Collected Poems
Page 32
And distilling by its queries passionless thought
In small puffs from the alembics
Of sleeves and collars
With the tiny writing motions
And slight nods of head; everybody
In this well-lighted room
Of sharp pencils and dazzling pages
And cleanest clothes is exhaling subtexts,
Is inhaling information secretly colluding;
The invigilator knows there is no copying –
But how can all the answers be identical?
He is suspicious of the brightest boy
And the dullest, equally.
BLACKTHORN WINTER
A blackthorn winter. The trees lighter
Than at other times, showing
The inwards of their leaves; the stars
Because of the bitter wind
Twinkle fiercely; the masses of air
Create a hollow echoing in the woodland;
Sunset’s slant light rebuilds ghost villages, echoing
In their shadow-plane out of moist deep foundations,
And celtic boundaries pulse in ceaseless wind-markings;
To smell the touch of the wind, to hear the contours.
UNDER THE RESERVOIR
The reservoir great as the weight
Of a black sun radiates through the cracks
In the concrete, expresses water supercharged
By pressure and darkness, the whole body
Of water leaning on the hairline cracks,
Water pumping itself through masonry
Like light through glass. Water charged
By the mystery of lying there in storeys
In transparent tons staring both upwards and downwards
(His coffee hand spills on his shirt the regalia
Of his worried mind in linked splashes like medals
Of a muddy war)
The reservoirs in their unending battle to flow
Turned into steely strain like hammered pewter
Endure their thousand tons of mud, as though
They held their surfaces open like Samson
To the dust that sifts on to their cold pewter,
And rejoice in their dark linings, as they might
Rejoice in plentiful seed,
Black seed of illimitable forest cracking
Open the stone rooms when the water has gone.
FALMOUTH CLOUDS
I
The weather, opening and closing
Doors in the head,
Opening them gently like
A gradual suffusion of sun, or
Slamming thunder-splattered doors shut,
II
With a jangle of chairs disclosing
A writhing chain-locker of cloud
Slithering away into itself.
III
A chalky bust of Beethoven breaks open
On rows of ruffled theatre-chocolates which gleam
In the lightning; then, the stars
Walking in long chiffons of rain
IV
Where later chiffons are unrolled
Along a blue counter, a bolt of silk thumped down
So it unrolls with an astonishing perfume
And a blaze of white.
V
In the high wind implosions of dark-cloaked cloud
As through the stage trapdoors called ‘vampires’, plunge.
VI
An exploding herb-garden or laboratory
Shoots across the sky,
Arrests one’s head and simultaneously
Across the inside of that dome
Plants horticultures of changeable perfumes.
VII
That ice-cathedral which built itself from nothing
But faith, is being shot from a cannon
For charity, with silver candlesticks and sonorous
arches And clergy scattering in their whitest surplices;
VIII
The cathedral was full of dazzling tablecloths
Which come rolling everywhere above on which are thrown
Dark shadows from much higher, of personages who appear
To be eating supper at a long table in an upper room.
IX
These clouds are packed with white gulls, while those
Are an aviary of dark rainbirds; when they collide
There is suddenly nothing but sun, hey presto.
X
Skywalkers with immense tension of presence
And extreme visibility and invisibility as well,
The cascades roll past, turn dragonish and then
They are all simple lace very high
On a blue robe which darkens with emergency generating stations
Black as floating mines of coal.
XI
I wake from a dream of crowned and grimacing white faces
To my bedroom window which crowds with vast white faces grimacing.
SNIFFING TOM
One who goes to and fro in summer
Sniffing the saddles of girls’ cycles:
A Sniffing Tom.
The same chap (I know him well)
Farts in the bath and bites the bubbles:
He doubles as a Snorkist.
To secure his rank, the prince
Catches in his mouth the rank breath
Of the dying king: this is the Air Apparent.
He is crowned soon enough
And married with Holy Rites, which should
More properly be called Holy Ruts,
For after copulation the rank dream comes,
And he that dreams also sweats, farts, snores
And erects and should revere
Le rêve, its reverie, for he has dreamed
A classy one, that he unlocked
The school shed among the daffodils
And it contained 100 girls’ cycles,
So he sleeps to dream again, and sweats,
And he is juicy; that is, sapient;
By Jiminy, this is sooth! by the twins
Of the two worlds, soothe, sleep
And wake; by Gemini!
IN THE LAB WITH THE LADY DOCTOR
The Old Woman resembles a fairy-tale princess
Who has stayed too long in her tower unrescued,
She precedes me among the benches, she puts
Her protective goggles on, and in this mood
Resembles that gnome who captured me; I look closer:
It is that gnome. She comes in again
With a flock of young men in white flapping coats
To whom she is goosegirl. I insist that the chemicals
On this side of the bench are strictly mine, and this includes
The bottle of gold salts, and the retort distilling
An infusion of bull-semen. There will be a fight, it’s plain,
One of the young Privatdocents has his white coat off already
Underneath which he is naked, and in mock compliment I reach out
And shake him firmly by the wedding-muscle, upon which
He hits me all over maybe sixty times
In five seconds with karate blows, one of which
Catches me near my Person but safely thuds
On pubic bone, and I declare ‘This assault should not
Have helped your case, but nevertheless this does not mean
That certain experiments cannot be performed in joint names …’
At my resolve, a spattering of applause, and the Old Girl
Crosses over from her young squires in dazzling plumage
And asks to see the bruises, so I strip off my shirt.
The marks of striking hands patter across my chest
And already the dark bruises are rainbowing like pieces
Of peacock tail. The young chap who inflicted them
Stands by, sniffing my retort’s nozzle; with a shyly winning smile
‘Will you give me a drink of this?’ he asks. I feel like a fruit
Which has been bruised in order to ferment
Some delicious rare liquor; I say so; they applaud again.
from FOUR POEMS OF LOVE AND TRANSITION
I
Her great thoroughfare,
Her sunlit valley; from the testes
Pass multitudes of liquid pearl. Her clitoris
Is a pearl stud on the jade step whereby
The jade pavilion is set on fire.
Thus the train was laid,
The rising stair, tides, docks, sluices,
Saltworks; now they drink
At the fountain of jade and raise
Their heads, dripping, and look around
At the chambers of paradise richly furnished
With the perfume which are prayers
Said on the prayer-mats of flesh and bone.
[…]
IV
The cat returning after his night’s foray,
All the smells of it about him,
All the dews soaked deep into his midnight fur
By passage through the midnight grass
Which is the multitude observatory of the sky,
Each blade a green telescope poring upwards
A tube of green ichor-lenses
To which the whole earth puts her eye;
This observatory absorbs within itself
The rays of moon and stars, they sweat
Green recording-dew, these vessels,
A liquor which contains their transits,
And these cassettes of crystal are transferred
Like unction to the cat’s black coat.
He is a walking astronomy.
He is liquor-of-moon in its animal form,
He is one whole-body deep-perfumed black moustache
Wandering thunderstruck full of kisses
Of astrological perfume through the grass verges.
from BUVEUR’S FAREWELL
Afore Ye Go!
II
The brown light of God all around,
The mature autumnal light, soaked
Into the eyepods of pure ambrosia,
He says, leaning back, his elbow
On the bar, and sucks his cigarette,
An impalpable meal that will not stick
On a fork, a satisfactory intangible meal
Of talk in syllables of tobacco ash,
A communion in a temple of fellowdrinkers
Sharing the one round belly, one acrid breath.
III
Like Gods, we relish
The burnt sacrifice,
A meal of grey ghost
Inhaled, and we scatter
The yellow ashes
Of earth-brown beer used up
Pissed out clean,
For we are plumbers and purifiers
In the place where women
May not enter and which is dirtier
Than they would believe; we gaze
At the ceiling like astronomers
As we grab our pub-tackle
In dreamy relaxation,
Tributory stream, contributing,
Sings Piss-on-Boots.
V
The benefits receding
Cigarettes and beer
Make small turds;
And the poet caught on a shingle
Seething with fag-ends
And dead men, which is what
With prophetic insight
They call empty bottles;
The dead men outnumber all the stars.
VII
And in the abrasive return
To the house of children and regular meals
Do these spirits satisfy actually?
It may be not, but it is still the way
To achieve the serenity of the woman
In her temple with her child
Where the raw is cooked and spooned
Into the hungry mouths sweet as flowers;
Accordingly we like hunters quaff the raw
Blood of the world out of barrels, the darting
Lightning of brandies. I say it is a womb-state,
A gentleman’s lodge on the way home, and communion,
This meal taken in a male Sabbath
Or sewer, as you prefer.
VIII
Not just a meal
But a frenzy,
A three-and-a-half-hour’s feast
With messages from Booze Country;
The poet will get an idea, with trembling hand
Unhasp the small pocket pad or tablet …
The morning after – what disgrace!
The script too shaking to be read:
It is in Doctor Death’s handwriting
Illegibly prescribing from his own pharmacy.
IX
Buveur
A gallon-an-hour man,
He is a river below the waist
Sliding towards the sea
He has drunk up his legs
Staggering from this church
Its stained glass
The quaffable brown light of God
Of the Real (meaning Royal) Ale Hall;
The depth and sheer well
Of opening time not deep enough
Not if it were all the beer in the world –
Why, he could leak it!
Or the globe of the world turned to beer
Whirling about the sun
In one great tun,
The cloud-capped towers of alcohol …
X
The skin tight at extreme
He has the notably bad idea of taking drink back
For the wife and the daughter –
In the brown earth-light
Of the spirit of earth
Passing through him,
At last he has the Sight!
The town is a harmony, the people orient wheat,
Each man is a spirit, the ships
In the harbour are one ship
Containing the same spirit
Who is three hundred men
All piss-pals.
XII
The liturgy is out of hand,
The brown eyes of God shining
From all the tables
We sit round tables
Furnished with pint-eyes,
Brown eyes in glass sockets –
We blind them all, one after another,
To obtain the Sight.
XIII
The dust interests,
And the ashes,
The goblet of dog-ends,
The sheer well of all beer
Interests
The brown light
Which is all places on earth at once
And the Mass of ships on the estuary
Interest, every detail seen
Through a precise microscope of pints and at once
Forgotten, because of the greater interest
Of the next grain of dust,
Or sufflation of the breeze, forgotten.
I am a wax face through which beer pours
Into a self greater than I can understand
Or remember, I feel eternal and young,
For I drink up the brown child of beer,
All beers are young beers,
I drink up the adolescent,
I drink up my childhood,
My health, my wealth, my safety.
XV
To stroll home from his church
After purification by pickling,
The brown light of God about him,
The khaki earth-light, the cackie air,
The women in their skirts of fine foam
And light ale in bottles of pubic hair,
All clothes drinking-clothes
The company of saints swaggering and staggering
From home to pub to home to pub
Pace down the bottomless well
To the brown basis of things.
XVI
The women shine, it is something
They distil from the booze
; And redistil as they talk
Filling up the retort sip by sip;
The brown leather benches shine
With the polishing transit of
Boozers past, present and finished,
Things shine of themselves
At the bottom of this well, it is
Neo-platonic and like the brown back of books,
Study-pub, the volumes bound in glass
And with a handle and all precisely
The same length, or a prescribed length
Like easy books, and you can tell
In this library who is well-read by their gait.
XVII
Taking new surroundings
With each pint,
The feet carrying me without my volition
Back to the drowning-place
Where I sit under flavoured brown water
Drinking from never-empty glasses;
The whole air is my tears and urine;
We converse as the fishes do
By gobbling and presentiment,
The entire room is our bubbling voice
We are a school of people who drink
Like fish and are pissed as newts
And piss the brown of exhausted blood,
The mud of nicotine and decay,
Brown years, brown bread, mud bed,
Brown moss; the curtains
Sweep open, they have let
Too much light into this place, the drowned
Corpses puff up to the ceiling.
XVIII
Bed to pub to bed to pub
Despite wife and daughter –
They will take you on again,
Like ships, under their white sails
Blinding as blossom, masts of cherry-tree,
Who, blown along by their blossom,
Sail in willing to take you
Aboard again
Brown sailor
Bronzed by his voyages
Through his sabbaths and sewers
As ballast