THE AGNOSTIC VISITOR
for Roy and Agnes
Dawn, his first day.
Slowly the mountain fills the window.
They are off to the church. They offer him coffee.
Gently enquire how he’ll pass his first morning.
‘Finish my coffee, browse in a book, take a short stroll.’
They hear him out mildly, carry plates from the kitchen,
Lay him knife and fork quietly, with an indwelling look,
God-takers, inlooking, take none for themselves,
Lay him fork and knife quietly, a white folded napkin,
Carry plates to the kitchen. God-partakers
Touch his hand mildly, bid him goodbye.
And on that walk the visitor paused
Looked head up around me snuffing the hill air;
The hill-face opposite across the valley-steep:
Slate racked and slotted like shelves of great books
Leaning tall folios, and the hills bent-shouldered
Like great slow readers crowded around
With their indwelling look, sides trodden by god-lovers
With their indwelling look. And I pulled at the roadside
Tugged down a small slate.
Into the rock bed
Clear water gathered, water spilled over
From inside the mountain, long cool water
Threading the mountain within the soft turf
Under the hard rock, falling presence of water
Reaching from peaks, downward and cool,
Moist stone aflow, thick turf-springing.
I plucked my stone down, the socket a freshet,
Dabbled a hand, raised my palm to my lips,
Sipped indwelling water. With an indwelling look
Trod on down the cutting, reading my brief slate,
The mountains following.
FROM THE QUESTIONS TO MARY
The Virgin Mary gave birth to Dionysus, who said:
When I have grown my horns I shall begin listening to them.
Meanwhile, Mother, why do you yet give me that blissful milk
While I can give you nothing back but these turds
Which we throw among the straw?
No, says Mary calmly, there is no blame.
Make me a turd, my son.
And Dionysus makes Mary a warm little turd scented with his body
She holds her white palm out and Dionysus lays his
Egg of earth in the palm of her hand
And she takes the turd and she digs a little hole
In the soft earth of the garden and she lays
The turd therein and she takes a nutmeg
And lays it on top of the turd.
Look, she says, we shall water this spot for a year.
That was March, Dionysus three months old.
By April, a slick green spear through the soil.
May gives it white flowers in foamy tufts,
In the summer bees come with their eternity drone,
By the autumn the tree is Dionysus’ height,
It bears fruits of gold and others of silver.
Mary says, did I ever make you feel you had stolen milk?
Her son replies: I used to wonder, before this tree,
What I could ever give that was half so good as what you gave me.
THE ORACLE29
‘You shall be my partner in fainting’
(Puppet-magician in my 11-year-old son’s play)
He is very impressive. I am very impressed by him.
His hair escapes from his collar like white steam boiling from a pot.
I don’t care if he remembers nothing. I don’t care if he is deaf.
He is helping me he has agreed to go the whole way with me.
Depression is withheld knowledge is his theme
Go into the dark bravely
He leaves me in the garden
Into the dark bravely
I am in the seat by the sundial, I am waiting for a beam
Time illuminated in a shaft
A tall-beam, brimming with health-days
It comes
a precise shadow on the stone clock
I rise and look at the time VII on a sunny winter evening
It is a time that reaches into the past and this clock never stops
It resembles time written with fast ink on parchment
It is horoscope time it gives me hope
Behind me the shadows are assembling
I am their hustings and they are holding an election
They are the shadow-party in opposition
The sun’s platform has fallen vacant they are unopposed
The shadow-ministers propose an increase in taxes
I remove my jacket and throw it into the shadows
They impose an additional surcharge
I give them my tie
There are further concealed duties and taxes
Where I am going there is no need for shirt and trousers
I shall walk like Adam through the pinewoods until it is time to die
And the dew fall on me and the dew fall on me
I sigh and turn away from the sunny hours
Away from the garden sundial along the shadowy path
The shadow cabinet is waiting for me
With opening doors with open arms
They bear me away I burn in the dark I go bravely
Like a wisp of black hair a white cinder
A voice bravely
Part of the dark offers me a black book I had better not say no
His dark eyes flash like rains falling expecting dark pages I open the book
I am right the pages are black but the writing is moonlike
The moon is writing on wavelets, the endless nibs busy
I am on the cold black sand reclothed I am cold
I peer over the water trying to read the moon’s script
Downy bones in the mist can that be me? If the wind blows
My bones fall to the sand, my bones rise as the water elects
Wavelet flesh of slow water, a gathering-place for mists
The dark story of the child
The blood-tides and your mother rides with all womankind …
The moon writes a sudden picture of a woman in a silver boat
A silver woman and the blood sea is ceaseless pulsing
The sundial in the seagarden shows me a moontime V
I look back over the black book of the waves
I have read some of its writing
I know how to faint how to wake how to be written on a little.
A PHILOSOPHY IN WELSHESE
The summer before last I saw my vision
Driving back from the cinema along the Pwllheli road
Having consumed no more than a quarter of Welsh whiskey
Glancing out of my driver’s window to the right
There was the vision walking over the sea
In a cloud of fire like raw tissues of flesh
Like an emperor bleeding at every pore because he is so alive.
On my left the sun westered behind the mountains
Which were dark and packed with too much scree,
Too many pebbles in slopes like millions of people
But on my right hand you walked over the sea in your single scarlet garment!
I searched in my head for what you were called and I shouted silently
OSIRIS or some such name and you wheeled slowly
Bowing to acknowledge my cry then as the road turned inland
The mountain got up slowly and laid along the crisp shore
Its pattern of farmers’ fields that fitted each other endlessly.
Once there was this Chinese philosopher driving his horse and cart
Through the mountain passes and he was not thinking exactly of philosophy
His one thought was fuck the slut as he drove carefully along the road towards her
Which concept alerted a nearby c
loud that was coloured exquisitely
Like blood washing away on a cool stream. The same cloud
Had been appearing nightly at this spot for six million years
Pondering over the pass in the ancient mountains without hearing philosophy
Expressed with quite such concision and determination before.
Brother! Old Friend! Colleague! I shouted to China.
This cloud rolled down the mountain like an immense glowing dog
Followed him home and all night wrapped his house
As all night he fucked the slut and every night
People of the area observed that the sunset descended
To attend this holy man whom the gods kept safe.
He never understood why his reputation grew but he kept hard at it
Preaching that if you wish to be loved by men of discernment
Find a slut and fuck her deep as she will go into her yin
Indulging your manifold perversions which you must woo as a fair person
Which is what the Welsh whiskey showed me and I wonder whether it’s true
On the road to Pwllheli driving back from the cinema at Bangor
Through the great mountains on no more than a quarter bottle taken
With Dante Alighieri, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Albert Einstein in the back of the car.
THIS CORNISH PASSAGE
The stone church whitewashed for navigation.
These terrible seas. The tall church trees
Spurting rooks like fountains of the dead,
The gorge leaning towards the shore and the boulders
Great as giants’ heads, great as their bolsters,
Great as their white beds, towards the sailing vessels.
This mouth, with a white church in it.
The yarrows bend, and weave themselves into odours.
The beetles’ furniture of fretted lichen.
Dove-grey tombs, a soft wind.
These dead wrecked in their churchyard, all around.
The gossamer like breathing ladders of glass.
SAM’S CALL30
for Derek Toyne
My uncle Sam Lines always seemed
an enlightened person to me, but then I
was a child. I never went
to chapel where he preached, though people told me
he was a marvellous preacher. I asked him what he said:
he told me he never could remember.
He saw his double in the garden. Came in to my aunt:
I just saw a funny chap, an old un under the trees, he said.
All right, said my aunt. Went up to him
to take a closer look and it was me.
He had a lovely death. My aunt told me.
Almost gone, then up he sat, bolt upright and cried:
Meg lass, get me a clean shirt, I’ll not be seen
dead in this one. They got him one,
struggled him into it, he never spoke again.
That was when I was guided, the one and only time.
Sam was laid out and waiting for his funeral.
I felt suddenly curious about an old box in the barn
Meg had said was full of old writings, now I must see them.
I went out quietly because of the death in the house
and the blinds down into the barn-smell
of chicken-shit and damp feed. Inside the box I found
one old piece of paper with green writing
‘To be buried with Sam Lines’, folded,
a red mark and something stuck round and crinkled,
like an ancient condom, then the tears
spurted into my hand, I understood
it was his caul he had been born with.
He could tell the time without looking at his watch.
He’d sleep in his chair by the range; after supper
we kids’d creep up, whisper in his ear,
(head back and closed eyes fixed on the ceiling)
‘Sam, what’s the time?’ His big oakapple hand
crept into his waistcoat head still asleep,
He took his turnip watch out and said the time
from his sleeping mouth. He was always right
you could check him from the watch his big hand
would close and tuck away into its pocket again.
X
FROM EVERY CHINK OF THE ARK
(1977)
DOG PROSPECTUS31
The dog must see your corpse. The last thing that you feel
Must be the dog’s warm-tufa licking of your hand,
Its clear gaze on your trembling lips, then
Snapping at flies, catches the last breath in its teeth,
And trots off with you quickly to the Judge,
Your advocate and friend. The corpse a dog has not seen
Pollutes a thousand men; the Bishop’s hound
Tucked like a cushion at his tombstone feet
Once through the door carries a helix staff
And looks like Hermes on that side, the Bishop tumbling
On the puppy-paws of death …
as a temporary Professor
at this U
I practise, when the campus swarms with them,
Focusing out the students, so the place
Is amply empty, except for a few dogs.
They should study here, the U enrol them
And take more fees, at agreed standards teaching
Elementary Urinology, and Advanced
Arboreal Urinology: The Seasons and their Smells;
Freshman Osteology: The Selection and Concealment
Of Bones; Janissology: The Budding Watchdog, with
Fawning, a two-semester course. Lunar Vocalisation,
Or Baying at the Moon; the ‘lame-dog bid for sympathy
With big sad eyes and hanging tongue,’ which is
Cosmetic Opthalmology with Intermittent Claudication
In the Rhetorical Physiognomy Gym. Shit and Its Meaning;
Coprology: the Dog-Turd and Modern Legislation; The
Eating of Jezebel, or Abreactive Phantasising; The Black Dog,
Or Studies in Melancholy; The Age of Worry
An Era Favourable to Dogs …
How to Beg:
A Long-Term Economic Good; with How to Fuck,
Or Staggering in Six-Legged Joy; Fleas,
A Useful Oracle and in this same last year
The Dedicated Castrate or God’s Eunuch,
The Canine Celibate as Almost-Man;
And finally how, if uncastrated,
To change places and become Master-Dog,
The Palindromic Homocane and Goddog-Doggod,
Wise Hermes of the Intelligent Nose
Leading to the Degree of Master of Hounds.
The campus throngs with hounds, this degree
Is very popular, alas,
I focus them out: in ample emptiness
A few humans hurry to their deep study
Without prospectus, without University.
This one is desirous of becoming a perfect scribe:
He knows vigilance, ferocity, and how to bark;
This one studies gazing as the dogs used to
On the images of the gods, as prophets should.
What gods, what images?
Those glorious trees, trilling with birds, cicadas,
Pillars of the sky, our books and ancestors;
I piss my tribute here, I cannot help it;
The few humans left, noble as dogs once were,
Piss on this university.
TAPESTRY MOTHS32
for Vicky Allen
I know a curious moth, that haunts old buildings,
A tapestry moth, I saw it at Hardwick Hall,
‘More glass than wall’ full of great tapestries laddering
And bleaching in the white light from long windows.
I saw this moth when inspecting one of the cloth pictures
Of a man offering a basket of
fresh fruit through a portal
To a ghost with other baskets of lobsters and pheasants nearby
When I was amazed to see some plumage of one of the birds
Suddenly quiver and fly out of the basket
Leaving a bald patch on the tapestry, breaking up as it flew away.
A claw shifted. The ghost’s nose escaped. I realised
It was the tapestry moths that ate the colours like the light
Limping over the hangings, voracious cameras,
And reproduced across their wings the great scenes they consumed
Carrying the conceptions of artists away to hang in the woods
Or carried off never to be joined again or packed into microscopic eggs
Or to flutter like fragments of old arguments through the unused kitchens
Settling on pans and wishing they could eat the glowing copper
The lamb-faced moth with shining amber wool dust-dabbing the pane
Flocks of them shirted with tiny fleece and picture wings
The same humble mask flaming in the candle or on the glass bulb
Scorched unwinking, dust-puff, disassembled; a sudden flash among the hangings
Like a window catching the sun, it is a flock of moths golden from eating
The gold braid of the dress uniforms, it is the rank of the family’s admirals
Taking wing, they rise
Out of horny amphorae, pliable maggots, wingless they champ
The meadows of fresh salad, the green glowing pilasters
Set with flowing pipes and lines like circuits in green jelly
Later they set in blind moulds all whelked and horny
While the moth-soup inside makes itself lamb-faced in
The inner theatre with its fringed curtains, the long-dressed
Moth with new blank wings struggling over tapestry, drenched with its own birth juices
Tapestry enters the owls, the pipistrelles, winged tapestry
That flies from the Hall in the night to the street lamps,
The great unpicturing wings of the nightfeeders on moths
Mute their white cinders … and a man,
Selecting a melon from his mellow garden under a far hill, eats,
Wakes in the night to a dream of one offering fresh fruit,
Lobsters and pheasants through a green fluted portal to a ghost.
THE STAINS
The woman in the besmutched dress
It was I who was afraid and the Indians rising
Collected Poems Page 14