And she turned to me again, her shirt open,
And the current changed around us, and in the canal
The underwater forests switched direction
Showing that sluices far away had opened up
New reaches of the waterway, with varying tides.
AT THE COSH-SHOP
Hard rubber in its silk sheath like a nightie:
The assistant offered me a small equaliser,
A Soho Lawyer that could be holstered
In a specially-tailored back pocket,
And he would introduce me to his friend
The trouser-maker. I did not think this
Necessary, but I asked, Why the silk?
It seemed luxurious for such a hard argument.
Oh, Sir, so that it will draw no blood!
He seemed surprised I asked; I thought this not right;
I believe it was the blackness
The makers did not like to show,
Like an executioner it should draw on
Lily gloves, or like a catering waiter
For an instrument that performs a religious service,
Letting the ghost out temporarily with a shriek:
While all is peace within
They steal your worldly goods
Settling the argument by appeal
To deep non-consciousness
With a swift side-swipe, the Bejasus out of him –
Or an act of sexuality, equivalent?
Do the same people make the instrument
That will put the Bejasus back into a person?
The silk then would be the finest, for silk chafing
Hard rubber rouses electricity, it would be
Moulded to the individual sculpt of her lover,
Providing wisely for a longish trip, could seem
Dressed in his silk pyjamas, hard and tingling,
Or as the white silky cloud conceals the thunder
And the black current
That is going to shoot its white darts up and through.
THUNDER-AND-LIGHTNING POLKA54
to J. H. Barclay
The fishmonger staring at the brass band
Offers us golden eyes from a cold slab
And silver instances of sea-flow. The birds
Which were dinosaurs once blanco the stone hats
Of pale admirals. The bandsmen puff their looping brass,
The music skating round and round its rinks
Of shiny tin, the hot trombones and the cool
And silvery horns, light
Sliding like the music along these pipes
And valves, curlicues and flaring tunnels,
Shells, instances of sonorous
Air-flow; we take a piece and present it
On the cold air to the staring ears
Of the sea fishmonger with his wet pets, our part
Of the hypersensitive cabaret. The river
Slides past all the feet; opal mud
Full of sunshine, some dead eye
Caresses the watery catacomb. A hot
Mailed fish has greased windows in the paper,
We eat to music. Above,
A cool high mountain of piled snow,
Its halls stuffed with thunderwork like wardrobes
Of black schoolmasters’ gowns and lightning-canes,
White-painted; it turns to one immense
Black gown full of a booming voice from empty sleeves,
And shakes, and shakes its rain down,
And I kiss the thunder-water still booming in every drop
That strikes my face, I hear its flashing brass.
The bandsmen play on in their pavilion,
The instruments flash with lightning,
Their music is full of rain, and fate. I will not go indoors,
My sleeves are wet and heavy
Like velveteen; the trees are shaggy
With birds and lichen, singing in the leaves
In light tones and falling drops that break again
Like little thunder, and cold rain streams across
The wide golden eyes staring from the white slab.
INTO THE ROTHKO INSTALLATION55
(Tate Gallery, London)
Dipping into the Tate
As with the bucket of oneself into a well
Of colour and odour, to smell the pictures
And the people steaming in front of the pictures,
To sniff up the odours of the colours, which are
The fragrances of people excited by the pictures;
As the pair walk down the gallery
On each side of them the Turners glow
As though they both were carrying radiance
In a lantern whose rays filled the hall like wings
That brushed the images, which glowed;
Into the Installation, which smells
Of lacquered canvas soaking up all fragrance,
Of cold stone, and her scent falters
Like cloth torn in front of the Rothkos
Which are the after-images of a door slammed
So blinding-white the artist must shut his eyes
And paint the colours floating in his darkness.
He chose the darkest of the images for that white,
That green; red on red beating to the point
Where the eye gasps, and gives up its perfume
Like a night-flowering plant; and with many
Thin washes he achieves the effect
Of a hidden light source which smells
Like water far off in the night, the eye
So parched; paintings you almost can’t see;
As if in painting
The Israelites crossing the Red Sea
He painted the whole wall red, and,
Black on black therein,
God somewhat like a lintel. We brought
The lanterns of ourselves in here
And your imagination blotted our light up, Rothko;
The black reached out, quenching our perfume
As in a dark chapel, dark with torn pall,
And our eyes were lead, sinking
Into that darkness all humans have for company;
Standing there, eyes wide, her lids faltered
And closed, and ‘I see it, now’ she said
And in her breath a wonderful blaze
Of colour of her self-smell
Where she saw that spirit-brightness
Of a door slammed open, and a certain green insertion
Shifting as her gaze searched
What seemed like a meadow through the white door
Made of lightning, cloud or flowers, like Venusberg
Opening white portals in the green mountain
Stuffed with light, he having used
The darkest of all that spectrum almost to blindness
And in his studio in the thin chalk of dawn
Having passed inwardly through that blackness,
Slitting his wrists, by process of red on red
He entered the chapel under the haunted mound
Where the white lightning of another world
Flashed, and built pillars. We left
The gallery of pictures rocked
By the perfume of a slammed eye, its corridors
Were wreathed with the detonation of all its pictures
In the quick of the eye, delighting into
Perfumes like fresh halls of crowded festival.
PLAYING DEAD
His dead-white face,
The eyelids of chalk
With the bold black cross marked
Cancelling the eyes, declaring
Hollow-socketed death, and the
Marble-white countenance
Declaring death
And the red nose to admit
He had died drinking
And the vertical eyelid-stripe
Telling us not only can he open
His eyes up and down but also
From side to si
de in the stare
Of a real ghost
Who does as he likes
Because Death breaks all the rules, and is
At very best an outrageous joke, and almost
Whatever Death does is quite soon forgotten;
So the Clown pratfalls on the skeleton
Of a banana, and two well-dressed Clowns
Accelerate with custard pies their mutual putrefaction,
As if it were funny to worry overmuch
About these bodies we wear like increasingly
Baggy pants with enormous knucklebuttons, especially
If like that sepulchral makeup they wipe off
In cold cream to white sheer speechless laughter.
A DEWY GARMENT
The shower withheld matures to thunder,
Such activity, then such rest;
I walk out in my worm-coloured shoes
Through the puddles where the worms luxuriate,
The bone-coloured worms
In the fallen skies of the puddles;
My love of thundershowers was given to me
By Odeon University:
Such downpours in the tropical forests,
The great leaves catching the rain by its lips
Hanging poised in banquets,
And the repose was as wide as the blank screen
Still crossed by the images.
And there was never a storm without a wet girl
Shiny in drenched tropicals
Flickering to those lightnings, submitting to Tarzan,
And the film a black-and-white thunderstorm
Flashing eighteen times a second,
Which welded its lights to a seamless narrative,
For the demonic or the divine is the sudden,
And the cinema soothes the sudden.
Katharos, the putting on of a fresh garment
Even of jungle-grass
After soil and toil, the repose
In a fresh garment clean as an imagery screen,
This skin across which the thunder has played,
This skin
Of discharged rain and stretches of water;
A dewy garment covers me,
Restless manhood is gone.
THE GIRL READING MY POETRY
This is an impossible event!
This melody is my extensive lechery –
The girl reading my poetry
Launders it;
An impossible accomplishment!
Cleansed white, in London –
The beauty distilled of this dreck
Washed in a maidenly mouth …
And moreover the audience
From the facing 200 gilt chairs
Witnessing the ablution
Stay entirely quiet,
And as they warm to the mouth of this new muse
Give off first a perfume in the breath,
Then from their entire tapestry of skin
So that
I cannot believe this blossoming,
Like a baby fresh from its bath,
Like flowers nodding
In the quickened breath
Along the polite rows –
And then they spatter it by applause,
The fast detonations of applause,
The rattle of musketry in a flowering garden!
They charge it with kinesis
And propel it like bullets
With bravo and encomium –
And she stands there spattered with it
And glowing with the fine smell,
And takes her smiling breath
Of the cloud of quelques fleurs and cordite
And drinks up these chemicals and the electricity
Generated by applause inside the invisible
Air-hued cloud of alchemy
And imagery poetry-gas.
Overwhelmed and saturated by this opera
I glance at my printed words,
They are a taciturn libretto,
Yet I must have said something right,
My own smell small like a damp railway station,
The iron-flavoured air of it waiting for the local train:
While she, and they,
Were like the express roaring into Truro,
The doors shooting open, the holiday plumage alighting,
Boarding, the terrace of doors slamming,
And the whole symphony rowing up the line out of my ken,
Articulating with its rolling stock and its headlights blazing.
FAR STAR
It is like living in a transistor with all this radio
Which is the inner weather of the house
Presided over by housegoddesses who turn
Everything that happens into perfume and electricity;
Oh! she cries, what a blessing – and I smell the blessing
Like a candle lighted, a scented flame that spreads
Through closed doors, opening them;
And when she curses, sulphur blackens all the knives.
We have tuned our circuits by living together so long
And the child, never having known another house, deepest tuned:
She was broadcast into this world via the lady transmitter
And mostly plays musical comedy, though now is of an age
For an occasional tragic aria about the sister she has not got,
Who will not now be broadcast from that far star;
And I wish heartily we had more loos – our tuning is such
On the same channel that we all three must shit simultaneously.
A SCARECROW
A scarecrow in the field,
Dressed like a King
In streamers of tinfoil
Which flash in the sun
And glitter;
And in the deep night
As the moon rises
That glittering again
Appears in the field
As if a fountain
Were standing guard
Over the furrows;
A tattering robe
Of strips of tinfoil
Ragged and gorgeous because
Of its liquid facility with the light,
And so multiplex
That it is a squadron riding
With swords out saluting the light.
The birds rejoice with their song
At this wonder of the sun
Willowing on its cross-pole,
And in this presence of the moon
Raggedy in the fertile field,
And nip therefore their share only
Of seeds sown out of the loam,
And do not multiply their kind
Desperately being content seemingly
That an alchemical balance has been achieved:
The tinfoil rebus in the open field.
Even the vicar, passing the scarecrow field
Is reminded of life
That is not only dust to dust
But light to light and air to air,
Shooting his cuffs,
Flashing his watch.
DRY PARROT
The Parrot of Warlock’s Wood,
Of Peter’s Wood,
It leaves wide twiggy footprints,
It walks in its cinder wings
Like a tight-buttoned fellow
In oyster-grey tailcoat;
A Parrot has no blood
Only calcium filings,
It dries a room;
Peter keeps the Parrot
To dry the house out;
It was a clinker egg
Before it was a thirsty Parrot.
Now it taps on the clear dry mirror
And with its beak begins
To loosen the mummy plumage
And shake the egg-sand out
And utters an Egyptian cry and flies
Taking to the air up the chimney
Like a roaring hearth-fire
In its anhydrous glory.
THE BIG SLEEP
Sea, grea
t sleepy
Syrup easing round the point, toiling
In two dials, like cogs
Of an immense sea-clock,
One roping in, the other out.
Salt honey, restless in its comb,
Every-living, moving, salt sleep,
Sandy like the grains at eyes’ corners
Of waking, or sleepiness, or ever-sleeping;
And when the sun shines, visited as by bees
Of the sun that glitter, and hum in every wave,
As though the honey collected the bees;
The honey that was before all flowers, sleepiness,
Deep gulfs of it, more of it than anything,
Except sleepy warm rock in the earth centre
Turning over slowly, creating magnetism,
Which is a kind of sleepiness, drowsy glue
Binding the fingers, weakly waking fingers,
Or fingers twitching lightly with the tides;
And the giant clock glides like portals, tics
Like eyelids of giants sleeping, and we lie
In Falmouth like many in a bed,
And when the big one turns
We all turn; some of us
Fall out of bed into the deep soil,
Our bones twitch to the tides,
Laid in their magnetic pattern, our waters
Rise like white spirits distilled by the moon,
Can get no further, and turn over
Heavy as honey into the sea
To sleep and dream, and when the big one dreams
We all dream. And when she storms
We all weep and ache, and some fall
Into her gulfs as she tosses, and we weep
For the lifeboats toiling on the nightmares …
But in those beds waters touch each other
Coiling, in a certain way, and where they touch,
At the very point, a mineral spark,
A bone begins to grow, someone is
Putting bones together in the gulf,
In her accustomed patterns – and in their season
The women walk about the town, a big drop
Of the Dreamer in their bellies, and in the drop
A smaller dreamer, image of themselves,
Who are the image dreamed by the ocean’s drop,
By the two clocks, one roping in, one out.
XVII
THE FIRST EARTHQUAKE
(1989)
THE FIRST EARTHQUAKE
The birds squabbled and fell silent
In their million trees like colleges of monks
With their mean little ways and their beautiful songs;
Collected Poems Page 29