by R. S. Thomas
for a farthing? What recipe
did he bequeath us for the solution
of our problems other than the statement
of his condition? The territory
has expanded since then. We
see now that the journey is
without end, and there is no joy
in the knowledge. Going on, going
back, standing aside – the alternatives
are appalling, as is the imagining
of the lost traveller, what he would
say to us, if he were here
now, and how discredited we would find it.
Resolution
The new year brings the old resolve
to be brave, to be patient,
to suffer the betrayal of birth
without flinching, without bitter
words. The way in was hard;
the way out could be made
easy, but one must not take
it; must await decay perhaps
of the mind, certainly of the mind’s
image of itself that it has
projected. The bone aches, the blood
limps like a cripple about the ruins
of one’s body. Yet what are these
but the infirmities that we share
with the creatures? It is the memories
that one has, the impenitent bungler
of love, refusing for too long
to say ‘yes’ to that earlier gesture
of love that had brought one
forth; it is these, as they grow
clearer with the telescoping
of the years, that constitute
for the beholder the true human pain.
In Memory
I dislike the convention
but I place this stone here
in memory of those afternoons
when they slept, when happiness descended
an invisible staircase
of air, and the surf of their snoring
parted to reveal the shore
I must make for. A child
has scarcely the right
to forgive its parents. They were not bad,
wrong only, proud as
their neighbours of the necessity
of being so. Even the gaps
in their taste were windows on
to a wider world. The ornaments smile
from the past. There is no hatred
here, merely a bitter affection
for the thoroughness of their scrubbing
of a boy’s body against
the contagion of the interior mind.
Two
So you have to think
of the bone hearth where love
was kindled, of the size
of the shadows so small a flame
threw on the world’s
walls, with the heavens
over them, lighting their vaster fires
to no end. He took her hand
sometimes and felt the will to be
of the poetry he could not
write. She measured him
with her moist eye for the coat
always too big. And time,
the faceless collector
of taxes, beat on their thin
door, and they opened
to him, looking beyond
him, beyond the sediment
of his myriad demands to the
bright place, where their undaunted
spirits were already walking.
The Valley Dweller
He heard that there were other places
but he never saw them. No travellers
came back to him with gold on their boots,
with sand even. What was his life
worth? Was there a tree he did not eat
of, because he was not tempted
to? And must we praise him for it?
I have visited his valley:
beautiful enough, the trees’ braziers
alight, the clouds tall, the river,
coming from somewhere far off, hurrying
where? Is wisdom refraining
from thinking about it? And is there
the one question we must not put?
He looked in this mirror, saw that
for all its wateriness his image
was not erased; listened while
life lasted to what it seemed
to be saying to him between
two sides of a valley, which
was not much, but sufficient for him.
Eheu ! Fugaces
One year for Llew the spear
was in the making, for us
how many the viruses
that will finish us off?
Meanwhile
with our ear to history’s
curved shell we listen
to mixed sounds. No recipe
there. The facts are neutral
and to be endured. Lorca
was innocent and died
young. Francis the emperor
of the Austrians, first
gentleman of Europe, bloodless
and out of touch, lived
on, setting his hand
to the barbed treaties.
Between
one story and another
what difference but in the telling
of it? And this life
that we lead, will it sound
well on the future’s
cassette? I see the wise man
with his mouth open shouting
inaudibly on this side of the abyss.
The Listener in the Corner
Last night the talk
was of the relationship of the self
to God, tonight of God
to the self. The centuries
yawn. Alone in the corner
one sits whose silence persuades
of the pointlessness
of the discourse. He drinks
at another fountain that builds
itself equally from the dust of ruffians
and saints. Outside the wind
howls; the stars, that once
were the illuminated city
of the imagination, to him are fires
extinguished before the eyes’ lenses
formed. The universe
is a large place with more of
darkness than light. But slowly
a web is spun there as minds like
his swing themselves to and fro.
Almost
Was here and was one person
and was not; knew hunger
and its excess and was too full
for words; was memory’s
victim. Had he a hand
in himself? He had two
that were not his: with one
he would build, with the other
he would knock down. The earth
catered for him and he drank
blood. What was the mirror
he looked in? Over his shoulder
he saw fear, on the horizon
its likeness. A woman paused
for him on her way
nowhere and together they
made in the great darkness the
small fire that is life’s decoy.
Incense
The disingenuousness
of the dawn, showing everything
it possesses even to the kid
gloves waiting on the table
of the board meeting for the directors
to put on before beginning
their gang warfare – the dawn with
its one cloud the colour of the carnation
in the chairman’s buttonhole, and smells,
myriads of them, spiralling
upward from the sacrifice of
integrity to the clogged nostril of God.
Nuclear
It is not that he can’t speak;
who created languages
but God? Nor that he won’t
;
to say that is to imply
malice. It is just that
he doesn’t, or does so at times
when we are not listening, in
ways we have yet to recognise
as speech. We call him the dumb
God with an effrontery beyond
pardon. Whose silence so eloquent
as his? What word so explosive
as that one Palestinian
word with the endlessness of its fall-out?
Praise
I praise you because
you are artist and scientist
in one. When I am somewhat
fearful of your power,
your ability to work miracles
with a set-square, I hear
you murmuring to yourself
in a notation Beethoven
dreamed of but never achieved.
You run off your scales of
rain water and sea water, play
the chords of the morning
and evening light, sculpture
with shadow, join together leaf
by leaf, when spring
comes, the stanzas of
an immense poem. You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.
Barn Owl
1
Mostly it is a pale
face hovering in the afterdraught
of the spirit, making both ends meet
on a scream. It is the breath
of the churchyard, the forming
of white frost in a believer,
when he would pray; it is soft
feathers camouflaging a machine.
It repeats itself year
after year in its offspring
the staring pupils it teaches
its music to, that is the voice
of God in the darkness cursing himself
fiercely for his lack of love.
2
and there the owl happens
like white frost as
cruel and as silent
and the time on its
blank face is not
now so the dead
have nothing to go
by and are fast
or slow but never punctual
as the alarm is
over their bleached bones
of its night-strangled cry.
Tears
The man weeps
in her lap and the woman
looks at him through tears
of anger, dropping her words
like coins in the cap
of a beggar. If he had
my learning, he would hear
Nietzsche whispering. If I
had his strength – between
such absences they
get away with it, the
women, and are not happy.
They
The new explorers don’t go
anywhere and what they discover
we can’t see. But they change our lives.
They interpret absence
as presence, measuring it by the movement
of its neighbours. Their world is
an immense place; deep down is as distant
as far out, but is arrived at
in no time. These are the new
linguists, exchanging across closed
borders the currency of their symbols.
Have I been too long on my knees
worrying over the obscurity
of a message? These have their way, too,
other than prayer of breaking that abstruse code.
Phew!
Not caring about it
but keeping on and the going
not good, getting ever further
away, and the perspectives
enormous. Is there a knowledge
not to be known? There is the tree of man
to be climbed; wait for me,
says the body, waving to us
from halfway up. There is a fork
that we come to over
and over, with a choice
to be made that is not
ours, and the worm gnaws
at the root. We lean far out
over ourselves and see the depths
we could fall to. Help me,
the heart cries, but the mind
jeers at it, knowing that nothing
is holy and is where
it comes from and is the distance
that has to be kept open
between its grasp and its reach.
The Way of It
With her fingers she turns paint
into flowers, with her body
flowers into a remembrance
of herself. She is at work
always, mending the garment
of our marriage, foraging
like a bird for something
for us to eat. If there are thorns
in my life, it is she who
will press her breast to them and sing.
Her words, when she would scold,
are too sharp. She is busy
after for hours rubbing smiles
into the wounds. I saw her,
when young, and spread the panoply
of my feathers instinctively
to engage her. She was not deceived,
but accepted me as a girl
will under a thin moon
in love’s absence as someone
she could build a home with
for her imagined child.
The Gap
God woke, but the nightmare
did not recede. Word by word
the tower of speech grew.
He looked at it from the air
he reclined on. One word more and
it would be on a level
with him; vocabulary
would have triumphed. He
measured the thin gap
with his mind. No, no, no,
wider than that! But the nearness
persisted. How to live with
the fact, that was the feat
now. How to take his rest
on the edge of a chasm a
word could bridge.
He leaned
over and looked in the dictionary
they used. There was the blank still
by his name of the same
order as the territory
between them, the verbal hunger
for the thing in itself. And the darkness
that is a god’s blood swelled
in him, and he let it
to make the sign in the space
on the page, that is in all languages
and none; that is the grammarian’s
torment and the mystery
at the cell’s core, and the equation
that will not come out, and is
the narrowness that we stare
over into the eternal
silence that is the repose of God.
Present
I engage with philosophy
in the morning, with the garden
in the afternoon. Evenings I
fish or coming home empty-handed
put on the music of
César Franck. It is enough,
this. I would be the mirror
of a mirror, effortlessly repeating
my reflections. But there is that
one who will not leave me
alone, writing to me
of her fear; and the news from the city
is not good. I am at the switchboard
of the exchanges of the people
of all time, receiving their messages
whether I will or no. Do you
love me? the voices cry.
And the
re is no answer; there are
only the treaties and take-overs,
and the vision of clasped
hands over the unquiet blood.
The Porch
Do you want to know his name?
It is forgotten. Would you learn
what he was like? He was like
anyone else, a man with ears
and eyes. Be it sufficient
that in a church porch on an evening
in winter, the moon rising, the frost
sharp, he was driven
to his knees and for no reason
he knew. The cold came at him;
his breath was carved angularly
as the tombstones; an owl screamed.
He had no power to pray.
His back turned on the interior
he looked out on a universe
that was without knowledge
of him and kept his place
there for an hour on that lean
threshold, neither outside nor in.
Fishing
Sometimes I go out with the small men
with dark faces and let my line
down quietly into the water, meditating
as they do for hours on end
on the nature and destiny of fish,
of how they are many and other and good
to eat, willing them by a sort of personal
magic to attach themselves to my hook.
The water is deep. Sometimes from far
down invisible messages arrive.
Often it seems it is for more than fish
that we seek; we wait for the
withheld answer to an insoluble
problem. Life is short. The sea starts
where the land ends; its surface
is all flowers, but within are the
grim inmates. The line trembles; mostly,
when we would reel in the catch, there
is nothing to see. The hook gleams, the
smooth face creases in an obscene
grin. But we fish on, and gradually
they accumulate, the bodies, in the torn
light that is about us and the air
echoes to their inaudible screaming.
Groping
Moving away is only to the boundaries
of the self. Better to stay here,
I said, leaving the horizons
clear. The best journey to make
is inward. It is the interior
that calls. Eliot heard it.
Wordsworth turned from the great hills
of the north to the precipice