Something is coming with a deep note …
Closing all eyes as it comes … both men and angels burst with praise as the father nears, nothing but sealed eyes and adoration in the fire of him, with the eschewment of flesh, and the basting of tears …
Congregation: This is good comfort. We tremble and glow. But what of comfort down here – below?
Minister: I was coming to that precisely, to give you real and immediate comfort. Of such is the kingdom of heaven. Mark 10. And here is his special dispensation and mercy, the Secret, the innermost heart of the forest.
You think you’re going to age, fall apart, get dusty and grey, smell, plunge into a wallow of decrepitude, a slough of incontinence, annoy little girls with rattling sweetiebags, wet your pants at the flash of a white skirt and the rumble of a baby-carriage with longing for the starchy lap of a young plump nursemaid, lose your tongue in your teeth mumbling old sockets for gamey meat-shreds and sit speechless, death’s worst, winding-sheets, and tumbling to decay – but it’s not so.
You see, we live backwards!
Haven’t you noticed? We start as angels, spirits, pure souls – little children. When we grow up – maybe not so good. And in some of us the orient and immortal wheat gets ground exceeding small. But we’ve got the memory of it. So isn’t it best and wisest to have the reward first, so nothing can spoil it? To live first and pay later? I know you all must have many things at home you’ve bought without paying for. That television set? The mortgage? The very clothes you stand up in? Feel the nap of the cloth. It’s somebody else’s. You’re paying for it now. But nobody can take your childhood away from you. Your reward is safe. You’ve had it! For I dare hazard a guess that there is nobody here who has not at some time, it may be in the distant past, it may be yesterday or last week, nobody who has not been a child of some sort or another. You may not quite make it when you’re grown up, but never mind. Little angels.
Congregation: All this is a great comfort. But tell us, reconcile us to that bomb. It hovers over our heads like a spiteful thumb.
Minister: I was coming to that.
O, my dear, dear brethren and friends, let me once again appeal to you, let me try. Do not worry what happens to your flesh, your mere bodies. Go back to your lives, deliver your babies into their reward, it is God’s work. Shift the lead out of your pants. What happens to your flesh, your tissues, can only a little rust the bright white metal of your souls, a little dust it, obfuscate, occlude, corrode, but only a little, constipate, tie it in knots, it cannot kill it, not even in the great blaze of pain, the sheet of lightning, the great sheet of agony, and remember it is God’s pain, our blazing agony multiplied by our millions, for him. You have seen the dry burnt corpses of that agony with their poor cindered fists caught up like a boxer’s. But God cannot die, and by the same token no more can we! Remember that whatever happens cannot hurt us, because we are God – not hurt us permanently, anyway. Brothers – and I am speaking to God – do not sit about wailing here for God’s second-coming-before-it-is-too-late – he is already here, and We will be There, each of us a shard of him, a ward of him, a bright, piercing, secure, razor-sharp splinter of him, and heaven … where no moth nor rust … Matthew 6 … We are already Here … and More of Me arrives every day!
Congregation: We’ve had enough. This is blasphemy. You are Antichrist. You are the Devil. God is not mocked! In his own house too! And I saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy; and there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies. Revelation 13. You can’t carry on like this in our church! You can’t carry on like this in our church!
Minister: But I was coming to that—
What I am asking you to do, friends, IS to carry on before it is too late, before we are all snatched back to God from whom we came, and who frightens us so; before we’re all snapped back like elastic, blown up back to God whom we will not understand, any more than the clippings understand the toenail; snatched back away from life as we know it – I am asking you, all of you, whoever you are, cutthroats, croupiers, cripples, blacksmiths, wordsmiths, birdsmiths, birdbathmakers, billiard-markers, in-patients, waiters, head-waiters, hairdressers, hairy or hairless, bright or stupid, good-headed or beheaded, I am asking you, friends, whatever it all means, whoever is right, whatever explanation we use – to – carry on, so some good can come of it, to carry on, to experiment, as I am doing, good my dear sweet world, to carry on, to carry on …
THE CASE16
for Roy Hart
‘Man … is an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and irresolute.’
Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
I am a gardener,
A maker of trials, flowers, hypotheses.
I water the earth.
I raise perfumes there.
Mother told me to stand, and I did so,
Stepping towards the window in which she sat.
‘Now, did you find him, your other half?
And mine,’ she said, and I shook my head:
‘No, my time is so short and I’ll take no oath.’
‘You’ve just taken one, by standing,
My dear one,’ she said, and she told me how the stars
Had said as much, and I concurred and saw
How the crystalware of the polished table,
The cabinets of glass things walling the room,
The tall roses beyond the glass, the gloss of the table,
Had said as much in sunshine from my first tottering.
So she lifted my hand and kissed it and said I was to be celibate,
And this was great good fortune and I was a good child
For I had a quest and few had as much.
The roses nodded.
So I became a gardener,
A maker of prayers, flowers, hypotheses.
A gardener ‘washed in my fertile sweat’,
My hair of an opulent brown ‘like the Lord’s,
That makes you think of fertile fields’.
And among the flowers, in the walled garden, ‘This is life!’ she cried,
‘What a shame, oh what a shame,’ she said,
‘What a shame we have to die,’ she cried, all
The flowers pumping and pumping their natures into her,
Into her nostrils, winged wide, she leaning,
Leaning back, breathing deeply, blushing deeply,
Face shining and deep breath and tall brick
Holding the air still and the heat high in a tall room.
And I swam in the thunderstorm in the river of blood, oil and cider,
And I saw the blue of my recovery open around me in the water,
Blood, cider, rainbow, and the apples still warm after sunset
Dashed in the cold downpour, and so this mother-world
Opened around me and I lay in the perfumes after rain out of the river
Tugging the wet grass, eyes squeezed, straining to the glory,
The burst of white glory like the whitest clouds rising to the sun
And it was like a door opening in the sky, it was like a door opening in the water,
It was like the high mansion of the sky, and water poured from the tall french windows.
It was like a sudden smell of fur among the flowers, it was like a face at dusk
It was like a rough trouser on a smooth leg. Oh, shame,
It was the mother-world wet with perfume. It was something about God.
And she stood there and I wanted to tell her something and she was gone.
It was something about God. She stood smiling on the wet verge
And she waited for me to tell her but she was gone.
And three gusts of hot dry air came almost without sound
Of blown and bruised roses. And she went. And the bushes were blown
And the gusts were hot, dry air, nearly black with perfume,
Alive with perfume. Oh shame. It was like an announcement,
Like an invitation, an introduction, an invitation, a quick smile in the dusk.
It was like a door opening on a door of flowers that opened on flowers that were opening.
It was like the twist of a rosy fish among lily-pads that were twisting on their deep stems.
The rosy goldfish were there in the dusky pond, but she was gone.
It was something about God. My hand made a wet door in the water
And I thought of something I knew about God. My mother
Stared at me from the pool over my shoulder and when I turned she was gone.
Then the wind blew three hot dry gusts to me through the broken rose-bushes
And she came to me dusky with perfume and I walked toward her
And through her, groping for her hand. And it was something about God.
And I searched in my head for it with my eyes closed. But it was gone.
And I became a gardener, a hypothesiser, one who would consult his sensations,
For ‘we live in sensations and where there are none there is no life’,
One with the birds that are blue-egged because they love the sky!
With the flocks of giraffes craning towards the heavens!
With the peacocks dressed in their love for the high sun
And in their spectra of the drifting rains, one
With the great oaks in my keeping that stretched up to touch God!
And one who could look up gladly and meet God’s gaze,
His wide blue gaze, through my blood, as I think;
And God was silent and invisible and I loved him for it,
I loved him for his silent invisibility, for his virile restraint,
And I was one with my peacocks that sent out their wild cry
Sounding like shrill ‘help!’ and meaning no such thing,
While my flocks of deer wrote love in their free legs
Their high springy haunches and bounding turf. And they would pause
And look upwards, and breathe through wide nostrils, and all day
It was wide and firm and in God’s gaze and open: tussock and turf, long lake,
Reed-sigh, silence and space, pathway and flower furnace Banked up and breathing.
And the people. And the causeway into the walled garden.
And the people walking in so slowly, on their toes
Through the wide doorway, into the cube of still air,
Into the perspective of flowers, following each other in groups,
Gazing around, ‘Oh, what shame, to die!’ and the great doorway
And ourselves, smiling, and standing back, and they changed,
Concentrated, concentrating, at the edges of the body, the rims
Tighter, clearer, by the sensations of their bodies, solidified, bound,
Like the angels, the bodies’ knowledge of the flowers inbound
Into its tightening and warming at the heart of flowers, the fire called
‘Then-shall-ye-see-and-your-heart-shall-rejoice-
And-your-bones-shall-sprout-as-the-blade. …’
And she was gone. And she lay down like the earth after rain.
It was love-talk in every grain. And something about God.
The brick walls creaked in the wind, grain to grain.
And judgment came as the father comes, and she is gone.
Clouds swoop under the turf into the pond, the peacock cries
‘Help!’ strutting in its aurora, love talks
Grain to grain, gossiping about judgment, his coming. Ranges
Tumble to boulders that rattle to shingles that ease to wide beaches
That flurry to dust that puffs to new dusts that dust
To dusting dust, all talking, all
Gossiping of glory, and there are people
In the gardens, in white shirts, drifting,
Gossiping of shame through the gardens, ‘Oh glory!’
Through the gardens. … Well, father, is that how you come?
Come then.
Whose breath is it that flares through the shrubberies?
Whose breath that returns? Look at the people
All ageing to judgment, all
Agreeing to judgment. Look at that woman
Still snuffing up the flowers. My mother!
Look at her. She bends backwards to the tall flowers, falls.
Her flower-laden breath returns to the skies.
I think this garden is a prayer,
Shall I burn it as an offering?
And I think these people are a prayer,
I think they are a message.
Shall I burn them for their syllable?
There is a fire crying ‘shame!’ here already!
It mixes dying with flowering.
I think we husk our uttering. I think
We tip it out. Our perfect syllable,
Tripped out over the death-bed, a one,
Round, perfectly-falling silence.
Look how they seek the glory over these flowers!
I wanted to say something about God,
My syllable about God. I think
We are a prayer. I think
He wants his breath back, unhusked
Of all the people, our dying silences.
Our great involuntary promise
Unhusked, flying out into the rain, over the battlefields,
Switching through shrubberies, into the sky. …
You press, oh God!
You press on me as I press on an eyeball,
You press sunsets and autumns and dying flowers,
You press lank ageing people in gardens ‘Oh shame
To die,’ you feather roses and matchflames like wisps of your fingers,
Your great sun cuffs age at us. I will bring,
I will bring you in, father, through the bounds of my senses,
Face to face, father, through the sockets of my head,
Haul you in, father, through my eyes with my fingers,
Into my head through my eyes, father, my eyes, oh my eyes. …
To live in the blind sockets, the glorious blunt passages,
Tended by gardeners, nostril, eye, mouth,
Bruised face in a white shirt ageing,
To be called ‘Father’ and to hear call high
‘Oh shame, what a shame, to die’ as they see the great flowers,
To hear the peacock ‘help!’ that means no such thing,
And to live unseeing, not watching, without judging, called ‘Father’.
VI
WORK IN PROGRESS17
(1969)
THE OLD WHITE MAN18
adapted from a Chinese T’ang Dynasty story
Having immured his new bride
In an inner room without doors or windows
Sunk into the earth, dry but cobwebby,
Through a trapdoor on which he sat guards
Of many years’ experience and unlined faces
Save for the two furrows of fighting concentration
As if the prongs of the face stood at midnight, he
Felt he could rest in the open bedroom
With the balcony and straw matting
That plucked the hairline starbeams as it swung.
At three a.m. something blocked the stars
And with a swishing noise of breath
Started up a high breeze which rolled
Him over once, who was so tired.
The guards’ alert eyelids flickered.
Suddenly he sprang out of bed,
The guards sprang up, it was a fright
With no cause, why should they wake?
They made sure of that looking for her
And flung up the trap in the wooden floor
>
With a cruel slap to any sleeper –
But there was none by shouts, nor by lights,
By taking lanterns and peering for escape,
She’d gone, not even a mousehole:
A city gate for mists. Outside
(They made intent to follow) all men were helpless,
A thick fog wadded up the night –
It was the great god had turned his back
And his shadow shone around them in the dawn.
It stayed awhile, then broke up
In pieces with the sun, and flew away.
He swore to stay till she was found.
A military commander after all
He’d use the expedition,
Station here and send out patrols.
A month later they found an embroidered shoe
On a bush some thirty miles off
Quite sopping with the rain, half-rotted.
He moved his camp right up to it,
Let the relic swing in its centre.
The hills were to be scoured by all personnel
And he at their head not flopped in grief
But map-making busily.
In rings they spread out, in bands of thirty,
He working like the rest. All rock.
All rock and ridge and high bare cliff
With torrents bounding on the rock
Flexing like basketwork to stones.
Collected Poems Page 9
