New and Selected Poems
Page 18
Neither of Life nor of Death:
The tiger within the tiger:
The Tiger of the Earth.
O Tiger!
O Sister of the Viper!
O Beast in Blossom!
Orts
In the M5 Restaurant
Our sad coats assemble at the counter
The tyre face pasty
The neon of plaster flesh
With little inexplicable eyes
Holding a dish with two buns
Symbolic food
Eaten by symbolic faces
Symbolic eating movements
The road drumming in the wall, drumming in the head
The road going nowhere and everywhere
My freedom evidently
Is to feed my life
Into a carburettor
Petroleum has burned away all
But a still-throbbing column
Of carbon-monoxide and lead.
I attempt a firmer embodiment
With illusory coffee
And a gluey quasi-pie.
That Star
That star
Will blow your hand off
That star
Will scramble your brains and your nerves
That star
Will frazzle your skin off
That star
Will turn everybody yellow and stinking
That star
Will scorch everything dead fumed to its blueprint
That star
Will make the earth melt
That star … and so on.
And they surround us. And far into infinity.
These are the armies of the night.
There is no escape.
Not one of them is good, or friendly, or corruptible.
One chance remains: KEEP ON DIGGING THAT HOLE
KEEP ON DIGGING AWAY AT THAT HOLE
Poets
Crowd the horizons, poised, wings
Lifted in elation, vast
Armadas of illusion
Waiting for a puff.
Or they dawn, singing birds – all
Mating calls
Battle bluff
And crazy feathers.
Or disappear
Into the grass-blade atom – one flare
Annihilating the world
To the big-eyed, simple light that fled
When the first word lumped out of the flint.
Grosse Fuge
Rouses in its cave
Under faint peaks of light
Flares abrupt at the sun’s edge, dipping again
This side of the disc
Now coming low out of the glare
Coming under skylines
Under seas, under liquid corn
Snaking among poppies
Soft arrival pressing the roof of ghost
Creaking of old foundations
The ear cracking like a dry twig
Heavy craving weight
Of eyes on your nape
Unadjusted to world
Huge inching through hair, through veins
Tightening stealth of blood
Breath in the tunnel of spine
And the maneater
Opens its mouth and the music
Sinks its claw
Into your skull, a single note
Picks you up by the small of the back, weightless
Vaults into space, dangling your limbs
Devours you leisurely among litter of stars
Digests you into its horrible joy
This is the tiger of heaven
Hoists people out of their clothes
Leaves its dark track across the octaves
Children
new to the blood
Whose hot push has surpassed
The sabretooth
Never doubt their rights of conquest.
Their voices, under the leaf-dazzle
An occupying army
A foreign tongue
Loud in their idleness and power.
Figures in the flaming of hell
A joy beyond good and evil
Breaking their toys.
Soon they’ll sleep where they struck.
They’ll leave behind
A man like a licked skull
A gravestone woman, their playthings.
Prospero and Sycorax
She knows, like Ophelia,
The task has swallowed him.
She knows, like George’s dragon,
Her screams have closed his helmet.
She knows, like Jocasta,
It is over.
He prefers
Blindness.
She knows, like Cordelia,
He is not himself now,
And what speaks through him must be discounted –
Though it will be the end of them both.
She knows, like God,
He has found
Something
Easier to live with –
His death, and her death.
The Beacon
The Stone
Has not yet been cut.
It is too heavy already
For consideration. Its edges
Are so super-real, already,
And at this distance,
They cut real cuts in the unreal
Stuff of just thinking. So I leave it.
Somewhere it is.
Soon it will come.
I shall not carry it. With horrible life
It will transport its face, with sure strength,
To sit over mine, wherever I look,
Instead of hers.
It will even have across its brow
Her name.
Somewhere it is coming to the end
Of its million million years –
Which have worn her out.
It is coming to the beginning
Of her million million million years
Which will wear out it.
Because she will never move now
Till it is worn out.
She will not move now
Till everything is worn out.
TV Off
He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass –
Staring into flames, through the grille of age
Like a late fish, face clothed with fungus,
Keeping its mouth upstream.
Remorseful for what nobody any longer suffers
Nostalgic for what he would not give twopence to see back
Hopeful for what he will not miss when it fails
Who lay a night and a day and a night and a day
Golden-haired, while his friend beside him
Attending a small hole in his brow
Ripened black.
A God
Pain was pulled down over his eyes like a fool’s hat.
They pressed electrodes of pain through the parietals.
He was helpless as a lamb
Which cannot be born
Whose head hangs under its mother’s anus.
Pain was stabbed through his palm, at the crutch of the M,
Made of iron, from earth’s core.
From that pain he hung,
As if he were being weighed.
The cleverness of his fingers availed him
As the bullock’s hooves, in the offal bin,
Avail the severed head
Hanging from its galvanized hook.
Pain was hooked through his foot.
From that pain, too, he hung
As on display.
His patience had meaning only for him
Like the sanguine upside-down grin
Of a hanging half-pig.
There, hanging,
He accepted the pain beneath his ribs
Because he could no more escape it
Than the poulterer’s hanging hare,
Hidden behind eyes growing concave,
Can escape
What has replaced its belly.
He could
not understand what had happened.
Or what he had become.
UNCOLLECTED
Remembering Teheran
How it hung
In the electrical loom
Of the Himalayas – I remember
The spectre of a rose.
All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.
In the Shah’s Evin Motel
The Manageress – a thunderhead Atossa –
Wept on her bed
Or struck awe. Tragic Persian
Quaked her bosom – precarious balloons of water –
But still nothing worked.
Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust.
With a splash of keys
She ripped through the lock, filled my room, sulphurous,
With plumbers –
Twelve-year-olds, kneeling to fathom
A pipeless tap sunk in a blank block wall.
*
I had a funny moment
Beside the dried-up river of boulders. A huddle of families
Were piling mulberries into wide bowls, under limp, dusty trees.
All the big males, in their white shirts,
Drifted out towards me, hands hanging –
I could see the bad connections sparking inside their heads
As I picked my way among thistles
Between dead-drop wells – open man-holes
Parched as snake-dens –
Later, three stoned-looking Mercedes,
Splitting with arms and faces, surfed past me
Warily over a bumpy sea of talc,
The uncials on their number-plates like fragments of scorpions.
*
I imagined all Persia
As a sacred scroll, humbled to powder
By the God-conducting script on it –
The lightning serifs of Zoroaster –
The primal cursive.
*
Goats, in charred rags,
Eyes and skulls
Adapted to sunstroke, woke me
Sunbathing among the moon-clinker.
When one of them slowly straightened into a goat-herd
I knew I was in the wrong century
And wrongly dressed.
All around me stood
The tense, abnormal thistles, desert fanatics;
Politicos, in their zinc-blue combat issue;
Three-dimensional crystal theorems
For an optimum impaling of the given air;
Arsenals of pragmatic ideas –
I retreated to the motel terrace, to loll there
And watch the officers half a mile away, exercising their obsolete horses.
A bleaching sun, cobalt-cored,
Played with the magnetic field of the mountains.
And prehistoric giant ants, outriders, long-shadowed,
Cast in radiation-proof metals,
Galloped through the land, lightly and unhindered,
Stormed my coffee-saucer, drinking the stain –
At sunset
The army flag rested for a few minutes
Then began to flow North.
*
I found a living thread of water
Dangling from a pipe. A snake-tongue flicker.
An incognito whisper.
It must have leaked and smuggled itself, somehow,
From the high Mother of Snows, halfway up the sky.
It wriggled these last inches to ease
A garden of pot-pourri, in a tindery shade of peach-boughs,
And played there, a fuse crackling softly –
As the whole city
Sank in the muffled drumming
Of a subterranean furnace.
And over it
The desert’s bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion
Thickened a pinky-purple thunderlight.
The pollen of the thousands of years of voices
Murmurous, radio-active, rubbing to flash-point –
*
Scintillating through the migraine
The world-authority on Islamic Art
Sipped at a spoonful of yoghurt
And smiling at our smiles described his dancing
Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads
(But only God, he said, can create a language).
Journalists proffered, on platters of silence,
Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –
*
Chastened, I listened. Then for the belly-dancer
(Who would not dance on my table, would not kiss me
Through her veil, spoke to me only
Through the mouth
Of her demon-mask
Warrior drummer)
I composed a bouquet – a tropic, effulgent
Puff of publicity, in the style of Attar,
And saw myself translated by the drummer
Into her liquid
Lashing shadow, those arabesques of God,
That thorny fount.
Bones
Bones is a crazy pony.
Moon-white – star-mad.
All skull and skeleton.
Her hooves pound. The sleeper awakes with a cry.
Who has broken her in?
Who has mounted her and come back
Or kept her?
She lifts under them, the snaking crest of a bullwhip.
Hero by hero they go –
Grimly get astride
And their hair lifts.
She laughs, smelling the battle – their cry comes back.
Who can live her life?
Every effort to hold her or turn her falls off her
Like rotten harness.
Their smashed faces come back, the wallets and the watches.
And this is the stunted foal of the earth –
She that kicks the cot
To flinders and is off.
Do not Pick up the Telephone
That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech
Before the soft words with their spores
The cosmetic breath of the gravestone
Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death
Do not worship the telephone
It drags its worshippers into actual graves
With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices
Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone
Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone
Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone
Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone
Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone
Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone
Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone
The secret police of the telephone
O phone get out of my house
You are a bad god
Go and whisper on some other pillow
Do not lift your snake head in my house
Do not bite any more beautiful people
You plastic crab
Why is your oracle always the same in the end?
What rake-off for you from the cemeteries?
Your silences are as bad
When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane
The stars whisper together in your breathing
World’s emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece