I wash the oily skin and sound of the metal off,
I buzz still in my skin like those grinding hulls,
I see the water roughen in the buzzing bath,
Soap-clouds spread, the steel mantra dies.
The metal bees have sought their garages.
We are their honey and pollen, the sweet thing
They gather and destroy, the flesh-roses.
GOD SAYS ‘DEATH’34
God says ‘Death’ in a gentle voice
To the corpse sleepless with the wheats
That hiss on a low earth-note all night
Like a door hung over with dark leaves
Out of which the immense syllable blows:
‘Death’ in God’s voice dressed in his spiderweb shirt
With its tassels of wheat, in his knobbly dressing-gown
Pulled from the oak; he
Says ‘Death’ with all his clothes,
And his mushroom buttons,
And his ponds which are mirrors
Tunnelling into the sky where he jumps up
Parting the thundercloud with electrical claws;
The reedy marshes of the railway, on some platform
Deep in East Anglia with the mire-drummer thumping
Through the lonely sky, God might pop out of the mud
Puffing a smoke rolled of flesh, dung and pelt,
And offer me one
And I could ask him then why ‘Death’,
And he would smile like a dago in his black cloak,
And offer me life to keep quiet about it,
‘Would you call God a liar?’ he hands me flowers
From the churchyard: ‘Do you call these dead?’
VICARAGE MOONCAKES
The white pillar of water throws itself
Over the inlet cliff. What keeps the Moon up?
Nothing but itself, rolling over the ground,
Luminous millstone. The Vicar has made a clock
Out of balsa-wood and black soapstone,
He has a pair of pants of black bible-leather,
He has a parson’s leather-jacket marked Holy
Across the shoulders, and Bible on the bum;
He has made a walking-stick
Of plaited straw: he likes featherlight things.
He lies on Fridays in a special bed
Which is a wooden plank in his large dry hall.
He writes a long letter to his Bishop, cold as a prison corridor.
He feeds a death’s-head moth on a piece of marzipan:
He is an authority. The Moon
Grinds soft white flour over his parsonage,
The daily round bakes him like a loaf of crust,
And he feeds us with Jesus like little soft moonstones
That taste of marzipan from his lepidopterist’s fingers.
THE GRAND LUNACY
The moon is the mansion of the mighty mother,
With its one blazing window it wings across the sky,
It is the abyss, sensing everything,
It is the opener, pulling up the frail spirit,
Snapping its rootlets a little more, each time.
Its glassy beverage, sticky as libido,
Oozes out of the mistletoe,
My moon-yolk leaps out into the bedroom,
Moon-beam, self-coloured.
The dead are the embryo people of the earth,
They are called Demetrians, eternal freshness
Is guaranteed for them; as the moon passes
They all stand on tiptoe, her beams
Comb them, they are like cobwebby wheat
As the wheat is, with its indefinite stalks,
Its frayed alleys of shadows, bending, tiptoe.
It is she who causes the woman’s tongue in my mouth
To branch like an antler, and the wings of cupid
Deep in my body, to beat; it is she
Who twines her fingers in my skin,
Flays a layer as one pulls
A sheet off a mirror in which she stares
From the one window flying in the sky of her stone cottage.
SEAN’S DESCRIPTION
The grave of the careless lady who swallowed pips,
From the rich subsoil of her stomach and snapped coffin-timbers
A fine greasy crop of apples glittering
With their waxes; and Sean told me
Over a customary glass the best description he’d read
Of what a dead person looked like, actually:
‘A green doughnut with eyeholes in it,’ he said,
‘A green doughnut with black cream,’ as we sat
By the waterlilies rooted in mud of the pub garden,
And a bumble-bee in a tippet of glossy fur
Snatched a line from the air, and I brought
One of her apples from my pocket, and bit
Through the sweet flesh that fizzed with young ciders
And my toothmarks blazed white through the red skin.
‘Look,’ I said, holding up another firm sweet apple,
‘This is what a dead person really looks like; taste her.’
THE LOOMS OF THE ANCESTORS
Cloth woven on a loom whose spindle-weights
Are made of the sliced bones
Of forefathers and foremothers.
The loom is the burial place of the ancestors:
The long bones for the treadles,
The sliced bones for the weights,
The thin bones carved into the shuttles.
As each person dies, some portions
Are fed to the birds,
The remainder buried in the cotton-fields,
The bones boiled and varnished,
Carved, and pegged with bone-nails
Into the loom, which is called
By the person’s real name, which is not used
When they are alive, but is their loom-name.
Some flesh flies in the air, other meat
Is buried wrapping cotton-seeds,
This harvest also bears their name and is woven
On the loom of their bones which is placed
In the courtyard where the birds drink.
The garment is called by the relationship.
I am wearing my grandfather’s aunt on my back.
My first wife is these knickers.
Sheep graze on the cemetery grass
Where the wool-people are buried, not far from the hills
Where we white cotton-people burst our pods.
When the sheep are filled, the goats graze there,
We ferment their milk to a spirit
Which speaks through the shaman’s lips
Drunk on ancestors. The chief wears
A robe of woollen chiefs, many-layered as an umpire,
And the birds feed from his grandmother mittens.
I spin my father’s white flesh onto my wife’s fast wheel.
PLACE
The train’s brakes lowing like a herd of cattle at sunset
As it draws up by Lesson’s Stone, by mountains
Like deeply carved curtains, among small birds
Knapping at the stationmaster’s crumbs, hopping-black
Like commas of wet ink: I could see their small eyes glisten.
I thought I must die in my sleep, I lay in my bunk
Like wet clothes soaking, the convulsions were the journey,
The bedroom bumped. I stepped off and the mountain landscape
Was like stone guests set round a still table
On which was set stone food, steaming
With the clouds caught on it; a plateau
Surrounded with peaks and set with cairns
And stone houses, and a causeway up to Giant’s Table,
And the railway trailing like a bootlace. My house
Was hard by Lesson’s Stone, near the sparkling Force
That tumbled off the cliff, that in summer
Left its dry spoor full of thornbush. Then the
lizards
Flickered among the rocks, like shadows
Of flying things under a clear sky, or like
Bright enamelled painted rock on rock, until they swiftly
Shot sideways too fast to see. I arrived
On Lesson’s Stone Stop platform a decade ago;
The place where I live is still like pieces
Of a shattered star, some parts shining
Too bright to look at, others dead
As old clinker. I am afraid to mention
The star’s name. That would set it alight.
GUARDED BY BEES
The pornographic archives guarded by bees
Who have built comb in the safe; iron doors
From which the honey drips; I sip a glass
Of bee-sherry, yellow and vibrant; I came here
Past the old post-office, boarded up,
From within the cool darkness sun-razored
I heard the hum of bees; my friend tells me
That the radioactive cities of the future
Will be left standing for euthanasia,
They will be kept beautiful though all trees
And lawns will be plastic. Those who wish to die
Will drift through the almost-empty streets,
Loiter through the windows of the stores,
All open, all untended, what they fancy they can take,
Or wander through the boulders of Central Park, its glades
To hear the recorded pace and growl in the empty zoo-cages,
And consider the unperturbed fountains of water,
While it, and they, are rinsed through and through
As the pluming spray by sunlight, with killing rays,
Lethal broadcasts, until they can consider no more.
Germs over the whole skin die first, the skin after,
Purity first, then death, in the germless city that amazes
The killed lovers with its pulsing night-auroras.
I reply I would prefer a city constructed of OM,
A city of bees, I want this disused city
Converted to a hive, all the skyscrapers
Packed with honeycomb, and from the windows
Honey seeping into the city abysses, all the streets
Rivers of cloudy honey slipping in tides,
And the breeze of the wings as they cool our city.
This would be my euthanasia, to be stung by sweetness,
To wander through the droning canyons scatheless at first,
Wax thresholds stalagmited with honey-crystals
I snap off and munch, and count the banks
That must brim with the royal jelly …
And some wander through the sweet death, city of hexagons
And are not stung, break their hanging meals off cornices
In the summer-coloured city, drink at the public fountains
Blackened with wings drinking, and full of wonder
Emerge from the nether gates that are humming
Having seen nature building;
others stagger
Through the misshapen streets, screaming of human glory,
Attended by black plumes of sting,
With a velvet skin of wings screaming they’re flayed.
THRUST AND GLORY
A great longhaired hog, glistening with the dew,
It knows night by heart, sucked through blue irises,
But day it allows to rest and glitter on its skin
And its long hairs harsh as fingernails
Like coarse reeds on a hump of the bog.
It is a golden pig and its underslung rod
Is the very word for thrust, like the drill
Into the future, and it will run along that drill’s sights;
But now, glistening with distillate, it waits
For the sun to raise moulds of steam along its back,
For the sun to warm it dry and the air to towel it
Testing its hooves meanwhile that clock on the stone,
Ready with its seed and tusks and bolts of muscle
And the grease of seed it pumps into the black sow
Like lightning-bolts into the hulking black thunder anvil
And the storm will gather until it breaks and rains pigs,
The mud glorious with rain-shine, pig-grease and wallow.
THE WHOLE MUSIC AT POD’S KITCHEN
While eating a crisp ice-cold lettuce at Pod’s Kitchen
I thought of how the white flesh of cumulo-cirrus was ice,
How wind pulled the fronds from the seven-mile lettuce
That hovered daintily over counties, wide as a county,
I thought of how the thunderstorm whirls the white blanketings,
How the sheer-white terraces become a palace of fireworks
Like a Snowdon aviary of rainbows spreading their wings
And sparking their beaks and fucking in great thumps;
I find on my green lettuce
A tiny snail like hard snot
I think of poisons so old
That they have become precious stones
Pulling back to black earth edible men and women
And how the earth folds over them like grave thunderbulks
With white inscriptions startling in the dusk.
I swallow my edible green fronds and regard
My glass of water fallen from those clouds
In black thunder;
It stands still and clear, poised to enter me,
Like one long distinct note of the whole music.
A MOVE TO CORNWALL
I must raise a teashop in this place with my own two hands,
I am marrying a wife to conceive a child to adventure
Once more in these mother-lands, these hills
Like great fat mothers in green, dreaming
And as they dream sweating slightly in their sleep;
And the woods of grey oaks unravelling from their age
In green foils and glossy membranes this dawn’s freshness;
The black-and-white fungus like a branch of magpie;
The radar we call trees reading the weather day by day,
Building models of the weather vertically in grids
Fining to twigs, the climbing axis of rings,
Cylinder upon cylinder of recorded weather,
Like old people crabbed with their reading,
Cramped among their books, the forking pathways between stacks,
Each apple a complete summary indexed in ten pips
That I shall serve baked brown and running in juice
With a core of sugar like melted resin,
With a drawer of money,
With a drawer of forks smelling of fish;
The child runs in from the swings; I gave her scalding hot weather-apples.
from LIVING IN FALMOUTH35
I
Seagull, glittering particle, climbing
Out of the red hill’s evening shadow into sunslant
At high tide and sunset; there is a moth
On the rusty table that spreads out wings
Like lichened tombstones.
A crackwillow leaf
Floats into an ashtray; we are among mirrors
And water, and the small windowed boats
Gently in the tide play with long beams
Like silent swordplay
And the gull arrives into the high air
Still full of sunshine, and his particle shines
And the boats knock gently among the shades
And the heads nod
And the good and bad dreams come swimming
Up out of the water glittering as they arrive
Sliding from under the red hills on which
The four-legged phantasms of wool graze,
Cloud-dreams let loose a moment of shower,
Dream-tides knock the fencing dream-boats
And two-legged dreams make one flesh.
II
I sit inside one of her gran
ite tents
Praising against reason the high winds,
The stars hard like gimlets, her bronchitis,
Her onsets of winter and damp moulds,
Her spooks that do not linger,
Her magic touches.
She is only the same town from day to day
In the sense that a book is the same from page to page:
Or her water in the estuaries banked high
With mica-mud that glistens like satin garments
Ready for the spring to put on and shake out
To every colour, is the same water
That lies glowering under corpse-skies.
III
The tourists run like tides through granite houses,
Their ebb the dereliction of seaside pavilions,
Summer woods like smashed clocks, cliffs
Like crumbling cloudscape, dry-rot like wood-spooks
With white cobwebby arms: a bad smell, holding
Out a large repair-bill. Falmouth’s bathing-beauties
Are sewing next summer in their dressmaking classes,
Her art-school a tenement of night-dreaming canvasses;
His clouds a tight lid God fastens on the box
Full of thousand-year-old churches and stony boarding-houses
Deciduous of visitors; her echoing mines
Terrible art-galleries for works
Of miner-death that mills tinfoil, of cars in the raw
Bleeding over the roofs of profound caverns. That
Organ-note as the Redruth wind blows over the moor
Winds on the pipes of long-dead mines,
Brings all the bad weather, all the ’flu.
This is the wind that blanches Falmouth, shrinks it
To thin-glassed tombs of drunken landladies;
Her blossoms wither, like an alcoholic flush;
The tourists ebb like tides out of the houses.
[…]
VI
A ship’s figure-head bobbing in on the tide?
A floating pew, shaggy with saints?
Then I saw some of the hair was roots, it was an oak
Upended, a tree swimming ashore.
It bumped against the quay, nobody I could see
Stepped off its felloe of roots, but the town lightened
As if this traveller had tales. Two hundred years
Of voyaging oak, by its girth; say it had sailed
Collected Poems Page 19