Cloudless as minds asleep
One careless cemetery buzzes on and on
As if her tombstones were all hives
Overturned by the impatient dead—
We imagined they had stored up
The honey of their immortality
In the soft commotion the black bees make.
Below us, far away, the road to Paris.
You pour some wine upon a tomb.
The bees drink with us, the dead approve.
It is weeks ago now and we are back
In our burnt and dusty Languedoc,
Yet often in the noon-silences
I hear the Vaumort bees, taste the young wine,
Catch a smile hidden in sighs.
In the long grass you found a ring, remember?
A child’s toy ring. Yes, I know that whenever
I want to be perfectly alone
With the memory of you, of that whole day
It’s to Vaumort that I’ll be turning.
1980/1972
SPRING SONG
My lovely left-handed lover
Will be riding down from Geneva
On the afternoon Catalan bound for Barcelona.
I’ll catch her all honeygold at Nîmes
And embrace her on behalf of the city council,
On behalf of Apollinaire, on behalf of Lou.
Ah, Lou, Lou, she is somewhat like you.
My lovely slowcoach, come, I’ll teach you.
The Geneva train is faster than a river.
I am no laborious and insipid drone,
But an Irish poet, and thus perfectible.
Together we will submit
To the mesmerism of objects
Painted or hewn—and without too much cheating.
And all this nonsense about women’s liberation
Will fade into the fifty-fifty of kisses shared.
Let us be enemies of intellectual cosiness.
Every embrace is an empirical exchange of vitamins.
Your last postcard from the dark lake read:
‘Se réaliser? Oui. Mais comment?
Darling, I am buying a clockwork mouse
To show my independence from men.
Signed: A REAL WOMAN.’
Perhaps now do you see why?
1980/1972
HEY, MISTER, THERE’S A BULGE IN YOUR COMPUTER
How loud the perfume of common gin
How morose the pigment that covers a lipid
How soft the equal gauze of quits
How purple the pits of amazing berries
How snuff the cough of the rough shark
Your sake, my sake, his sake, her sake
Everyone is entitled to one sake.
1980/1972
ON THE SUCHNESS OF THE OLD BOY
Such was the sagacious Suchness of the Sage
That all of a sudden in his old age
He was uplifted bodily by
A wonderful Umptiousness.
He became Umptious in the highest degree.
A heraldic uproariousness of mind possessed him
And he said: If so things are, why let them be.
Enough of the doctors of high degree
Whose rhetoric is the purest road-haulage,
Damn the deep freeze, bugger the cold storage
Of minds as cold as a lavatory seat.
I will just squat here in my umptious extravagance
Until all the extremes agree to meet.
It was another way of saying
That he had discovered the heraldic law
Namely, that while someone somewhere
Weeps and tears his hair with his claws
In some other spot someone is laughing:
And both from the same damn cause.
Look not for reason anywhere; but keep
Revelation for those who least care.
Be umptious if you can, it’s everywhere.
Be umptious asleep, awake, dressed or undressed.
The scrumptiousness of Umptiousness can not be overstressed.
Is your gaiety fully enigmatic,
Or are you at odds with some bedwetting ghost?
A mouse gnawing at a coffin is not static.
Why do the many never reach the Most?
To decode even the narrow and finite
Stuff of life is to tumble upon answers.
If only space had edges it would bite.
If time flowed more it would melt into dancers.
The best philosopher of the cryptic mode
Is at best a primrose in the carnal mind.
He only discovers what he set out to find.
There is no sense in all your deadlock.
Consider the bees, they are all born out of wedlock.
Enough of this huge fornication rosary,
Wearisome are the great commonplaces.
They have no aptitude for death, agree,
The million upon million non-Umptious faces.
In the days of all our Yore
Folklore was the only Yolklore
Imprinting was the natural sire
Of earth air water fire.
Now to our vapid visual age
We present our whitewashed cage,
The present burns in iron symmetry
With love built in like a geometry.
If cleanliness is next to Godliness
Umptiousness is a sort of Sumptuousness,
Umption the ultimate fruit
Of holy Gumption.
It is not a question of being conscious
Or washing your little white hands like Pontius.
So spake the Sage, disbursing Suchness
Like a fine sow, a more than Muchness.
To have broad canopy with zip and twang
Is the mark of the sage in his cosmic charabanc.
Pain may be relieved so often
By its own intensification.
How well we know those elephant neuroses
Lead to the girls who always dish out doses.
Live the life of a stowaway in this world,
All places, languages or nations,
Old couples clinging together like tired gloves
Images of disaster in a renewal of patience.
Everywhere revisited is only
Half of the real story, for death is free.
The naked runners braked by the soft sea,
A naked silence going on a spree.
Spread it like butter over he and she.
Whole winters long my ape and I
Winnowed and mused, discussed as best we could,
The fake images, the true-to-what effect
To distil the great elixir of the elect,
Sorting the perfect from the merely good.
And when at last it died, without presumption,
I wept, but gave it the extreme Umption.
This is my choice now, music and tobacco,
As happy on my hilltop I review
The vistas of a world it never knew,
To which my Umption is the only clue.
Always at midnight when I hear the chimes,
I tell myself while pouring out a drink,
Things are less complicated than you think.
Dreams, therefore crimes, honey,
Dreams, therefore crimes.
1973/1972
THE OPHITE
For Saph
First draw the formal circle O
Of the whole oblong mind, as in the snake
Where mouth and anus meet to complete it.
The onus
The harness
Of the heartwhole whose cool apples conspire
Against the serpent like all perverse fruit;
Which identify with sin but remain innocent.
The tree of good and oval
Soft branch of all renewal
Where the sincere milk of the whole word
First set the gnostic grimly dreaming
To furnish an alphabet of
pure dissent,
Dark night of the Whole
Convincing to the finite mole.
Warp and woof like magnets coming together
In silence thumbless as a pendulum.
It could be accident. Believe what you prefer.
No advice worth giving is worth taking.
1973/1973
ALPHABETA
Some withering papers lie,
The bloody spoor of some great
Animal anxiety of a poem he wounded
And followed up in fear, holding his breath.
The blood was everywhere, the yellowing inks
Of old manuscripts reproached.
In stark terror that loaded pen was ready,
With the safety catch turned off,
Only the target lacked,
Crouching somewhere in its own blood.
Some hideous animal without a name.
To be called man, but with such a rotten aim!
1973/1973
A FAREWELL
Colours have no memory, friend,
And can therefore prophesy,
Turn whiter than tea-roses can
With whom to exchange addresses
In far away cities for a good-luck goodbye.
Time slips her moorings soon, and the
Surf-gathering boom of candles can retrace
To the whisper of canvas on the sky
A tiller’s lug, jerked like some big dog,
The muscle-softening farewell embrace.
Survivals and calamities supported
In thoughts now, no more in words,
Out there on the flailing waters of everness,
The flora of tumultuous oceans around me,
And for company archaic folding birds.
I will seek out now
All the arts of silence and of anger
For many such Aprils have come and gone.
The lines of your palm are always changing
As you move from the unknown to the known.
So often the bountiful hemlock beckoned me,
I guess it would undeceive,
Ransacked the secret childhood of the race,
To pinpoint the groups of fearfulness
And pardon the terrors it could not reprieve.
The dangerous years approach, friend.
You will be lucky to come through whole.
This speck of lead, a word, fired into the mind
Will in its queer way change it
While never seeking to argue or console.
One thing about death—it isn’t far to fall,
Its brightness disfigures every silence,
Its reflections splashed about like in spoons
Gives a reassurance to the dusty kiss of stars,
The cold procession of worn-out harvest moons.
1973/1973
MANDRAKE ROOT
Vagina Dentata I love you so,
You are wide as my dreams are long,
Like the kipling hiss of the cobra,
Or the screams of Fay Wray in King Kong.
Vestal of fire lethargic
Whose seminal doctrines extract
The rivets from Caliban’s backbone
To leave him less fiction than fact.
Aphrodite Urania we need you
To lighten the people’s path,
By the marvellous insights of Crippen
Or the Brides in the Bath.
O precious pudendum of seeming,
We come from the Gullible Isles,
Where the cannibal complexes frolic
And the Mona Lisa smiles.
1973/1973
APESONG
Hatch me a gorilla’s egg
And catch me in the offing,
Buckle me to a wedding ring
And make me die of laughing.
Rock me in the XVI psalm
And fill my bowels with honey,
Up in the trees I’ll find a mate,
If not for love, then money.
1973/1973
WANT TO LIVE DON’T YOU?
Somewhere in all this grace and favour green
Autumnal in the public gardens,
Sunk on benches between all ages
Under the braying foliage mimeographed
Like the Lord’s Prayer for a computer
In this fate-forgiven corner of reflection
The genetic twilight of a race evolves:
Dreaming in codes, you only think you think.
Sweet rainwashed cobbles of old towns
A moving spur on sundials recording.
The roll of drums buried in the soil,
Somewhere a pair of fine eyes looking out
Under a magnificent forehead, but so full
Of an immense and complicated mistrust
Of human ways: very reasonable indeed
I should say, very reasonable indeed.
Our glances lie unfermented among statues.
A hunchback pokes a dead swan with a stick
While children buzz and cannot fathom.
Then, tied as if to a buoy far out at sea
An emancipated municipal orchestra makes
Some shallow confidences to the prams.
This very spot where the writings of solitaries
Limp off, take passage for foreign lands,
Falter to an end, there being nothing left
With which to compare them,
Never looking back. Well then, goodbye.
1973/1973
THE GREY PENITENTS
Far away once, in Avignon, the Grey Penitents
Set up their chapter on a drear canal
For podgy minds to bleed with happiness
Upon the waters of a supposed redemption
Under the orders of twelve concise pigs,
Revealed their goodness like smooth-feathered men.
They tried like later you and me
To find one beauty without sophistry.
Alas!
I lit a candle for you once
But it was slow to the last match;
The tiny wick, like loving, wouldn’t catch.
Nature’s lay penitent, I taught thee to fuck;
But winter came and we were out of luck.
‘When the pupil is ready the master always appears,
But sometimes after 9 lifetimes of a thousand years.’
Pale students of the Quite Alone
Whose dreams cut to the very bone
Add or subtract the kisses of the mind,
They will not catch, the engine will not fire,
A vestal love no destiny could bind.
Now on the far side of Europe
We suddenly meet far from that faltering candle,
Not guilty like the penitents of laic misdemeanours,
Wishing never to have been born, all that stuff.
And knowing quite well that even without you
I can easily go on breathing.
But why you come back I cannot fathom.
It reminds me of something I once achieved
To love someone at the speed of thought.
Walking the loops of the companionable Liffey
It came to me to think that over these actual
Waters no shadows lie between there and here,
Thou and I, you and myself, the far and the near.
Nor is the remedial therapy of an embrace the answer.
Dark plaintiff of the courtly love how wisely
Your reason has subdued the heart’s long pace:
And tomorrow we’ll be gone to leave no trace.
Perhaps the primal illness which is loneliness
Can’t be countered by a stupid candle
Burning however rosy in the flesh
Of a writer’s concise and loving wish.
Would you have supposed, with night
Coming on over the thorn-curdled hills
And the snowy dales, that after this long
Discouragem
ent about you I got kind of severed
Even from poetry, and for so many years?
How foolish to make no distinction between the two of you;
The penitents must have documented so much
That ordinary lovers spurn, but to their cost.
A farthing dip is all it costs to formulate
A wish that burns a dogged lifetime through.
1973/1973
DUBLIN
Sweet sorrow, were you always there?
I did not recognise
At first the grave tilt of the head,
Or the meek dark eyes.
To share my deepest joy with you
I sought you—but you seemed to hide
Far in the mindless canyons of your love
Which lay for you, like me, near suicide.
That rainbow over Joyce’s tower
Was another rare deceit,
Raising once more those vaulting hopes
You soon proved counterfeit.
1973/1973
SAGES
The old men said: to wet the soul with wine or urine
Then stretch it like choice kid over a drumhead,
Tapping on the cartridge of words one might
Encapsulate the truth of something latent
In time, in destiny, in natural lore,
A caricature of simple intuitions. Giving back.
The old men said: you might arrive at last
To pierce behind the mask, for evermore
Match passion and clarity—that hopeless task.
Collected Poems 1931-74 Page 27