Swimming Chenango Lake

by Charles Tomlinson

  Returned to this: to river, town and plain,

  Walked in the fields and knew what power he’d lost,

  The cost to him of that metropolis where

  He must come back to rule and Robespierre.

  Not yet. This contrary perfection he

  Must taste into a life he has no time

  To live, a lingered, snatched maturity

  Before he catches in the waterchime

  The measure and the chain a death began,

  And fate that loves the symmetry of rhyme

  Will spring the trap whose teeth must have a man.

  Casarola

  for Attilio Bertolucci

  Cliffs come sheering down into woodland here:

  The trees – they are chestnuts – spread to a further drop

  Where an arm of water rushes through unseen

  Still lost in leaves: you can hear it

  Squandering its way towards the mill

  A path crossing a hillslope and a bridge

  Leads to at last: the stones lie there

  Idle beside it: they were cut from the cliff

  And the same stone rises in wall and roof

  Not of the mill alone, but of shed on shed

  Whose mossed tiles like a city of the dead

  Grow green in the wood. There are no dead here

  And the living no longer come

  In October to crop the trees: the chestnuts

  Dropping, feed the roots they rose from:

  A rough shrine sanctifies the purposes

  These doors once opened to, a desolation

  Of still-perfect masonry. There is a beauty

  In this abandonment: there would be more

  In the slow activity of smoke

  Seeping at roof and lintel; out of each low

  Unwindowed room rising to fill

  Full with essences the winter wood

  As the racked crop dried. Waste

  Is our way. An old man

  Has been gathering mushrooms. He pauses

  To show his spoil, plumped by a soil

  Whose sweet flour goes unmilled:

  Rapid and unintelligible, he thinks we follow

  As we feel for his invitations to yes and no:

  Perhaps it’s the mushrooms he’s telling over

  Or this place that shaped his dialect, and where nature

  Daily takes the distinctness from that signature

  Men had left there in stone and wood,

  Among waning villages, above the cities of the plain.

  The Faring

  That day, the house was so much a ship

  Clasped by the wind, the whole sky

  Piling its cloud-wrack past,

  To be sure you were on dry land

  You must go out and stand in that stream

  Of air: the entire world out there

  Was travelling too: in each gap the tides

  Of space felt for the earth’s ship sides:

  Over fields, new-turned, the cry

  And scattered constellations of the gulls

  Were messengers from that unending sea, the sky:

  White on brown, a double lambency

  Pulsed, played where the birds, intent

  On nothing more than the ploughland’s nourishment,

  Brought the immeasurable in: wing on wing

  Taking new lustres from the turning year

  Above seasonable fields, they tacked and climbed

  With a planet’s travelling, rhymed here with elsewhere

  In the sea-salt freshnesses of tint and air.

  A Night at the Opera

  When the old servant reveals she is the mother

  Of the young count whose elder brother

  Has betrayed him, the heroine, disguised

  As the Duke’s own equerry, sings Or’

  Che sono, pale from the wound she has received

  In the first act. The entire court

  Realize what has in fact occurred and wordlessly

  The waltz song is to be heard now

  In the full orchestra. And we, too,

  Recall that meeting of Marietta with the count

  Outside the cloister in Toledo. She faints:

  Her doublet being undone, they find

  She still has on the hair-shirt

  Worn ever since she was a nun

  In Spain. So her secret is plainly out

  And Boccaleone (blind valet

  To the Duke) confesses it is he (Or’ son’io)

  Who overheard the plot to kidnap the dead

  Count Bellafonte, to burn by night

  The high camp of the gipsy king

  Alfiero, and by this stratagem quite prevent

  The union of both pairs of lovers.

  Now the whole cast packs the stage

  Raging in chorus round the quartet – led

  By Alfiero (having shed his late disguise)

  And Boccaleone (shock has restored his eyes):

  Marietta, at the first note from the count

  (Long thought dead, but finally revealed

  As Alfiero), rouses herself, her life

  Hanging by a thread of song, and the Duke,

  Descending from his carriage to join in,

  Dispenses pardon, punishment and marriage.

  Exeunt to the Grand March, Marietta

  (Though feebly) marching, too, for this

  Is the ‘Paris’ version where we miss

  The ultimate dénouement when at the command

  Of the heroine (Pura non son’) Bellafonte marries

  The daughter of the gipsy king and

  Mushrooms

  for Jon and Jill

  Eyeing the grass for mushrooms, you will find

  A stone or stain, a dandelion puff

  Deceive your eyes – their colour is enough

  To plump the image out to mushroom size

  And lead you through illusion to a rind

  That’s true – flint, fleck or feather. With no haste

  Scent-out the earthy musk, the firm moist white,

  And, played-with rather than deluded, waste

  None of the sleights of seeing: taste the sight

  You gaze unsure of – a resemblance, too,

  Is real and all its likes and links stay true

  To the weft of seeing. You, to begin with,

  May be taken in, taken beyond, that is,

  This place of chiaroscuro that seemed clear,

  For realer than a myth of clarities

  Are the meanings that you read and are not there:

  Soon, in the twilight coolness, you will come

  To the circle that you seek and, one by one,

  Stooping into their fragrance, break and gather,

  Your way a winding where the rest lead on

  Like stepping stones across a grass of water.

  The Gap

  It could be that you are driving by.

  You do not need the whole of an eye

  To command the thing: the edge

  Of a merely desultory look

  Will take it in – it is a gap

  (No more) where you’d expect to see

  A field-gate, and there well may be

  But it is flung wide, and the land so lies

  All you see is space – that, and the wall

  That climbs up to the spot two ways

  To embrace absence, frame skies:

  Why does one welcome the gateless gap?

  As an image to be filled with the meaning

  It doesn’t yet have? As a confine gone?

  A saving grace in so much certainty of stone?

  Reason can follow reason, one by one.

  But the moment itself, abrupt

  With the pure surprise of seeing,

  Will outlast all after-knowledge and its map –

  Even, and perhaps most then, should the unseen

  Gate swing-to across that gap.

  In Arden

  This is the for
est of Arden…

  Arden is not Eden, but Eden’s rhyme:

  Time spent in Arden is time at risk

  And place, also: for Arden lies under threat:

  Ownership will get what it can for Arden’s trees:

  No acreage of green-belt complacencies

  Can keep Macadam out: Eden lies guarded:

  Pardonable Adam, denied its gate,

  Walks the grass in a less-than-Eden light

  And whiteness that shines from a stone burns with his fate:

  Sun is tautening the field’s edge shadowline

  Along the wood beyond: but the contraries

  Of this place are contrarily unclear:

  A haze beats back the summer sheen

  Into a chiaroscuro of the heat:

  The down on the seeded grass that beards

  Each rise where it meets with sky,

  Ripples a gentle fume: a fine

  Incense, smelling of hay smokes by:

  Adam in Arden tastes its replenishings:

  Through its dense heats the depths of Arden’s springs

  Convey echoic waters – voices

  Of the place that rises through this place

  Overflowing, as it brims its surfaces

  In runes and hidden rhymes, in chords and keys

  Where Adam, Eden, Arden run together

  And time itself must beat to the cadence of this river.

  The Shaft

  for Guy Davenport

  The shaft seemed like a place of sacrifice:

  You climbed where spoil heaps from the hill

  Spilled out into a wood, the slate

  Tinkling underfoot like shards, and then

  You bent to enter: a passageway:

  Cervix of stone: the tick of waterdrops,

  A clear clepsydra: and squeezing through

  Emerged into cathedral space, held-up

  By a single rocksheaf, a gerbe

  Buttressing-back the roof. The shaft

  Opened beneath it, all its levels

  Lost in a hundred feet of water.

  Those miners – dust, beards, mattocks –

  They photographed seventy years ago,

  Might well have gone to ground here, pharaohs

  Awaiting excavation, their drowned equipment

  Laid-out beside them. All you could see

  Was rock reflections tunneling the floor

  That water covered, a vertical unfathomed,

  A vertigo that dropped through centuries

  To the first who broke into these fells:

  The shaft was not a place to stare into

  Or not for long: the adit you entered by

  Filtered a leaf-light, a phosphorescence,

  Doubled by water to a tremulous fire

  And signalling you back to the moist door

  Into whose darkness you had turned aside

  Out of the sun of an unfinished summer.

  Translating the Birds

  The buzzard’s two-note cry falls plaintively,

  And, like a seabird’s, hesitates between

  A mewing, a regret, a plangent plea,

  Or so we must translate it who have never

  Hung with the buzzard or above the sea.

  It veers a haughty circle with sun-caught breast:

  The small birds are all consternation now,

  And do not linger to admire the sight,

  The flash of empery that solar fire

  Lends to the predatory ease of flight.

  The small birds have all taken to the trees,

  Their eyes alert, their garrulousness gone:

  Beauty does not stir them, realists to a man,

  They know what awe’s exacted by a king,

  They know that now is not the time to sing.

  They’ll find their way back into song once more

  Who’ve only sung in metaphor and we

  Will credit them with arias, minstrelsy,

  And, eager always for the intelligible,

  Instruct those throats what meaning they must tell.

  But supply pulsing, wings against the air,

  With yelp that bids the silence of small birds,

  Now it is the buzzard owns the sky

  Thrusting itself beyond the clasp of words,

  Word to dance with, dally and outfly.

  The Flood (1981)

  Snow Signs

  They say it is waiting for more, the snow

  Shrunk up to the shadow-line of walls

  In an arctic smouldering, an unclean salt,

  And will not go until the frost returns

  Sharpening the stars, and the fresh snow falls

  Piling its drifts in scallops, furls. I say

  Snow has left its own white geometry

  To measure out for the eye the way

  The land may lie where a too cursory reading

  Discovers only dip and incline leading

  To incline, dip, and misses the fortuitous

  Full variety a hillside spreads for us:

  It is written here in sign and exclamation,

  Touched-in contour and chalk-followed fold,

  Lines and circles finding their completion

  In figures less certain, figures that yet take hold

  On features that would stay hidden but for them:

  Walking, we waken these at every turn,

  Waken ourselves, so that our walking seems

  To rouse some massive sleeper out of winter dreams

  Whose stretching startles the whole land into life,

  As if it were us the cold, keen signs were seeking

  To pleasure and remeasure, repossess

  With a sense in the gathered coldness of heat and height.

  Well, if it’s for more the snow is waiting

  To claim back into disguisal overnight,

  As though it were promising a protection

  From all it has transfigured, scored and bared,

  Now we shall know the force of what resurrection

  Outwaits the simplification of the snow.

  Their Voices Rang

  Their voices rang

  through the winter trees:

  they were speaking and yet it seemed they sang,

  the trunks a hall of victory.

  And what is that and where?

  Though we come to it rarely,

  the sense of all that we might be

  conjures the place from air.

  Is it the mind, then?

  It is the mind received,

  assumed into a season

  forestial in the absence of all leaves.

  Their voices rang

  through the winter trees and time

  catching the cadence of that song

  forgot itself in them.

  For Miriam

  I

  I climbed to your high village through the snow,

  Stepping and slipping over lost terrain:

  Wind having stripped a dead field of its white

  Had piled the height beyond: I saw no way

  But hung there wrapped in breath, my body beating:

  Edging the drift, trying it for depth,

  Touch taught the body how to go

  Through straitest places. Nothing too steep

  Or narrow now, once mind and muscle

  Learned to dance their balancings, combined

  Against the misdirections of the snow.

  And soon the ground I gained delivered me

  Before your smokeless house, and still

  I failed to read that sign. Through cutting air

  Two hawks patrolled the reaches of the day,

  Black silhouettes against the sheen

  That blinded me. How should I know

  The cold which tempered that blue steel

  Claimed you already, for you were old.

  II

  Mindful of your death, I hear the leap

  At life in the resurrexit of Bruckner’s mass:

 
For, there, your hope towers whole:

  Within a body one cannot see, it climbs

  That spaceless space, the ear’s

  Chief mystery and mind’s, that probes to know

  What sense might feel, could it outgo

  Its own destruction, spiralling tireless

  Like these sounds. To walk would be enough

  And top that rise behind your house

  Where the land lies sheer to Wales,

  And Severn’s crescent empties and refills

  Flashing its sign inland, its pulse

  Of light that shimmers off the Atlantic:

  For too long, age had kept you from that sight

  And now it beats within my eye, its pressure

  A reply to the vein’s own music

  Here, where with flight-lines interlinking

  That sink only to twine and hover the higher,

  A circling of hawks recalls to us our chains

  And snow remaining hardens above your grave.

  III

  You wanted a witness that the body

  Time now taught you to distrust

  Had once been good. ‘My face,’ you said –

  And the Shulamite stirred in decembering flesh

  As embers fitfully relit – ‘My face

  Was never beautiful, but my hair

  (It reached then to my knees) was beautiful.’

  We met for conversation, not conversion,

  For you were that creature Johnson bridled at –

  A woman preacher. With age, your heresies

  Had so multiplied that even I

  A pagan, pleaded for poetry forgone:

  You thought the telling-over of God’s names

  Three-fold banality, for what you sought

  Was single, not (and the flame was in your cheek)

  ‘A nursery rhyme, a jingle for theologians.’

  And the incarnation? That, too, required

  All of the rhetoric that I could bring

  To its defence. The frozen ground

  Opened to receive you a slot in snow,

  Re-froze, and months unborn now wait

  To take you into the earthdark disincarnate.

  IV