Swimming Chenango Lake
Page 9
Now rivers ran where the streams once were.
Daily, we heard the distance lessening
Between house and water-course. But floods
Occur only along the further plains and we
Had weathered the like of this before
– The like, but not the equal, as we saw,
Watching it lap the enclosure wall,
Then topping it, begin to pile across
And drop with a splash like clapping hands
And spread. It took in the garden
Bed by bed, finding a level to its liking.
The house-wall, fronting it, was blind
And therefore safe: it was the doors
On the other side unnerved my mind
– They and the deepening night. I dragged
Sacks, full of a mush of soil
Dug in the rain, and bagged each threshold.
Spade in hand, why should I not make
Channels to guide the water back
Into the river, before my barricade
Proved how weak it was? So I began
Feeling my way into the moonless rain,
Hacking a direction. It was then as though
A series of sluices had been freed to overflow
All the land beneath them: it was the dark I dug
Not soil. The sludge melted away from one
And would not take the form of a trench.
This work led nowhere, with no bed
To the flood, no end to its sources and resources
To grow and to go wherever it would
Taking one with it. It was the sound
Struck more terror than the groundlessness I trod,
The filth fleeing my spade – though that, too,
Carried its image inward of the dissolution
Such sound orchestrates – a day
Without reprieve, a swealing away
Past shape and self. I went inside.
Our ark of stone seemed warm within
And welcoming, yet echoed like a cave
To the risen river whose tide already
Pressed close against the further side
Of the unwindowed wall. There was work to do
Here better than digging mud – snatching
And carrying such objects as the flood
Might seep into, putting a stair
Between the world of books and water.
The mind, once it has learned to fear
Each midnight eventuality,
Can scarcely seize on what is already there:
It was the feet first knew
The element weariness had wandered through
Eyeless and unreasoning. Awakened eyes
Told that the soil-sacked door
Still held, but saw then, without looking,
Water had tried stone and found it wanting:
Wall fountained a hundred jets:
Floor lay awash, an invitation
To water to follow it deriding door
On door until it occupied the entire house.
We bailed through an open window, brushing
And bucketing with a mindless fervour
As though four hands could somehow find
Strength to keep pace, then oversway
The easy redundance of a mill-race. I say
That night diminished my trust in stone –
As porous as a sponge, where once I’d seen
The image of a constancy, a ground for the play
And fluency of light. That night diminished
Yet did not quite betray my trust.
For the walls held. As we tried to sleep,
And sometimes did, we knew that the flood
Rivered ten feet beneath us. And so we hung
Between a dream of fear and the very thing.
Water-lights coursed the brain and sound
Turned it to the tympanum of an ear. When I rose
The rain had ceased. Full morning
Floated and raced with water through the house,
Dancing in whorls on every ceiling
As I advanced. Sheer foolishness
It seemed to pause and praise the shimmer
And yet I did and called you down
To share this vertigo of sunbeams everywhere,
As if no surface were safe from swaying
And the very stone were as malleable as clay.
Primeval light undated the day
Back into origin, washed past stain
And staleness, to a beginning glimmer
That stilled one’s beating ear to sound
Until the flood-water seemed to stream
With no more burden than the gleam itself.
Light stilled the mind, then showed it what to do
Where the work of an hour or two could
Hack a bank-side down, let through
The stream and thus stem half the force
That carried its weight and water out of course.
Strength spent, we returned. By night
The house was safe once more, but cold within.
The voice of waters burrowed one’s dream
Of ending in a wreck of walls:
We were still here, with too much to begin
That work might make half-good.
We waited upon the weather’s mercies
And the December stars frosted above the flood.
Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984)
Above Manhattan
Up in the air
among the Iroquois: no:
they are not born
with a head for heights:
their girder-going
is a learned, at last
a learnèd thing
as sure as instinct:
beneath them
they can see in print
the newssheet of the city
with a single rent where three
columns, clipped out of it,
show the Park was planted:
webbed and cradled
by the catenary
distances of bridge on bridge
the place is as real
as something imaginary:
but from where they are
one must read with care:
for to put
one foot wrong
is to drop
more than a glance
and though
this closeness and that distance
make dancing difficult a dance
it is that the mind is led
above Manhattan
The Iroquois were employed in high construction work.
All Afternoon
All afternoon the shadows have been building
A city of their own within the streets,
Carefully correcting the perspectives
With dark diagonals, and paring back
Sidewalks into catwalks, strips of bright
Companionways, as if it were a ship
This counter-city. But the leaning, black
Enjambements like ladders for assault
Scale the façades and tie them to the earth,
Confounding fire-escapes already meshed
In slatted ambiguities. You touch
The sliding shapes to find which place is which
And grime a finger with the ash of time
That blows through both, the shadow in the shade
And in the light, that scours each thoroughfare
To pit the walls, rise out of yard and stairwell
And tarnish the Chrysler’s Aztec pinnacle.
At the Trade Center
Paused at the more than Brocken summit,
Hand outstretched to touch and cover
The falling height beneath, I watch
Between the nakedness of fingers – light
On each knuckled promontory of flesh
And shadows tremulous between the gaps –
The map of land, the map of air:
Rivers both sides o
f this island
Tug the gaze askance from the grid of streets
To the sea- and bird-ways, the expanse
That drinks the reverberation of these energies.
What can a hand bring back into a view
No rule of thumb made possible? It spans
The given rigours and the generous remissions
Of ocean, of the ferryings to-and-fro
Between the harbour and the islands. As you climb
The more you see of waters and of marsh
Where, angle-poised, the heron
Stands within earshot of this city
Back to the horizon, studying its pool.
The horizon is where we are:
The Bridge is small from this new vantage,
The view in space become a view in time:
Climbing we see an older city’s fall –
The waterfront is down: the clerks are hived
Window on window where the town began
And spread. I spread my fingers
And the traffic runs between. The elevator grounds
Us back to streets where in the cracks
Between immeasurable buildings beggars
From their domains of dust and paper-bags
Hold out one hand deep in the traffic sounds.
To Ivor Gurney
Driving north, I catch the hillshapes, Gurney,
Whose drops and rises – Cotswold and Malvern
In their cantilena above the plains –
Sustained your melody: your melody sustains
Them, now – Edens that lay
Either side of this interminable roadway.
You would recognize them still, but the lanes
Of lights that fill the lowlands, brim
To the Severn and glow into the heights.
You can regain the gate: the angel with the sword
Illuminates the paths to let you see
That night is never to be restored
To Eden and England spangled in bright chains.
Black Brook
Black Brook is brown. It travels
With the hillside in it – an upside-down
Horizon above a brackened slope – until
It drops and then: rags and a rush of foam
Whiten the peat-stained stream
That keeps changing note and singing
The song of its shingle, its shallowness or its falls.
I pace a parallel track to that of the water:
It must be the light of a moorland winter
Let them say that black was fair name
For such a stream, making it mirror
Solely the granite and the grey
As no doubt it can. But look! Black Brook
Has its horizon back, and a blue
Inverted sky dyeing it through to a bed
Of dazzling sand, an ore of gravel
It has washed out beneath rock and rowan
As it came here homing down
To the valley it brightens belying its name.
Poem for my Father
I bring to countryside my father’s sense
Of an exile ended when he fished his way
Along the stained canal and out between
The first farms, the uninterrupted green,
To find once more the Suffolk he had known
Before the Somme. Yet there was not one tree
Unconscious of that name and aftermath
Nor is there now. For everything we see
Teaches the time that we are living in,
Whose piecemeal speech the vocables of Eden
Pace in reminder of the full perfection,
As oaks above these waters keep their gold
Against the autumn long past other trees
Poised between paradise and history.
The Beech
Blizzards have brought down the beech tree
That, through twenty years, had served
As landmark or as limit to our walk:
We sat among its roots when buds
Fruitlike in their profusion tipped the twigs –
A galaxy of black against a sky that soon
Leaf-layers would shut back. The naked tree
Commanded, manned the space before it
And beyond, dark lightnings of its branches
Played above the winter desolation:
It seemed their charge had set the grass alight
As a low sun shot its fire into the valley
Splitting the shadows open. Today that sun
Shows you the place uncitadelled,
A wrecked town centred by no spire,
Scattered and splintered wide. At night
As the wind comes feeling for those boughs
There is nothing now in the dark of an answering strength,
No form to confront and to attest
The amplitude of dawning spaces as when
The tower rebuilt itself out of the mist each morning.
Night Fishers
After the autumn storms, we chose a night
To fish the bay. The catch
I scarcely recollect. It was the climb,
The grasp at slipping rock unnerved
All thought, thrust out of time
And into now the sharp original fear
That mastered me then. I do not think
I ever looked so far down into space
As through the clefts we over-leapt:
Beams of our torches given back
Off walls and water in each rift
Crossed and recrossed one another, so the mind
Recalling them, still seems to move
Inside a hollow diamond that the dark
As shadows shift, threatens to unfacet:
It was no jewel, it was the flesh would shatter.
And yet it did not. Somehow we arrived
And crouched there in the cool. The night
Save for the whispered water under-cliff,
The hiss of falling casts, lay round
Thick with silence. It seemed
A sky spread out beneath us, constellations
Swimming into view wherever fish
Lit up its dark with phosphor. A thousand
Points of light mapped the expanse
And depth, and yet the cliff-top height
Hinted no pull of vertigo along
Its sudden edge: through diaphanous waters
The radium in the flowing pitchblende glowed
Holding both mind and eye
Encompassed by a stir of scattered lambency:
And unalarmed, I could forget
As night-bound we fished on unharmed,
The terrors of the way we’d come, put by
The terrors of return past fault and fall,
Watching this calm firmament of the sea.
The Sound of Time
When the clock-tick fades
out of the ear you
can listen to time
in the flow of fire:
and there a cascade
streams up the coals:
loud as Niagara
these climbing falls:
it pours within
forked and fleering
over the thresholds
of a deafened hearing
till the superfluity
of the room’s recess
has filled the auricle
with time’s abyss
The Return (1987)
In the Borghese Gardens
for Attilio Bertolucci
Edging each other towards consummation
On the public grass and in the public eye,
Under the Borghese pines the lovers
Cannot tell what thunderheads mount the sky,
To mingle with the roar of afternoon
Rumours of the storm that must drench them soon.
Cars intersect the cardinal’s great dream,
His parterres redesigned, gardens half-gone,
Yet Pl
uto’s grasp still bruises Proserpine,
Apollo still hunts Daphne’s flesh in stone,
Where the Borghese statuary and trees command
The ever-renewing city from their parkland.
The unbridled adolescences of gods
Had all of earth and air to cool their flights
And to rekindle. But where should lovers go
These torrid afternoons, these humid nights
While Daphne twists in leaves, Apollo burns
And Proserpine returns, returns, returns?
Rome is still Rome. Its ruins and its squares
Stand sluiced in wet and all its asphalt gleaming,
The street fronts caged behind the slant of rain-bars
Sun is already melting where they teem:
Spray-haloed traffic taints your laurel leaves,
City of restitutions, city of thieves.
Lovers, this giant hand, half-seen, sustains
By lifting up into its palm and plane
Our littleness: the shining causeway leads
Through arches, bridges, avenues and lanes
Of stone, that brought us first to this green place –
Expelled, we are the heirs of healing artifice.
Deserted now, and all that callow fire
Quenched in the downpour, here the parkland ways
Reach out into the density of dusk,
Between an Eden lost and promised paradise,
That overbrimming scent, rain-sharpened, fills,
Girdled within a rivercourse and seven hills.
In San Clemente
What deer are these stand drinking at the spring?
Ask of the child the saint is carrying
Across a stream in spate. The steps that flow
Downwards through the sonorous dark beneath,
Should be a water-stair, for where they go,
A child that angels bring forth on the wall
Has lived a whole year on the ocean bed;
Then, down once more, and past the humid cave
Of Mithras’ bull and shrine, until they lead
To a wall of tufa and – beyond – the roar
Of subterranean waters pouring by
All of the centuries it takes to climb
From Mithras to the myth-resisting play
Of one clear jet chiming against this bowl