Collected Poems 1945-1990
Page 27
with their notes. They filtered through
the boughs like sunlight,
looked at me from three feet
off, their eyes blackberry bright,
not seeing me, not detaching me
from the withies, where I was
caged and they free.
They would have perched
on me, had I had nourishment
in my fissures. As it was,
they netted me in their shadows,
brushed me with sound, feathering the arrows
of their own bows, and were gone,
leaving me to reflect on the answer
to a question I had not asked.
‘A repetition in time of the eternal
I AM.’ Say it. Don’t be shy.
Escape from your mortal cage
in thought. Your migrations will never
be over. Between two truths
there is only the mind to fly with.
Navigate by such stars as are not
leaves falling from life’s
deciduous tree, but spray from the fountain
of the imagination, endlessly
replenishing itself out of its own waters.
Confrontation
And there was the serpent
running like water
but more quietly with no desire
to bicker. They see us
with smooth eye; what is man
in a snake’s world? And if
we would come too close,
they strike us as painfully
as the truth.
It is no part
of divine mind to repudiate
its reflections. We must exchange
stare for stare, looking
into that eye as into a dark
crystal, asking if Eden
is where we must continually
seek to charm evil by playing
to it, knowing that it is deaf.
Moorland
It is beautiful and still;
the air rarefied
as the interior of a cathedral
expecting a presence. It is where, also,
the harrier occurs,
materialising from nothing, snow-
soft, but with claws of fire,
quartering the bare earth
for the prey that escapes it;
hovering over the incipient
scream, here a moment, then
not here, like my belief in God.
Unposted
Dear friend unknown,
why send me your poems?
We are brothers, I admit;
but they are no good.
I see why you wrote them,
but why send them? Why not
bury them, as a cat its faeces
You confuse charity and art.
They have not equal claims,
though the absence of either
will smell more or less the same.
I use my imagination:
I see a cramped hand gripping
a bent pen, or, worse perhaps,
it was with your foot you wrote.
You wait in an iron bed
for my reply. My letter
could be the purse of gold
you pay your way with past
the giant. Despair.
I lower my standards
and let truth hit me squarely
between the eyes. ‘These are great
poems,’ I write, and see heaven’s
slums with their rags flying,
cripples brandishing their crutches,
and the one, innocent of scansion,
who knows charity is short
and the poem for ever, suffering
my dark lie with all the blandness
with which the round moon suffers an eclipse.
Asking
Did I see religion,
its hand in the machine’s,
trying to smile as the grip
tightened? Did I hear money
arguing out of the tree’s
branches, shadowing
the world, about the love
at its root? How beautiful
in a world like this
are the feet of the peace
makers upon the mountains
risen out of our own molehills?
A Life
Lived long; much fear, less
courage. Bottom in love’s school
of his class; time’s reasons
too far back to be known.
Good on his knees, yielding,
vertical, to petty temptations.
A mouth thoughts escaped
from unfledged. Where two
were company, he the unwanted
third. A Narcissus tortured
by the whisperers behind
the mirror. Visionary only
in his perception of an horizon
beyond the horizon. Doubtful
of God, too pusillanimous
to deny him. Saving his face
in verse from the humiliations prose
inflicted on him. One of life’s
conscientious objectors, conceding
nothing to the propaganda of death
but a compulsion to volunteer.
Folk Tale
Prayers like gravel
Flung at the sky’s
window, hoping to attract
the loved one’s
attention. But without
visible plaits to let
down for the believer
to climb up,
to what purpose open
that far casement?
I would
have refrained long since
but that peering once
through my locked fingers
I thought that I detected
the movement of a curtain.
Ystrad Fflur
(Strata Florida)
I hardly knew him.
The place was old,
ruins of an ideal in chaste
minds. Rows of graves
signalled their disappointment.
Time, I said. Place, he replied,
not contradicting.
Had we found
what we sought, for him
somewhere, for me when
to listen to a mossed voice
beyond our dimensions?
Where are the twelve gates
I wondered, looking at the low
archway through which we had come.
Had the years left us
only this one? Must masculine thoughts
once more be tonsured?
I am
a musician, the voice said.
I play on the bone keys in an audience’s
absence. The light twitched,
as though at the blinking
of an immense eyelid; the foliage
rippled in shadowy applause.
We regarded one another,
neither wanting to be first
to propose. Is every proposal
a renunciation? Was our return
mutual to where the machine offered
its accelerating alternatives
to the noon-day of the soul?
Approaches
We began by being very close.
Moving nearer I found
he was further off, presence
being replaced by shadow;
the nearer the light, the larger
the shadow. Imagine the torment
of the discovery that it was growing
small. Is there a leak somewhere
in the mind that would comprehend
him? Not even to be able to say,
pointing: Here Godhead was spilled.
I had a belief once that even
a human being left his stain
in places where he had occurred.
Now it is all clinical light
pouring into the interstices
where mystery could li
nger
questioning credentials of the divine
fossil, sterilising our thought
for its launching into its own outer space.
Where?
Where to turn without turning
to stone? From the one side
history’s Medusa stares,
from the other one love
on its cross. While the heart
fills not with light
from the mind, but with the shadow
too much of such light casts.
This One
Sometimes a shadow passed
between him and the light.
Sometimes a light showed itself
in the darkness beyond. Could
it be? The strong angels wrestled
and were not disposed to give
him the verdict. Are there journeys
without destinations? The animals
paused and became gargoyles
beside the way. And this one,
standing apart to confer
with the eternal, was he blamed
for reaction? There is always
laughter out of the speeding
vehicles for the man
who is still, half-way though he be
in a better direction. From receding
horizons he has withdrawn
his mind for greater repose
on an inner perspective,
where love is the bridge between
thought and time. Consumers
of distance at vast cost,
what do they know of the green
twig with which he divines,
where life balances excess
of death, the bottomless
water that is the soul’s glass?
Truly
No, I was not born
to refute Hume, to write
the first poem with no
noun. My gift was
for evasion, taking
cover at the approach
of greatness, as of
ill-fame. I looked truth
in the eye, and was not
abashed at discovering
it squinted. I fasted
at import’s table, so had
an appetite for the banal,
the twelve baskets full left
over after the turning
of the little into so much.
Retrospect
As they became
cleverer, they became worse –
So history publishes
its contempt for the scholars
who can’t spell. One thing
I remember: There was
a man time should have
bowed down to: bones of a bird,
great brain, whose argument broke
on the big fist; while a girl wept
her confetti tears,
bellowing to be deflowered.
Andante
Masters, you who would initiate
me in discourse, apostrophising
the deity: O Thou, to Whom ...
out of date three hundred
years. The atoms translate
into their own terms, burnishing
the dust, converting it
to a presence, a movement of light
on the room’s wall, a smile quickening
and going out as the clouds
canter. Inhabitants of a flower
they fix that gaze on us
which is without focus, but compels
the attention, mesmerising us until
we are adrift on its scent’s timelessness.
The huskiness of an emotion!
Can molecules feel? There is the long sigh
from the shore, the wave clearing
its throat to address us, requiring
no answer than the due
we give these things that share
the world with us, that compose
the world: an ever-renewed
symphony to be listened to
admiringly, even as we perform
it on whatever instruments
the generations put into our hands.
A Country
It is nowhere,
and I am familiar
with it as one is
with a song.
I know its background,
the terraces
of cloud that are the hanging gardens
of the imagination.
No sun
rises there, so there is no sun
to set. It is the mind
suffuses it with a light
that is without
shadows.
Invisible fountains
play, though their skirts
are of silk.
And who lives there,
you ask, who walks
its unmetalled highways.’
It is a people
who pay their taxes
in poetry; who repair broken
names; who wear the past
as a button-hole at their children’s
marriage with what is to be.
Their Canvases Are
full of the timeless faces
of their kind, gazing out
at a distance that is empty
of our inventions and serene
so. The trees are dark
flames, burning in the Florentine
weather in answer to
the need of the blind hand
for form, kindling nothing
but the imagination, for
the earth that produced
these was fertile of
worse things: our shadows,
for instance. Fortunate
people, foreseeing so much
on the horizon, but never ourselves coming.
Aim
A voice out of the land –
animal, vegetable, mineral –
‘The pain, the beauty – Why, why, why?
Tell me the truth, give me
understanding.’
And the rose
wastes its syllables; the rock fixes
its stare; the stoat sips
at the brimmed rabbit.
And one,
leuan Morgan, his mind
in a sling, goes on his way
past the crouched chapel,
its doors’ barrels levelled
on him out of the last
century, neither knowing nor caring
whether he is a marked man.
Reply
Do the wheels praise,
humming to themselves
as they proceed in unnecessary
directions? Do the molecules
bow down? Before what cradle
do the travellers from afar,
strontium and plutonium, hold out
their thin gifts? What
is missing from the choruses
of bolts and rivets, as they prepare
for the working of their expensive
miracle high in the clerestories
of blind space? What anthem have our computers
to insert into the vacuum caused
by the break in transmission
of the song upon Patmos?
Cures
‘We sat under a tree
at the season when elms
put forth their leaves. It was then
Guillemette Benet said to me:
“My poor friend, my poor friend,
the soul is nothing
but blood.”’1
So the deposition
at Foix. Inquisitor,
what would you have the soul
be to escape the rigour
of your laundering? Your Christ
died for you; for whom
would you have these die?
No answer. He has withdrawn
iron-faced into the silence
from which history resurrects
everything but our reasons.
Meanwhile a few leagues
to the west, like a suppuration
of grace, the soiled fountain
plays, where the scientists gather
bacteria. Their claims are refuted
by the virgin smile on the face
of the water. Holy Church
has become wise, recognising
the anaemic soul is no substitute
for the bone’s need.
And the mind,
then, weary of the pilgrimages
to its horizons – is there no spring of thought
adjacent to it, where it can be
dipped, so that emerging but
once in ten thousand times,
freed of its crutches, is sufficient
testimony to the presence in it
of a power other than its own?
1 From Montaillou by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, translated by Barbara Bray
Look Out
At the dance of the dust,
at the recital
of flies, the master of ceremonies
is the scarecrow, brandishing
his baton. Is this
evening-dress? we ask,
admiring his shirt-front
of fresh straw.
‘Pouf’ says the wind,
‘by his lack of expression
he conducts nothing,
not even himself.’
‘Are the crossed sticks
where I must perch?’ the dove
wonders.
And history: ‘I have wasted
all my time
in ascending him, but
there is no view from the top.’
Revision
Heaven affords
unlimited accommodation
to the simple-minded.
Pardon,
hymn-writers, if levity deputises
for an Amen. Too much
has depended on the exigencies
of rhyme. You never
improved on ‘odd’ as the antiphon
to a heavenly father.
Tell
me, is truth’s victory followed
by an armistice?
How many
of man’s prayers assume
an eavesdropping God?
A bishop
called for an analysis
of the bread and wine. I being
no chemist play my recording
of his silence over
and over to myself only.
Fuel
And the machines say, laughing
up what would have been sleeves
in the old days: ‘We are at
your service.’ ‘Take us’, we cry,