(1995)
THE MOTHS
Palpitations – the moth-beats
Of the heart in the clambering weather
Wrestling with itself.
The moth lies down on the windowpane full of light
In its bath of lights.
I look out of the window past the moth
Like some gigantic inhabitant rising from its unconscious mind.
What does the unconscious mind of a moth resemble?
The conscious mind of a devoted naturalist.
That is why the moths come to him like inhabitants
Of his unconscious when he lays his white sheet down in midnight
Over the grass and shines his car’s headlights on it;
They speed to their baths of light.
And here come more moths over the estuary,
They stagger over the roof of the house of light built without hands,
And they settle in its garden of white lawn.
Before he thought of blacking his face they came to him,
To its whiteness, and sipped from the fountains in the pores.
Now they come to his body-heat
When he lies down in his bedsheet.
They will eat him like candy even to the bones,
He will fly away on their wings;
None of the wicked will understand,
But the wise shall understand.
A SHELL
The shell the skeleton of all the waves.
Lacking a sea view
I place it on the windowsill
Which watches the drizzle along the canals,
The chained doors of the Green Inn,
And the commercial district where there are no theatres.
On some magnetic points of the iron footbridge
I thought I could estimate by a certain note
The city river’s depth;
During the demolitions
When the copper ceiling of the theatre fell
Bells sung in all the padlocked churches.
They took it away for a military bandstand
That green resonator. I return to my shell
As though it were my wife.
Was Lot’s wife, bones and all, turned to salt?
She would stand there, a pillar, until the next shower.
The old buildings are showing their bones in this leached-down city.
I pick up my salt shell, and listen
To its hushing tune like the city’s, listen
To city-air tossed here and there
In all its wave-shaped singing opus-chambers.
CAT AND TREE
There is a fragrant and spiky small tree
In bud, into which the birds descend.
It is the cat’s bird-machine.
He stands poised with one paw
Resting on the slender vibrant trunk, like a cellist
Testing the hall’s atmosphere through his G-string before
He starts to play.
Birds descend and ascend, untroubled, pause
On a bough a while to contemplate and mute
Guano, they rise up having done so
With the cat like a black shadow at the trunk’s foot.
There is a detonation from the docks, and the birds rise
And scatter like a black substance torn to fragments,
The cat merely lays his head back on his shoulder and watches
For the echoes to subside among the ship-machinery.
The echoing birds slip back one by one
Into his bird-machine; now they will scare less.
He pushes his stare forward and enters the slaughter-tree;
It is all cat now along every bough, as the spider
Lays a paw to her harmonium of gossamer.
PURE CHANCE
The trees were dark as bears, and moved disturbingly,
And made one think of uneasy bones
Digging their way out. Indoors,
The pretty wooden gospels, ludo,
Snakes and ladders, that make visible
The tiny throws of chance,
The disposition of the powers,
As the trees do, heavy breathing in the oaks,
Nothing but green lungs and air. Are they
The powers? They are very close to them.
He takes his dice board under the oaks in the park
To improve his lot; the snakes may glide
Out of the boards and wreathe the oaks,
The green snakes becoming invisible in the leafy ladders;
Thus the pictures flat on the boards grow solid:
Snakes and laddering branches, the snaky wind
Coiled into the oaks, hissing. He walks free of them
Out of the wood on to the meadows of pure chance.
SEA-EYE
He knew a clergyman he could say anything to,
But nothing changed inside him; it was horrible
That there was no horror,
None of the horror that melted him
So that his belly plucked like a saurian in a tar-pit,
And if he melted deeper inside it was to white,
To pure, liquid boy,
His thick, secret sauce. This was what he wanted:
Deep feeling; so, instead of the vicar he went to see
The one-eyed old man with corded forearms
On the beach who had furnished
His entire cottage with chairs and tables
And bookshelves washed up out of the sea
And the boy brought him books
And that made him friendly so he took out his eye
Which scared the boy satisfactorily, and, staring at him
With one dark moist orb and one cavernous gristle
That old man further melted the boy to his essence
With the horror of his tales that all ended
With his losing his eye by the deliberate action
Of a young boy who has come to listen to his stories,
But the sea had rinsed that socket clean; and once
They were rowing, and he paused on his oars
And wiped his brow and took his glass eye out
And rinsed it in the ocean and dropped it
So the dark-irised ball went dwindling down
And the boy jumped in and swam down after it
And scooped it up just as it touched the sand
And brought it back triumphant glaring in his palm
And tossed it to the old man who caught it saying
‘Not Popeye but Sea-eye’; the diver felt the whole ocean
Running through his clothes, undressing him;
Sometimes the old man wore instead a smooth sea-pebble in his socket.
FAMILIAR
The cool seriousness
Of the cat’s gaze while the stars rise
And dry leaves catspaw past the windows,
Contented maestro who proceeds
By ritual gestures, his eyes blazing
With that interior self-monument of gold:
Linked with all tigers, striped
For their passage through the long grass invisibly,
Voiding immense stalings that are volumes of passion
At the four corners of the green garden;
Like an enchantress too
Walking her battlements passionately
And chucking out her chamberpot at the four castle-corners,
Familiar with an angel
Who has pouncing wings and the miaow
Of a choir of ten thousand from the one pair of catlips.
XXIII
ASSEMBLING A GHOST
(1996)
ESHER60
The two suns,
The sun in the sea, the sun in the sky:
The bicycle of summer.
Do I deserve it,
Shirt open to my breastbone as I ride?
My shirt billowing like more lungs,
Like sunny clouds
On my summer bicycle
,
The dawn wind
Smelling like a scrubbed deck.
Later, the sky of an uncolour –
Pale as a grey cat’s fur,
Or ancient glassware
Rubbed misty in the desert.
Do I deserve it?
The garden birds flow up out of the lilac,
The gulls
Hang up by one wing and wheel around.
The bicyclist with all Esher
In his shirt, kept
Warm and sunny there.
BIBLIOPHILE
Because of Falmouth
He has more Bibles than he has shirts.
He will search out Jerusalem with candles.
Falmouth seems undersea,
Or it brims with the understructure of the clouds,
With invisibly salted water and mist
Which webs everything into one great mansion,
A mansion turning all the time,
An invisible manor-house greater than any human home.
Staircases, dungeons, great slam-gates,
Sequent chambers, draughty galleries, speed past me,
Secret passages disclosed, lifts on their hawsers,
On their salt ropes ascending
Momentary high towers whose shafts
Exclaim with sunshine and open to the foundations.
What does the Bible give to an unbeliever?
The Bible has fullness.
Fullness stops the mind being wiped
By Falmouth, that is my prayer
As I shut my shirt to my chin and open my Bible
Every time the clouds
Blow in from the East, on that East wind
Which has holes opening in it, bible-deep.
DAVY JONES’ LIONESS61
There was a siege of dreams
Of needing or wanting
To buy a new watch; almost
It slipped away as I paused
By the Xmas display of actual watches, spoke
To the woman serving in dark suit
And pearls, of the beauty
Of the pearl display on dark velvet
(Meaning herself also)
We agreed they were pretty
And what a pity it was
That men did not wear them. I informed her
I had gone out in the heavy male
Serpentine beads and they interested the women
Just as they liked my sporting
A pigtail, and she said
She could see that, and why had I
Not put them on to visit her? this was unspoken,
And now she paced
Like a small dark lioness,
Her movement round the shop
Had been increasing, I could not
Keep track and she seemed
As she moved to roar subsonically
Through the open maw of her black suit
While I told her that a stranger
In the pub had kissed me because
I wore beads and she did not know
That men could, and I said yes,
As you see, they can; but,
Said the dark lioness, does that
Include pearls? she was pacing now
Up and down the jeweller’s stairs while I
Looked again at the watches, remembering my dream
Of needing a watch and she watched me
Because it was a dream in which
I had remembered my dream, and this was why
She came and roared at me
Soundlessly in her dark. The bijouterie
With its beauties shedding
Their light everywhere was now charged
With the subsonic breath of pearls;
It was like lions in an aviary,
It was the singular oyster-shop of pearls,
Of pearls and glittering innuendo;
The slime of the sea necklaced round
The long neck of the dark assistant,
The cabinets full of ticking salt
Sea-jewels telling me the tide was rising;
This was Davy Jones’ Locker
Full of ivory-treasures, tides and gems,
That is the watch of watches, and she?
Davy Jones’ Lioness from the Orient
Now wearing pearls that gathered
Like rain under the sea.
ENÝPNION62
A bee in the library
Of elm books and oak books,
Holly shelves,
Ivy shelves,
The drowsy-house,
The dreamlike slumber in books;
Polishing the windows
Of the drowsy-house
That open to and fro
One sees out of the leaves;
I open the book and its honey runs over,
The supple binding polished with beeswax,
The dark-veined pages,
The whispering leaves
Inscribed with sentences that hum
In the amber twilight,
A gentleman’s library
In which to drowse
That is full of Virgil
Who has retired,
Who has finished with all
Heroes larger than beesize.
LEATHER GOODS63
I feel emptied by the thunderstorm. She
Looks as I feel. He takes me behind the shop
To show me the source of the leather with which
He makes his wonderful supple skirts, waistcoats,
Tabards, luggage, including doctors’ bags. I must
Conceal the origin, he says, handing me her skin
Perfectly tanned, hanging it over my arm, it is heavy
As the ulster of a big man, the hands bear nails
Which are as fresh as any person’s living,
I cannot see the expression, her hair
Brushes the planking. He tells me
It was a pleasure-steamer wrecked
Off the Manacles and the bones
Gently rolled out of them and their leather
Brine-tanned in a volcanic undersea stream
That was sulphurous;
‘The diver into that wardrobe,
She came in one evening, when I was closing,
With a beautifully supple Gladstone bag, out of it pulled
A total body-suit with nails complete and a zip
“I can deliver five hundred,” she said;
“The leather breathes, but is warm still
In sub-arctic chills,” “There’s
Little call for this degree
Of warm clothing here,” I said,
‘“Then shut your eyes,” she said. I felt
A little soft cool hand steal
Into my own, it was comforting. “Let me take
Just the hands, six dozen at first, see how they go …”
‘Under the sea the teeth rolled
Away like pearls as the gums rotted, scoured
Into white sand. The hair
Continued growing all those years, hiding the wreck
Like a head of hair itself, with full tidal tresses;
Out of that undulant harvest the diver plucked her fortune.’
from ASSEMBLING A GHOST64
MS POTTER
A smile painted red
Signifying mastery of oral sex,
Teeth white as the Moon,
And an amazed ‘Oh!’
From the warm blackness –
Having shown that chord of colours:
Red, white and the deep
Black of her spoken merriment;
Now she sits down at her wheel
In her death-clothes
Creating the algorithm
Of the Potter who made us all
With her belly-art, and winks
And throws down clay
With a slap on her spinning
Wheel, and she catches it
With her fingers as it
Shoots away in loops –
And i
mmediately form rears up,
A low vase of hers spins in
Pulses from shallow to deep
And back again, storing darkness
In the bowl of the vase, then
Dismissing it, thumb-forcing
The shadow out of the bowl in
This messy cave with
Its mud-splashes, puddles,
A hissing tap. Her smock
Is filthy-stiff. There is a streak
Of clay across her cheek while
The zinc perfume of the stinging earth
And high velocity mud shoots
Off the wheel-rim, this makes the place
So real that almost every gesture now
Hypnotised by the wheel falls
Into the ritual,
The vase deepening
Like the night-sky forming
In the potter’s thighs
Her fingers digging
In the spinning void
That falls exactly
Into the tall vase-walls:
Central night, with stars of wet clay;
I needed to spin my heirs
On her wheel
Like a meteor-swarm, the children
Pushing and shoving to get in
The stout thumb and the gracile fingers
Opening the door in her death-clothes
A door is opened
To the yard and birds
With the cool faces of virgins
Pace over the threshold, pick their crumbs
From the bread-rolls tall as vases.
I sit patiently on the uncomfortable
Stool made of a late-mediaeval
Crosshead; the heiroglyphs are swarming
Again as she peddles at the wheel, the hypnotic vase
Pulsing with shadow, then shallowing
To a vibrant bowl; she is interested
In the brown and carrot-shaped
Amphoras made of Nile mud; this is how
The wines of Egypt were transported;
She, by chucking and spinning
Has constructed just such a bottle; I cannot help it –
I picture her at her wheel of light and shadow;
It needs to be oblivion wine from such a bottle.
NUDE STUDIES VI: THE HORSE
She is in love with the canoe-faces of horses,
Their violin smile. Riding them
Naked skin to skin
Is to sail close to the symphonic brink of the known world.
It amazes her that entering the pub
Of kisses, basket meals, stout decals, accelerando
Collected Poems Page 35