In blond hair and buttons to his trumpeting prize.
DREAM-KIT
Shut away here in Cornwall
With these provocative black
Materialising cabinets: TV or radio set,
That raise horrors and slight
Glories in the mind with
Invisible rhythms caught in
Their lightless black interiors
On skeletal fingers. The whole
Earth’s atmosphere is a pond
Of trembling waves made
Of invisible colours, a river
Of transmissions full of
Coloured images of where it’s been,
Its receptive water peering into cities
Full of troubling troubled ripples
The news makes and the dramatists
And the rainbowing commercials, and packed
With invisible creatures that swim
Plainly into view on the
Aquarium of your screen.
The set itself is like the window
On to a great tank of sharks,
Or one set into a swimming-pool,
Or into a river’s banks,
You switch from place to place,
You have so many windows; it is like
A diving-bell searching over ooze
Or a tumbler pushed into a stream for you to see
The sportive minows footballing
Back and forth over the green watery colours:
But they are all phantasms: you are watching
Vibrations only, rhythms, which are
Nothing shaking the radio-ether, which is
Nothing also. Racks and racks
Of goodly-looking nothing in a broadcasting hypermarket
Transmitting centuries of miles away,
And not at that moment either
Since these are only phantasms of reflections
Stored on tape, strips of plastic
Lined with finely-powdered forms of rust.
And these rays penetrate our brains,
Like God’s rays of outer space
That warm us, but unlike those
Asking only that we remain
Distracted. The TV set
Is an artificial dreaming-kit.
The true instrument
Is the dreaming mind
That pushes its tumbler
Into the river that flows
Under the skin: the groping
Caressing fingers enter
The neck’s skin and grasp words there
That cry out.
THE JOURNEY
Carriages sealed, and marked ‘reserved’.
In the dining-car everyone turns
Frowning at something that slips out of sight
Past the window among the thundery horizons.
The clouds are like black cliffs streaked
With torrents of lightning, with the rain
Flying against the panes like an explosion in a glassworks.
Clouds like great white moths, wet moths
With the voice of an old lady out of control,
Mist riding over the gravel-pits like white Christians,
Mist on the steely waters like the cliffs of heaven.
I see stream past the window
A magpie like a black bible partly open, fluttering
Its white pages between black covers; it arranges them
So that some text is always showing; the wind
Flicks its pages and the bible spins past, and everyone
Turns to look again. One bible? What bad luck …
But here comes another, slowly rowing after the first,
Catching it up at last. Bible and counter-bible,
Man bible and wife bible: good luck for eternity.
The thunder has a human voice, now it is coming close
To having a human face: the clouds fold
Into a benign countenance, turning away. Behind its skull,
A bright shaft of sunlight breaks through.
On the rubbish-dumps I see the breeze still blowing
And the many feathery plant-seeds like travelling candle-flames.
They are burning rubbish-heaps like vast
Lantern-faces set in the hill, like a
Village of windows. I think that a city should not
Be hemmed by its disjecta, however beautiful
At night, but that it should be surrounded
By a wall carved to sound a fanfare on the dawn wind.
I observe this to the young lady opposite; she does not reply;
Her toes wriggle guiltily in their open-work shoes
Like a little stream over its rubbishy pebbles.
THE SECRET BREAKFAST
The secret that was her marvellous beauty;
Sometimes he saw it everywhere, when he least expected it,
Though at any moment the bad habits would wear thin
And it was there in items of his person, or in what
He had not thought to look at before. He might suddenly
Catch a glimpse of it among the birds,
Not the song merely, but the flicker
Of white excrement muted
Between the legs could give it;
Just that phrase, ‘muting a white
Excrement’, with its flicker, could
Do it. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘my world
‘Is broken up in patches, little
Windows. The domes of the acorns
With their polish as of some Islamic masterpiece
‘Infinitely jointed: they will have it. But
The oak is not my lover, only my friend.
Snatches of a friend’s speech open to the beyond,
‘The touches of a lover’s hand are guaranteed!
But I will keep my scepticism,’ he shouted,
As he walked into the breakfast room
And the table set was a sudden playground
Of toys, arbitrary and laughable shapes
That demanded to be played with; the spoons
Like paunching fairground mirrors on handles;
The boiled eggs like sealed skulls, full of a runny thought;
The salt like a caged swarm of pure white flies
In a fluted aviary; the pepper
Like beige gnats each with its pungent sting;
The fried eggs shining like the sun and so defenceless,
Blood of greasy gold; the napkins folded
Each in its ring like the silver thorax of a snow-moth;
Marmalade like an aquarium of orange eels;
The butter shining like a sweating steed
In its small loosebox; all the forks
Tingling with their tunes; ‘Hum,’ he said,
Watching the zoo parading and his actual breakfast
Coming and going, like poetry
In between the factual lines; ‘Good,’
She said, not bothering about his hesitation,
But knowing he was happy, and that, in his case,
Meant seeing things, while
The eggshell fluttered in her white hands.
THE HOUSEKEEPER
The long esparto of the nether world,
The grass avenues that rip you to pieces
Whispering Isis, Isis,
Go there a second time
And they restore you whole;
It is worth risking all.
The left hand of God is clothed
In a whispering glove of rushes,
Or it is clothed in a bed that creaks
Like leather; I found a great spider
That held fast like straps of leather tacked
Behind my picture of the Vicar smiling.
In the high wind, in the churchyard, he and I
See that the spiders are having difficult landings,
They have become caught up in their parachutes
Now their flight is hampered by a light drizzle –
They cannot raise their soaked webs, the
ir windrows,
Their skyhooks, their gossamer strands
That lift them into the unknown by their
Bottoms where the spinnerets are; these matters
Blaze at me because my buxom pillow
Waits for the kephalia of my teacher, while the yews
Distil their flashing poisons over the indifferent graves.
I will seduce him from the church
With the empty foxskin
That wraps my full white bosom; after
Through the mists and jet black graves we’ll wander
With the light gone out of holy marriage,
Religion changing hands, and all the old
Arguments gone. The sea goes on
With its distant signing on all the beaches,
White writing on gold. I draw off his limbs
Jesus’ black shroud of cleric’s cloth.
My master of communion
Lies flat on the pillow like a snake flattened
On the superspeedhighway, crushed
And recrushed by the speeding traffic,
Its venom evaporating
Harmlessly. I have tried
The taste of the cloth mask of his chest,
I have loosened his linen collar with my teeth,
Rustling Isis, Isis, and he comes
Like an express-train, calling on
The thousand-windowed name of God; and now
It is the yews distilling slowly on the mirror-graves,
And the marriage gone up the chimney where the cats shriek
On slanting roofs in midnight moonlight. My cup runneth over
And my house is as if full of holy bread new-baked,
A tough flaky roof and inside
One entirely beautiful white bed that must be eaten
Smelling of love’s light alcohols and yeasts
Before staleness hardens it like holy marriage.
SILENCE FICTION44
The late houses are built over the early caves,
The foundations and cellarage are where the first people lived.
We have fitted stout doors and hang their keys
High in the chimney-vaults where, out of sight,
They gather from the flames great swatches of soot,
Bunches of soot-flowers out of the food-fires,
Like the brushes of black foxes through the generations.
Then in the especial bad times a besmutched woman
Enters in defiled white to fetch down our keys
And open the earth to us. As she stands in the threshold
We know we must cast over our hearth pitchers of water,
And she treads through the warm ashes and with black sleeves
Reaches into the hanging soot,
Unhooks and rubs across her skirt revealing
The bright metal under the black grease. She
Throws the key down ringing on to the stone flags,
Leaves into the dusk for the next house.
We unlock and descend into the cellar-roots,
Light in the chimney-roots our lower fires,
And begin our lives on the unadorned earth floor
Some of which is sheer sand, elsewhere silky clay.
There we find shells of earliest cookery, and our fingertips
In the dirt encounter marvels of red-ochre bones,
Our torches tossing shadow like black potter’s clay.
The wind blows through the upper houses, and the rain blows,
Cleansing hearth and porch, rinsing chimney. We know
By no messenger when to return; under the tangled
And matted hair, and the grime, and through the rags
That have rotted, a look shines,
An acceptance. Then we return
To the sunlit chimneys and the whitened hearths,
Out of the earth cradle; quenching the flares,
Troop chattering out of the cellar stairs,
Draw baths and strop to mirror-glass the rusty razors,
Secure the lower doors with their immense keys we hang
Shining bright in the chimneys; light our upper fires.
The black soot feathers through generations on the long keys.
We recall wondering, occasionally, that in those cellars
We never spoke, not at any time; once through the door
We were to keep and breathe the silence
That had gathered there like foundation water
In the roots of the chattering houses, deep and pure.
THE APPLE-BROADCAST
(Meditation-experience at Boscastle, N. Cornwall)
An Apple a day …
I
A valley full of doctor apples,
A valley-stream like flaming straw,
The valley blushing from its roots, and rustling,
The hill-roads cobbled with red fruit.
Some hidden bird blows his dry trumpet
Under the oaks, hoarse as an insect
Crying, under the crisp fretted oakleaves,
Hoarse as a fly walking in its hair,
Its swishing skeleton, its crackled footsteps,
Over the tusked leaves, hoarse as broken bone.
The air goes taut on water-strings
To dirigibles of thunder riding, it splits,
We see the lightning packed with apple-valleys,
All the insects shaking, and their shutters shine
In repeated flashes, under the lightning.
There is the dry trumpet from the rustling leaves
Of some bird chopping at the oak-line
Full of green caverns with the dew
Running over every twig forming
An eye wherever it can,
Walking up from the sleep of water,
Shaken into the sudden light,
Tall water-being shaped by fretted trees,
And the hoarse bird trampling over the leaf
Under the green caverns with its dry trumpet,
While I lie intensified among the grass-sheaves
By cobwebs in their flashing wheels,
An instrument among bird and insect instruments:
The oak-walker scrubbing with its throat,
Or the spider’s wiry grasp
In its silk aerial hung, catching parched transmissions
That cry with dry coughs
Out of their saline drops
That moisten their batteries of wings,
The moisture that looks out of their dry eyes
Which the spider blots up with its tusks.
A bird speaks like crackling porcelain,
Like the crunching of its sky-blue shell,
The lightning flashes over the apples,
The black birds skid across the red roads,
And I lie as if transfixed by the lightnings
Amid the stiff dry arrow grass
Near the Spider with her crisp handclasp
In her glass ladder rocking the empty fly.
A dog barks a command from a cottage yard,
The apple-college shakes
Over the entire valley.
On the upper road a quarry-lorry
Hits a bump, its boulders bark and spark.
II
The valley full of doctoral apples,
Round doctoral books among the spider-webs,
Scarlet with white sugared pages;
The oak-colleges ponder in their timber halls
To the bird’s music of the dry oak-trumpet,
The wasp demented in the apple-crags
Turning over and over the red book
Of tattered skin and fragrant learned oozing,
The bird barking under the trees from far off:
That standing wave called ‘Bird with Dry Voice’
Held in branches, broadcast in echoes;
The broadcast ‘Valley Water’ flashing and rustling;
The birds sailing on their silky circuits
Among the laddered robes of water,
Their skirts that brush us constantly
Hanging from stars, their sparking silks,
The enormous white voices over the wet apples.
III
I listen to the voices in the rock cottage
I dwell in which is a radio-set,
I go outside and watch the planets brush us,
Their wakes of birds and insects, their broadcast
Called Spider in her silk antenna.
The stars shine down in their long dresses,
Every cell of the grey house becomes glass,
The skin clears of each red apple, every seed
Like slow lightning spreads in orchard-boughs,
The enormous white voice over the apple-valley
Beats in echoes orbed like spider-webs that shine
In broadcasts hung with appled water-drops,
Its electricity races down all streams and stems
Like flaming straw and mirror appleskins,
The stiff grass stands on end.
I am electrical for ever with these sights,
This broadcast uttered from the apple-storm,
Beneath my skin its lightning runs for always;
Like cobbled groves of rosy apples
I will transmit my programmes,
Like insect-eyes glittering under lightning.
IV
In the valley full of doctors,
In the weather full of round young doctors,
The lightning is a white priest hurrying
Past fat black convocations far above him,
And the red doctors knock heads conferring
Like the rolling green heads of the sea close by
With white beards and rumbling snowy rafters;
In my granite cottage which is a crystal-set,
The walls flashing with their ancient broadcasts
Recorded as the rock flowed, then set in wavelengths,
The baby sits with fingers weaving programmes,
Sitting in a broadcast which is a jersey,
Picking up a programme which is a rusk,
Mouth full of dew, fingers which are aerials,
Sitting on a wavelength which is a blanket
Woven out of meat and starlight on some far hill;
I will give my baby an apple which is a doctor daily,
We shall tune in together to what it says,
Breathing apple-scented air-transmissions,
For with my tender knobbed antenna
I tuned into a certain star babe-broadcast
Deep in a girl’s receiver
Collected Poems Page 24