Collected Poems 1945-1990

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Collected Poems 1945-1990 Page 23

by R. S. Thomas


  Suddenly

  Suddenly after long silence

  he has become voluble.

  He addresses me from a myriad

  directions with the fluency

  of water, the articulateness

  of green leaves; and in the genes,

  too, the components

  of my existence. The rock,

  so long speechless, is the library

  of his poetry. He sings to me

  in the chain-saw, writes

  with the surgeon’s hand

  on the skin’s parchment messages

  of healing. The weather

  is his mind’s turbine

  driving the earth’s bulk round

  and around on its remedial

  journey. I have no need

  to despair; as at

  some second Pentecost

  of a Gentile, I listen to the things

  round me: weeds, stones, instruments,

  the machine itself, all

  speaking to me in the vernacular

  of the purposes of One who is.

  Arrival

  Not conscious

  that you have been seeking

  suddenly

  you come upon it

  the village in the Welsh hills

  dust free

  with no road out

  but the one you came in by.

  A bird chimes

  from a green tree

  the hour that is no hour

  you know. The river dawdles

  to hold a mirror for you

  where you may see yourself

  as you are, a traveller

  with the moon’s halo

  above him, who has arrived

  after long journeying where he

  began, catching this

  one truth by surprise

  that there is everything to look forward to.

  Brother

  It came into being.

  From eternity? In

  time? Was the womb

  prepared for it, or it

  for the womb? It lay in the cradle

  long months, staring its world

  into a shape, decorated

  with faces. It addressed

  objects, preferred its vocabulary

  to their own: grew eloquent

  before a resigned

  audience. It was fed

  speech and vomited

  it and was not reproved.

  It began walking,

  falling, bruising itself

  on the bone’s truth. The fire

  was a tart playmate. It

  was taken in by the pool’s smile.

  Need I go on? It survived

  its disasters; met fact

  with the mind’s guile; forged

  for itself wings, missiles.

  Launched itself on a dark

  night through the nursery

  window into adult orbit

  out of the reach of gravity’s control.

  Remembering David Jones

  Because you had been in the dark wood

  and heard doom’s nightingales sing,

  men listened to you when you told

  them how death is many but life

  one. The shell’s trumpet sounded

  over the fallen, but there was no

  resurrection. You learned your lettering

  from bones, the propped capitals which described

  how once they were human beings.

  Men march because they are alive,

  and their quest is the Grail, garrisoned

  by the old furies so it is blood

  wets their lips. Europe gave you

  your words, but your hand practised

  an earlier language, weaving time’s branches

  together to form the thicket the soldier

  is caught in, who is love’s sacrifice

  to itself, with the virgin’s smile poised

  like a knife over it as over her first born.

  The Moment

  Is the night dark? His interiors

  are darker, more perilous

  to enter. Are there whispers

  abroad? They are the communing

  with himself our destiny

  is to be outside of, listeners

  at our breath’s window. Is there

  an ingredient in him of unlove?

  It is the moment in the mind’s

  garden he resigns himself

  to his own will to conceive the tree

  of manhood we have reared against him.

  Gospel

  And in the midst of the council

  a bittern called from the fen

  outside. A sparrow flew in

  and disappeared through the far doorway.

  ‘If your faith can explain ...’ So

  they were baptised, and the battles began

  for the kingdom of this world. Were

  you sent, sparrow? An eagle

  would have been more appropriate,

  some predator to warn them

  of the ferocity of the religion

  that came their way. The fire was not more voluble

  than the blood that would answer the sword’s

  question.

  Charles by divine right

  king. And not all our engines can drain

  Marston Moor. The bittern

  is silent now. The ploughshares are beaten

  to guns and bombs. Daily we publish

  hurrying with it to and fro on steel

  wings, the good news of the kingdom.

  Minuet

  But not to concentrate

  on disaster, there are the small

  weeds with the caterpillar

  at their base that is life’s proof

  that the beautiful is born

  from the demolition of the material.

  The butterfly has no

  clock. It is always noon

  where it is, the sun overhead,

  the flower feeding on what feeds

  on itself. The wings turn and are sails

  of a slow windmill, not to grind

  but to be the signal for another

  aviator to arrive that the air

  may have dancing, a movement

  of wings in an invisible

  ballroom to a music that,

  unheard by ourselves, is to them

  as though it will never cease.

  Sonata

  Evening. The wind rising.

  The gathering excitement

  of the leaves, and Beethoven

  on the piano, chords reverberating

  in our twin being.

  ‘What is life?’

  pitifully her eyes

  asked. And I who was no seer

  took hold of her loth hand

  and examined it and was lost

  like a pure mathematician

  in its solution: strokes

  cancelling strokes; angles

  bisected; the line of life deviating

  from the line of the head; a way

  that was laid down for her to walk

  which was not my way.

  While the music

  went on and on with chromatic

  insistence, passionately proclaiming

  by the keys’ moonlight in the darkening

  drawing-room how our art is our meaning.

  Carol

  What is Christmas without

  snow? We need it

  as bread of a cold

  climate, ermine to trim

  our sins with, a brief

  sleeve for charity’s

  scarecrow to wear its heart

  on, bold as a robin.

  Requiem

  To the mature itch I lent my hand;

  a sword grew in it, withered

  in the exact blood. When next I looked,

  murder; the sour commons

  attainted me. But the king’s head

  lapping at the emptying troug
h

  of existence, reprieved me. I took aim

  with the long musket, writing in lead

  on their horses. Hysterical women

  my loot, I rendered complete

  service, sowing the blank field again.

  Alleluia! The cannonade of the bells

  rang. I built a cathedral –

  to whom? Decorated it with the stone

  population, the dumb mouths, the eyes blinded

  by distance. Naughtiness of the chisel

  in time’s hand distorted the features

  of those who had looked on that far

  face and lived to bear witness.

  Prayer

  Baudelaire’s grave

  not too far

  from the tree of science.

  Mine, too,

  since I sought and failed

  to steal from it,

  somewhere within sight

  of the tree of poetry

  that is eternity wearing

  the green leaves of time.

  Guernica

  Pablo Picasso

  The day before

  it was calm.

  In the days after

  a new masterpiece

  was born of imagination’s wandering

  of the smashed city.

  What but genius can re-assemble

  the bones’ jigsaw?

  The bull has triumphed

  at last; the tossed

  humans descend up-

  side down, never

  to arrive. The whole is love

  in reverse. The painter

  has been down at the root

  of the scream and surfaced

  again to prepare the affections

  for the atrocity of its flowers.

  Portrait of a Girl in a Yellow Dress

  Henri Matisse

  Windows in art

  are to turn the back

  on. Facing the public

  she challenges it to prefer her

  to the view. The draught

  cannot put out

  her flame: yellow

  dress, yellow

  (if we could come close

  enough) eyes; hands

  that, after the busyness

  of their migrations between cheek

  and dressing-table, lipstick

  and lip, have found in the lap’s

  taffeta a repose

  whose self-consciousness the painter

  was at pains not to conceal.

  Father and Child

  Ben Shahn

  Times change:

  no longer the virgin

  ample-lapped; the child fallen

  in it from an adjacent heaven.

  Heaven is far off, back

  of the bombed town. The infant

  is human, embraced dearly

  like a human mistake.

  The father presses, his face set,

  towards a displaced future.

  The mother has salvaged her mother’s

  portrait and carries it upside down.

  Portrait of Madame Renou

  André Derain

  Could I have loved this?

  To show too little

  is to ask too much.

  A tendency to disdain

  our requirements promises

  she has nothing to give.

  It is not the observer

  she pouts at, but life itself.

  Yet now the disclosure:

  Madame Renou! While the mind

  toys with the title, the

  rest of me has no time

  for the spouse. Art like

  this could have left her tagged surname out.

  The Good Inn

  Frits van den Berghe

  Nothing is here

  but essentials

  the bicycle that conveyed

  him his thirst

  sharpened by unpalatable

  truths and the woman

  reaching far down

  into unmentionable

  depths to draw up

  the female alcohol

  that will not assuage him.

  The Child’s Brain

  Giorgio di Chirico

  The book is as closed

  as the mind contemplating

  it, vocabulary’s

  navel in all that gross flesh.

  While the school reminds,

  windowless at his left

  shoulder, how you open

  either of them at your own risk.

  The Oracle

  Giorgio di Chirico

  So life in the end

  is profane, our worshipping

  done in the cemetery

  of a blackboard. Who

  sits over the bones

  of the problem without

  face but with certifiable

  expression?

  So mathematicians

  should appear in surrealist

  mourning, shaven-headed

  to reveal the skull

  half in darkness, half in light

  in permanent procrastination

  of the eclipse of thought.

  The Red Model

  René Magritte

  Given the boots

  solitary against

  the boards, I construct

  the body, kneed

  and hooded, perforated

  with dark, taken

  away at dawn on

  a barrow to be provender

  of a grave.

  Tall

  and shapeless, too

  (as they deemed)

  big for them, he

  left them behind,

  not for robins

  to build nests in,

  not for the dust to tell

  boneless time; for his out-

  at-toe ghost to walk

  onward for ever against

  an ingrowing thought.

  Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale

  Max Ernst

  Inviting them into a house

  haunted by a clock

  on the wall, whose notes

  are its music. The gate

  out of the picture by which Keats left

  on his way to eternity

  is wide open.

  Fly, children,

  anticipate the nightingale’s

  migration. Postpone

  the knowledge of the insects

  that are required to produce

  its sweetness of tone.

  Remember the babes

  in the wood who were discovered

  with their heads buried

  in leaves that were the colour

  of the feathers of the bird

  that had sung to them,

  pressing sanguinely

  its breast against time.

  On the Threshold of Liberty

  René Magritte

  What it means is:

  you must accede

  to the invention. Flesh,

  trees, dwellings, the grain

  in the wood

  are vulnerable and not

  to be shot at;

  only the sky is

  target.

  Challenged

  the inventor would claim

  all he wants is

  for it to go off.

  So move

  the paintings to one side

  in the humanist’s

  gallery; open a window.

  Let the gun point its muzzle,

  silently barking,

  at the idea that there are limits.

  Captain Cook’s Last Voyage

  Roland Penrose

  Beautiful because

  she is without an arm

  to embrace your reasons.

  He has thrown the globe

  about her and set forth

  on his maiden voyage

  to the flesh that is the iceberg

  on which we are wrecked.

  On eternity’s background

  is the shadow />
  of time’s cage, where nautically

  we are becalmed

  listening to the echoes

  in the nerves’ rigging

  of that far-off storm

  that is spirit blowing itself

  out in the emptiness at the Poles.

  Drawing by a Child

  Diana Brinton Lee

  All of them, Mummy and Daddy

  in their various disguises –

  it is my revenge on them

  for bringing me to be.

  And, oh, yes! The toys

  who play with me, whose justification

  I am. I take my revenge

  on them, too, giving them claws,

  indices of the underworld

  to which they belong. Can you imagine

  how a doll snarls? With

  what relish a kitten converts

  its tail into a serpent?

  And horns, horns for everything

  in my nursery, pointing to the

  cuckold I know my father to be.

  The Message

  A message from God

  delivered by a bird

  at my window, offering friendship.

  Listen. Such language!

  Who said God was without

  speech? Every word an injection

  to make me smile. Meet me,

  it says, tomorrow, here

  at the same time and you will remember

  how wonderful today

  was: no pain, no worry;

  irrelevant the mystery if

  unsolved. I gave you the X-ray

  eye for you to use, not

  to prospect, but to discover

  the unmalignancy of love’s

  growth. You were a patient, too,

  anaesthetised on truth’s table,

  with life operating on you

  with a green scalpel. Meet me, tomorrow,

  I say, and I will sing it all over

  again for you, when you have come to.

  A Poet

  Disgust tempered by an exquisite

  charity, wrapping life’s claws

  in purest linen – this man

  has history to supper,

  eats with a supreme tact

  from the courses offered to him.

  Waiting at table

  are the twin graces, patience

  and truth, with the candles’

  irises in soft clusters

  flowering on thin stalks.

 

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