by R. S. Thomas
what? The world passes,
they remain, looking
as they were meant to do
at a spectacle
beyond us. It affects them
in several ways. One stares
as at her fortune.
being told. One’s hands
are together as if
in applause. The monsieur surmounts
them in sartorial calm.
Degas
The Dancing Class
Pretending he keeps
an aviary; looking no higher
than their feet; listening
for their precise fluttering.
And they surround him, flightless
birds in taffeta
plumage, picking up words
gratefully, as though they were crumbs.
Cézanne
The Card Players
And neither of them has said:
Your lead.
An absence of trumps
will arrest movement.
Knees almost touching,
hands almost touching,
they are far away
in time in a world
of equations.
The pipe without
smoke, the empty
bottle, the light
on the wall are the clock
they go by.
Only their minds
lazily as flies
drift
round and round the inane
problem their boredom
has led them to pose.
Degas
Women Ironing
one hand
on cheek the other
on the bottle
mouth open
her neighbour
with hands clasped
not in prayer
her head bent
over her decreasing
function this is art
overcoming permanently
the temptation to answer
a yawn with a yawn
Van Gogh
Portrait of Dr Gachet
Not part of the Health Service;
no one to pass his failures
on to. The eyes like quinine
have the same medicative
power. With one hand
on cheek, the other
on the equivocal
foxglove he listens
to life as it describes
its symptoms, a doctor
becoming patient himself
of art’s diagnosis.
Toulouse-Lautrec
Justine Dieuhl
As we would always wish
to find her waiting for us,
seated, delphinium-eyed, dressed
for the occasion; out of doors
since it is always warm
where she is.
The red kerchief
at the neck, that suggests
blood, is art leading
modesty astray.
The hands,
large enough for encircling
the waist’s stem, are,
as ours should be, in
perfect repose, not accessory
to the plucking of her own flower.
Gauguin
Breton Village in the Snow
This is the village
to which the lost traveller
came, searching for his first spring,
and found, lying asleep
in the young snow, how cold
was its blossom.
The trees
are of iron, but nothing
is forged on them. The tower
is a finger pointing
up, but at whom?
If prayers
are said here, they are
for a hand to roll
back this white quilt
and uncover the bed
where the earth is asleep,
too, but nearer awaking.
Directions
In this desert of language
we find ourselves in,
with the sign-post with the word ‘God’
worn away
and the distance ...?
Pity the simpleton
with his mouth open crying:
How far is it to God?
And the wiseacre says: Where you were, friend.
You know that smile
glossy
as the machine that thinks it has outpaced belief?
I am one of those
who sees from the arms opened
to embrace the future
the shadow of the Cross fall
on the smoothest of surfaces
causing me to stumble.
Covenant
I feel sometimes
we are his penance
for having made us. He
suffers in us and we partake
of his suffering. What
to do, when it has been done
already? Where
to go, when the arrival
is as the departure? Circularity
is a mental condition, the
animals know nothing of it.
Seven times have passed
over him, and he is still here.
When will he return
from his human exile, and will
peace then be restored
to the flesh?
Often
I think that there is no end
to this torment and that the electricity
that convulses us is the fire
in which a god
burns and is not consumed.
Waiting
Yeats said that. Young
I delighted in it:
there was time enough.
Fingers burned, heart
seared, a bad taste
in the mouth, I read him
again, but without trust
any more. What counsel
has the pen’s rhetoric
to impart? Break mirrors, stare
ghosts in the face, try
walking without crutches
at the grave’s edge? Now
in the small hours
of belief the one eloquence
to master is that
of the bowed head, the bent
knee, waiting, as at the end
of a hard winter
for one flower to open
on the mind’s tree of thorns.
Saraband
That was before the Revolution
as it must always be for the heart
to appraise it. I think they met
in the peculiar sultriness
of August... And the voice says: Carry
on; I am interested. But I labour
to find my way. It is true
that I made my choice and the poem
cannot hit back; but the colour of it
is not that which her eyes made,
cold stones in the fierce river
of his breath, while the lark’s clockwork
went on and on.
What a wild country
it is, as hot and dry for one part
of the year, as it is dead and cold
for the other; and the frost comes down
like a great bird, hovering silently
over the homes of an inert people
who have never known either freedom or love.
Correspondence
You ask why I don’t write.
But what is there to say?
The salt current swings in and out
of the bay, as it has done
time out of mind. How does that help?
It leaves illegible writing
on the shore. If you were here,
we would quarrel about it.
People file past this seascape
as ignorantly as through a gallery
of great art. I keep searching for meaning.
The waves are a moving staircase
to climb, but in thought only.<
br />
The fall from the top is as sheer
as ever. Younger I deemed truth
was to come at beyond the horizon.
Older I stay still and am
as far off as before. These nail-parings
bore you? They explain my silence.
I wish there were as simple
an explanation for the silence of God.
Pluperfect
It was because there was nothing to do
that I did it; because silence was golden
I broke it. There was a vacuum
I found myself in, full of echoes
of dead languages. Where to turn
when there are no corners? In curved
space I kept on arriving
at my departures. I left no stones
unraised, but always wings
were tardy to start. In ante-rooms
of the spirit I suffered the anaesthetic
of time and came to with my hurt
unmended. Where are you? I
shouted, growing old in
the interval between here and now.
Fair Day
They come in from the fields
with the dew and the buttercup dust
on their boots. It was not they
nor their ancestors crucified
Christ. They look up at what
the town has done to him,
hanging his body in stone on a stone
cross, as though to commemorate
the bringing of the divine beast
to bay and disabling him.
He is hung up high, but higher
are the cranes and scaffolding
of the future. And they stand by,
men from the past, whose rôle
is to assist in the destruction
of the past, bringing their own beasts
in to offer their blood up
on a shoddier altar.
The town
is malignant. It grows, and what
it feeds on is what these men call
their home. Is there praise
here? There is the noise of those
buying and selling and mortgaging
their conscience, while the stone
eyes look down tearlessly. There
is not even anger in them any more.
Voices
Who to believe?
The linnet sings bell-like,
a tinkling music. It says life
is contained here; is a jewel
in a shell casket, lying
among down. There is another
voice, far out in space,
whose persuasiveness is the distance
from which it speaks. Divided
mind, the message is always
in two parts. Must it be
on a cross it is made one?
Arriving
A maze, he said,
and at the centre
the Minotaur
awaits us.
There are turnings
that are no through road
to the fearful.
By one I came
travelling it
like a gallery
of the imagination,
pausing to look
at the invisible portraits
of brave men.
Their deeds rustled
like dry leaves
under my tread.
The scent of them was
the dust we throw
in the eyes of the beast.
Aleph
What is time? The man stands
in the grass under
the willow by the grey
water corrugated
by wind, and his spirit reminds
him of how it was always
so, in Athens, in Sumer under
the great king. The moment
is history’s navel
and round it the worlds
spin. Was there desire
in the past? It is fulfilled
here. The mind has emerged
from the long cave without
looking back, leading eternity
by the hand, and together they pause
on the adult threshold
recuperating endlessly
in intermissions of the machine.
Seventieth Birthday
Made of tissue and H20,
and activated by cells
firing – Ah, heart, the legend
of your person ! Did I invent
it, and is it in being still?
In the competition with other
women your victory is assured.
It is time, as Yeats said, is
the caterpillar in the cheek’s rose,
the untiring witherer of your petals.
You are drifting away from
me on the whitening current of your hair.
I lean far out from the bone’s bough,
knowing the hand I extend
can save nothing of you but your love.
One Way
There was a frontier
I crossed whose passport
was human speech. Looking back
was to silence, to that
wood of hands fumbling
for the unseen thing. I
named it and it was
here. I held out words
to them and they smelled
them. Space gave, time was
eroded. There was one being
would not reply. God,
I whispered, refining
my technique, signalling
to him on the frequencies
I commanded. But always
amid the air’s garrulousness
there was the one station
that remained closed.
Was
there an alternative
medium? There were some claimed
to be able to call him
down to drink insatiably
at the dark sumps of blood.
Mediterranean
The water is the same;
it is the reflections are different.
Virgil looked in this
mirror. You would not think so.
The lights’ jewellery sticks in the throat
of the fish; open
them, you will find a debased
coinage to pay your taxes.
The cicadas sing
on. Looking for them among
the ilex is like trying to translate
a poem into another language.
Senior
At sixty there are still fables
to outgrow, the possessiveness
of language. There is no book
of life with the pen ready
to delete one’s name. Judgment
days are the trials we attend
here, whose verdict the future
has no interest in. Is there
a sentence without words?
God
is a mode of prayer; cease
speaking and there is only
the silence. Has he his own
media of communication?
What is a galaxy’s meaning?
The stars relay to the waste
places of the earth, as they do
to the towns, but it is
a cold message. There is randomness
at the centre, agitation subsisting
at the heart of what would be
endless peace.
A man’s shadow
falls upon rocks that are
millions of years old, and
thought comes to drink at that dark
pool, but goes away thirsty.
The New Mariner
In the silence
that is his chosen medium
of communication and telling
others about it
in words. Is there no way
not to be the sport
of reason? For me now
there is only
the God-space
into which I send out
my probes. I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. And astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with messages
I cannot decipher, garrulous
about them, worrying the ear
of the passer-by, hot on his way
to the marriage of plain fact with plain fact.
Bent
Heads bowed
over the entrails,
over the manuscript, the
block, over the rows
of swedes.
Do they never look up?
Why should one think
that to be on one’s knees
is to pray?
The aim is to walk tall
in the sun.
Did the weight of the jaw
bend their backs,
keeping their vision
below the horizon?
Two million years
in straightening them
out, and they are still bent
over the charts, the instruments,
the drawing-board,
the mathematical navel
that is the wink of God.
Flowers
But behind the flower
is that other flower
which is ageless, the idea
of the flower, the one
we smell when we imagine
it, that as often
as it is picked blossoms
again, that has the perfection
of all flowers, the purity
without the fragility.
Was it
a part of the plan
for humanity to have
flowers about it? They are many
and beautiful, with faces
that are a reminder of those
of our own children, though they come painlessly
from the bulb’s womb. We trouble
them as we go by, so they hang
their heads at our unreal
progress.
If flowers had minds,
would they not think they were the colour
eternity is, a window that gives
on a still view the hurrying