Full of birdcircuits talking,
Full of birds and no leaves,
Birds, not leaves,
Look higher: there the aeroplanes fly south, scoring
Skaters’ tracks across the raftered ice.
SHE BELIEVES SHE HAS DIED
She believes she has died
Has become a spirit, naked as air,
So she steps out of her front door, nude as a peeled wand,
With peeled eyes, observing like a spirit.
There is an old tractor, a stiff fountain of rust;
She salutes as one invisible the squirrel, representative
Of the creatrix of the British Navy,
Who created the wooden ships by planting oaks,
Her presence passing does not hinder it, the rusty
Squirrel gnawing on a nut confirms her spirithood.
The elaborate bodies of death that people bequeath!
The house behind her, with its rustling wardrobes,
Those fleets of oak tall-masters, the oceans of clean water
Enough to float them which hasted through that body!
If you could see the perfume of the wood
Come rolling from its aisles! Older spirits might.
She passes through the meadows underneath the pylons
That flash and hum with their electricals, skeleton castles
Trapezing with ghosts, past the docks, the black
Spanish query of the great hook, the steel hulls
Booming with their riveting, like spirits
Battering to be released from flesh, or hymning,
On to the magnetism and glitter of the marshes, the little trees
With their backs bent laving their faces in the mud,
For she wishes to live again, and lave her body
In the mud, to make it heavy
Enough to live again; she straightens up
Her face glittering with it. The green lantern cabbages, the
Spotless mushrooms, are spirits compared to her now.
THE MAN NAMED EAST
The dew, the healing dew, that appears
Like the dream, without warning, hovering on the blades;
The motions of his wings bring dew and light,
The man named East. The ghosts have lost
All sense of perspective
In the drinking-water, twisting and turning,
Shaped by too many vessels, and furrowed
By too many fearful vessels, for we
Drink the water of a drowned village
Of a drowned College from College Reservoir,
And across our drinking-water goes
A small yacht like a lighted kitchen,
A fishing-boat like a ruined cottage,
Dinghies like little violins
With squeaky rowlocks, with violin-voices,
With the devil’s music written on the waters.
I stand by the small stream which contributes.
I kneel and dip my hand in, it insists
Into my palm with a slight pressure
Like a baby’s hand, which is still
The elasticity of yards of water
Reaching down the hill
From the clouds on high; I crouch
With my hand in that baby’s hand
Feeling the slight movement of its fingers,
The light clasp which is love,
The little bony stones rattle
And the cool flesh of glass sinews;
It babbles like a baby, I bend
My ear to the water and now I find
Underspeech I did not hear before;
With the forest like a vast moth
Settling its wings on the hill,
I dip my finger in my mouth and taste
Forests and air and the ice
Of the white rain-wing and its power-pinions.
IN AUTUMN EQUINOX
Black cat sitting in the scotch mist
A white sheen over her, every single hair
Piercing a water-bead
In a high magnetic autumn of electric sunsets,
My heart leaps in my chest like a cat
With a silver sheen on it jumping over a wall.
The sun, the enlightener, the whitener.
The snail has made his silk track over the berries.
Summits of water rise above
Cold summits of water.
The crowd, the myriad, the millions,
The region beyond the tomb,
This day on which the ghosts of those
Who have died during the year assemble
And prepare to follow the sun
Through the underworld as their leader
Into light, does not feel like death,
The white sheen over everything, that was mist.
On my walk over the hill I meet
A buddleia of the skyline
The blooms the same hue as the early evening sky,
So there are rooms in the bush
Where the sky seems to hang
And there are white butterflies at the flowers
Tugging and fluttering
As if the sky with its clouds
Had assembled like bloom, the bush hung
Thick with bunched sky and fluttering cloud;
While from time to time the silver underneaths
Of many leaves bend giving their sheen back
Like an electric shiver on this sky-tree;
And the long grass is full
Of big gunpowder-coloured birds who take off
With a detonation of wings, and to its thunderclap
A thunderhag rises out of the hills
Sliding sideways and gunpowder-hued,
Making our feet tingle
With its electrical presence, and in this field
Crouches an idle tractor visited by bees,
Great flower throbbing
With its metal scent, and a wasp
Nibbles at the grease ruched from two great pistons.
Now the mist returns:
All the spiderwebs – waterbeds! in the hedges
Every bush a contraption of sheen and waterbed.
At home in autumn
The dog’s magnetic body
And its dynamite health abounding
Marking with its delighted pawprints the sensitive sheen,
Drives winter sickness from our blazing hearth.
WHITSUNWIND
The aerodynamics of the hold of the house,
Our wooden, cello-voiced ship,
The hull of the house, its grip on the wind,
The sheets and rigging of the beds
As they dream their noisy voyages,
Its heeling in the seaweather,
Marvel of nailed timber,
My carriage which thunders:
The dead trees of it resurrect and
Howl through their corridors
Like huge fires passing by on either hand.
I draw a tumbler of foaming weir, let there be
Weir foaming out of all the taps,
I run From tap to tap to augment the sound,
And all the lights on too, trees of lightning
With fruits of thunder,
Wagner on the recorder;
There are ghosts enough to rattle all the bolts
Like nuts in their wooden cases, and the nails
Bow silkily their grains; such bottles
Of stouted fire, and the charged air,
And the sea wind rushing with its manes
To leap the mansards packed with light
And groaning like string orchestras.
Now, the calm of Whitsunday. The waxy seed
Of grasses that shines over the field
Of light laid down like mother o’pearl,
And the sea still rocks, and in the ears
Water-radios in stereo sealed in a cave,
Two coiled shells like cockles locked in chalk,
Small twin blowholes ta
king the air’s full fetch;
The sea quietly puffs tons
Of white sound at them in Whitsun.
THE BROTHEL IN FAIRYLAND
(Madame Twoswords – Goddess-patroness of brothels)
The courtesan with a taper guides
A young man to her mosquito-net.
There is a river-party in full swing
With hired geisha, and three courtesans
Dance their winding dance on the
Landing-stage of a teahouse. It is called
A teahouse where we drink the girls
And meditate on the tea, the women
Dressed like peony-gardens fill the fairyland
Of painted screens and doors, their shadows
Lie solid on the layers of mosquito-net
Where a woman holds up a stone saké-dish
With cherry-blossoms in it and beckons to a client
Unseen behind the mosquito-net, the stone steps
Shine with the little hovering lamps,
And a lighted-up pleasure-boat like a wedding-cake
Iced with light, a ‘fairy-boat’,
Does its winding dance
Like a torchlit procession down the guts of the river;
It passes on the current swiftly; we glimpse
On the deck a woman holding up a bamboo cage
Of fireflies and pointing at them.
In Japanese, ‘fairyland’, in English, ‘brothel’.
The fairyland is full of candlelight, perfumes, and electrical skins,
You can feel them as they pass by on their currents swiftly
Entering your skin and leaving it, gliding by
In their visible skirts, touching you
With their invisible clothes, their electrical dress
Such as a forest also makes, or a wooden scow
Blazing with candles, or a swift-flowing river makes;
With a screen by the enclosure announcing business
And a shaped electrical neon picture of Madame Twoswords,
Lightning in a peony gown. Many holy ghosts
Crowd round her to see the outcome of that fight.
MOTHERS AND CHILD
I
The soft modelling for hours,
The soft handling.
Undressing, she forgets to say her prayers.
The town of wives, promenading,
Staring among the lighted beauty-shops
Which are shadows of the beauty that is above,
That is too bright to look at
Except in the shadowing of lipstick and powder,
Painting with colour, camera obscura,
This in the town of the two electricities,
The powerhouse, lighting the shops,
The wives, stiff in their orgasms
With fingers stretched like starfish
And eyes going like electric bulbs,
Witch-hair cracking the taut white pillow;
And the stiff filamentous reach of the powerstation
Incandescent also in its circuits
Like some miraculous gestating glow-worm
Or silk-spinner of tungsten
That shines with that power,
The elastic of magnetism,
For whirl wheel within wheel
It comes spitting
Into the lamps, over the sheets
Of the great metropolis of rooms
And the lighted villages of wives
With the lover wanting the skin off
Wanting the electricity in essence,
The stripped wires,
Electricity with its rubber off,
Electricity more naked than last time;
He strokes for hours
Mowing the magnetism,
The sheets crackling,
The soft handling over and over,
And gradually the first skins loosen;
And the wives observe this recreation
As the mother her rounding belly
And wishes her child to be naked of it
Herself now willing her own birth
As the fish skips out of the wave
To be nude of the water
Water that peels off water as it marches
Nakedness off salt nakedness,
So that, undressing, she forgets to say her prayers,
As water forgets, and reflects
The beauty above her.
II
Or does she beam beauty up
To be bounced off the ceiling
Or off the man above her,
Transforming her beauty
Into his (and he needs it);
Her fighting-gear
A silk shirt,
Excellent accumulator of electricities,
Admirable rubbing battery of orgasms,
Or, as they say, Static,
For time stands still.
Such heroes as there might be
Awake when they touch her skin,
With a silent shout of recognition,
Skin which flutters unbearably
When they touch it sufficiently,
Like a moth beating in the light of the sheets,
The moth whose wings are flaming
Without being consumed;
And the wellspring where the more it is drawn
The more it flows;
While the wife as mother of herself opens
And draws herself off
That which steps out
Over the sill, the berth, the landing-place.
LIKE A ROCK
Rain marks cold coins in the water.
When she wears a shirt, a blouse,
It is as if she were dressed in water;
The whole river turns with her
And crinkles with her breathbeat.
I have seen a rock in the
Fast stream dressed
In a beautiful shawl of water
Hunched round the shoulders and
Open in front; I have seen
A smooth rock standing
In a waterfall, dressed
In a never-ending weave
Of water-trails down the stream,
A twisted glass shirt like flame,
Like a personage
On whose head light beats
And refines him utterly down to the tail
During many centuries. When
She wears a shirt, or blouse,
This is saying: thus
I glisten, and ripple so,
Under my skin and in my secrets,
And I am dressed like this for you to
Prepare your entry and stand
As a rock does in flowing water.
WOODEN WHEAT
As the ear of the wheat, the cone
Of the pine. A bunch
Of wooden ears, the wooden
Honeycomb dripping with balsam
Tasting of cough-drops,
Ligneous cog; and aphids
In swarms like a tremendous crop
Of green apricots with legs, big
Glass bums of clear emerald syrups.
Over there a modern hotel
Among the terraced needles,
Like a luxury liner washed up in wooden tides,
The green-shadowed fish of air
Vaulting through their rollers, feathered fishes
With ample wings, and everywhere
A pine cone, like wooden roses
Perfumed with cough-balsam;
Or a cabinet of ears that prick up in the sunshine,
Or a comb of wooden eyelids curiously jointed
Opening upon honey; a cabinet
Of wooden eyelids most marvellously jointed
And overlapping like an Islamic masterpiece
That falls open with a click, spreading;
A cabinet of a hundred lids that all at once
Unlock. It is full
Of yellow dusts and sherberts, each grain
Elaborately carved, carving within carving.
&nb
sp; Unripe it is green and like a spindle
Of green fingernails tipped with red,
Of green fingernails that begin to tap and click
As falling off the bough this gift rolls
Into the patch of hot sun and starts to stretch.
Many remain fastened to the tree
Like dark lanterns engraved
All over with sealed eyes.
THE YOUNG AND PREGNANT SPIRITUALIST
By mere breathing, she sees her own shape,
The solemn tranquillity of her naked life
Under her clothes, the day-long caress.
The tie of each sitter like a crucifix
Nailed to the throat, their heads
Being washed in blackness; she is
Washing their heads with night
In her chant, her moaning chant,
They bow their heads and take it,
All of them, in their circle, the sitters.
She has a baby in her womb that sways in its bonds.
In trance, that baby is, communicating with her;
And she tells herself this child is of such a virtue
I am made a prophetess. Accordingly I speak
From the womb to these nice young chaps
Who serve in country offices and shops;
I help them jump the counter into this world.
The room is psychic, the whole space answering,
The draperies flutter at the windows in grimaces,
Straining to speak, the great sewn faces,
The very air is living with currents like her birthwater,
And tapping out her heartbeat there climbs a disc,
The luminous tambourine, to which there floats
An ectoplasm that grasps the shivering drum
Like a foetus in its robes,
Or like a lily unfolding, and from the draperies
Steps out a spirit naked as pips, with
A few wisps caught up for modesty; and to herself
This is the grown-up image of her baby
Adult and unspoilt; I pray I will meet her
In our afterlife together; but now
She is the centre of this circle, they may ask
Their questions, and to one it is
The dead wife returning, to another
His sainted grandmother, seeing her drapery as age,
Those wisps clinging to the face as wrinkles, but I,
I know she is the future
Growing in me and talking round this table
XV
THE MUDLARK POEMS & GRAND BUVEUR
(1986)
EYE-BESTOWING
(Mudlark III)
Collected Poems Page 27