Collected Poems
Page 12
And if they char too far they can never be turned off again.
There is another which is the faucet of pouring darkness, my eyes dim,
I grope, can I ever find it again to stop the darkness coming?
And there is yet another and this is the worst that seems to give out nothing
But when you look round there are certain articles missing.
But mostly they give out good things, sunshine and earth,
Or milk, or fine silky stuffs that glide out rustling,
The sleepy evening sounds of a town on the edge of the country
With rooks cawing as they settle, the clank of a pail, a snatch of radio music,
(Though I remember another that turned on a soft and continuous cursing
And from it extruded a pallid foul-mouthed person
Whose mouth foamed as I turned him off at the chest …)
But so many of them turn out good things, there is no majority
Of flowing blood or raw gobbets of flesh, it is mostly
Womansong, a stream of laughter or of salmon or bright blue pebbles –
And the lion-headed spigot that gushes mead and mead-hall laughter –
There are so many giving moonlight and in the day bright sunlight, rich dark barley-wine, and dew …
In this house of personages that prefer tenants to use the taps and sample the waters
And best of all to install faucets running with their own personal tastes and choices,
In the great house of the Reverend Mrs Earth and Doctor Waters
THE HAUNTED ARMCHAIR26
‘… and hid his lord’s money …’ (Matthew 25)
I want it not it not to go wrong. I want nothing to go wrong.
I shall guard and hedge and clip to the end of my days
So that nothing goes wrong. This body, this perfect body
That came from my mother’s womb undiseased, wholesome,
No, nothing must go wrong. It is not I. It is not I.
No, it is not I. I is lodged in its head’s centre,
Its turret, a little towards its eyes; it is not I, it is not I but it is mine
And an over-ranking shame to disease it, to let it disease.
I wash my hands, I wash my hands, I wash my hands once, twice, thrice,
I rinse my eyes with the sterile saline; I close, I pull the thick curtain,
I close the door and lock it, once, twice, thrice, I sit, I lie, I sleep in the great armchair,
And I sleep. Sleep, sleep is the preservative, cultivate sleep, it keeps me perfect.
No, no, it is not I; I lives only in the turret;
It is the body, it is the body, it is the body is the loved thing,
It is from my mother, it is my mother’s
It came from my mother, it is an organ of the body of my mother
And I shall keep it with no rough touch upon it
No rough disease to ramp up and down in it. The world?
And the world? That is the mind’s. In the turret. And now I will sleep.
I will sleep now, for my body exists. That is enough.
Something wakes me. Is it the fire?
It crackles like a speech. The buffet of winds, the cracks
Of the beams, the taste of the sun, the swimming shark of the moon?
No, I think, no, I think, I think I hear time flowing,
No, I think I hear time eroding, the cinder withering in the grate,
The grate withering with the time, my hands raised to my eyes
Where my eyes are withering, I look close at my withering hands. How long?
How much time have I seen withering? Did I come here today?
Suddenly everything grants me withering. Shall I sit here again?
The body is gone. I sit here alone. A nothing, a virgin memory.
A grease-spot. A dirty chair-back.
FRANKENSTEIN IN THE FOREST
‘I am afraid for the meat
Of my illegitimate son
In the warm autumn.
When will the lightning come?’
Much wisdom had congregated there
In the open-air laboratory which is a cemetery
Under the great oaks
In the litter of acorns:
Mute parcels of impending forests.
There are grim-mouthed toads
Flocked round a boulder of quartz
Deep, complex and prodigious
That gloams in its depths
And twitches there as with a flutter of lightning.
On a portable radio
The size of a hymn-book
A harpsichord plays Scarlatti,
It suffers an attack of amnesia
As the lightning steers near.
The darkness has eaten everything except his face
The alert wise face
Backed by a view of tossing trees,
The bones of his skull
Are as loose as the leaves of the forest,
‘I will send lightning through him
It will live under his skin
It will heal his mouldering
Undead bric-à-brac of other men.
There are so many bibles
Without a crack of light;
Mine has pages of slate
With fossils clearly inscribed,
Leather from racehorses
And crocodiles,
Thin frying leaves of electricity
That lies obediently in its place,
Man-skin, oak-bark and quartz. …’
The marble grave-stones
Are covered with equations
In the master’s quick black analytick crayon,
Their stone books open at only one page;
‘It is my great lightning son
Dressed in metal and bark
And the limbs of departed men,
Lightning peers out of his eyes;
He will heal their mouldering.
It is time
To raise him on the sizzling platform.’
The lightning makes a blue cave of the forest,
It strikes violently at a hawthorn tree,
A sweet smell fills the air,
It has blossomed heavily.
Now the bright blue
Thistling sparks have stuck to his poles,
His crystal machine
Fills with spangled golden oil.
His golden beehives’ buzz rises to a wail
And the monster ascends on its winches,
The clouds draw up their heavy black pews
The rain falls
And the lightning services.
The storm clears.
Cloud-men are digging
Deep blue graves in the sky.
Out of the machine steps
The man, mute, complex and prodigious,
His clothes flickering with electricity,
His first murder not due until tomorrow.
THE HALF-SCISSORS
Humming water holds the high stars.
Meteors fall through the great fat icicles.
Spiders at rest from skinny leg-work
Lean heads forward on shaggy head-laces
All glittering from an askew moon in the sky:
One hinge snapped; a white door dislocated.
The night leans forward on this thin window;
Next door, tattered glass,
Wind twittering on jagged edges.
Doors beat like wings wishing to rise.
I lean forward to this thin fire.
A woman leaves – even the flames grow cool –
She is a one hinge snapped, I am a half-scissors.
DR FAUST’S SEA-SPIRAL SPIRIT
For Julie Kendrick
I am frightened. It makes velvet feel too tall.
Its crest peers in at the library window and I cannot open the books,
They hug themselves shut like limpets months after it has gone.
The roses have learnt to thunder,
The sky looks like blue boxes of white powder being smashed by grey fists.
God is an angel in an angel, and a stone in a stone,
But everything enters this, and is gone.
That cry makes everything look afraid
And how small a whisper do we hear of him
Merely the brushing of his outer garment.
It passes pallidly over the meadow
And suddenly it is brilliant with pollen
It will now seek out female fields of flowers
It cannot help that, they will draw him.
It will pass through a field of bulls
And every hair will be stripped
And every bone broken
But the seed will spin on
A column of translucent horn pulled to the cows
Its seething tip.
It will so use a city
For the sake of one woman.
It destroyed an archipelago.
It was selecting human organs and a dhoti.
It reverses direction and is a person
For I have spoken to him, and he inhales deeply
And thinks deeply, and he speaks and he ceases speaking
Then there is an unforgettable perfume on the air
The woman to fit which I will seek for ever,
And an unforgettable tune for her to walk to.
That cry makes everything look afraid.
The bones float up to the ceiling and the iron bar bends.
It strips a whale for its immense bones
And stands the empty meat on its tail.
The rapid alteration of perfumes in it
Will kill with alternation of memories.
It is a shop of carpets furling and unfurling.
The plain pinafores alert themselves
And are a hive of angry spots.
It is a house of wineglasses and towering butter and cabbages
And its scream is the cry of wool under torment
Or a silk scream, and it is constructed like buttons
And I cannot hear what he is saying
For the wool-and-bone
Screaming at me of his buttons.
Yet the practised shaman
Drums until it appears,
Runs up its sides and travels the whole earth over,
Pees over its crown, a magical act
It is his glass ladder to heaven, his magical cannon
That can be fired once only, what nonsense!
Master Alice descended it, inspecting the good things
Arrayed on its shelves, it may also be summoned
By wounding the air upwards
With a rifle, or by burning Dresden
(There it was seen spinning between
Ranks of buildings gustily burning,
Casting light from winged chevrons), or
By laying the Tarot in an anti-clockwise pattern.
I suspect it and its wife are responsible for Moses’ head
And the ten great transmissions whose echoes never stop
Piped along the pair of them hurt my head too
Among all the others.
It will also let down as on a four-cornered cloth
Ancient gifts and treasures, such as
A whole slum of Ambergris like a
Giant’s pock-marked skull in curly earwax.
God was found with his head poxed to the bone
He had walked through a hungry cloud of it
It is everywhere it is one and many
It is ships of the desert-seas that sail fleets of it
It stands in linked chains on a calm among icebergs
It is playing its enormous chess and takes a berg with one of itself
Crashing a boom, and it takes each other
With a twang like a bridge breaking,
At Christmas dinner I have cracked it
Out of the brown dust of a walnut and as the bathwater runs out
It tickles my toes, it is manifold behind the iron doors
Of the neglected casemate, swinging
And breathing in restless thickets,
They say space is sewn of it and I have seen it pouring through the telescope
There it is at the north pole shining with the moon
And with the midnight sun, go to the south pole you will find it there too,
And between them they keep us all spinning
Growing so tall their crests freeze and throw off
Ice-circlets sparkling, flying diadem upon diadem
Called UFO by the observers, scrutinizing our latitudes.
And yet I have known it
Stand still at my right hand long enough
I have opened the little cupboard in its flank
And plucked out the small brown monkey who lives there
Who became my friend and stayed with me a good while.
It wrenched itself from the head, and the head listened with its lack,
It wrenched itself from the rock, and the snail crept in its wake.
To Red Indians it always carries a dead spider gently in its buzzing jaws
As the refugee mother carries her dead baby many miles in the dusk.
The anatomist tells me I have a pair of small idols of it set in my head
That are the kernel of hearing: the tone-deaf apparition
Is a river on tiptoe, rhythmically digesting its own bed.
But it is also a band of eyes and a solid wall of God
Seeking embrace, and it is the great one from the North
That opens like theatre-curtains and there are four beasts marching
With a man on a throne inside, but I know too
That it sets with a click and leaves skimming on the waves
The great pearly nautilus that lets out its sails and scuds gently off
Its inhabitant glowing dimly through the thin shell walls
A coil of luminous foam by night and a swimming red bone by day.
Thus it seems to me. To itself
It is trees, with high leafy galleries
And scrolls of steel, equation-shaped; a man, bearded,
Strolls up its staircase, a bird
Alights on its branches. With our spiral stairs
We have built it homage, it mounts itself in homage
To its own perfected double helix; that crucifix
Dangling between your breasts is a long-section of it.
Like the unicorn’s horn it is male and female at once
And emits waves of all lengths from intense internal friction,
It will make a white sound on your transistor
Though a few notes of church organ might fly together:
Chance will have it so among all the other sounds;
And the electricity that branches through its lacquered walls
Is of a purer fine than armature-power, that whining sham;
You can time a great clock on its global pulse.
It is the pouring tower of pebbles
That walks the coast glittering in the cool evening,
It is trees among trees that are trees
Until it decides to leave the forest by revolution.
But men have pinned the giant down in clocks and churches
I watch its face wounded hour after hour
Behind the glass of my bedside clock,
Hacked into numbers, plucked
By enumerating metal
Welded inside a castle:
Within its fortress-windows rounded axes
Powered by its replica in metal
Chink like milled money
Fiscal time
But I would love to go to the church
And be served by its priest
In whirling petticoats
Where the Host
Greasy with electricities
Flies into our mouths
Like flocks of roasted pigeons.
It changes place
s
With Job continually.
It carries seven directions in itself
And five elements,
Music, and thunder,
And small gods laughing with patient happiness.
Slice it low down and find a fish
Lower still, granite and chrysoprase
Fairly high, the embryo babe in water
Higher still, his wail winds out of the wound
He travels at youth-speeds
In the slimmer reaches
Moves zodiac-slow with beards
Through the greater girths.
I take a sip
From the cup chained to its waist.
Faust shunted himself.
Indeed he tamed it
Peered through the sea in it
Inspected the mountain for gems.
I saw him bounding over the Carpathians
Like a child on a pogo-stick.
To cheat the devil he was interred in it four hundred years.
Its grip over the land has eased.
Warm summer breezes
Flow from its palm
Faust strolls happily
Through its flowering palms.
At the bow, the atom; at the stern, the zodiac.
The atomic bomb is a bad picture of it, clumsy and without versatility,
It discriminates not at all, and there are too many bad things to say about it,
I will not spend time on that figment of the thing I am talking about.
It hums like a top and its voice smashes volcanoes,
Yet it will burrow and from the riflings of Etna
Speed skyward, hurtling pillar of red rock.
The mouth is not necessarily a one-way trip
Though you should take plenty of room.
It has shaggy lips, a necklace of pines.
It electrifies Perranporth sand-dunes
Every grain crackles and hums
In flickering organ-notes under
My blue slippered prints.
It is a great traveller and sometimes slips
Up its own back-passage to assuage its terrible wander lusts.
When men and women embrace
They impersonate it
They are a cone of power
An unbuilt beehive
We two are a brace of them behaving as one
We invaginate, evaginate,
Time stops inside us.
In it the ticking
Of innumerable stolen clocks
Welds to an organ-note.
It is sometimes made of lightning
And at others nothing but magnetism.
It is a kind of knot
Too intricate to undo
Too virile to pull tight.
Untied, a world explodes,
Tied, it winks out.