Collected Poems
Page 21
Pulled over the water by their blinding veils.
REV. UNCLE37
The cool tankard engraved in wriggle-work.
A slight scraping or nibbling noise
In the house-timbers, like boughs chafing.
The salmon-silvery river over the red rocks.
A clockwork theatre. A munumental
Calendar musical longcase bellows-clock,
That measures the lunations and strikes
Christmas again after thirteen have passed.
A salt-saw in a glass case over the fireplace.
Rev. Uncle’s ’Obby ’Oss: the rotary spark discharger,
Stinking of ozone with the blue crackling spark
Leaping among its wires like a chattering monkey.
He says: ‘Teeth are the most indestructible of fossils,
And I wish to understand everything to understand God,
And because it is Sunday I make electrical sparks
To remind me of His Holy Ghost, nut-cracking ape
Swinging from Apostle to Apostle chattering
In tongues. I make myself
Both literate and numerate, Peter, and the alphabet
Is God’s knucklebones of Pentecost
Where he fleshes himself fingers of flame, my lover,
And in algebra numbers are letters, you can hear
God’s voice of creation when you vibrate the equations …’
And he did so, singing quadratics,
‘Let X be middle C: now strike me an A …’
And I did so, on the piano.
‘Not that the fossil-stone is a shut-in god,
Say rather it is a constant, something so slow
It shows its godlikeness only by residence
In many centuries. Don’t tell the Bishop
But God-Mumgod made the world in their image;
Virgins like you will understand in due time …
Ma-God is a sea-maid, created from brine
Delicate skinned patterns of beating gonads
Like a fleet of umbrellas frailer than rain
Each like a seawater castle or mandala
A curtained pulse of bliss of the sea
And I tell you, boy, being dead is like that,
A celestial jellyfish shaped like the sky, beating, beating,
A whole eye, grazing on aether … but I love
Being God’s vicar on two legs, lad, and the hymns,
Give me that A again …’
In my Uncle’s library, my Mother’s brother,
Every book and stone after church
Speaking his tongue, and on the brass lamp
His dog-collar swinging like a starched half-moon.
LIGHT HOTEL
The little girl riding the fallen tree like a spindly horse,
Like a queen mounted on a green spider;
The little girl’s white flesh is so sacred, so queenly,
I love and fear it so much
Carefully I think only of her dress,
Her foliate dress that falls in dry green pleats,
Or think as I look away from her sunlit face
How the sunlight holds a great conference in a sandgrain
With its plate-glass terraces and vista-windows of gold-tinge,
Then how the moon will hold her conference in the same sealed chamber.
In between times the non-staff have no clearing to do, no ashes to empty,
No glasses to polish, the light simply passes, great guest,
The light simply passes from the hotel, it is left untouched,
And above the million sandgrains, the one girl swishing her wide green horse.
TALL HAIRDO38
I
Her bronze hair beaten into a bearded face looking backwards,
She posed for her photo by the orchard, her coiffure
Stared backwards deep into the blossom where the clear stream raced
Full of its rippling fishes without blood, bones or skin
That wait for the apples to drop and become cider in them.
Open the wooden doors! cried that face
As her backwards-countenance stared deep into the trees.
I took my photo to purify the air,
Memory will perfect itself with its aid
Like bees sipping honey from a picture,
Painted flowers, real honey.
II
That face!
The grass grows fast in the starlight,
The sheep’s entrails smell of mown grass and starlight,
The dew falls on the grass like the stars descending to feast;
That bronze gaze does it!
The rich bodies of stars
Covered with molten syrups and roasting waxes
Have dark-distilled themselves into featherings of moisture.
III
Remembering Jupiter’s shadow
Peering out of the bronze hair-do,
In the roasting sun I smash that black
Bristling Devon fly: popping out of its back
Fat bunches of sallow eggs across the thin green window,
Like a banana-truck packed with yellow bananas in vehicular black,
Like smashing a flying ear of wheat which is black.
IV
The grave countenance of polished hair
Climbs into the evening;
There are clouds like Buddhas of slithering flour,
There are Butter-Buddhas of fatness, sunset-melting,
There are Buddhas of flowing pearly wax,
And now the storm, of great black-eyed Buddhas
Thrusting quick enlightenment from goffered halls.
Morning Buddhas climb rungs of frill and ruff, in the quiet air
White gulls turn, fine themselves
To a razor-line, turn back
A countenance alighting with a lemon stare,
A hooked nose, adjusting feather garments round a look
Rustling, of gold and black like apple-bees,
A waspish eye with a centre
Like the cold black earth flying a sunshine corridor.
V
She looks out of the picture,
Her bronze countenance facing backwards
Pores over the gravestones at St Materiana’s:
Smooth bald slate to the east, light lichen coastwards.
We paced it out
Like walking through a great black tree
Of silver-lined leaves, changing as we passed
The colour of God’s acre.
VI
The croaking frogs in the springtime:
The cries of unborn children.
The light shower sets the wood ticking
Like a great oval watch made of many oval drops.
For modesty, she looks down at her feet;
The bronze face rears up, alert:
Suddenly all the hoar oaks are chattering with auburn sunlight
As though troops of monkeys with torches ran through the boughs.
VII
Your inward skin studded with eyes like yonis
Looking down within you like the stars
Dilating out of blackness: there presides
Your photo-face and a bronze countenance watching backwards.
All the stars are gliding to fresh places,
Fretting as they glide, twirling like gimlets.
As they pass over, the dark apple-trees
Release their perfume in slow explosions.
They relimn into a new constellation
With two profiles that is the whole sky.
The moon climbs its slow hill to the centre,
Wish! it hangs there like a mirror.
Then the sun rises and does not put the stars out:
They shine still, strong black rays, and beams of perfume.
XII
THE APPLE-BROADCAST
(1981)
ON THE PATIO
A wineglass overflowing with thunderwater
Stands out on the
drumming steel table
Among the outcries of the downpour
Feathering chairs and rethundering on the awnings.
How the pellets of water shooting miles
Fly into the glass of swirl, and slop
Over the table’s scales of rust
Shining like chained sores,
Because the rain eats everything except the glass
Of spinning water that is clear down here
But purple with rumbling depths above, and this cloud
Is transferring its might into a glass
In which thunder and lightning come to rest,
The cloud crushed into a glass.
Suddenly I dart out into the patio,
Snatch the bright glass up and drain it,
Bang it back down on the thundery steel table for a refill.
SPRING
Even the bicycle-oil smelt of daffodils.
The full round drops slid into the little orifices.
I made my chain glitter.
I pumped the pedals with my hands, the bike
Inverted on its handle-bars and saddle,
And made the wheels shine like mirrors,
And they whirled like skirling puddles;
My pleasure was intense to think
Of the scented oil spun into the machine’s recesses.
She came out into the sunshine from the house;
She wore a kind of bloomers and a blouse.
She mounted on her wheels like summer cobwebs.
The air was scented with my father’s daffodils.
My pleasure was intense to see her cycle
And to watch the air puffing through her blouse,
Past every recess in her perfumed fields.
I opened my collar to the breastbone
Like a proper cyclist, and my erection
Was angular and pleasant on
My pointed pommel as I pedalled after
Along sweet-smelling roads, the scented oil
Spinning through my glitter.
THE BRITISH MUSEUM SMILE
None of the visitors from teeming London streets
Smiles. The deeply-lined downtrodden faces
Elbow the galleries. The sphinxes inside smile
And the colossal faces.
The face of a king with shattered legs
Smiles. And the guards smile. Their solitude
Forms into a smile and the patience
Of all the seated faces in navy uniforms
On the little chairs with the deeply-marked cushions
Smiles. They have caught it from the sphinxes
And the colossal kings and the powerful scribes
With the stone incense-bowls who smile sweetly
Over the smoky crowds. Some of the smiles
Are printed on the air from the faces of the guards,
And the stone faces have dissolved a little in the air;
Passing through and through the smiling galleries
Rubs inch by inch the face into a smile,
The smile of the king you pass (whose legs are sand),
The imagined absent smiles of the drenched nereids
Whose headless robes blow back against their flesh
In many folded smiles, whose smiling heads
Are museum air; the mummies
With their gasping toothy grins
Under the polite smile-paintings of their coffin-shells
Lumbered here by ship and block and tackle
Scattering a trail of smiles; elsewhere
The nereid heads are pebbles or sand,
And who picks up the pebble smiles at its smoothness;
(And the sleek sand is made of microscopic nereid heads
Turning and kissing in the water of the tide
The smiles rubbing from quartz lip to lip,
Dissolving in the sea and flying on spume;
The mariners inhale, and smile.)
Such smiles have flittered down
Like pipistrelles of Egypt on to the faces of the guards
And the smiling guards know something unknown to their crowds,
Something fallen from the sphinx that patters down
To fit you as you sit still on a stool
Polishing with your back those polished stones
For twenty years, or among those polished volumes
Not reading, but learning that smile. It took
Four thousand years to teach that smile
That flutters in these galleries among the guards
Who exchange mirrored smiles across glass cases; how
Did stone first catch it, that virus smile?
MY FATHER’S SPIDER
The spider creaking in its rain-coloured harness
Sparking like a firework. In the cold wind
Round the sharp corner of the house,
In the cold snap of that wind,
Many turned to ice:
Circular icicles.
My father lifted one off
Very carefully over the flat of his glove.
When I see these hedgerow webs
It is always with the sighing of the sea
In my heart’s ear; it was at the seaside
In the smell of sand and tar that I first
Understood the universal perfection
Of these carnivorous little crystals
Coiling from their centres like the shells.
They were cruel and beautiful
At the same time; abominable
And delightful; why else did the silly
Flies dart into them to be drunk
Up like horny flasks, as if
The pints of beer had veiny wings –
If I could see those dartboard webs
Surely they could. They are doorways
To death and the mandala-sign
Of renewed and centred life. And this one,
Here, look, with its array of full lenses
(For the thread is fine enough for minutest
Beads to catch and roll the light in strings)
Is like a Washington of the astronomers,
Planned, powerful, radial city, excited by flying things,
At every intersection and along each boulevard
Crowded with lenses gazing upwards, pointing light.
DELIVERY-HYMN
(During birth the baby’s head rotates against the os crucis at the back of the mother’s pelvis.)
See! the Woman is coming,
A Christ child in sun’s rays
Painted across her clothing.
The Ancient of Days is in His heaven,
Dangling like a parachutist in angelic cords
Among white wings feathering and beating;
The Ancient’s finger is hushing His nose,
He is white-nightied in womb-clothes,
Curled currents of birth-water are His beard;
His Mother’s true presence rustles through all her veins,
He knows the whole Torah,
His skull bowed and in the mouth the small thumb,
Preaching the thumb-suck sutra from the hollow womb.
See, under her bellyskin little knuckles punch up at heaven!
The Mother croons over her cathedral-dome
Hymns to her Ancient who will emerge into light and form
Fragrance and other wonders in His good time,
But is first to be crucified headlong on bone.
Now He is full-bearded and in the nave,
His serene locks are curled pulsations of the water,
He is warm-shirted in membrane,
And knows the whole Torah.
(The Woman is coming now, and some Christ spills Bright-red over her clothing.)
AT THE STREET PARTY39
(Jubilee 1977)
Water makes her way, accustomed
Into all places, through mire as an eel,
Through the air as a hawk,
She gets past the obliterator of forms
Because
she is the transformer,
Gets past clothed in food-chains,
Buckled into such sappy, stretchy satchels,
As wasps and gnats, such expanding
Revelation luggage as you. And the air
Which separates forms: to breathe with joy
Through the double nostrils, the nosethrills,
And to smell at the street-long table
Of the jubilee party in the open air
The head of my son as a mark of tenderness,
Smelling my sweet son in salutation,
Like fresh-baked bread mixed with the smell of tar
Of useful rope, sitting at his banquet
Under the street lamps with the other youngsons,
And – I could live on the smells of it –
He is warm and slightly sweating,
My sweet son, having drunk wine,
And I can smell the wine escaping from his hide,
And on the table the scones brick-brown
And the fruits arranged in castles,
And water making her way into our forms with joy
By way of wine and beer in cool pewter
As we drink to each other, and the pewter has its scent
Its faint eternal scent of tin, and the crowned
Heads above smiling wide on the flags, bending and rippling
Taking into wide mouths their great draughts of air.
GWENNAP CROSS40
Suddenly, it is autumn,
The convolvulus chars
With a fleshy scent,
The little Saxon Christ
Stands among his ebbing flowers.
He is carved from oolite
With his arms outstretched,
He stands in his stone loop
Supported by a thick shaft.
The prehistoric seas strive
And the result is this same Christ
Speeding through the corridors of time
With arms outstretched and welcoming
As though the shaft into the ground
Were those self-same corridors of stone time,
For the sea has set as stone, and we,
We carve it into welcoming gestures.
And since the light that fell into the great tree’s head
Became that plant, and the beasts
Nibbled and their bones were inundated