by R. S. Thomas
too many had been burned in that fire
for your contrast to hold.
Still, you are the mountain
the teaching of the carpenter of Nazareth
congealed into. The theologians
have walked round you for centuries
and none of them scaled you. Your letters remain
unanswered, but survive the recipients
of them. And we, pottering among the foot-hills
of their logic, find ourselves staring
across deep crevices at conclusions at which
the living Jesus would not willingly have arrived.
Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man
1
It is calm.
It is as though
we lived in a garden
that had not yet arrived
at the knowledge of
good and evil.
But there is a man in it.
2
There will be
rain falling vertically
from an indifferent
sky. There will stare out
from behind its
bars the face of the man
who is not enjoying it.
3
Nothing higher
than a blackberry
bush. As the sun comes up
fresh, what is the darkness
stretching from horizon
to horizon? It is the shadow
here of the forked man.
4
We have eaten
the blackberries and spat out
the seeds, but they lie
glittering like the eyes of a man.
5
After we have stopped
singing, the garden is disturbed
by echoes; it is
the man whistling, expecting
everything to come to him.
6
We wipe our beaks
on the branches
wasting the dawn’s
jewellery to get rid
of the taste of a man.
7
Nevertheless,
which is not the case
with a man, our
bills give us no trouble.
8
Who said the
number was unlucky?
It was the man, who,
trying to pass us,
had his licence endorsed
thirteen times.
9
In the cool
of the day the garden
seems given over
to blackbirds. Yet
we know also that somewhere
there is a man in hiding.
10
To us there are
eggs and there are
blackbirds. But there is the man,
too, trying without feathers
to incubate a solution.
11
We spread our
wings, reticulating
our air-space. A man stands
under us and worries
at his ability to do the same.
12
When night comes
like a visitor
from outer space
we stop our ears
lest we should hear tell
of the man in the moon.
13
Summer is
at an end. The migrants
depart. When they return
in spring to the garden,
will there be a man among them?
The Other
They did it to me.
I preferred dead, lying
in the mind’s mortuary.
Come out, they shouted;
with a screech of steel
I jumped into the world
smiling my cogged smile,
breaking with iron hand
the hands they extended.
They rose in revolt;
I cropped them like tall
grass; munched on the cud
of nations. A little oil,
I begged in conspiracy
with disaster. Ice
in your veins, the poet
taunted; the life in you
ticking away; your breath
poison. I took him apart
verse by verse, turning
on him my x-ray
eyes to expose the emptiness
of his interiors. In houses
with no hearth he huddles
against me now, mortgaging
his dwindling techniques
for the amenities I offer.
Gradual
I have come to the borders
of the understanding. Instruct
me, God, whether to press
onward or to draw back.
To say I am a child
is a pretence at humility
that is unworthy of me.
Rather am I at one with those
minds, all of whose instruments
are beside the point of
their sharpness. I need a technique
other than that of physics
for registering the ubiquity
of your presence. A myriad prayers
are addressed to you in a thousand
languages and you decode
them all. Liberty for you
is freedom from our too human
senses, yet we die
when they nod. Call your horizons
in. Suffer the domestication
for a moment of the ferocities
you inhabit, a garden for us to refine
our ignorance in under the boughs of love.
Measure for Measure
In every corner
of the dark triangle
sex spins its web; the characters
are ensnared; virtue
is its own undoing, lust posing
as love. Life’s innocent
need of itself is the prime sin.
And no one able to explain why
at the margins of her habit
the fifteenth phase of the flesh
so mercilessly dazzles.
The Cones
But why a thousand? I ask.
It is like breaking off
a flake from the great pyramid
of time and exalting the molecules
into wholes. The pyramid
is the hive to which
generation after generation
comes with nectar for the making
of the honey it shall not eat.
Emperors and their queens? Pollen
blown away from forgotten
flowers. Wars? Scratches upon earth’s
ageless face. He leads us to expect
too much. Following his star,
we will find in the manger
as the millennium dies neither
the child reborn nor the execrable
monster, but only the curled-up
doll, whose spring is the tribute
we bring it, that before we have done
rubbing our eyes will be back
once more in the arms of the maternal
grass in travesty of the Pietà.
Adder
What is this creature discarded
like a toy necklace
among the weeds and flowers,
singing to me silently
of the fire never to be put out
at its thin lips? It is scion
of a mighty ancestor
that spoke the language
of trees to our first
parents and greened its scales
in the forbidden one, timelessly shining
as though autumn were never to be.
Cadenza
Is absence enough?
I asked from my absent place
by love’s fire. What god,
fingers in its ears, leered at me
from above the lintel, face
worn by the lapping
of too muc
h time? Leaves prompted
to prayer, green hands folded
in green evenings. Who
to? I questioned, avoiding
that chipped gaze. Was lightning
the answer, scissoring
between clouds, the divine
cut-out with his veins
on fire? That such brightness
should be attended by such
noise ! I supposed, watching
the starry equations,
his thinking was done
in a great silence; yet after
he goes out, following
himself into oblivion,
the memory of him must smoke
on in this ash, waiting
for the believing people
to blow on it. So some say
were the stars born. So,
say I, are those sparks
forged that are knocked like nails
one by one into the usurping flesh.
Centuries
The fifteenth passes with drums and in armour;
the monk watches it through the mind’s grating.
The sixteenth puts on its cap and bells
to poach vocabulary from a king’s laughter.
The seventeenth wears a collar of lace
at its neck, the flesh running from thought’s candle.
The eighteenth has a high fever and hot blood,
but clears its nostrils with the snuff of wit.
The nineteenth emerges from history’s cave
rubbing its eyes at the glass prospect.
The twentieth is what it looked forward to
beating its wings at windows that are not there.
The Tree
So God is born
from our loss of nerve?
He is the tree that looms up
in our darkness, at whose feet
we must fall to be set again
on its branches on some April day
of the heart.
He needs us
as a conductor his choir
for the performance of an unending
music.
What we may not
do is to have our horizon bare,
is to make our way
on through a desert white with the bones
of our dead faiths. It is why,
some say, if there were no tree,
we would have to set one up
for us to linger under,
its drops falling on us as though to confirm
he has blood like ourselves.
We have set one up, but
of steel and so leafless that
he has taken himself
off out of the reach
of our transmitted prayers.
Nightly
we explore the universe
on our wave-lengths, picking up nothing
but those acoustic ghosts
that could as well be mineral
signalling to mineral
as immortal mind communicating with itself.
Grandparents
With the deterioration of sight
they see more clearly what is missing
from their expressions. With the
dulling of the ear, the silences
before the endearments are
louder than ever. Their hands have their accidents
still, but no hospital will
receive them. With their licences
expired, though they keep to their own
side, there are corners
in waiting. Theirs is a strange
house. Over the door in
invisible letters there is the name:
Home, but it is no place
to return to. On the floor
are the upset smiles, on the
table the cups unwashed they drank
their happiness from. There are themselves
at the windows, faces staring
at an unreached finishing
post. There is the sound
in the silence of the breathing
of their reluctant bodies as
they enter each of them the last lap.
Publicity Inc.
Homo sapiens to the Creator:
Greetings, on the mind’s kiloherz.
For yours of no date,
thanks. This is to advise
that as of now our address
broadens to include the planets
and the intervals between. No
longer the old gravitational
pull. We are as much
out there as down here. As likely
to meet you on the way back
as at our departure.
You refer to the fading away
of our prayers. May we suggest
you try listening on the inter-galactic
channel? Realising the sound
returned to us from a flower’s
speaking-trumpet was an echo
of our own voices, we have switched
our praise, directing it rather
at those mysterious sources
of the imagination you yourself
drink from, metabolising
them instantly in space-time
to become the ichor of your radiation.
History
It appears before us,
wringing its dry hands,
quoting from Nietzsche’s book,
from Schopenhauer.
Sing us, we say,
more sunlit occasions;
the child by the still pool
multiplying reflections.
It remains unconsoled
in its dust-storm of tears,
remembering the Crusades,
the tortures, the purges.
But time passes by;
it commits adultery
with it to father the cause
of its continued weeping.
Passage
I was Shakespeare’s man that time.
walking under a waned moon
to hear the barn owl cry:
Treason. My sword failed me,
withering at its green
tip.
I took Donne’s word,
clothing my thought’s skeleton
in black lace, walking awhile
by the bone’s light;
but the tombstone misled me.
Shelley put forth
his waxwork hand, that came off
in my own and I sank down
with him to see time
as its experiment at the sand’s
table.
I walked Yeats’
street, pausing at the flowering
of the water in a shop
window, foreseeing its drooping
from being too often
smelled.
I stand now, tolling my name
in the poem’s empty church,
summoning to the celebration
at which the transplanted
organs are loth to arrive.
The Bush
I know that bush,
Moses; there are many of them
in Wales in the autumn, braziers
where the imagination
warms itself. I have put off
pride and, knowing the ground
holy, lingered to wonder
how it is that I do not burn
and yet am consumed.
And in this country
of failure, the rain
falling out of a black
cloud in gold pieces there
are none to gather,
I have thought often
of the fountain of my people
that played beautifully here
once in the sun’s light
like a tree undressing.
Contacts
The wheel revolves
to bring round the hour
for this one to return to the darkness
and be born again on a chill
&nbs
p; doorstep, and have the blood washed
from his eyes and his hands
made clean for the re-building
of the city. While for this one
it revolves to make the tanks
stronger the aeroplanes faster.
The scholar bends over
his book and the sage his navel
to enter the labyrinthine
mind and find at the centre the axis
on which it spins. But for the one
who is homeless
there is only the tree with the body
on it, eternally convulsed
by the shock of its contact
with the exposed nerve of love.
Inside
I am my own
geology, strata on strata
of the imagination, tufa
dreams, the limestone mind
honeycombed by the running away
of too much thought. Examine
me, tap with your words’
hammer, awaken memories
of fire. It is so long
since I cooled. Inside me,
stalactite and stalagmite,
ideas have formed and become
rigid. To the crowd
I am all outside.
To the pot-holing few there is a way
in along passages that become
narrower and narrower,
that lead to the chamber
too low to stand up in,
where the breath condenses
to the cold and locationless
cloud we call truth. It
is where I think.
Island
Of all things to remember
this is special: the Buddha
seated cross-legged, disproving
Donne, himself an island
surrounded by the expanses
of space and time. From his navel
the tree grows whose canopy
is knowledge. He counts the leaves
as they fall, that are words
out of the mouth of the unseen
God, washing his thoughts clean
in them. Over the waters
he sees the argosies of the world
approaching, that will never
arrive, that will go down, each
one sunk by the weight of its own cargo.