We gaped at the car-park of ‘The Stag’s Head’ where a bonfire of beer-crates and holly-boughs whistled above the tar. And the chef stood there, a king in his new-risen hat, sealing his brisk largesse with ‘any mustard?’
IV
I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole
shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.
V
So much for the elves’ wergild, the true governance of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern.
Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings – I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.
XXV
Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg.
The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust –
not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the ‘quick forge’, another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.
Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg.
XXVII
‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funereal gleemen: papal legate and rural dean; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries; a shuffle of house-carls.
He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs.
After that shadowy, thrashing midsummer hail-storm, Earth lay for a while, the ghost-bride of livid Thor, butcher of strawberries, and the shire-tree dripped red in the arena of its uprooting.
XXVIII
Processes of generation; deeds of settlement. The urge to marry well; wit to invest in the properties of healing-springs. Our children and our children’s children, o my masters.
Tracks of ancient occupation. Frail ironworks rusting in the thorn-thicket. Hearthstones; charred lullabies. A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost sound.
Tumult recedes as though into the long rain. Groves of legendary holly; silverdark the ridged gleam.
Geoffrey Hill (1971)
from Shooting Script
14
Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats; ashes spilled on white formica.
The death-col viewed through power-glasses; the cube of ice melting on stainless steel.
Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.
Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the web of cracks filtering across the plaster.
To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.
To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.
To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.
To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.
To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your old neighborhood.
Adrienne Rich (1971)
The Bookcase
It was fetched from the dead woman’s apartment. It stood empty for a few days, empty, until I filled it with books, all the bound ones, the heavy ones. In doing so, I had let in the nether world. Something came from underneath, rose slowly and inexorably like a massive column of mercury. One was not allowed to turn one’s head away.
The dark volumes, closed faces. They are like Algerians who stood at the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint and waited for the Volkspolizei to examine their passports. My own passport has long since lain among the glass cages. And the haze which was in Berlin in those days is also inside the bookcase. In there lies an old despair that tastes of Passchendaele and the Versailles Peace, that tastes even older. The dark heavy tomes – I come back to them – they are in reality a kind of passport and they are so thick because they have collected so many stamps through the centuries. Evidently you cannot travel with enough heavy baggage, now when you set off, when you at last …
All the old historians are there, they rise up there and look into our family. Nothing is heard but the lips are moving all the time behind the glass (‘Passchendaele’ …). It makes you think of an aged civil service department (a pure ghost-story follows), a building where portraits of long since dead men hang behind glass and one morning there was vapour on the inside of the glass. They had begun to breathe during the night.
The bookcase is still more powerful. The glances straight across the border! A gleaming membrane, the gleaming membrane on a dark river which the room must see itself in. And one is not allowed to turn one’s head away.
Tomas Tranströmer (1970), translated from the Swedish by Robert Fulton
For John Clare
Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything – bush and tree – to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling – so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future – the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.
There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope – letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier – if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside – costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.
It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind – and yet it’s keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it’s their time too – nothing says they aren’t to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to – dumb bird. But the others – and they in some way must know too – it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun an
d west of the moon. So their comment is: ‘No comment.’ Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.
John Ashbery (1969)
Milk
Milk used to come in tall glass, heavy and uncrystalline as frozen melted snow. It rose direct and thick as horse-chestnut tree trunks that do not spread out upon the ground even a little: a shaft of white drink narrowing at the cream and rounded off in a thick-lipped grin. Empty and unrinsed, a diluted milk ghost entrapped and dulled light and vision.
Then things got a little worse: squared, high-shouldered and rounded off in the wrong places, a milk replica of a handmade Danish wooden milk bat. But that was only the beginning. Things got worse than that.
Milk came in waxed paper that swelled and spilled and oozed flat pieces of milk. It had a little lid that didn’t close properly or resisted when pulled so that when it did give way milk jumped out.
Things are getting better now. Milk is bigger – half-a-gallon, at least – in thin milky plastic with a handle, a jug founded on an oblong. Pick it up and the milk moves, rising enthusiastically in the neck as it shifts its center of weight. Heavy as a breast, but lighter, shaping itself without much changing shape: like bringing home the milk in a bandana, a neckerchief or a scarf, strong as canvas water wings whose strength was only felt dragged under water.
On the highway this morning at the go-round, about where you leave New Hampshire, there had been an accident. Milk was sloshed on the gray-blue-black so much like a sheet of early winter ice you drove over it slowly, no matter what the temperature of the weather that eddied in through the shatterproof glass gills. There were milk-skins all around, the way dessert plates look after everyone has left the table in the Concord grape season. Only bigger, unpigmented though pretty opaque, not squashed but no less empty.
Trembling, milk is coming into its own.
James Schuyler (1969)
from it
TEXT symmetries
1
On the first day they invented sand. And the sand settled into itself, just as they thought it would. After the sand had settled, they tried it out to see if it could be walked on. It could. When they walked they sank in a little, but not enough to worry about. And they saw that they left marks in the sand. Every step they took left marks in the sand. They called them footprints. Now it was easier to see where they had walked. That was good. And they hadn’t invented wind and rain, so the footprints stayed where they were. That way others could follow them. If any others should want to. And that would be good. So on the very first day they made a lot of footprints in the sand. The whole first day they walked around and made footprints in the sand. When they really had made a lot of footprints in the sand, they sat down to rest and to enjoy the results of their efforts. They looked over the endless expanse and described it to each other. And when they were through describing it to each other and had no more to say to each other, either about the sand or about the many footprints they had made in the endless expanse, they saw that something was missing. And one of them said: I go in and out of this desert whenever I want
2
On the second day they invented light. And the light spread by itself, as they had thought it would. When the light was through spreading and there was light everywhere, they saw that they could see the sand. And they immediately began to describe what they saw. Yellow and brown, they said. And green and blue and red, they said. And black and white, they said. And gray, they said. And they said it a lot of times. Finally they really felt that they were all seeing the same thing. And that was good. A little later they saw that they could also see each other. We can see each other, they said. Just like that. And because they had said it just like that, they felt that they were all seeing the same thing. And that was good. In the middle of the day, when the light was very strong, they realized the light was very strong, and they closed their eyes and sat down in the sand to rest and to keep from getting lost. They had never imagined that the light would be so strong. It’s taken over, they said. And while they sat there in the sand with their eyes closed, they really did suffer in the heat of all the light they had invented. They hadn’t invented wind and rain, remember. So there was no coolness at all. Let’s look away from it all for a moment, one of them said. So they did. And they really felt that they were all seeing the same thing. I can visualize the light, they said. That was how they suddenly understood that they had loved each other all along.
3
On the third day they invented water. If they hadn’t, the water might have appeared by itself. It looks like it appeared by itself, they said. And they tried it out, to see if it could be walked on. It couldn’t. They kept falling through. And when they went back to the sand their feet were wet, and the sand stuck to them. So they sat down and brushed the sand from their feet. At first it was hard because the sand was wet. Little by little it got easier because the sand dried. So they talked together about the sand and the water and their effects on each other. And they realized that they had felt the sand back on the first day. It had vanished between their fingers. So they felt the water. It vanished between their fingers. Finally they felt the light. It was as if our fingers were vanishing, they said. And they felt that now they had proof of their love.
Inger Christensen (1969), translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied
A Case
They call me that we have a case at the hospital. It is a fine night, not late, only a little after eleven. When I arrive, they tell me, ‘Mr H— is going to operate. The patient is in the first bed on the left in the men’s ward.’ I go in.
It is dark but some light comes from a wall fixture above the bed. He is a man in early life. I begin to ask the usual questions. I explain that I will give the anaesthetic for the operation. He says, ‘My name is Pisgah.’ I nod and go on with my questions and examination. He appears tired and in some distress. The exact nature of his condition is still in doubt.
It is true, when he tells me his name, I have a momentary surprise, which I suppress. The name is that of the mountain mentioned in the Bible from which Moses is said to have viewed the Promised Land. As a child, the name had intrigued me. It also occurs in a hymn, as if it were a man’s name: Pisgah’s Mount. I had often thought, singing the verse: who was Pisgah? I had used the name later, rather at random, for a person who existed in a story I was writing.
It was a story upon which I had exerted myself and then, in one sense, abandoned. Pisgah, in fact, was the person in that story with whom I was most concerned. I had written two extended versions, and others more fragmentary, without being able to bring them to any satisfaction.
That I had not finished those pieces did not mean that I had abandoned the work. To abandon a piece of writing is one thing. To abandon a work, is another. A particular piece of writing is a means, for a writer, which may not always finally serve the work. Thus, I write this, which also serves, for the moment.
I give the anaesthetic while my friend Mr H— does the surgery. The details of the case are of no consequence. It goes well. Towards the end, when my attention is not too pressed with technical details, I have the chance to look more closely at Pisgah’s face.
It is the face of a man asleep. As he sleeps, he is remote, both from himself and from us. Yet he sleeps by my will. I check his pulse, his blood pressure, his colour, his muscle tone, and gently assist each breath.
In the story I had often had the experience that Pisgah was difficult to lay hold upon. His character seemed to change. Even the details of what he did or said. I had wanted to discover who exactly he was. So that I could, in some way, come to terms with him, to finish the story. Now, suddenly, I felt him alive against my hand. And that life dependent upon my attention. If my attention should fail, I might lose him for ever.
I speak occasionally with Mr H—. Sometimes about the details of what he is doing. Sometimes about other things entirely. Neither of us speaks of the man with whom, in our seve
ral ways, we are involved.
Later, before leaving the hospital, I make a last routine visit to Pisgah’s bed. He is now partly awake and responds to a touch on the face or a simple question. I look again into that face, somewhat firmer now, and occasionally tightened by the first twinges of pain from the incision.
‘Who are you?’ I ask. He smiles faintly, out of his half sleep, as if amused that after all this time I should not know.
Gael Turnbull (1968)
An Old-fashioned Traveller on the Trade Routes
I was sitting upstairs in a bus, cursing the waste of time, and pouring my life away on one of those insane journeys across London – while gradually the wavering motion of this precarious glass salon, that flung us about softly like trusses of wheat or Judo Lords, began its medicinal work inside the magnetic landscape of London.
The bus, with its transparent decks of people, trembled. And was as uniquely ceremonious in propelling itself as an eminent Jellyfish with an iron will, by expulsions, valves, hisses, steams, and emotional respirations. A militant, elementary, caparisoned Jellyfish, of the feminine sex, systematically eating and drinking the sea.
I began to feel as battered as though I had been making love all night! My limbs distilled the same interesting wide-awake weariness.
We went forward at a swimmer’s pace, gazing through the walls that rocked the weather about like a cloudy drink from a chemist’s shop – with the depth and sting of the Baltic. The air-shocks, the sulphur dioxides, the gelatin ignitions! We were all of us parcelled up in mud-coloured clothes, dreaming, while the rich perishable ensemble – as stuffy and exclusive as a bag of fish and chips, or as an Eskimo’s bed in a glass drift – cautiously advanced as though on an exercise from a naval college.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 17