Brown as the hills
Resolute to stay at home
Give it up, or maybe sup
On a few cans, or maybe
Out for a quick one
With that press-gang.
XIX
The moon smiles;
She knew it would not last;
There is drinking money where that came from;
She shines with her white meed
As though she were covered
With cherry-blossom, and, he swears,
A fragrance from the full arena
As it glides from behind the hills
And this clear sensation will surely last,
This cannot fade, he must catch it
In his glass, like the coin of a pint
Lying at the bottom of the pint
And he drinks the moon up, where
Is the next moon coming from;
The woman reaches into her lap,
Into her handbag; she will forgive
And she will buy him a last drink,
Even now, after all that, so he can
Catch his feeling and tell her about it,
And she will tell him back again so he can believe it,
And drink no more, in the small garden
At opening time among the blossom, watch
The moon blossom with her and in to bed;
Even now
With further silver coins
With further wells of tears
Reaches into her bag
For further wells of tears.
XX
All our sailing songs, our stamping
On deck-planking under sail
Of glass with reverse lettering,
Our voyages in the mirrors
Sounding to the well’s note
Which fills the glasses not shatters them
With brown sweat of tuns, we live riotously
In this well until we are liverish bones
Wheeled in at opening-time, covered
With brown-spotted liver-moss and
There are always men off the rigs delighted to pay,
The beers flow through our fingers
Covered with Scandinavian calls
And German labels sounding like moss
And green halls and flowing dwarves’ gold,
Pungent with their foreign colognes
Which in an international spirit
We absorb right into our bones
And deepest tubes, while
In her belly, a quart
Of pure water lies, containing a drinker;
Persuade her in pure fellowship
To have another mother’s ruin and make her baby
So drunk he will sing all the way home.
XXIII
Time please, she chants
Breaking open the bubble room
Like a piggish litter,
Tumbling them out
Into the too-bright street
Snatching them from their rows of teats
For the sun to devour.
XXIV
For he has attended the sinister BROWN MASS,
The secret Mass of St Stagger;
He counts his steps home like time allowed,
Like mortal days remaining;
He must wait them out in his kindly bed
Where his ears fill with beer-sweat;
He tosses his head
Like a drinker throwing away pints;
I turn and turn again
Emptying those shells
That stain my pillows
With their murmuring waters;
I have drunk my inheritance;
That which disclosed grace to me
Closed it almost immediately.
XXV
Later, and maybe for ever,
I lift my glass,
And salute my fate;
My Grail
Which shows me everything at once;
I write of this as I drink
And find in the morning only spidertracks:
A few winged ideas caught,
And drunk up.
XXVI
Pallid animal, resembling lemmings,
Or the long-drowned from the sea inside,
Myself enclosing the womb-liquor I swim in,
Hauling myself on feeblest limbs
Out of a headache of my whole body,
I have stolen my head from myself,
I have stolen my hands, my legs, my liver,
Being stolen they are no good to me,
My hands cut off, my feet cut off,
My mouth sealed, my bride eloped.
Secret brown roots
Tap my night water, I sleep
Like the tuns in the cellar, fermenting.
Is this bed or bar-cellar?
Time is called again. I walk back
From the pub like blind Oedipus
Sockets weeping brown ale,
I will return again to these bars
In the town called Colonus, again and again
Until I can no longer be found;
Do you call these sanctuaries gracious
When they show me as I am to my lover and child first
And to myself only at the very last.
XX
THE LABORATORS
(1993)
PIGMY THUNDER
With a supple action
Of the wrist he extracts or pulls
My front tooth making no more
Of it than the snipping
Of a button off a shirt, though
That would not make me lisp.
I take the little cavernous
Fragment of stained ivory
Home and upstairs. In it one could
Carve without much alteration a Taoist
Temple with a staircase of its own,
Bamboo plants and cranes,
Set it under a minute
Glassy dome for a spirit house.
Unknown invisible
Personages would stroll conversing
Up and down the staircase
With feet bare and sensitive
As my tongue which already knows
Every cranny of that
Lilliput precinct, though this stone
When it was fastened into the stones of my head
Always seem to me the condensed
Form of a powerful mountain
Lodged in its rainswept range
Booming with my pigmy thunder.
STENCH AND STORY57
What a child fears most
In a parent is fear. When the maroons woke us
I lay in bed talking to my children
The whole night long, in the steep house
By the dock of ships under repair and the
Fish-packing station that fills the whole air
With invisible dead fish swimming in
Odorous shoals; these smells, I swear,
If you smell them sleeping, cause nightmares.
My children feared their dreams, was this the cause?
My stomach noticed the stench, then my heart fluttered,
My nostrils told me why; it was a presence
Rather than a stench; the moon was full, it smelt
Decidedly of fish, the moon-goddess a fishwife
Bending over her tides and shoals of ghosts.
My children wanted talk of ships, not goddesses,
Which were and are spontaneous painting in steel,
Still-life great as a village of rusting fruit
Tall as three-storey houses in their dry-dock. Ships
Had read the ocean, and printed it on their vertiginous sides.
I lay talking with my children, all night
In bed, in the house with the tidal atmosphere
And the warm south-easterly blowing off the plant,
Overlooking the Roads where in summer the small boats race
Their sails smelling only of their storms, where
The water runs in long c
lean sheets like decent dreams.
THE MOUNTAIN
The beefarm on her sloping meadows, the sweet
Exacting spaces spinning honey;
Under the elms and the sycamores
The light leaves cherish many flowers,
The light air under the boughs threaded
With the vivid bees who return
Speaking excitedly by dance
Like soldiers in armour yellow with pollen
Instead of bloodstain from the battlefield,
Buttercup field. On higher slopes
The banks of pines with their silent smell
In serried battalions, their needles
In thick hushing carpets; here only
The solitary wasp lives, or the rotund
Humble bee, under that dark green light
In that cherished silence as under
A thick fabric gathered up and pleated
Into trees on the skirts of the mountain.
ORPHELIA
Orpheus’ swimming torn-off head
Babbles its prophecies as it speeds
Upstream to the source, an entire river
His muscle-rippling body that flies
Mission to the clouds which are a river
Winding above, and the muslin petticoats
Of drowned Ophelia reaching into
Every rainy chamber of the rapid sky
Pouring into the river; her sole dress
Water, from mouth to source; there is
A certain fugitive countenance in water
Which shakes its locks and utters a penetrating
Small voice or voices, called Orpheus,
Ophelia, Orphelia, Ophelius (but how can one
Be mad or bad any longer in water’s presence,
Be of anything but magnetic water?)
POPULAR STAR
He was hounded from one bride-chamber
To the next, because somebody dreamed of him
Every night, and used him; or was it
The weather used him? When it was not girls
Or married women, it was the clouds – he pulled out
On racks of clouds, and stretched carefully,
Lovingly, limb from limb, the white intestines
Parting, the rain falling like glass blood, putting
Him together in the calm reflecting puddles; this dream
Better by far than those where the girls
Dressed him in leather and whipped him, or he them,
Or revealed that the next stage was
An acid bath, or maybe that cruel sawhorse
Set with the butcher’s cleaver upright so that once
He was astride, with weights pulling at his ankles, he was
Very slowly sliced in half, upwardly, the severance
Of his right and left halves complete
Long after he was dead by the blade passing
Of itself through his navel and after that
All the way; or the wire jackets waffling
The flesh, or the body-cages which let in rats
To partake of living him to the grating bone.
The frequency of these bad ones made the good ones
Quivery: being married to the Princess in St Paul’s
And bedding down in Buckhouse for the dream would never
Let him settle in case she changed her mind
And had him decapitated in the Tower or defenestrated
In Whitehall. It seemed that the whole human weather
Used him in its seasons for its dreams, passing him
From mind to mind or more likely
Featuring him in many minds at once,
So, if he woke to all the dreams
He would be the anthill of himself being
Branded, butchered, fucked, knighted, blinded, deballed,
Wedded, delivered out of royal bellies so She could say
‘You’re mine at last, truly mine,’ putting him
To the nipple and stopping his cries; so popular,
Passed from city-mind to city-mind across the globe,
His head torn off and winged like Morpheus,
Or like Orpheus the torn and raw wound of the neck
Connecting him to his dreambody which is every-Body.
ANNALEE AND HER SISTER
I
I rainwalked to Annalee in Lower Lodestone,
I met her sister and felt the wells
Of friendship rising in a great daylight
Which pictured the recesses of her clothes
Like private rooms where she strolled naked,
I pictured such intimacies because of their scent,
The fresh smell as she turned of the wind turning
Over a bed of flowers with the infrasmell
Of dark soil that is the buried garden
Containing all possible flowers.
II
When I rainwalked to Lower Lodestone intending Annalee
It was her sibling’s clothes that hung
Around her sisterly blue stare, and upon
The triangle of her throat
By means of flowing ties;
It was because of this that in her presence was bent
The scent of things, as light is bent
By the mere presence of the magnetic rain.
III
I felt the wells of friendship rising in a great daylight
Dwelling on Annalee’s sister, for when she dressed
To meet me, it was in her sister’s clothes,
Creating thereby a new world. In that scent
Of flowering soil I pictured intimacies
Alternative to the clean bright sibling
Who would not walk in her caryatid clothes
Which her sister borrowed; their apartments grew damp
And clung in galleries emitting
Earthy wetness, creating in that scent a personal world in which
Only the one sister walked as the tall rain walked.
TOAD AND OTHERS
The butterflies pause to sip at nectar-
Stations, their spiral tongues
Like watches’ hairsprings
Poked stiff into the nectar-wells
Of amaryllis, rose and myrtle-flower;
Time stops as you watch
The floral wings pumping full of insect wings
Drinking up the flower-nature,
Becoming it. In the garden,
A well silk-lined by water-spiders,
A white sleeve to the well, supporting spiders,
But I choose toads; and, above,
The aeroplane sounding with its purr the abyss.
Among the dusty ivy-creepers
A toad makes its apartments
Feminine and studious;
I will bring her, so she seems to purr,
Into her twilight, dusky grapes,
She will eat the nimble
Grain-sized flies that breed in grapes,
That will be her banquet in her rafters,
That will be her beauty,
Reaching in to scoop
The grapeskin see-through with a dainty claw.
XXI
MY FATHER’S TRAPDOORS
(1994)
EIGHT PARENTS58
I
At the climax of the illuminated
Book of Hours the Trinity is seen in truth to be
Three self-same white-clad bearded figures
Of Jesus on three identical thrones.
It makes the eyes go funny, like trifocals.
II
This devotional picture resembles
My mother’s triptych dressing-table mirror;
When she sat there, three other mothers appeared.
III
The fourth turned round to me and smiled;
The three simultaneously looked back over their shoulders
At somebody out of sight down the glass corridors.
Then she got up, and the thrones were empty.
Nearly a decade after she had emptied her throne, my father
Sat himself down in front of the same mirror and died.
He paid his Access- and paper-bill, laid out
Like hands of cards folders on the dining-room table
For his executors, climbed the stairs to his widower bedroom,
Sat down at my mother’s mirror and saw there were three more of him,
Then his heart burst and shot him into mirror-land.
V
Where is that mirror now? you may be reasonably sure
If you buy a second-hand house or bed, then
Somebody has died in it.
VI
But a dressing-table triple mirror? Can you
Enquire of the vendor, expecting nothing but the truth,
‘Who died in this mirror?’ Death
Leaves no mark on the glass.
ARGUS
Argus, in a pulse of waves,
Closing some eyes here, opening
Others there; the long
Light lashes shake out an air
As if his skin were breathing.
Were all the eyes closed
At one time, then he would be
Pelted like a beast with those
Thick womanly lashes, but, no,
The soft-lidded darkness travels
Over his skin in bands;
Were all his eyes wide open
At any one time, then it would be
Like surprising a peacock
Whose whole skin was vivid with eyes;
But they are not, in the iridescent man; those
Which are shut are opening and the open eyes
Are flickering drowsily, and beginning to close
In brindles over the skin, of sleeping, waking:
The opening eyes admire the world outside,
The closing eyes surprise the inner world, and
The opening and closing of the eyes
Winds inner and outer close
And ever more closely together,
Like ropemakers on their long productive walks in sunlight
To and fro between the shadowy boles of avenues.
Collected Poems Page 33