Collected Poems
Page 25
As every bird and beetle and doctor apple
Does, on its own particular waveband.
There is so much unseen, and so many tuning
To lightning broken over the apple-orchards, responding
To lightning spun through white-skinned orchards.
Now the thunder has closed his humming station,
The moon-band rises, moths dressed like moonbeams
Take wing into the excited grasses.
The Spider plucks some for their floury blood,
Good bread, but many couple
Lamb-faced in their woolly wings,
Tumbling like moonlit monarchs in their ermines,
And printed across with black star-signallings
Flutter the constellations on their wide white wings.
XIII
THE WORKING OF WATER
(1984)
SECONDS, DROPS, PENCE
The river green as its trees that stand
Up to the breeze in flounce and ferment.
Every drop accounted
Not as by a miser,
But by awareness, somewhere,
Or green awareness everywhere.
The water creased by colliding ringlets,
Every feathering accounted for,
The fishmouths plucking the smooth stream
Tucked with buttonhole mouths
Which leave shadows and ghosts
On the mirror, colliding ghosts,
Scudding shadows. And the mud,
The plush green mud
The close-set velveteen
Combed everlastingly, electrical
With the river combing by, its slow
Green sparks dancing
And flashing between sky-pole
And water-pole, water
Brushed through grilles,
Deeply sliced currents
Through railings and through chains,
And the rows of sluicewheels
Like gardens of steel flowers;
The green walls built
Of the courses of leaves,
Some panels hiss,
Others are shuttered still.
A river of leaf-colour liquor,
And in the Works, repressed water,
Misery counted in ledgerly sinks,
Concrete tanks like catalogues,
All their leaves unturned
Mouldering in the unread libraries of water.
Suddenly the people in the town feel dirty
And turn on their taps because
A dirt-coloured cloud glides overhead,
And the countermanded water stirs,
Great librarians of pulse reach into pages
Tear relevant passages off concrete shelves,
Slices are taken down and drawn into baths.
The clear texts are dirtied again.
Water lies in its hearths
Like an ashless fire,
Like a great glassy puppy ready to play
If the taps whistle at him;
The river-current plays with its bone of sunlight.
This is how you adjust the water-set. Six
Sluice-wheels on a gantry over a brick-lined pit;
The swirling images of all life
Flowing into the square chamber;
And at the bridge of the brick ship
To watch over the eternal wheels and spirals
Forming in the water
And wheeling there like the stars;
Turn the wheels upon the wheels
To pull yourself into the world behind the world,
Which in its sudden cold snap
Sets in innumerable six-sided wheels,
The cogs of the universe of the planned water-city,
Time set and visible like an Einstein precinct.
XIV
THE MAN NAMED EAST
(1985)
CALL45
for F.
The shipwright’s beauty, who butchers the forest,
Dresses it again in shining sails,
Garments like blossom,
And nailed with new iron like budding grain,
With big ship-bosoms full of wonderful fruit
And men of unbelievable expertise
Of knowledge of the stars and sands;
You serve branching ocean routes
As though the whole sea were a sailing-tree
And the ships were blossom on it
Gliding slowly
On its world-embracing boughs
Transferring goodness and prosperity,
You give them yare names:
Ocean Moon, Tidesource,
And their travellers a berth of womb
In the big-belly blown along
By blinding blossom;
And others dig
And uncover the scarlet iron
And with fire forge sounding hulls and bells
And the great mines of iron feather on the waters,
The heaviest stone sails the wide seas,
Or in the dusty dry dock
Resounds to its remaking
As a cathedral calls out to its glad city to serve.
IN THE PHARMACY46
for Wendy Taylor
A moth settled on the side of a bottle,
Covering its label, a marvel. The embroidered wings
Of the moth called Wood Leopard. It flutters off
And settles on another bottle. The label of this violet
Fluted container with the glass stopper reads
Lapis invisibilitatis: it would make you disappear.
The moth like a travelling label walks
From bottle to marble bottle with floury wings
Embracing each and tapping with fernleaf tongue
Sugared drops at neck and stopper,
Built like a fat rabbit with gaudy wings extracting
The essence of pharmacies, the compendium,
Staggering from jar to sculptured jar and sealing
Into capsules its own cogitatio,
Implicating in its eggs our explicit medicine.
And the draughts of invisibility, the poisons?
The caterpillar remembers to die, and disappears,
As the labelled stone declares,
All melts to caterpillar soup inside the wrappings
Where the pupa cogitates,
Just the nerve-cord floating like a herring-skeleton,
And round those nerves lovingly unfolds
The nervous wings on which is marked
In beautiful old pharmacy script, the formula.
THE HEART
An autumn bluebottle,
Frail winged husk with the last squeezings
Of the year sealed up inside,
The last juices and saps of the fruits
Crystallising inside the stone gaze
Of the insect-mask, countenance of sugars.
It sings softly, in search of sugars.
The maiden sings softly,
She whose red blouse
Is blowing on the line,
Its buttons glittering like sugar,
Full of the wind’s tits,
That I saw her filling yesterday;
As though she had given one of her bodies
To the elements,
For the weather to fill,
The red blouse pulsing on the line,
Emptying and filling like a heart
In the strong gusts,
The wind’s heart beating on the line;
And the sails of blood,
The stout red-rigged yachts competing on the estuary,
Red for celerity and heart,
And the transparent word breathing everywhere.
The maiden and the fly sing softly,
It butts its drumstick head against her window,
She stares out at a heart of hers beating in the weather,
The fly so full of low sweetness it hums like rubbed crystal.
THE GREEN TOWER47
(C
arn Brae)
Leaves on their wooden shelves
Like shelf after shelf of shiny footgear
All marching on the wind,
Boots without soldiers,
The battleground of wind
Under one blue helmet,
Spirit soldiers marching in their winged boots,
The sycamore of the churchyard full of ghost
By this broad calm church
Light and airy and white with plain windows,
Built in the seventeen hundreds
Like a rational cabinet of light and praise
And at the nave-back a step down into an old tower,
The old bell-tower with the map of scores of churches
All the bell-able churches in Cornwall.
As I stepped down into this area
I thought that a high bell must still be ringing,
Have lately been rung,
Or its late echoes were caught still in the crystals
Of the dark stone blocks of this elder tower,
And like an electricity a slight
And relaxing current passed through my whole skin
And I stepped out into the broad church and there was nothing
And I stepped back into the stone tower that was tingling
And I stepped out and took her back down with me
And she felt it also, like the near presence of water.
And outside the tall tower was green from weather,
And with its gargoyles that looked like piskies of the rain,
Like a towering haunt of piskies, the green tower;
And every Sunday the tiger of blood
Lashed its tail on their altar,
The bible turned its pages
Over and over not wearing them out,
The souls all marched in the big
Thumping boots of their hymns,
The congregation roaring aloud with their cunning
Who have that sweet relenting pagan
Bell-hung current at their Cornish back.
THE QUIET WOMAN OF CHANCERY LANE48
The blind girl points at a star.
At night, she says, when all the stars are out,
She feels their rays feathering on her face,
Like a fringe of threads.
She stands by the beehive’s low thunder.
There will be snow, the bees of ice
Will swarm from their darkening hives. I see
Clouds are gliding, and becoming, in the moonlight,
Mountaineering from nowhere, as the mass of air,
The town’s hanging breath, soars into the cold
And is ice in dirigible bergs
And apparitions of a terrain they have created:
Cloudscape. How, under these glories, I wonder
Can men stroll past in deadblack suits, signifying
Ignorance and blindness of the skin,
Swinging griefcases packed with inky briefs,
And a spring in their step from this uniform?
They have a blind confidence, she says, in their power
And in the courts cry ‘Proof, proof!’,
They can make all others’ skins go sightless,
Blind with worry, yet mine, she says,
The Quiet Woman without eyes,
Not living in my head,
The Headless Woman, my skin
Is open as the night sky, with the remote stars
And nearer glories easing across; my eyes
Are blind, but I know these people
By the no-shapes of their numbness as they go,
But since, blind, I am not in their power,
Being afflicted by God, they will not touch me,
With their penal pleading, for I belong
To Another, Who has my eyes. These lawful men
To her are like stars that have gone black, turned
Inside out with the suction of nothingness,
Empty sockets walking the Inns of Court.
The blind girl points to the stars
As if she could see; she informs me
How a special breath from space
Tells her they are out in their moist fullness.
Yet the sky is so packed, how can she not,
Pointing, light on some constellation or other?
But I believe her when she tells me how
Her life without eyes is so full. I take
The blind girl by her night hand.
With her fingers raised, she traces in the air
The slow rising of that mountain that hangs, the full moon,
It is like the presence of a fountain, she says,
Like the fresh aura of falling water, or like
That full head of the thistle I stroked in the park,
And its sound is like a fountain too, or like snow thistling.
UNDER THE DUVET
Sleep-feather, the sleep-feather
Comes drifting down,
Rocking the child to sleep,
The child sleeps covered
In a bag of drifting sleep-feathers;
Eider-plume, the ducks are flying
Loftily through feathered clouds.
She sleeps flying through their death,
Their flow of plumage, bag of the whole flock.
Just as we realise with care
That we are dreaming, just there,
Entering the Self, and leaving, just there,
That we are asleep, and watching a dream,
And just there, waking, but entering
The small door of a second, the opening of a tick,
The nip of a cog, and watching,
Our Mother above shakes out her bag and the snow flies,
Or the dew manifests, like stars
They are suddenly there, a multitudinising of the grasses,
A heavying and a lighting-up,
We glance down, and the dew is there,
Like all the still seconds
There ever were, stopped,
Each one seeing into the morning, deep
In the interior of its glance, the morning;
And it is a dream of feathery embrace
Like a cloud pluming a mountain,
And the fleeces of sheep too heavy to walk,
So they must settle, and sleep
As the cloud settles
Grazing the mountain, among the silvered grass
Where all, air, mountain, sheep
Is a feathered being, silent with fog,
And within a fleeced pinion
I see the dark mouth of a cave
And enter the cavern
And am immediately among
A feathering of echoes
And I remember that Goddess
Who hid her child to conceal his cries,
Hid him in a cave known for winding passages
And galleries among which the echoes
Never ceased to cry, and surely
This is the passage along which the cloud retires
To its mountain’s interior in the daytime,
To its inner pasture, and I find
That my hair and my dress
Are plumed with that cloud’s dew
As the spiderwebs and the grasses are feathered
On every fibre with the water
Of the mountain’s grey brain ever-distilling
Among its cool granite convolutions,
And I squeeze droplets out of my sleeve
On to my lips, the cloth is rough and the taste
Is of cloth, sheep, grass, wings and ancient water
Stilled over and redistilled until it shines
Again like the plumage
Birthwet from its egg of the newborn angel.
SHELLS
See shells only as seawater twining back
To the first touch, of seawater on itself;
The water touching itself in a certain way,
With a certain recoil and return, and the mollusc
Start
s up in the water, as though the conched wave
Had been struck to stone, yet with the touch
Still enrolled in it, the spot was struck
And life flooded through it
Recording a thin stone pulse of itself,
Its spiral photo-album, its family likeness
Caught in nacreous layers, as if
Your skull grew spiring from a skull-button,
Your roles coiling out of your smallest beginning,
Full of shelves of selves
Turning around each other
Like a white library that has been twisted,
Like a spired library turned in the tornado
Unharmed, keeping the well of itself
Open to past and future,
Full, like the mollusc, of the meat of sense,
The briny meat, twirled by the tornado;
And this, whose fleshy books have swum away,
Emptying the magnificent pearl-building,
All its walls luminous in the sunlight,
Empty stairwell full of sound,
For since the books created the shelves
To fit their message and their likeness,
Echoes of books remain, resounding,
Printed endlessly around the shelving,
Like the seasound of seapages turning over
And over, touching themselves
In a certain way, echoing, reminding,
Evoking new themes of old sea-shapes. A new shell,
A new skull begins again from its speck
Echoing the older books made of water.
See how the clouds coil also above the eggshells of cities,
Touching each other in certain ways, so that
Rain falls; clouds invisible
Over the sea, but when the watery air
Lifts over the land, the white shells float
Crystallised over the hot cities, muttering with thunder.
TO THE WATER-PSYCHIATRIST
I
The water-psychiatrist: the plumber
Who will come at my emergency,
So that I can give my head another good wash.
Mice, porcupines, sloths and shrews:
All the same core-mammal, the obsession
Of all species, the family face,
So different from antelopes who are
Skittish as butterflies, leaping wise-faced
Like an astronaut at the end of his silken string.
In the gurgle of the urinal
I took a charge of water-electricity
Straight through the end of my penis;
The cistern was discharging with a white noise,
The cleanly electrix went right up my tube