flanked at either end
by rampant rockets
torpedoing moonwards. Again
on either side,
an artificial vine
twines down: it is tied
to rails in the aisle
and, along it, flower –
are they nasturtiums? They are
pink like the bathing dresses
of the cut-out belles
it passes in descending,
their petals are pleated
like the green
of the fringed curtain that borders the windshield:
they are lilies
of the field of Mexico,
plastic godsend,
last flourish
of that first Fiat from sister goddesses
and (yes)
the end…
Weeper in Jalisco
A circle of saints, all
hacked, mauled, bound,
bleed in a wooden frieze
under the gloom of the central
dome of gold. They
are in paradise now
and we are not –
baroque feet gone
funnelling up, a blood-
bought, early resurrection
leaving us this
tableau of wounds, the crack
in the universe sealed
behind their flying backs.
We are here, and a woman
sprawls and wails to them
there, the gold screen
glistening, hemming her
under, till her keening
fills the stone ear
of the whole, hollow sanctum
and she is the voice
those wounds cry through
unappeasably bleeding where
her prone back shoulders
the price and weight
of forfeited paradise.
Small Action Poem
for Robert and Bobbie Creeley
To arrive
unexpectedly
from nowhere:
then:
having done
what it was
one came for,
to depart.
The door
is open now
that before
was neither
open
nor was it there.
It is like
Chopin
shaking
music from the fingers,
making that
in which
all is either
technique
heightened to sorcery
or nothing but notes.
To arrive
unexpectedly
at somewhere
and the final
chord, the final
word.
The Way of a World (1969)
Prometheus
Summer thunder darkens, and its climbing
Cumuli, disowning our scale in the zenith,
Electrify this music: the evening is falling apart.
Castles-in-air; on earth: green, livid fire.
The radio simmers with static to the strains
Of this mock last-day of nature and of art.
We have lived through apocalypse too long:
Scriabin’s dinosaurs! Trombones for the transformation
That arrived by train at the Finland Station,
To bury its hatchet after thirty years in the brain
Of Trotsky. Alexander Nikolayevitch, the events
Were less merciful than your mob of instruments.
Too many drowning voices cram this waveband.
I set Lenin’s face by yours –
Yours, the fanatic ego of eccentricity against
The systematic son of a schools inspector
Tyutchev on desk – for the strong man reads
Poets as the antisemite pleads: ‘A Jew was my friend.’
Cymballed firesweeps. Prometheus came down
In more than orchestral flame and Kerensky fled
Before it. The babel of continents gnaws now
And tears at the silk of those harmonies that seemed
So dangerous once. You dreamed an end
Where the rose of the world would go out like a close in music.
Population drags the partitions down
And we are a single town of warring suburbs:
I cannot hear such music for its consequence:
Each sense was to have been reborn
Out of a storm of perfumes and light
To a white world, an in-the-beginning.
In the beginning, the strong man reigns:
Trotsky, was it not then you brought yourself
To judgement and to execution, when you forgot
Where terror rules, justice turns arbitrary?
Chromatic Prometheus, myth of fire,
It is history topples you in the zenith.
Blok, too, wrote The Scythians
Who should have known: he who howls
With the whirlwind, with the whirlwind goes down.
In this, was Lenin guiltier than you
When, out of a merciless patience grew
The daily prose such poetry prepares for?
Scriabin, Blok, men of extremes,
History treads out the music of your dreams
Through blood, and cannot close like this
In the perfection of anabasis. It stops. The trees
Continue raining though the rain has ceased
In a cooled world of incessant codas:
Hard edges of the houses press
On the after-music senses, and refuse to burn,
Where an ice cream van circulates the estate
Playing Greensleeves, and at the city’s
Stale new frontier even ugliness
Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.
‘Prometheus’ refers to the tone-poem by Scriabin and to his hope of transforming the world by music and rite.
Eden
I have seen Eden. It is a light of place
As much as the place itself; not a face
Only, but the expression on that face: the gift
Of forms constellates cliff and stones:
The wind is hurrying the clouds past,
And the clouds as they flee, ravelling-out
Shadow a salute where the thorn’s barb
Catches the tossed, unroving sack
That echoes their flight. And the same
Wind stirs in the thicket of the lines
In Eden’s wood, the radial avenues
Of light there, copious enough
To draft a city from. Eden
Is given one, and the clairvoyant gift
Withdrawn, ‘Tell us’, we say
‘The way to Eden,’ but lost in the meagre
Streets of our dispossession, where
Shall we turn, when shall we put down
This insurrection of sorry roofs? Despair
Of Eden is given, too: we earn
Neither its loss nor having. There is no
Bridge but the thread of patience, no way
But the will to wish back Eden, this leaning
To stand against the persuasions of a wind
That rings with its meaninglessness where it sang its meaning.
Assassin
‘The rattle in Trotsky’s throat and his wild boar’s moans’
Piedra de Sol, Octavio Paz
Blood I foresaw. I had put by
The distractions of the retina, the eye
That like a child must be fed and comforted
With patterns, recognitions. The room
Had shrunk to a paperweight of glass and he
To the centre and prisoner of its transparency.
He rasped pages. I knew too well
The details of that head. I wiped
Clean the glance and saw
Only his vulnerableness. Under my quivering
There was an ease, save f
or that starched insistence
While paper snapped and crackled as in October air.
Sound drove out sight. We inhabited together
One placeless cell. I must put down
This rage of the ear for discrimination, its absurd
Dwelling on ripples, liquidities, fact
Fastening on the nerve gigantic paper burrs.
The gate of history is straiter than eye’s or ear’s.
In imagination, I had driven the spike
Down and through. The skull had sagged in its blood.
The grip, the glance – stained but firm –
Held all at its proper distance and now hold
This autumnal hallucination of white leaves
From burying purpose in a storm of sibilance.
I strike. I am the future and my blow
Will have it now. If lightning froze
It would hover as here, the room
Riding in the crest of the moment’s wave,
In the deed’s time, the deed’s transfiguration
And as if that wave would never again recede.
The blood wells. Prepared for this
This I can bear. But papers
Snow to the ground with a whispered roar:
The voice, cleaving their crescendo, is his
Voice, and his the animal cry
That has me then by the roots of the hair.
Fleshed in that sound, objects betray me,
Objects are my judge: the table and its shadow,
Desk and chair, the ground a pressure
Telling me where it is that I stand
Before wall and window-light:
Mesh of the curtain, wood, metal, flesh:
A dying body that refuses death,
He lurches against me in his warmth and weight,
As if my arm’s length blow
Had transmitted and spent its strength
Through blood and bone; and I, spectred,
The body that rose against me were my own.
Woven from the hair of that bent head,
The thread that I had grasped unlabyrinthed all –
Tightrope of history and necessity –
But the weight of a world unsteadies my feet
And I fall into the lime and contaminations
Of contingency; into hands, looks, time.
Against Extremity
Let there be treaties, bridges,
Chords under the hands, to be spanned
Sustained: extremity hates a given good
Or a good gained. That girl who took
Her life almost, then wrote a book
To exorcize and to exhibit the sin,
Praises a friend there for the end she made
And each of them becomes a heroine.
The time is in love with endings. The time’s
Spoiled children threaten what they will do,
And those they cannot shake by petulance
They’ll bribe out of their wits by show.
Against extremity, let there be
Such treaties as only time itself
Can ratify, a bond and test
Of sequential days, and like the full
Moon slowly given to the night,
A possession that is not to be possessed.
The Way of a World
Having mislaid it, and then
Found again in a changed mind
The image of a gull the autumn gust
Had pulled upwards and past
The window I watched from, I recovered too
The ash-key, borne-by whirling
On the same surge of air, like an animate thing:
The scene was there again: the bird,
The seed, the windlines drawn in the sidelong
Sweep of leaves and branches that only
The black and supple boughs restrained –
All would have joined in the weightless anarchy
Of air, but for that counterpoise. All rose
Clear in the memory now, though memory did not choose
Or value it first: it came
With its worth and, like those tree-tips,
Fine as dishevelling hair, but steadied
And masted as they are, that worth
Outlasted its lost time, when
The cross-currents had carried it under.
In all these evanescences of daily air,
It is the shapes of change, and not the bare
Glancing vibrations, that vein and branch
Through the moving textures: we grasp
The way of a world in the seed, the gull
Swayed toiling against the two
Gravities that root and uproot the trees.
Descartes and the Stove
Thrusting its armoury of hot delight,
Its negroid belly at him, how the whole
Contraption threatened to melt him
Into recognition. Outside, the snow
Starkened all that snow was not –
The boughs’ nerve-net, angles and gables
Denting the brilliant hoods of it. The foot-print
He had left on entering, had turned
To a firm dull gloss, and the chill
Lined it with a fur of frost. Now
The last blaze of day was changing
All white to yellow, filling
With bluish shade the slots and spoors
Where, once again, badger and fox would wind
Through the phosphorescence. All leaned
Into that frigid burning, corded tight
By the lightlines as the slow sun drew
Away and down. The shadow, now,
Defined no longer: it filled, then overflowed
Each fault in snow, dragged everything
Into its own anonymity of blue
Becoming black. The great mind
Sat with his back to the unreasoning wind
And doubted, doubted at his ear
The patter of ash and, beyond, the snow-bound farms,
Flora of flame and iron contingency
And the moist reciprocation of his palms.
On the Principle of Blowclocks
Three-way poem
The static forces
not a ball of silver
of a solid body
but a ball of air
and its material strength
whose globed sheernesses
derive from
shine with a twofold glitter:
not the quantity of mass:
once with the dew and once
an engineer would instance
with the constituent bright threads
rails or T beams, say
of all its spokes
four planes constructed to
in a tense surface
contain the same volume as
in a solid cloud of stars
four tons of mass
A reading of ‘On the Principle of Blowclocks’ should include (a) the italicized lines, (b) the unitalicized, (c) the whole as printed.
Words for the Madrigalist
Look with the ears, said Orazio Vecchi,
Trusting to music, willing to be led
Voluntarily blind through its complete
Landscape of the emotion, feeling beneath the feet
Of the mind’s heart, the land fall, the height
Re-form: Look with the ears – they are all
Looking with the eyes, missing the way:
So, waiting for sleep, I look
With the ears at the confused clear sounds
As each replenished tributary unwinds
Its audible direction, and dividing
The branchwork of chime and counterchime
Runs the river’s thick and drumming stem:
Loud with their madrigal of limestone beds
Where nothing sleeps, they all
Give back – not the tune the listener calls
But the measure of what he is
&n
bsp; In the hard, sweet music of his lack,
The unpremeditated consonances: and the words
Return it to you over the ground-
Bass of their syllables, Orazio Vecchi:
Hear with the eyes as you catch the current of their sounds.
Arroyo Hondo
Twice I’d tried
to pass the
bastard outside
of Arroyo Hondo:
each time, the same
thing: out he
came in a
wobbling glide
in that beat-up
pick-up, his
head bent
in affable accompaniment,
jawing at
the guy who sat
beside him: the third
time (ready
for him) I
cut out wide,
flung him
a passing look as I
made it: we almost
made it together
he and I: the same
thing, out he
came, all crippled speed
unheeding: I could not
retreat and what
did I see? I
saw them
playing at cards
on the driving seat.
A Sense of Distance
The door is shut.
The red rider
no longer crosses the canyon floor
under a thousand feet of air.
The glance that fell
on him, is shafting
a deeper well:
the boughs of the oak are roaring
inside the acorn shell.
The hoofbeats – silent, then –
are sounding now
that ride
dividing a later distance.
For I am in England,
and the mind’s embrace
catches-up this English
and that horizonless desert space
into its own, and the three there
concentrically fill a single sphere.
And it seems as if a wind
had flung wide a door
above an abyss, where all
the kingdoms of possibilities shone
like sandgrains crystalline in the mind’s own sun.
Swimming Chenango Lake Page 4
