in the flow of fire:

  and there a cascade

  streams up the coals:

  loud as Niagara

  these climbing falls:

  it pours within

  forked and fleering

  over the thresholds

  of a deafened hearing

  till the superfluity

  of the room’s recess

  has filled the auricle

  with time’s abyss

  The Return (1987)

  In the Borghese Gardens

  for Attilio Bertolucci

  Edging each other towards consummation

  On the public grass and in the public eye,

  Under the Borghese pines the lovers

  Cannot tell what thunderheads mount the sky,

  To mingle with the roar of afternoon

  Rumours of the storm that must drench them soon.

  Cars intersect the cardinal’s great dream,

  His parterres redesigned, gardens half-gone,

  Yet Pl
uto’s grasp still bruises Proserpine,

  Apollo still hunts Daphne’s flesh in stone,

  Where the Borghese statuary and trees command

  The ever-renewing city from their parkland.

  The unbridled adolescences of gods

  Had all of earth and air to cool their flights

  And to rekindle. But where should lovers go

  These torrid afternoons, these humid nights

  While Daphne twists in leaves, Apollo burns

  And Proserpine returns, returns, returns?

  Rome is still Rome. Its ruins and its squares

  Stand sluiced in wet and all its asphalt gleaming,

  The street fronts caged behind the slant of rain-bars

  Sun is already melting where they teem:

  Spray-haloed traffic taints your laurel leaves,

  City of restitutions, city of thieves.

  Lovers, this giant hand, half-seen, sustains

  By lifting up into its palm and plane

  Our littleness: the shining causeway leads

  Through arches, bridges, avenues and lanes

  Of stone, that brought us first to this green place –

  Expelled, we are the heirs of healing artifice.

  Deserted now, and all that callow fire

  Quenched in the downpour, here the parkland ways

  Reach out into the density of dusk,

  Between an Eden lost and promised paradise,

  That overbrimming scent, rain-sharpened, fills,

  Girdled within a rivercourse and seven hills.

  In San Clemente

  What deer are these stand drinking at the spring?

  Ask of the child the saint is carrying

  Across a stream in spate. The steps that flow

  Downwards through the sonorous dark beneath,

  Should be a water-stair, for where they go,

  A child that angels bring forth on the wall

  Has lived a whole year on the ocean bed;

  Then, down once more, and past the humid cave

  Of Mithras’ bull and shrine, until they lead

  To a wall of tufa and – beyond – the roar

  Of subterranean waters pouring by

  All of the centuries it takes to climb

  From Mithras to the myth-resisting play

  Of one clear jet chiming against this bowl