New and Selected Poems
Page 19
Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses
Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters
And you cannot utter
Lies or truth, only the evil one
Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone
Blackening electrical connections
To where death bleaches its crystals
You swell and you writhe
You open your Buddha gape
You screech at the root of the house
Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone
A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone
A dead body will fell out of the telephone
Do not pick up the telephone
Reckless Head
When it comes down to it
Hair is afraid. Words from within are afraid.
They sheer off, like a garment,
Cool, treacherous, no part of you.
Hands the same, feet, and all blood
Till nothing is left. Nothing stays
But what your gaze can carry.
And maybe you vomit even that, like a too-much poison.
Then it is
That the brave hunger of your skull
Supplants you. It stands where you stood
And shouts, with a voice you can’t hear,
For what you can’t take.
from Prometheus on His Crag
2
Prometheus On His Crag
Relaxes
In the fact that it has happened.
The blue wedge through his breastbone, into the rock,
Unadjusted by vision or prayer – so.
His eyes, brainless police.
His brain, simple as an eye.
Nevertheless, now he exults – like an eagle
In the broadening vastness, the reddening dawn
Of the fact
That cannot be otherwise
And could not have been otherwise,
And never can be otherwise.
And now, for the first time
relaxing
helpless
The Titan feels his strength.
3
Prometheus On His Crag
Pestered by birds roosting and defecating,
The chattering static of the wind-honed summit,
The clusterers to heaven, the sun-darkeners –
Shouted a world’s end shout.
Then the swallow folded its barbs and fell,
The dove’s bubble of fluorescence burst,
Nightingale and cuckoo
Plunged into padded forests where the woodpecker
Eyes bleached insane
Howled laughter into dead holes.
The birds became what birds have ever since been,
Scratching, probing, peering for a lost world –
A world of holy, happy notions shattered
By the shout
That brought Prometheus peace
And woke the vulture.
9
Now I know I never shall
Be let stir.
The man I fashioned and the god I fashioned
Dare not let me stir.
This leakage of cry these face-ripples
Calculated for me – for mountain water
Dammed to powerless stillness.
What secret stays
Stilled under my stillness?
Not even I know.
Only he knows – that bird, that
Filthy-gleeful emissary and
The hieroglyph he makes of my entrails
Is all he tells.
10
Prometheus On His Crag
Began to admire the vulture
It knew what it was doing
It went on doing it
Swallowing not only his liver
But managing also to digest its guilt
And hang itself again just under the sun
Like a heavenly weighing scales
Balancing the gift of life
And the cost of the gift
Without a tremor
As if both were nothing.
14
Prometheus On His Crag
Sees the wind
Whip all things to whip all things
The light whips the water the water whips the light
And men and women are whipped
By invisible tongues
They claw and tear and labour forward
Or cower cornered under the whipping
They whip their animals and their engines
To get them from under the whips
They lift their faces and look all round
For their master and tormentor
When they collapse to curl inwards
They are like cut plants and blind
Already beyond pain or fear
Even the snails are whipped
The swifts too screaming to outstrip the whip
Even as if being were a whipping
Even the earth leaping
Like a great ungainly top
19
Prometheus On His Crag
Shouts and his words
Go off in every direction
Like birds
Like startled birds
They cry the way they fly away
Start up others which follow
For words are the birds of everything –
So soon
Everything is on the wing and gone
So speech starts hopefully to hold
Pieces of the wordy earth together
But pops to space-silence and space-cold
Emptied by words
Scattered and gone.
And the mouth shuts
Savagely on a mouthful
Of space-fright which makes the ears ring.
from FLOWERS AND INSECTS
A Violet at Lough Aughresberg
The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs.
Against the opened furnace of the West –
A branch of apple-blossom.
A bullock of sooted bronze
Cools on an emerald
That is crumbling to granite embers.
Milk and blood are frail
In the shivering wind off the sea.
Only a purple flower – this amulet
(Once Prospero’s) – holds it all, a moment,
In a rinsed globe of light.
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies
Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,
After May snow. After a winter
Worst in human memory, a freeze
Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,
And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly
A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled
With the sweatings of earth
And with the sweatings-out of winter
Feverish under the piled
Maywear of the lawn.
Now two
Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,
She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he
Drunk with her, float in eddies
Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,
Settling to nod her long spring tongue down
Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s
Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.
He settling behind her, among plain glistenings
Of the new grass, edging and twitching
To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing
Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open
Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching
To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –
Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly
Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her
Off any escape. She turns that
To her purpose, and veers down
Onto another Dandelion, attaching
Her weightless yacht to its cr
est.
Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter
Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,
A sealed book, absorbed in itself.
She ignores him
Where he edges to left and to right, flitting
His wings open, titillating her fur
With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,
His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,
Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,
Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –
And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops
On an elastic to settle accurately
Under her tail again as she clamps to
This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,
Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted
To what’s required
Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin
That performs piercings
Out of the still-bare ash,
The whole air just like him, just breathing
Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first
Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth
Opening its petals, the whole sky
Opening a flower
Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.
Where I Sit Writing My Letter
Suddenly hooligan baby starlings
Rain all round me squealing,
Shouting how it’s tremendous and everybody
Has to join in and they’re off this minute!
Probably the weird aniseed corpse-odour
Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,
As it disturbs me. Now they all rise
Flutter-floating, oddly eddying,
Squalling their dry gargles. Then, mad, they
Hurl off, on a new wrench of excitement,
Leaving me out.
I pluck apple-blossom,
Cool, blood-lipped, wet open.
And I’m just quieting thoughts towards my letter
When they all come storming back,
Giddy with hoarse hissings and snarls
And clot the top of an ash sapling –
Sizzling bodies, snaky black necks craning
For a fresh thrill – Where next? Where now? Where? – they’re off
All rushing after it
Leaving me fevered, and addled.
They can’t believe their wings.
Snow-bright clouds boil up.
Tern
for Norman Nicholson
The breaker humps its green glass.
You see the sunrise through it, the wrack dark in it,
And over it – the bird of sickles
Swimming in the wind, with oiled spasm.
That is the tern. A blood-tipped harpoon
Hollow-ground in the roller-dazzle,
Honed in the wind-flash, polished
By his own expertise –
Now finished and in use.
The wings – remote-controlled
By the eyes
In his submarine swift shadow
Feint and tilt in their steel.
Suddenly a triggered magnet
Connects him downward, through a thin shatter,
To a sand-eel. He hoists out, with a twinkling,
Through some other wave-window.
His eye is a gimlet.
Deep in the churned grain of the roller
His brain is a gimlet. He hangs,
A blown tatter, a precarious word
In the mouth of ocean pronouncements.
His meaning has no margin. He shudders
To the tips of his tail-tines.
Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.
The Honey Bee
The Honey Bee
Brilliant as Einstein’s idea
Can’t be taught a thing.
Like the sun, she’s on course forever.
As if nothing else at all existed
Except her flowers.
No mountains, no cows, no beaches, no shops.
Only the rainbow waves of her flowers
A tremor in emptiness
A flying carpet of flowers
– a pattern
Coming and going – very loosely woven –
Out of which she works her solutions.
Furry goblin midgets
(The beekeeper’s thoughts) clamber stickily
Over the sun’s face – gloves of shadow.
But the Honey Bee
Cannot imagine him, in her brilliance,
Though he’s a stowaway on her carpet of colour-waves
And drinks her sums.
Sunstruck Foxglove
As you bend to touch
The gypsy girl
Who waits for you in the hedge
Her loose dress falls open.
Midsummer ditch-sickness!
Flushed, freckled with earth-fever,
Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing,
A lolling armful, and so young! Hot
Among the insane spiders.
You glimpse the reptile under-speckle
Of her sunburned breasts
And your head swims. You close your eyes.
Can the foxes talk? Your head throbs.
Remember the bird’s tolling echo,
The dripping fern-roots, and the butterfly touches
That woke you.
Remember your mother’s
Long, dark dugs.
Her silky body a soft oven
For loaves of pollen.
Eclipse
For half an hour, through a magnifying glass,
I’ve watched the spiders making love undisturbed,
Ignorant of the voyeur, horribly happy.
First in the lower left-hand corner of the window
I saw an average spider stirring. There
In a midden of carcases, the shambles
Of insects dried in their colours,
A trophy den of uniforms, reds, greens,
Yellow-striped and detached wing-frails, last year’s
Leavings, parched a winter, scentless – heads,
Bodices, corsets, leg-shells, a crumble of shards
In a museum of dust and neglect, there
In the crevice, concealed by corpses in their old wrappings,
A spider has come to live. She has spun
An untidy nearly invisible
Floss of strands, a few aimless angles
Camouflaged as the grey dirt of the rain-stains
On the glass. I saw her moving. Then a smaller,
Just as ginger, similar all over,
Only smaller. He had suddenly appeared.
Upside down, she was doing a gentle
Sinister dance. All legs clinging
Except for those leading two, which tapped on the web,
Trembling it, I thought, like a fly, to attract
The immobile, upside-down male, near the frame,
Only an inch from her. He moved away,
Turning ready to flee, I guessed. Maybe
Fearful of her intentions and appetites:
Doubting. But her power, focussing,
Making no error after the millions of years
Perfecting this art, turned him round
At a distance of two inches, and hung him
Upside down, head under, belly towards her.
Motionless, except for a faint
And just-detectable throb of his hair-leg tips.
She came closer, upside down, gently,
And enmeshed his forelegs in hers.
So, I imagined, here is the famous murder.
I got closer to watch. Something
Difficult to understand, difficult
To properly observe was going on.
Her two hands seemed swollen, like tiny crab-claws.