(Now I have something to tell my plumber)
Leaping like that antelope through my mouse,
A charge right down from the waterworks
And through the fresh green hill of springs
Where the deer leap, bounding over streams,
Down from the clouds fluttering with lightning.
I shimmered with electrocution harmlessly,
With urinal lightning in the beer-smells
Enriched like a boudoir by gathering, in their passage,
All the perfumes of the magic galleries
They had passed through, drinking up
The pictures of thought painting themselves
And repainting over the red walls, enriched
Like the balsamic inside canopy of a great tree.
II
(Then there is the pacing puddle of her shiny shirt;
Her way of slapping together a cheese sandwich:
As she does it a figure of lancing light
Flashes across her shirt-back;
This shock went up my generation also;
I became skittish; the antelope
Of light was in the shirt; my mouse ran;
I was a hedgehog with prickles in my skin.)
III
I went out resolving to trace the source.
The little stream rippling down the hillside
Entered the urinal, so I travelled up
The glittering electrical water I had felt in my generations
(Some lightning flashed into a tarn held in the hilltop?)
Towards the source. It was a spring
Overarched by a tree, the source had reduced
The relenting mud to black because so full
Of all the colours of lime, leaf and bough;
The electrix of the tree had clambered up my spine.
IV
Dare I wash my head again, with lightning
In the water, starlight
In the source? I went out to the stars,
Hedgehogs of light; there was no surcease,
Nor did I need one, like the thunder-source
The lightning in the black
Followed by creative shadow, the black
In which light forms and daylight breaks,
The lovely shadow kingdom, ablaze with shocking light.
THE PROPER HALO
In those glad days when I had hair,
I used to love to smarm it down with Brylcreem.
In those old days this was the definition of a boy:
A scowl, Brylcreem, and back pockets, admonished
To refrain from pomades at one’s confirmation,
So that the Bishop would not get his hands oiled,
Greasy palms, laying them on. My uncle laughed at me,
And called me ‘Horace!’ with my flat-combed parting,
My head shining like a boot; though, as a Navy man,
He liked all that sort of thing himself,
Shaking a kind of Bay Rum out of a nozzled bottle
Labelled in Arabic that came from Egypt,
A brick-red Sphinx on yellow sand for scene,
Spidered with Arabic like uncombed hair. Retired,
He would send to London to the importers for it,
And I asked him what the spider-writing meant. He told me:
‘If you want to be like Horace, employ our oil.’
When he died, he left me his personal things,
A wristwatch with a back pitted
From tropical sweat, studs and cufflinks
Glorified with tiny diamond-chips, a dressing-case
With hairbrushes useful to me then, his shaving-mirror;
I mourned him, but enjoyed using his things,
Conversing with his shade, taking both parts in the mirror,
Remembering how we talked, fascinated by this grown-up;
And I remembered catching the habit of hairgrease,
He dropping a little in my palm and showing me
How to rub it in with fingertips, ‘You’ll
Never lose it now, keep up the massage,’
Which wasn’t true. Still, when he died
I did have hair, and liked the barber’s shop.
A university friend staying with me
Translated the Arabic on the bottle,
Laughing. I said ‘What spirit? and he said
‘Definitely religious advertising; could your uncle
Read the Arabic?’ I thought not, though he had
Many spoken phrases. ‘Then he picked up “Horace”
From the vendor’s gabble; it reads:
“Horus comes to greet you through this oil.”’
I liked the barber’s shop; the man
Stabs the pointed bottle at his palm;
My dark hair is cut and shaped and forests felled
Over my white-sheathed shoulders lie like toppled pines.
The oil shivers in the barber’s palm,
He puts the plump bottle down, and that hand
Descends swooping on the other; they rub together
Like mating birds and as they fly to my head
I see they shine. His rough fingertips
Massage my scalp like the beating of a flock
Of doves; now it is my hair that shines
And stands up as though an ecclesiastical charge
Were passing through me; I laugh! ‘You like
The scent of the oil, do you, Sir?’ I nod,
Though I don’t. It’s the shine I love;
I shine with glory! and this is worth
The barber’s shillings, many times. I shall feel
Of age as down the street I pass
In my shining pelt and glittering shako, my hair
Cut and shaped like my natural urges, properly, proudly,
In a halo of light and scent, godly contained.
THE FUNERAL49
For N.
I
Clouds and mountains were invited, both the conscious
And the unconscious creatures. The trees
Like visible outpourings of the stream’s music,
The urine of the animals in the dawn frost
Puffing like rifle-fire. The dark meat of the sun,
The bloody meat, the cremating sun.
II
Ninety-two percent of what we eat is from direct
Pollination by the bees, he tells me this
To cheer me and if true ninety-two percent
Of what he says with his mouth is said by bees. The first light
On leaves shines like apples hanging in the trees,
The whole forest a vast orchard, and all things
Are more than they seem, for they may fly away,
And disappear like Mother pausing on the threshold
Of the fields of light, which are like dew
Thick in the grassy meadows, for the light hangs
Dripping in the leaves, stands on the wind.
III
There is a Witness, I think, who has magnetic wings.
First it seemed to me at the funeral service with the terrible
Useless brass handles that would be saved screwed to
The veneer cardboard coffin which was much too small
That my emotions such as these swirled round my flesh
And some of them spurted from my eyes but ninety-two percent
Were beating in my back in a sensation like spread wings.
Since mine were sprouting I was able to see
The wings of others, such as my father’s, standing next to me,
And his were ragged and tattered like those of an old moth
Close to drying up and drifting away, it seemed my duty
To merge my birth-wet wings with his, and this I did,
Entwining them in an embrace with him that he would never know,
And sure enough he, the widower, perked up,
And I felt tattered, but not dry, for back at the house
I sobbed
my heart out in the little white-tiled loo,
And there was still a little angelic witness lodged in my spine
At the small of my back, in Jesus-robes, little calm watcher
In white, which I cannot explain, merely report.
IV
The other thing the funeral showed me, unpromising seance,
My Mother, subject of it, at the door ajar
On the field of light, looking back over her shoulder,
Smiling happiness and blessing me, the coherent veil
Of the radiant field humming with bees that lapped the water, and she bent
And washed her tired face away with dew and became a spirit.
WARM STONE FOR N
I
Death as pure loss, or immutability.
A watch falling into the well,
Ticking a while in the cool spring, distributing
Its faint shock; or death
As a diamond-second in the year, set
Glittering cold in the anniversary,
The tiny diamond in her ear
Surviving the cremation?
II
Death suddenly appearing, like a spiderweb in the fog,
A piece of paper opening into a house, the snapshot
Through an open door, and at the table sitting still
Somebody; the house
With one room and no kitchen,
The house with the card door;
The disposable house.
III
I turn my back on the ascensions,
The unscreened smokestacks, I do not wish
To watch her ascending, the knots
Solving themselves, fading,
Climbing into the antechambers of rain.
Besides, her smoke should be white,
Blinding!
IV
And the colour of lost rain escaping!
And the photographs white
As the clothes are empty.
I open the prayer-book;
It is empty.
So, with her death,
I will baptise this small
Quartz; it shall stand for death
Like a glass room
Of which only a spirit knows the door,
Which only a spirit can enter
Turning and showing itself in the walls
Lined with warm mirror
Knowing its form in floor and ceiling,
Able to say ‘I am here!’
V
It shall become a custom,
Warm room ringed to my finger,
Warm so long as I am warm,
Then left to my daughter
To keep warm, and bequeathed
To hers; warm stone
It will house multitudes.
TRANSACTIONS
I
The waves break on the shore with a scent
Of briny cellars of sea-fungus shrouding
Drowned shiny forests. I have a white door
To my cellar which when I crack open
Is as though the house were a wave, stopped,
Overhanging, and in the still
Round cellar in that moment’s time
The mushrooms manifested. I put them there.
A pulse of phosphorescence keeps the house up.
II
The little mushrooms are salt
And they smell of zest and venom.
I swim into the yesty air of the cellar
And see them stand like white circular messengers,
Helicopter-winged angels.
Stiff one-vertebra spine.
III
The pylons choiring in the wind
Marching like the X-rays of cathedrals
Along their zesty ozone spoor like the odour of mushrooms,
The earth spinning within its mother, the waters,
Around its father, the sun,
Within clear sight of its godmother,
The mob-capped, nectar-rayed moon.
IV
Whose white patched cap resembles a mushroom
Flying in its helicopter wings of magnetism
That raise the metal-sheeted tides
And crack them open scenting the sea-air with zest,
The pylons choiring,
Her silvery blouse flashing with electricity
Through its opening leaking her ozones
As the moonbeams scent the night-opening flowers,
My white shirt like an electric ghost
Specially laundered to enter this darkness
Under the cellar stairs where the white door stands open.
LIGHTS IN THE MIST
Lights in the mist branching across the water
Like fruit shining out of an orchard.
Then the mist clears, and the waves are disclosed
Stacked to the horizon, each with its poised sound,
Visible sound.
Her sleeping glances, her sleeping gloves,
Her body like some soft delectable debris
Awaiting collection. He breathed her odour in,
The carelessness of her relaxation overcame him
As no planned seduction could. He tastes the apple
She was eating when he began touching her.
The explosions of sea on the walls,
Random shell-bursts, traversing. Now she dreams
Of putting the final touches to the firstborn,
Knitting the baby’s only garment with bone needles,
Engraving on the flesh the fingerprints like a colophon.
Dewy cobweb frozen like bone-of-lace; the orchard
Doing its one thing: creating leaves and fertilising flowers
And rounding fruit;
The water of the well twisting back into its brick socket.
Tasting alternately the cold earthy water, and the cool
Earthy fruits out of the apple-tree rooted in the wall.
The fenestral mists branching. The new veins branching.
CLOUDMOTHER50
to D.P.
I
Several hot days,
The one after the other.
The standing cells of sunshine, lofty sunshine,
And in them blossom black thunderstorms.
Lathering clouds.
The wind tumbling in chunks.
The yachts tacking through the cells of gust,
Rigged like crescent moons, scudding.
The clouds the accumulated sails
Of the invisible wind-boats.
They throw their lightshadows,
Their visible loomings,
And they throw their windshadows,
The dark splashmarks of gust hurrying on.
The mountains in the distance
Steer the evening wind towards us.
The notes of bells
Blow towards us from the ravines of mountains
That halt the morning wind, and so
The long hot days, and the thunder
And the necessity for thunder, piling up
Like invisible pillars of the law: over the sea
Invisible and mere vapour, but over land
Which lifts the wind, it crystallises
Like silent moored navies awaiting orders.
II
A gap in the hedge which is a dry stream
Awaiting thunder. A footpath of dust to a wet valley.
My skin needed the wet meadow, I wanted to be
In that state of rest after thunder.
I considered the tree that gripped waters deeper than the dry stream
And the hedgerow in its roots, it
Considered me. The Cloudmother was glad
I noticed her, the invisible streamers
Pouring up from her boughs like
A reversed waterfall, patterning over the city.
I overheard a thought: ‘The unmoved mover
That wishes to be moved,’ then from her own
Accumulation of clouds her upper foliage fell
> And shone, the Cloudmother hissing with the pleasure.
MOTHERS
The Mothers elect to keep their hair
Cropped quite short in close caps.
It is as they pitch their voices close,
Near voices without coiling timbres or
Disturbing undertones, just so their faces
Shall not be swung across with hair
Nor with unpredicted modulations the expression alter,
Nor a curtain sweep to give the child a glimpse
Of the other half of her feelings
Instead of the whole libration, the balanced face.
Another mother may well peer out of the left-hand side.
That would make Mother unreliable, or
Seductive, and stunt the growth. She
Must carry everywhere that certain voice,
And with her a certain structured cloud of fragrance,
A pleasant regulated scheme of odours
That are bedmaking, and kitchen,
Clean paint, and freshly-cut bread,
Like a balsamic mother-tree growing
Behind everything; that oak-avenue
Of Father’s book-lined study, that
Alphabet-tree in the playroom tuck-box,
Joined at the Mother-trunk
Behind the appearance of everything,
A balsamic tree of odour everywhere,
A tree of flowering home. The Mother’s hair
Is short and frank; and, recollect,
That maiden that she was had never learnt to swear
Or curse either before she made herself a Mother.
THE WILL OF NOVEMBER
The millionth leaf blowing along the path.
The sea white-headed, white-tailed.
Sky of wind-pounded ice.
Frozen bees shaken from their hives,
Rattling from the box like gravel.
The travelling shadows of the gravestones,
Oblong slots of mortal sundials
Among the puffs of young fog
Out of the brown wet grasses.
Oak like a telephone exchange
Collected Poems Page 26