Collected Poems
Page 30
The yachts like moored forests,
The yachts rocked in their haven
Like women in long dresses
And invisible feet
Bowing to the earthquake.
The mist had rolled in
And developed all the spiderwebs,
The trees in the groves draped
Like pearl-sewn yachts,
The million spiders in them asleep,
The spiders in their white roofs,
The dew-lapping spiders,
They nodded their toolchest faces,
Beards wet with dew,
Dew brimming their webs and their claws;
Complex water shivered everywhere like a single ghost.
Lovers, smelling of almonds and new bread,
Roused from their beds, pointed
Rubbing their eyes at the copses of yachts
That tugged at the tremor and dipped,
Shivering rain from their tackles,
Lovers who shivered like silk
As the rafters groaned
Within their white ceilings,
This earthquake shoved up fifty new fountains!
After the first shock we are ravenous,
The little silvery fishes grizzling in the shiny pans.
SUMMER56
I
The summer mice are fat as butter.
There is the waste of a silent bronze-smithy,
Tightly-curled lathings, and the everlasting
Scent of brass.
There is a fly listening to an egg in the kitchen.
There is a child sipping warm blood in the womb,
In the hot bell-fat womb.
Auntie holds up the smoothing-iron
Polished like a mirror with its work,
She looks into it and spits,
It satisfies, she peels
The knife-edged denim off the ironing board;
It satisfies, his tomorrow’s shirt,
Blue as the sky faded with its clouds;
And as the river goes to bed in leaves,
In ten billion leaves flowing through the summer,
So must the nephew sink into the feather-bed upstairs,
Wallow in its lavender laundered marsh.
II
The nephew sunk in the feather-bed upstairs,
Nesting for summer in this feather-bed,
Dreams of the women of the house that all night
They braid their hair and chat
And sweep the kitchen for tomorrow’s chores
And they never go to bed at all,
Since they are still there in the morning frying breakfast.
Munching his fried bread with shining lips,
His smile pocked and sintered like cuttlebone,
The uncle rubs his big hands in the boy’s hair.
III
Past the river jammed like corduroy with logs
Which have been there so long their shoots
Are bushing into hedgerows, locking them,
There is a bluebell-wood by mudflats
And within it a comb of soft long meadow that delves
Into a flank of Shivering Mountain;
The shuddering cloud-shapes shake over it,
The small springs shiver down its slopes,
The scree slips day and night a little,
Expanding in the hot sun and holding,
Slipping a little further in oily dew of evening.
IV
The shades that pour down Shivering Mountain
Are irresistible to me,
Its grey locks, cloud canopy,
Its cap of invisibility;
I climb into insubstantiality
Like an old Chinese effacing among his chasms
Sliding through empty ghost rock-cities
Repopulated suddenly with shades.
I am not an old Chinese for long;
My uncle comes with dogs and shotguns looking for me,
And slaps me back into his world,
And cuffs me down slippery scree with his grinning acne,
With a pock-mask like the bottom of the sea.
HARVEST
I
The greatest possible touch, to bathe.
The wind bathing in the wheat,
The great invisible woman plunges
Into the heavy tassels, into the wheat-smell
That is like straw baskets full of new bread;
The wheat splashes round her, it must cry out,
All the stems chafing, like an immense piano plunged into
Which continues playing as she swims,
A piano full of wheat, a concert grand
Whose blackness opened on a field of wheat
And the music swims in it, and in wide waves descants;
She does the overarm crawl from one stone hedge
To the far end, and climbs out, invisible, dripping with rain.
II
As though all the wheat in the world
Were her hair, in which she bathes.
III
The Miners’ Brass Band concurs,
They are a procession of buttery lotuses,
The sunlit air pours into them
And coils around their instruments
Like lotuses evolving from their lungs
In the sound of mined metal vibrating
With human breath, earth and air
Married: its child, music.
I wonder if the great churches
And concert halls mark standing waves
Where the weather stills as over mines
And you can blow your golden lotus and be heard.
III
The metal walks and sings. Pausing
Halfway up the house stairs
I can hear the two radio sets at once
Tuned to the same music; we call that ‘The Well’,
A well of music sounding between two floors.
At present we have a well-known soloist
Playing with an anonymous orchestra
Unknown to him.
I think of a buck-naked
Skinny young fellow at the piano
The sunwarmed air of the music
Like a golden wheatfield brothing around him.
TO THE BLACK POET
I
The lightning flashes
Over her silk suit, the silk
In repose in which she dreams;
Now I am afraid she is out in
The garden, out in the rain,
In her pyjamas, again; and her skin
Jealous for that silk especially;
It is a bad sign the evening before
When she dons the stiff broadcloth trousers;
I am bound to find her wet
Out in the garden in white silk
That next morning. It was in silk
Open at the legs
She gripped her birth-pangs
As the Goddess gripped mountains; I stood by
Awaiting her pleasure and passed the time
Considering the tank where the fish glide
Kissing the water as they swim, their lips
Rosed by the tropics.
II
She has invited her lover
The famous black poet
Whose beauty she told me
Was in his nostrils
Which expand marvellously
As he inhales to speak poetry;
There is no filthy rubble
In there, no kind of
Misshapen surprise, no hard
Facial shit in such a nose.
III
One can stare deep into it
Without fear, inhaling
The sweet smell of his discourse;
She swears it was how she conceived.
It is rose-coloured up there
A rose twilight in black depths
Blowing with articulate winds
The raw material of his poetry speech,
A breath like a marvellous
Air of the tropics reversing in a black conch
Scented with hibiscus and mango-sweat.
IV
She says, It is for longing
Of him that I go out in white silk
To stare up into the southern rain
In the rose-coloured dusk
To feel it clasp my body’s form
As it slowly falls, in my pyjamas
Like a warm bed-embrace.
It is scented with the perspiration of mangoes;
I inhale that rain
Into my caves of poetry,
Our child will strip me off
Like silk clothes drenched with labour;
It will sneeze me out of its black conched caverns.
V
It is my privilege to know him
To stare into his nose
And listen to his mouth,
To be surrounded by his tropic air,
And, instead of having to meet
Him in the eye, as with the pink men,
To greet him by staring deep
Into his insufflating nose, his place
Of inspiration, myself a whole skin
Silk bandana to his spermatic sneeze.
STARLIGHT
Her menstruation has a most beautiful
Smell of warm ripe apples that are red,
And an odour of chocolate, a touch of poppy,
And bed-opiums roll from her limbs
Like the smokes of innumerable addicts between the sheets,
A morpheus tampon like a tomb of spices,
Full of spirits, red firework.
It makes me feel like Hercules!
Who spun the wheel in the house of women.
Indeed, the wheel spins, a crimson thread.
Suddenly, the stars are out,
Ripe, like the apples;
Menstruating, with the stars out.
CARCASS
In the bellies of the soft bronze flies
The carcass of the magpie flies again,
Humming like a fast song,
A gong hushed but purring to the touch.
The aviary of insects chirps with juice
They are working with their faces
At the white branches of the carcass,
Pungent little resurrectors, pepper-fruit
In bronze of false orchards slipping away
Full of their pips in lariat flight,
The magpie flies again
Through the churches of the air,
It breaks its dome
Laid by a fly in a black-white flurry,
The reverse stork that devours eggs and nestlings
Wings backwards down the gullets of resurrectors.
The navvy bows his head to the freezing asphalt,
His pneumatic thumper pounds the road
Belling with the decelerated fury
Of the wellington-boot tongue
Of a blowfly on its pitons hacking like a hero
Hard at a slab of refrigerated giant.
ROUND PYLONS
The clouds of luminous mist from the sea
Laying the round dew everywhere in the hedges
And the coils of innumerable dew encircling the spider,
The circuitry of the brash spider
In round pylons
As in a castle of awareness,
Many curtain walls and cistern keeps
Guarding the centre
And, down its lines of gossamer
The round helmets of light
In their slow march,
The land hung with these sheets,
The sheeted sea coming ashore
And hanging its pictures up in the hedges,
Its unsalted portraits,
The surface of the sea doubling
As it opens into sleep,
A source among white sources, cresting.
WOODEN PIPES
The hands in the womb,
The invisible hands serving at the feast,
The round banquet in the high domed hall,
Shaping the child and serving her,
Combing her body to the right shape;
This is going on now.
I believed I heard Zoe
Playing on wooden pipes as plain as plain
But as I woke fully
It was a seagull crying.
There is an inner, and an outer daughter.
My sleep makes me as my waking does,
The sleep of invisible hands
Of servitors, the music of wooden pipes,
The tree-song shortened for human ears,
The blessed ghosts of that feast
And the drunken guest at it, the reveller
Who wakes in the cold air
To the music of seagulls.
There is an inward, and an outer daughter,
And the outer girl sits, combing her hair,
The mother watching, takes the comb
Soothes her head, gliding out of it
Aches of the day with her visible hands,
For with invisible hands the same woman
Below and within is combing
Another daughter into shape
Among the birth-currents
A womb of full tresses
And the outer daughter speaks to the inner
Through the mother,
The inner daughter speaks through the mother’s actions,
The two sisters are combing each other’s hair,
The mother is the interface,
The two daughters kiss her.
ZOE’S THOMAS
A young leggy cat, so glossy black
He might in that instant have leapt
From the pitch-egg of night; his eyes
Golden as yolks. He scrutinizes
The room-dew of our breath running down
The cold windowpane as if it were mice.
A cluster of drops scuds down the glass
And shatters on the sill, his paw darts out
And inquisitorially turns the meagre
Water over and over – and then his tongue
Darts out and swiftly laps it up,
The innocent water which squeals with light.
QUIET TIME
The spider of the wainscot
Fell to the pliers newly arrived
Of a centipede out of the WC pedestal;
This aggressor was like the last bones of a God
Waiting for resurrection of the whole body,
Like an Osiris pillar, a small one,
A small god’s spinal column
Running independently, as a God’s might do –
But also like a long twist of toffee
Of that colour as I sat remembering
When toffee was the gold of my boy’s mouth,
And would not pluck the fillings from my teeth;
And this long twisted toffee has its own jaws
With which it strikes down the defenceless weaver
I have watched patching his sail
For several days in this same cloistered toilet –
My quiet time; a cloister’s clyster, that centipede
Is like a dark cloister running on its own
That has loosened itself from the Abbey stones
Incorporating into its twilight many brethren
Sprinting all together on brotherly legs
Like Chinese masquers chattering in their dragon –
Hunting for all the tremulous spinsters
And all the lockchesters in the world,
Hunting for the alchemistic spiders
For they have within them a Benedictine
Stilled from the swarms of prayerful night-moths
One of which now splashes the cream walls
Easing the fretted constellations of its cream wings;
I thought it was a speckling of ink, like –
DOMESTIC SUITE
The central heating buzzes
Like an apple with a wasp inside;
<
br /> Water-tree-house with a bark of copper,
The taps flower white water,
Dribble glass moss.
Outside the sea spreads tablecloths over and over,
Is full of milt,
The strong pure eggs of fish;
In the shops the pure pleated eyes of fish,
Salty goldfoil, open to all their troubles.
I slice the orange; it is a round table
Its place-segments designed for knights,
Fitted with sealed goblets of juice as for astronauts.
Our hen squeaks like a wooden sash.
The shore breathes like a horse
Running under the shade of trees into the sunlight,
In this wind, white horses or blossoming trees rush inland.
The meadow-breathing of a pony, the strong
Leathery lips as they nip up the sugar-lump,
The strong warm grassy flank;
There is the central heating with its low pulse,
There is golden foliage and a glittering wife, there is
An unweaned child that smells of honeysuckle in the nights, and
Subdued water-music of horses and wasps all winter.
THE DYNAMITE DOCTORS
The dynamite doctors
At the explosives factory
They nurse the melted stew
Like greasy gravy or mutton tallow,
A grey potency in its bowls
That must never be stirred too fast
Or else the door opens on a star
Opens on a sun, on creation
And the fire-blast hurries in
Like an angel of death with hair burning.
The ticklish doctors
Skimming the bowls
Tilting them over the kieselguhr
To contrive that virile mud
Called dynamite,
The precious stream that must not break
In its droplets like a stick of bombs,
Otherwise the medicine will suffer an attack
Which will take everyone with it.
One doctor takes the pulse
Of the machine and turns it down
A little, the vibration is excessive;
He dips his finger slowly
Into the gluten and sucks it most gently
So his head shall not explode:
He nods, he must not shake his head.