Round the world upsidedown since Garrick cast
An acorn into the Thames from Parliament Bridge. We got a tractor
And wrapped chains and lugged it from the harbour,
The gears screamed with the weight of the wet leafhead
Spread through the harbour like a green medusa
Dragged out of the sea full of acorns and foliage
Encaching tons of brine. I think the rains had clawed it
Out of Trelissick’s precipitous shores upriver;
The Clerk replanted it in our Gardens. In my dreams
It is a true sea-oak, riding shockhaired over the dark water,
Voyaging through the years white-barked like moonlight,
Its branches like veins of light dredging the deep.
VII
The whole world’s water at some time or another
Flows through the Carrick Roads, bringing
Its memories and Chinamen, its Portuguese ships,
Its sectarians and its briny sea-fruit.
Some days the water is bloodstained with trade-battles,
Others it is birth-water running like hot fat,
Sometimes it is industrial dregs, quite often
It runs pure from crystal springs:
And Helford oysters
Sit in the Passages selecting these waters.
Harvested by leathery faces with good eyes
And hands like watercourses, they entrain to London,
To the potted ferns and bow ties,
Where they induce savoury dreams of moonlit water
And Ancient Cornwall, in new young tycoons,
Seductive Poldark dreams that draw the money west …
We watch the great cars glide by to the boardrooms,
We own only topsoil, the minerals are reserved,
The ground is sold under our feet.
The Oysters call them here, the Blooms keep them.
They will own everything. Let the land
Packed with underpalaces of gold dripping with oil
Be oyster-tales only, told to a mining penis
On a hotel-bed in London; let it be rumours only, lest all
Our first-born be made miners by the great absent landlords:
Not made deep starved miners by the enormous absent landlords.
[…]
IX
Cinder-cakes and sour beer. In the cider-cellar,
A corner stuffed with cobwebs, and a little grey drinker.
He drinks and drinks until his loins hurt, and what does he see?
It is what he thinks he thinks that matters to him now.
He thinks of all the stars like animals, he thinks he dreams
He snips a piece of bristling fur from each, and puts
Peltry of light into his purse to sew a suit from.
He jerks awake and laughs, in his cider-cellar corner.
When he tries to tell us about it, he gets lost
Among the processions of animals, and animal-headed men,
In among the feet and hooves plashing starlight. Amazed,
I suppose, like him, I love the moist stars of morning:
Orion with his brilliant cock shining like the wet spiderweb,
Like a ladder of light heavier than all the world,
Climbing in his drenched plumage like pulsing snow,
Like a silver beaten so long that it gives back light in pulses,
Or like a black tree over-arching, of white apples with pulsing juice,
Or like a rainfall so massive it gluts and cannot fall,
Or like a full-rigged black ship, sailing with all knots white,
Or like wet herringbones at the rim of a great black plate,
Or am I drunk on apples like crushed stars, potent fruit,
That turns you grey and folded one day as cellar spiderweb?
X
Our radio is sensitive, but there is, thank God,
Beethoven sunlight beaming from the ionosphere,
Yet I can hear rain on the radio, and I think I can hear
The sheep tangled on the hillside, and I’m pretty sure
I can hear the broad black stairs of the slate quarry
Like pages torn out of the open hillside
Rustling packets of static;
And there is thunder! far distant,
High-pitched, like cellophane;
The soft grey sacks of rain pass over
In scratchy slippers,
The water is a continual whisper
That paces all ways down out of the skies,
Plashes on boulders, puts itself together
In new ways, raising rain-smells
Over the boulders, down from the moors;
You can hear every rasp and scratch
Of water from our speaker,
Every drop in the whole sky:
And Beethoven’s gone, dead
And buried in busy Cornish water.
XI
Sea-waves that are dry
Come off the tide
Or off the rolling Redruth highlands,
Electrical Winds,
Charging us up
It is one explanation.
Waves of exhilaration,
Waves of political rich broadcasts put out by the moorsoil,
Sparkling their invisibilities, recharging us.
The real broadcasters are marching, they are a sightless surf,
There is wave after wave of imperceptible police,
Invisible black psychiatrists in coats the colour of sea-wind,
Invisible white healers in the moonlight
Charging us up
The gusty weather heaves all the leaves of the brain,
The red cells scatter, you can see views through them,
We shall be down to the skulls soon –
Recharge us!
The dead have powerful lungs,
Lungs like parks, sky lungs,
The cemetery sex-adepts at their pursuits,
Joining the worlds with their maggoty electricities,
They set my mind to work with poisoned arrows
That dance you to death like windy trees
Charging about.
From this room we see a clock of breeze
And clouds that run fast or slow depending on
How much we interest each other,
Recharging ourselves
Great dockleaves stampeding in veridian pelts,
Herds of them with muscles of breeze,
Leathery resurrectionists!
The dew crackles and sparks,
Charged up,
In this wind the Goddess kisses every child at once.
XII
The church is very real, absolutely too real,
It is realer than me, realer than where I live;
If this church is a house then I am a white shadow;
Look, there are written stones here 200 years old.
Being my senior by 200 years they do not speak to me,
Except with formal cursive manners like engraved visiting-cards
Quoting their names and numbers, their vast antiquity.
They are so still my footsteps must fidget them,
I expect they wish I were as still as they are,
Sitting in some pew studying stoniness until I grow slatey-cold.
And there is that vast cross-death that is worshipped inside,
Tainting the air with sweats and hymns so that breath,
Which is something he doesn’t need on his side of the altar,
Is like a superfluous whispering of trees, appropriate to trees
Which are best cut down and employed as crosses,
Or chilled till they turn to stone; this death
Is so vast and old that the local deaths are trivial,
The people of the stones have not died, they have moved into the yew-shadow,
Which is a tree that has been casting shadows longer than I have,
And my parents who ca
st me are moving into the shadow: I follow slowly.
EXCREMENTITIOUS HUSK36
In the bright light which is the sun’s excrement,
That which it throws off in its processes,
I saw the big spider wrestling, intricately involved,
Wrestling with a shadow, with a filmier spider.
Was this its mate that it is sucking dry, is it
Topping up its fertilised eggs, the tight little capsules
With their juice of their father? Oh horror, I said,
That life comes out of death, and that this spider
Is feeding its children on its lover; and I saw
The spider struggle as a man might struggle
Out of his boots and his trousers soaked in the river,
And I saw the spider crooking and uncrooking its knees,
Extricating specks of claws from outworn skin,
Giving birth to itself in fits, like a belly-dancer, and having done
Scampering away leaving its dead self stuck to the altar-stone
Of St Cuby in Cornwall, mock-celtic restoration
It had chosen for its transformation
In the rosy light of the phony roundwindow,
With the little stream chugging under that altar
Where the Saint’s bones would have been laved to make miraculous water
Passing south through his skeleton for every pilgrim to drink
In the fabulous middle-ages where every other bone was a saint,
And the spider was a nothing, and the altar too busy to think.
ROUGH AND LECHEROUS
The wind blows furiously through the laurel grove,
As the frost twists and shatters there are sparks of ice.
The oaks create the morning-mist that is arranged in shelves,
White sequence of oak-shapes as the dew steams off their leaves
In the sweet tinge of first sun like a staining of honey;
But he wants the harsh tastes, he is not a man
Who lives in the steering eyes, in the jelly-globes,
The geographies of coloured images without taste or odour.
That he left his white syrup-of-mushrooms in her
In a meadow glimmering in the moist dust
With white puffballs large as lambs, is recorded
In the memory of his palms, the soles of his feet,
His prick, his scalp. He folded the woods up,
And all the moisture with the sheep and the puffballs,
Folded them very small and passed them through her cunt
Like a painted cloth through a ring, and through his prick
Like a lance into the heart as they made love
In the hot rain that splashed and steamed off
Their bodies-in-spate full of tumbling scree.
The birds mute their white cinders, happily fluting.
Now she cooks eggs on the stove of lava-bricks;
He lifts the Mexican sugar-skull white as a seabird
Out of its red paper, and takes it to her,
With its meaning: I wish to kill you sweetly again;
The frost-crackled horse-mushrooms smoking as the sun touches.
THE NINETY-TWO DEMONS
The vast brown shallows planted with seaweed
Awaiting harvest: iodine harvest, the violet element,
Evening element of the violet clouds vast as the shallows,
Vast languid harvest beating in the rock-pools.
The seaweed-scyther comes, his trousers rolled,
His hands crackled with salt sea-gathering, the little rivers
Of hand-blood add to the millions-of-brown-tongues harvest
Licking salt, licking blood from the gathering hands.
The boulders flower slowly with stone barnacles
Built of boulders that long ago dissolved in sea-chafe,
The dissolved ancient boulders rebuild on the boulders.
There are only ninety-two elements and most of them come from rock,
And the violet iodine returns like hair to grow on the rock,
And the human feet made of seawater and stones
Splash in the shallows gathering iodine
Under the violet clouds, among the dissolving rock
Made of the ninety-two demons of existence who
Travel the length and breadth of it, whose names
Enable you to chemist them; you are they.
SILICON STARS
(Diatomaceous plankton)
In the deep of the sea, a dandruff of plankton.
In the thin sunlit layers life thrives,
As it drops into the ever-night of the depths
Buries itself in itself, in fine dust
Always-raining. Adam, look at it
With the eye that God gave you for naming the smallest.
Those are footprints of life sharp as spur-rowels,
They are silicon stars like transparent iron,
Each is a vessel growing from its own centre
And pierced with windows like Washington
And, falling empty suddenly, so raining
Like a snowfall of glass;
much whale-meat masters
The open ocean, whistling and plunging,
Whose turds of plankton are entirely
The massed crystal vases of the almost-invisible creatures
Hurtling down to line the ocean with mud that is fine porcelain.
PEACHWARE
On the stoneware platter, a peach of bloom
Faintly blushing, arse-cleft like a wet dream,
With a gathered-in feeling under the down
Of heavy sap, like a great drop of honey
Held by its fibre and a little napped pelt; at its side
A silver knife with a white bone handle and writing
Cursive on the silver, the surname, Box;
And on the one-hundred-year-old planks
Glossy with beeswax and a hundred thousand man-hours
Polishing, done in peachwood with mountings of silver
At butt and tip, with a bunch of thongs
Riveted with thin stars in stainless steel,
A whip in peachwood, a wicked little whip.
AMONG THE WHIPS AND THE MUD BATHS
She offered the liqueur glass of Grenadine
Between her legs; the beard lapped it up;
She swooned, recovered, said
M. Grenadine’s the man for me; and from that day
The establishment was known as Mme Grenadine’s.
I saw her lose her temper with a punter once.
It was unprofessional, but after forty years of coaxing old cocks
She thought she had a flier, and it was not.
She screamed at him so furiously the sparks of anger
Danced in her teeth, picking them; she had a mouth
Of blue flame; I think I saw this; I was so respectful
That when she blew her top like Krakatoa I saw things
I did not believe. This went with the rumours of China,
How she was said to have learned to ease the slow blue lightning
Out of her skin and out of her lover’s skin
So that they were sheathed in radiance, and the dark room
Flickered with their body-prints, like sand-dunes electrified
After a dry day. I did go in without knocking once
And I saw something gleaming, but it was so faint,
A kind of mouldy shine on the snoring bodies
Wrapped like beached tunny in their silken sheets.
I have flickered static out of the great bed
Its sheets clung to me and would not be smoothed,
And there is continual restless bedmaking in this place, but aside from that
Her power makes me see things, I mean her personality, I mean my love,
Among the balustrades and carved galleries of her house,
The damasks and the fur rugs, the whips and the mud baths:
All t
hat sex populates my imagination and makes me happy.
THE WEDDINGS AT NETHER POWERS
I
The grass-sipping Harvestmen, smelling
Like haylofts on stilts, creaking
Like wet leather; a raven hops
And picks at them through the gravel:
It has macabre dandruff.
In its spotted froth the bark-faced toad squats
Among the daffodils like Stars of David.
II
A wasp crawls over the crucifix, sting out
Searching for a vulnerable part; the savage vicar
Strikes, the usurper bursts in melted butter
And horn-slices; another takes its place
Searching with its sting out over the holy places.
III
A gold-and-black body pinned to a matchstick cross,
The extra leg-pair free, glossy with wax, their cloven
Dancing-pumps shadow-boxing with slow death;
The sting stretched out in agony and clear drops
Slipping along the horny rapier to the tip
Where a woman crops the venom in an acorn-cup.
IV
The laboratory with skylights, the glass assemblies,
Tubes, taps, globes, condensers, flasks and super-hot flames:
With windows wide open to the pouring waterfall
White with every colour and exclaiming with every word,
With roof wide open to the starfall; just down the stream
The Mud Shop, with fifty-seven varieties of bath.
V
Two birds singing together like learned doctors;
The dew is open on every page;
He washes the dog’s feet gently with warm water;
She spreads luminous marmalade on cindered toast;
There is no tree of flies in which creamy skulls lodge, humming,
No dogs here have intercourse with any virgins;
There is a slug in the garden grey as a city kerbstone;
There is a cool sweet book of one page bound in appleskin.
VI
One hundred ship-weddings, the scoured planking, the pure sails,
The bride’s train blazing across the scrubbed poop,
The century of marriages and a hundred brides
Collected Poems Page 20