Like the navigator natives on Darwin,
a little flap of cloth would recharge
the whole person’s perceptions:
I did this by buttoning and unbuttoning
my shirt as I rode; it was rare
and to be remarked upon
To see an open shirt
on the way to Esher;
I am still the boy riding there
Or as far as Guildford
among the buzzing, the coloured
and tactile images. Once
I stopped at a cinema on the way:
a woman in ample Victorian dress
slipped and fell into a garden pond
In which she sat enraged, her beige skirt
struck shit-colour instantly,
with a shine –
What a vision! even women could get
sexy-wet, especially women; Jesus
offered living water to the women
At her well, but these were cunni-waters
and her own element and familiar.
Come and be well! my skin
Was transparent as water
with that vision of exterior cunt.
She offered her pond,
The woman in the flowing shirts,
and in the Song, the woman lover
is a fountain of living waters.
I could not send these visions away,
not for long anyway,
they were an ultimate for me.
The Sin is not the visions,
but is quenching the visions:
quench not the Spirit (1, Th. 5.19);
I knew something too of
the dry water of the alchemists
it was the vibratory
And streaming atmosphere my mother
could make in bed, and she was wise
with the bouquet of her skin,
Her dreaming breath, and mine.
How that woman of the pond
glittered in her new clothes;
What is that dream
you are having this instant;
how her jet necklaces shine
Like stars that are dark
and bright at once;
out of her belly
Living water, water
that will not be quenched.
DENTIST-CONJURERS
The dentist-conjurers,
initiates into the white robes;
because of all their signs –
The sharp white coats,
the surgical smiles and smells,
the subtle tools that clink
Into sonorous dishes,
the fountain of circular water
you spit into, and that the tooth
Is gone, only a footprint remains,
and the bite gone –
you allow them into your mouth
With their condom fingers.
Time is altered, the teeth
enlarged into mountain ranges;
A rubber touch to the lip
it strolls on the edge
of cruelty, the deep
Black torture-chairs
their cushioned comfort
awaiting pain, that see-saw
And swing on the same touch,
a small sharp pain
into the gum secures
Against a fully-developed pain
in the darkness like a magician’s hat
turned inside-out
That is your mouth in which
wispy shadow-rabbit shapes are
reflected from the instruments
And their rubbery touch,
and then a rending, profoundly
unfelt though it might be
That the anaesthetic breaks
and cancels, atrocious pain,
the brink that is everywhere
But not here, not in this mouth
which is a shadow-play,
a dreaming-place of
Snapping rafters, shattered stone;
It is my pain but feels like another’s hurt,
borrowed calm, and I walk
Away with one lip caught up painless
in a snarling invisible hook
with a ferocious lisp
But strengthened with fresh biting power
in a perfect gummy shell
eating as an oyster eats,
Flap flap the
digestible pap now rules
O.K.?
Where does the pain go?
everywhere but in this room
of bright light
And comfortable deep torture chairs.
BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT
Working in a little tent
the Healers, three of them,
under the cast-iron rafters of the echoing
Exhibition hall;
my daughter Z
went into them
And emerged shining
like Moses off the Mount,
would never tell me
What happened in the
off-white tabernacle
that shone her up so;
I knew it was supposed to be not touch,
but meridians of wildfire, of bio-energy
speeding over the skin like a
Shunting yard at night.
I approached the Chief Clairvoyant:
she took one look at me,
This old lady and said:
‘You’re a Glory-Boy. What do you want
of us, Glory-Boy …’
I was taken aback. Was it really
or entirely that I wanted
Own Glory, or was it truly
To extend spirit into body
and body to spirit. As she berated me
I saw her clairvoyance
By my own:
a great butterfly or moth has fastened
itself to her brow
At the ‘third eye’, and its wings were
beating over her forehead,
as if to fly.
APPRENTICE
My father at the bonfire
in the garden, under the great
sycamore tree near the laburnum
Into which I climbed
to poison myself with
its green fruit, black fruit;
The tree of a knowledge
that peeled scales
from my eyes –
Illumination and sickness
in the tiny studs;
my father demonstrating
The unreeling snake
he had made visible in the wind,
demonstrating to me the demons
And daemons of the smoke in the garden
polished up by the perilous laburnum;
demonstration of the horses
Of fire stampeding in their smoky stables,
the doors of smoke opening and slamming
on the lighted interiors;
The great magician working
and the sorcerer’s apprentice working
clapping the planks together
To lift into the blaze the juicy boughs;
his cacky or khaki shirt opening and closing
in the heat
Spiritual earth of soldier’s shirt; his
invisible beard and robes
tinctured into visibility
By the laburnum’s permission
showing me the world that came
on the wind that was him;
(My mother conducted me
between the surfing of the poplars
telling her tales of them
Simply of themselves on the wind, to and fro
exchanging stories of gentle monsters,
favourable green phantom fountains.)
My father rushed the wind
turning the solid wood to fluid smoke
that travelled over the world
Crying out laburnum! from
the clouds where I can see to this day
his white merlin shadows in the clouds,
And he tend
s his bonfire
that removes still
innumerable further scales from
My apprentice eyes.
XXVI
SHEEN
(2003)
TOM AS SUPERNATURAL PRESENCE
(For Tom) OB 9.9.99
A Guinness erect on the bar
like a straight-backed pint
of black cat, full
Of black lights;
the young black cat, he
is a dream-presence
Like a Guinness; it was as though
the sealed books of his heart
burst open; he shot out
His bolts of warmth
into my lap, the locked volumes
burst their clasp;
It binds me to him,
he does it
more than once,
To ensure our friendship;
then he glides down
and scuds away
Leaving my feelings aglow:
a bonfire of animal heat
right up to my midriff.
I have seen him retexture his coat
to make it fascinating;
it glows subvisibly;
Or he causes each hair
to declare itself separately,
each like a black ray
From an invisible star; as though
it were the nerve-endings
he combed with his tongue,
The plantations of blackness
rippling as with a night-breeze in
the moment before the first
Star becomes visible;
and then a swift glance
from the gold eyes
Like a ship floating painted black, lined
with its great cargo
of pleated gold-leaf;
Or in the shadows
at the stair-foot
this pair of jewels
Floating a few inches above
the carpet, as though darkness
were crouching to inspect
For night-mice
at the house-root.
SPIRITUALISM GARDEN70
Eating on the edge of death,
the brink –
green laburnum.
Black laburnum seed, the green forbidden
the black full of power
sharpening the presences
Of the garden by shifting of perception,
the plants and trees
offering their substances
To make their spirits visible
in soft green seeds in rows
which are death;
They must be dry and black
rattling in the pods
and I carried the black seeds about
In a white box
which would tell me all
from second month onwards
That happened beyond
the portals of the worm
to my siblings who were dead
Evolving into the apple-trees
of Orchard End and its laburnums;
I climbed up the laburnum ladder
For my lessons,
I sat in a tree
eating the black seed of my siblings
Using their eyes
to see the garden
with everything on the trembling
Edge of being seen, foetus, foetess,
colloquy with my garden siblings,
green spiritualism;
The seasons change as I eat
the black seeds, seeing.
SOLID PRAYERS
Sex as solid prayers
full of stars!
a high degree of reality
In the starry turning dome-stage where
she struts her funky stuff,
rain, skin and sweating slightly
To shine, making
a heiroglyph with each
ritual unconscious gesture
Saying
I am here
I am here again
I am here still,
I am here there everywhere;
she turns up her shine
Of the three colours which are gates:
black oral, white smile,
rouge lips; also
I know her from her gait
which struts
marching astride
Her pelvic cask,
she swings on her gates
everlastingly, all smile
Her smile everywhere
the barrel full of womanly ale,
hale and bellowing like a whale
As she blows and puts her tongue out
meaning
I can fellate you with this.
IN THE YEAR OF THE COMET
The roads are long metallic
rays of stars,
the comet is a great
Frozen lake flying in the sky, vibrating
reeds, ice-waterfalls and all,
a lake of frozen pitch flying,
A salt marsh flying;
a thunderclap from the blowhole;
the spray flies up in a cloud
in which a rainbow hovers
like a comet’s trail
we are passing through,
An entrance to the comet
in seven colours, thundering;
that winter
We cut steps in the gigantic ice
and went in and out of the house
by the lavatory window,
Cut steps and paths
in the frozen pitch
and in the saltmarsh:
Our upstairs room
was called the Gynoecium
because it was hers,
And she cleaned its wide-curving windows
so we could look out
while we were in bed
In the comet’s spectrum halls.
HENRHYD WATERFALL
Is like the bow window
of an ancient ship
sunk in its vale;
In this drought
only a little flow
tumbles into the air
Off the high lip of rock
and the captain’s
stateroom windows are
Blind stone. There is still
a hint of rainbow
in the gulf
A rainbow scent
or sensation in the
presence of the cliff
Which at spate cascades
bending its stout rainbow
in mid-air
Like the shining mainspring
in a clock
of seven colours
Its tensions
demonstrated
by its colours;
But today you see
the fall’s foundation
of rock, the dry
Nether underpinning
of the famous rainbow.
The Fall
Has followed us home
and the boulders abound,
and the stone of the hotel
Walls seem underpinning
for rainbows; a fly
from the falls
Hanging suddenly on the clear
outside bedroom window glass
seems a seed of that water’s
Withdrawn force, a seed
of that water’s force;
it lands straddled on the glass
Flexing its rainbow waxes
like a black star
with its legs stretched
A visitor of the black underground water
and its batwings
Like a draughtsman’s
perfect equilibrium
of flying forces, like a
Denotation water
captured and controlled
in an insect virility;
One of the thirsty parched mariners
that glide through the stone fissures
powered by secret rainbows,
The colours on the air
of the speed
of the ship’s still wake
at Henrhyd Falls.
AFTERGLOW LABORATORIES71
I poured the dry sand
from one broken milkbottle
to another –
Peterstone with all his eyes open,
the stone made of eyes,
at Llandudno, in the Great Orme,
In a cliff-cavern floored
with dry sand
like an alchemist
with his dry water
ora et labora: the pouring
was a kind of prayer-work
I poured and repoured
in the little warm cavern or cell,
poured flexible rock,
Dusty rock
with a light in it
once I slipped on the turf
The Orme rolled me
to the brink of the cliff
on the narrow pathway
Down from my sandlab,
one of my laboratories.
I had at home another laboratory
Made of fused sand, the glassware –
how did I gather
this impressive scene
Of crystalline tubes,
flasks, retorts,
fractionating columns
(An emblem of slowing the breath)
chromatography-stripes,
a kind of action-painting,
The look of the glass furniture, the luminosity of
the delicate transparent machinery
mattered a lot:
The transparency meant truth,
the battles of the home revealed,
boiled up in these test-tubes
Like glass magic skeletons
that healed with their fluid dance
their scudding drops
Made into the figures of a glitter-science
whose haunting solvent-smells
of ether, of acetone tuned
Into a glass trance-device
that bypassed
my father’s angers
My mother’s distresses.
She combed her distresses
my apparatus absorbed them,
Sent them out on the air like
dry water, and the great books
absorbed the anger
With their hexagonal sigils,
for I most loved Organic Chemistry,
its sonorous smells,
Its linked potencies.
At Cambridge, none of the laboratories
were mine, all were competitive
None contemplative,
my vocation was alchemist not chemist,
my laboratories were everywhere;
Also I could not follow
that other ritual of fertile mud
called Rugby Football, of chemists
Kicking a leather egg,
much to my father’s disappointment.
XXVII
A SPEAKER FOR THE SILVER GODDESS
(2006)
LUCKBATH
‘We need the mud’
C.G. Jung
Collected Poems Page 38