At Mrs Tyson’s farmhouse, the electricity is pumped
Off her beck-borne wooden wheel outside.
Greased, steady, it spins within
A white torrent, that stretches up the rocks.
At night its force bounds down
And shakes the lighted rooms, shakes the light;
The mountain’s force comes towering down to us.
High near its summit the brink is hitched
To an overflowing squally tarn.
It trembles with stored storms
That pulse across the rim to us, as light.
On a gusty day like this the force
Lashes its tail, the sky abounds
With wind-stuffed rinds of cloud that sprout
Clear force, throbbing in squalls off the sea
Where the sun stands poring down at itself
And makes the air grow tall in spurts
Whose crests turn over in the night-wind, foaming. We spin
Like a loose wheel, and throbbing shakes our light
Into winter, and torrents dangle. Sun
Pulls up the air in fountains, green shoots, forests
Flinching up at it in spray of branches,
Sends down clear water and the loosened torrent
Down into Mrs Tyson’s farmhouse backyard,
That pumps white beams off its crest,
In a stiff breeze lashes its tail down the rocks.
I SEE
I see a man and that man is myself
Standing in the trees in a downpour cloudy with rush
Who penetrates the soft swarming element with his senses alive.
He is aware of the wet apples,
They snag like a rosy mist in their orchards;
He is aware of the spray of the rain running like sharp white mist
Across running white mist, which is the spray of the grasses seeding;
He watches the crows stepping within a white bubble of watershed, a dome,
How they fletch the sopping mud deeply as they step forward, which closes again;
(The look of them sounds of wet grain creaking deep in crammed bowels;)
He stoops easily and notices a bug embracing a grass-bole:
It peers through the green gloss at the heavy sap-veins stiff with their flow,
He sees its mouth-awls working with excitement for the plunge,
And he sees it fuss back again stout with its eggs; (a water-load shatters nearby and the green mother starts to stillness;)
Now I feel manly and that man is myself
Digesting his dinner in his study after dinner
Digesting my drinking and my senses are confirmable and shut
With purple wine-drapes more magnificent than the rags at my window,
And I have the small hard globe of dinner warm under my clasped hands
And I ask myself without impatience (for impatience is an outdoor thing)
Who is that man who can stand in the rain and get his feet wet
And spit a cherrystone out into a weed-clump believing it will spring
Of his mouth, having warmed it and started the small germ moving,
And who is that man I ask no who is that boy who is he
A good dinner hurt nobody and drink is nutritious and wears off,
And I resolve to begin my exercises again after breakfast
As those tight-bellied crows are all fluttering underground
And in my belly tug and flutter as though picked to and fro by the wheat-roots.
THE HOUSE IN THE ACORN13
Ah, I thought just as he opened the door
That we all turned, for an instant, and looked away,
Checked ourselves suddenly, then he spoke:
‘You’re very good to come,’ then,
Just for a moment his air thickened,
And he could not breathe, just for the moment.
‘My son would have been glad that you came,’
He extended his thick hand, ‘Here, all together –’
We are not ourselves or at our ease,
I thought, as we raised our glasses, sipped;
‘Help yourselves, please. Please …’
‘If anyone would care …’ He stood by the table
Rapping his heavy nails in its polished glare,
‘My son is upstairs, at the back of the house,
The nursery, if anyone …’ I studied
Stocky hair-avenues along my hand-backs,
Wandered through grained plots dappled and sunlit;
‘My son … sometimes I think they glimpse
Perhaps for a while through sealed lids a few faces
Bending in friendship before it all fades …’ I nodded,
Slipped out, face averted,
And entered oak aisles; oaken treads
Mounted me up along oaken shafts, lifting me past
Tall silent room upon tall silent room:
Grained centuries of sunlight toppled to twilight
By chopping and fitting: time turned to timber
And the last oak enclosure with claws of bent oak
Where his white wisp cradled, instantaneous,
Hardly held by his home in its polished housetops.
A breath would have blown him; I held my breath
As I dipped to kiss …
Now the instant of this house rolls in my palm
And the company spins in its polished globe
And the drawing-room reels and the house recedes
(Pattering dome-grained out of the oak)
While, ah, as I open the door I hear their close laughter,
Cool earrings swing to the gliding whisper,
More apple-cup chugs from the stouted ewer.
THE FERNS14
The ferns, they dip and spread their fronds
With moisture easy through the stems,
Green moisture, that interior wash
Of living sugars. Spores dehisce.
Under the baking sun, they breathe
In currents, swirls and soundless gasps
Though you below here, standing idle,
Perceive no influence. Sun rifts the clouds,
Ferns die and breathe, arch and curl,
Breathe and remake their forms above,
Are clouds, that spread and dip their fronds,
Unravel fingers and moisture-banks
Of filigree bracken. All’s water.
All stoops and curls with water, gathers, droops
And doles the ferns their green moisture
Five miles down there on the baking earth,
And dunks the ferns in green moisture.
Spores dehisce. The ferns are breathing.
Then frost descends, like thronging ferns.
THE CONTENTMENT OF AN OLD WHITE MAN
The sky is dead. The sky is dead. The sky is dead.
I’m an old white man, if that is your opinion I’m content.
The fat white clouds roll in the old dead sky
They do me good, for all you say they’re dead.
They pat my brow. They sweat me a little wet, perchance.
Just as my dazzling beard parades my cheeks, they give me
Ornament. I’m an old white man as well …
Dead indeed! You’re a sack of wet yourself.
Step on them? Can you support the stroll of a razor?
They loll over my brow and childer my thoughts,
Or think I think them, so fond I am – not water-curds,
Thoughts! and correspondence! Dead skins and scurfs
And water-curds … but see how fatherly the sunset looks.
They rain, they pass into the ground, you piss,
You pass into the ground, I do, I know my kin,
My great kin, as a microbe is my lesser. Oh,
Lower a little shower and feel some roots, I say,
You’ve not slept in a bed at my age till you’ve wet it.
They pass and snort and snow, I’ll catch my dea
th
Squatting under a rainshower and pass away
At 105° all rubicund like a sunset. We’re all kind,
All water, they’re a little quicker, which means
Cleverer, sometimes, don’t it? Oh and ah
The graceful fruity woods, cabby! of the clouds,
Snow running on snow and bending as it deepens.
I see I coach among them, my breath sends out;
These woods on mountains, we send up shapes together
Ridge upon ridge, offering them, these clouds,
The only things large enough for God to watch
And judge from, we’d better get there fast. I’m halfway
Being an old white man and here the tree-heads straighten
Slowly and slowly leaf again as
Flickers of white drop off them and
Slowly straighten heads hurting with spring
As their white dreams leave them. Cabby! the clouds rise
Because the sun wants them. Each cloud is unique.
THE HEIR
Now here I am, drinking in the tall old house, alone,
The wide brown river squandering itself outside,
And there’s a fine smell of cane chairs and conservatory dust here,
With the mature thick orchards thriving outside,
And I am drinking, which is a mixture of dreaming and feeding,
Watching how the stone walls admit all their square glad answers
To the sun that is alive and thriving outside,
And rests folded in a full pot of beer brimming before me now.
Or it could have been cider, agreed, because of our thriving orchards,
But it is beer, because of the brewery just down the way
Sipping at the wide brown river all the year round.
So I am a feeder and dreamer both
Of firm thriving apples and of the wide river outside
And of the sun that arrives and rests gladly, folded in my food.
And I agreed to that, and to the passing of the days,
With winged lips of the mist streaming at night, and in the morning
Thick mists grinding themselves thin, and grinding themselves to nothing,
For mothers murther us by having us, naturally, and I am glad to be alive,
Drinking, with the beer squandering itself inside,
Sun folded in upon me and cider thriving among the trees,
And as I am a living man, Mother, I bear you no kind of a grudge,
Not to you, nor to the good kind cider or beer
Killing me and having me, for you agreed to die, and bear me no grudge
For being alive and dying, and dying much as you did …
So I’m glad to sit dreaming and feeding at the wide cane table set
For a solid meal that never comes, glad to be spending myself
As the river spends, and the sun pours out, and the ripe fruit splits,
Smiling juice sweetly to the hacking wasps, and you did as you agreed
Which was to give me life, and I agree to that too
For the beer agrees with me as I said, and I undertake
To go on agreeing so long as there’s passage in my throat.
DIRECTIVE
Attend to the outer world.
See the calm delicate spray of the branches,
Watch the cool grey spurs of the sky
Sliding volumes the one over the other,
Listen, not inwardly to that gravel-crunch
(Yourself strolling over your nature,) but
Listen and wait, for,
Falling over the springy testing boughs,
The sliding volumes of the clouds and roads,
Out of the light clear rain shed,
Out of the open hot throat
The world attends you
Like a friendship, in three clear notes
Out of a bird’s open throat.
THE ROOM IN THE TREES
The scent in pulses blowing off her beds,
The children birds cackling on their seeds;
The thirsty bee slaps my polished boot
Its horny snout humming with perception –
I love his black and honey-swinging club.
Great swashing heaps of birds struggle over rubbish.
Like shuffling footsteps now
The rain breaks, throbbing down the posts.
Then, through windows from the beds
And swerving back, the sound,
A weeping voice that rushes through the room,
Rains full into the glass and passes through,
Dashing droplets, and flashing shows the tasks
Born with me, into my very soul. It drops
And swings, and sinks into the wood
As into green foam and spray,
Dwindles, hooks up to a bush,
Cool waxy horn of yellow masses,
And that one flower’s whiteness draws me through the wood.
All moves past slowly as it drives me in
Through lurching timber, toothy weeds: it stares
Full into my eye, my eye poised in that bush.
My flowering jowls tug heavily at my sight,
And here I come, head of blossom, swollen, nodding,
Rain-lensed, frilled and pulpy, flower-betongued,
It seeks its way for me through my thickening scent.
I stoop and sink, my mane matting with the mud.
I lift my dews to what I shall become, and there
Before me trees stand glories, feeding, feeding,
Upon convulsive shifting of the sun
In palpable thick stalks set with shadow-lawn,
And on the muddy, lily-laden lake
Reeking of raisins – green wood all around
That sweats out spring in milky drops and blossom.
I’m only the wood then. You think you
Fancy faces in the trees, my rooms;
I think I only fancy rooms, crowded with faces,
But I pass through, taking mouths of treetops,
Jackets of vine, boots of water-topping stones,
Drubbing long grass like flames to flit my hearths
Of chimneys in their stout and hollow trunks,
I wander through my tables of the hawthorn
Thick-set with seeding food in empty rooms,
Gust them once again with tugging mouths
Thick-leaved and parting as I wish, and I lodge
In bearded boulders, berried heads of moss
Of mouths cracked wide with flowers from wishing hard.
SUNDAY AFTERNOONS
I want a dew-keen scythe –
Peering or prodding into the puddles
Outlook reflections or shadows
I want a power-mower –
Banging about in all breezes
Shaggy thick heads without repose
Lolling about in the rain, doddering in it
I want shears –
Joyous colours for suffering in
And those wet red blooms like sliced tomatoes –
I want to get in there with a thick insulting stick.
NOISE
Suddenly in this dream I was printer’s ink
Poured through the presses, patterned in every man’s mind,
Ideas lodged in his farthest recesses were mine,
Had taken in my angular black, the engrams
Of my pain under the presses.
Now I revenge, for when one dies
I let him see it all clearly, all that he’s learned
Now in its entirety for the first time known,
Laid in front of his soul’s eye, painfully learned …
Then lightly, laughingly, carelessly I withdraw my spirit.
Letters, sentences, paragraphs shudder and mingle, a little black smear
Replaces each most delicate printed utterance,
A little ragged black snigger like a smudge
That bites like a scorched hole, spreading,<
br />
And each book blackens with thick noise
Full of the cries of the words lost in it.
And the libraries! They haemorrhage from their stacks.
So you would do well never again to read books
Nor to build up your children’s brains on foundations of books
For it is a bookless pain and it lacks pictures
And it is an ocean of night-pain and noise.
REQUIRED OF YOU THIS NIGHT
A smoky sunset. I dab my eyes.
It stinks into the black wick of the wood.
Sparks wriggle, cut. I turn my back.
And night is at my frosty back.
I turn again. All stars!
It’s bedtime.
There’s no sky in my dreams, I dream none.
I work for sky, I work by sprinting up,
Breathing, sprinting up, and one star appears.
I chase it. It enlarges and I wake.
Dawn climbs into the sky like black smoke with white nails.
It’s compact with the day’s sharpness.
I’ll dry my sopping pillow in it.
How long’ll that take? I guess till sunset.
And then it sinks
All befrogged into that white glare.
The night is at my back instantly,
Draughty, and no star at all.
I weep again. I weep again frankly.
Sleep is nothing when you do it,
And nothing but a prim smile,
Except you’re fighting to pull the sun down
That may not come unless you fight
Not for you anyway, Peter.
THE ARTIST TO HIS BLIND LOVE
Slut, her muddy fingers leave a track
She buckles to her waist.
She stoops. She feels
With fingers in the turf.
She touches coarsened snow and gets
Cool fingers. It almost runs away
On freshet-fingers scuttling from the sides.
Watch the excrement!
Slut, her muddy fingers leave a track
She buckles to her waist.
Foodspots patter down her front. I haven’t the heart.
Her hair swells close around her head.
It’s not clean. She smiles,
She scrolled her own mouth this morning, I can see;
Air lies like thick soil on both eyes, sunbeams
Fall on top of that like warm twigs.
I haven’t the heart. Foodspots patter down her front.
Your eyes have their nightside uppermost,
Collected Poems Page 7
