Collected Poems
Page 16
Bright-sparkle in water-sound, deafened by glass.
IV
Among the always-twitching hands of fire
The creatures watch us, lobster
Ripped spiky from its pattern of imagined evil,
Precision prawns, those workers in glass,
And the biscuit-coloured, jet-propelled
And boot-faced cuttlefish.
They lean and tap the glass, and shiver
As we scratch back. To them
We are as they are, sea-creatures that float
With no support along the fiery corridors.
Through the glass
They wish to eat us, and turn us to themselves,
We lean back at them, our watery mouths
Like smashed aquaria with jagged fangs,
We return each others’ looks among fiery hands.
PICTURES FROM A JAPANESE PRINTMAKER
(Exeter Museum, August 1974)
I
Actor robed for a bravura role
Caught in the rain. He lifts a fist,
He threatens the thundercloud
With slices of his sword. Lightning strikes
Like gongs. He discards his sword,
It lands in a puddle. He walks away from his damp clothes,
We are dwarfed by his erection.
II
Actor in the role of a ghost-lady
Displaying a scroll. His high black
Eyebrows blocked on the white face
Hold, equilibrated like justice,
Sweetly questioning, ‘Do you
Understand now, my dear?’ before
She puts the scroll away
Tucking it into a sleeve
And rolls herself up.
III
Women being carried across a river
On the backs of husky watermen;
Foaming robes, foaming water;
One woman glances down at the man’s head
Stuck between her legs, taps the face
With her fan. The men are naked to the river
But for breech-cloths and head-bandages,
Their muscles tumesce against the dark brown water.
The ladies are particularly heavy, as they are dressed
In their own rivers of colour
Heavy with rain, heavy with river:
Each of the watermen shoulders his individual river.
IV
Two girls on a country walk. One is a floating head.
She wears a robe of the exact greenness
Of the froggy pond they are passing, so her body goes,
Not even outlined, and her head is turned
Coiffured in oily valances secured with pigmy daggers
Like an armed head appearing above the pond,
Prophesying to her friend in blue.
One instant more:
The girlish friends resume their harmless stroll.
V
A cave-shrine by the sea for communion
With the oysters the visitors sip from the shells
Fetched by naked priests who plunge from pumice rocks
Buoyant as waves-with-faces into the brine,
Pull themselves sitting on to the rocks,
Loosen the sinews of plucked oysters with their knives,
And pass them back up to the visitors for communion
With the sea and each other, for the silked
Visitors are drenched, all holy, all wet,
In the tang of oysters, holy salt water, and any pearls.
VI
Samurai who gets his ki’ai shout
From mating cats, proceeds to contemplating
Frogs in order to improve his
Fighting stance, and his
Fighting expression, and his
Sudden leaps. Foreground
A trinity of frogs enjoy mud-experience
In a sickly cart-track. The Samurai
Is not yet ready for such dingy skills
Of camouflage, he is a
Clean fighter, in young fresh robes.
VII
The story of the solitary house,
A gruesome episode, the pregnant girl
Hoist from the rafters by an ankle-rope
Over a small fire whose smoke rends to reveal
Her hopeless frowning face, while an old woman
Whets a knife, crouched by a block of black stone beneath.
The belly bulbed with baby lolls
So hard and fully-round on the chest
The breathing stops. We await
The amateur caesarian and the child leaping
Upright through the waterfall of blood
Straight to the withered tits and the haggard chest
That will cave to darkness in the monstrous lad’s suck.
Out of this he will leap to beget himself
On the lady who hangs on her rope from the sky
Waiting for pain, the belly pulled round and tight
And taut and full and shining through the cloud-race.
VIII
Beauties crossing by white steamer; the parakeets
Hackle-plunged in foaming cherry-flower; a Buddhist priest
Enraptured by butterflies that swoop in and out
Of his incense smoke, caresses like velvet cloth
The close-springing stubble of his vow-shaven head.
IX
A hero in a faceless helmet, so fierce
His armour bristles with hero-light at every joint,
Confronts his enemy, a gigantic porcupine
Like a black sunburst prickly as he is
Whose face however has informed itself
With bright blue eyes, cat-slotted, and white teeth.
He confounds the beast by leaping on his sword
Balancing on its mirror edge to guide himself
Like twins of fire between the bestial prickles.
X
Two women watch a thunderstorm
By the slid-open paper window, on the sill
A child pulls the pussy’s tail, the women
Have a warm brazier of coals with bamboo handles
But the great cat of thunder strikes with lightning claws
And electricity pours from the mountains,
The dry light twitches inside the women. On a ledge above
Really enjoying the storm, in the pouring rain,
A liberated girl as fairy mandarin
Stands in the midst of flowers created,
Co-operating with electricity, by her feet
That walk surely among precipices
Storms and waterfalls no deeper than she is.
XI
A ferry-boat’s thirty-foot poles for punting
Across the deep river are gripped
Like martial instruments by naked boatmen
For samurai who ride the raft and fiercely gaze
Like wigged sunbursts everywhere. Most people
Avoid that gaze, as do the women
Hurrying across the bridge who tilt
Their great hats as to downpour and hide their faces
That way, with the brims. One, however,
Carries a hatless child who gazes frankly
Down from the trailing bridge deep into the fierce water-faces.
WINTER OAT-FLIES
(Hamilton: Upstate New York)
Generations of black snowflakes, frail and durable,
Nothing to them, husk begat husk on husk,
A few jointed vestments put aside of a scorched colour,
Or walked by a dab of moisture:
Just bash the air near them,
That ruptures their skinny heart.
They fly with a soft hum, a low scream
And that sound is all they are
In a suit of dry fingernail, a life
Of tissue-paper and sliver, a lick of sun
Brings them out, or a fart, their instant
Resurrections almost hairless after so many returns
&
nbsp; Like tan grapes or banded like oats. Winter sunshine
Shows labouring gizzards like X-ray shadows.
Lycosid spiders patrolling the picture-rails
Spare their leaps, it would be squeezing dry oranges.
I wish they had somewhere better
To hang their toy eggs like sallow bananas,
And unzip their coffins to a better life,
Some oak-grove for little Draculas …
The snow through the window has more strength than they:
Generations of whitefly-swarms rivetingly six-legged,
Glassy as myriads of cod-pieced gloss-suited astronauts
No bigger than these oat-flies
But pulsing down and settling in white cities
Like the million hands of the slow winter watches.
ON LOSING ONE’S BLACK DOG
(an expression meaning ‘to reach the menopause’)
I
Thigh-deep in black ringlets,
Like a shepherdess at a black sheepshearing;
Like a carpentress in a very dark wood
Sawdust black as spent thunderstorms;
Like a miller’s wife of black wheat
The stones choked with soot;
Like a fisherwoman trawling black water
Black shoals in the fiddling moonlight
Squaring with black nets the rounded water;
Like an accountant, knee-deep in black figures,
A good fat black bank balance in credit with grandchildren!
Tadpole of the moon, sculptress of the moon
Chipping the darkness off the white
Sliving the whiteness off the night
Throw down the full gouges and night-stained chisels!
Coughing black
Coughing black
Coughing black
The stained lazy smile of a virgin gathering blackberries.
II
We opened the bungalow.
The sea-sound was stronger in the rooms than on the beach.
Sand had quiffed through the seams of the veranda-windows.
The stars were sewn thicker than salt through the window
Cracked with one black star. A map of Ireland
Had dripped through the roof on to the counterpane
But it was dry. There was no tea in the tin caddy,
Quite bright and heartless with odorous specks.
There was a great hawk-moth in the lavatory pan.
Our bed was the gondola for black maths, and our
Breakfast-table never had brighter marmalade nor browner toast.
Two ladies in a seaside bungalow, our dresses
Thundered round us in the manless sea-wind.
Her day-dress: the throat sonata in the rainbow pavilion.
We kiss like hawk-moths.
III EPHEBE
The beating of his heart
There was no translation
Eyes so round
The lad looked at me milkily
I had his confidence
In the dry street
Out came his secret
‘The Battleship,’ he said,
‘We’re going to see the Battleship’
As though a flower told me
Opened its deep pollens to me
He had teeth perfect and little as
Shirtbuttons, fresh and shining
He was about eight
Like a flower grown in milk
‘The Battleship!’ he said
So lively supernatural
His soft thumbprint
Creeping among the canines
IV CRY JELLIES AND WINE
Preparing jellies and wines in autumn
Sad wife alone
The rooms golden with late pollen
The neat beds turned down
The children smiling round corners
Sweet-toothed, sweet-headed
Her fruit, her blueberries on canes
The sad wife who would not listen
Boiling jellies, filtering wines in autumn
What shall she tell the children
They will not listen
They love jellies, russet jams
The sad wife in autumn
Her jellies and wines stolen
Stolen by love, stolen by children
The rooms golden with pollen
V A VIBRANT WASP
A wasp hanging among the rose-bines:
Footballer wandering in an antique market;
Damask and ebony, mahogany thorns, greenglass rafters, veined parquets.
Again he struck the wasp with the sheets of paper and
Believes he kills it; the wasp
Clinging to the tendon of his ankle looked very sporting and official
In black and gold clinging by the tail the high-pitched pain
Was yellow streaked with black oaths
He could not find the wasp-body it had been sucked
Along his nerves
after the rage
There is a sore pain turning to lust
That afternoon a plucky infant was conceived
Full of an infant’s rage and juices
He struck once, and conceived
He struck at the wasp once, his child
Ran in out of the garden, bawling like a plucky infant
Teased beyond endurance in a striped football jersey among gigantic cronies.
VI THE STATUE OF HER REVERED BROTHER-IN-THE-BOAT
She catches the bloodless statue of her
Revered boatman-brother a ringing blow with
A mallet; the pure note vibrating
Through the gouged stone sustains
For three hours of morning reverie
During which time at this pitch
(Om) her petitions come to pass
Beyond her expectations, or anybody’s:
gardens, walks,
Silvery lads and encounters among the knotgardens,
Clavichords humming to the shrill-chanting beds
In the manor dark as horn. Too soon
The singing stone falls silent and it is not yet time
To strike the next blow. Now that she has seen everything
It is time to strike the last blow, now that she has
Nothing further to ask, it is time to plead
That the rigid statue may grant its greatest boon and walk
As her living and immortal brother among
All the beds and garden beds and wives and grandchildren
Proved by the magic of her singing jewel; but first
Before he can so walk she must strike some blow,
The ultimate blow, the blow to end all blows
To finish things one way or the other, that will either
Reduce the great icon to bloodless rubble or
Free her brother to return
rowing in
From the further shore: either
Make the wishing-stone alive in granting
The goal of bliss, or
shatter felicity, all.
(This blow
Is struck only by the lunatic when the moon is
Full and directly overhead and the stony particles
Aligned like the cells of a yearning throat
Ready to sing, the birth-passage of man-song
Through a woman-throat)
In the beginning it was violence only and the shedding of blood
That started the gods singing.
VII AT THE PEAK
The tables laid with snow
Spotless cold napery
Tense white snowmen
Seated on snowthrones
Knives of sharp water
Icepuddle platters
Iceflowers
Carving the snowgoose
Slices whiter than pages
The sun rises
The self-drinkers
Swoon under the table,
Glitter the mountain.
The rivers foam like beer-drinkers
And meat you can eat.
VI I I THE TUTORIAL
My anointing
Gathers him
I draw the shapes of him
He has yet to learn
Over his skin
He recognises them
Flowing from feet to head
Baptism
He is a stony river, he swims with his head on the river
The brown body
I draw wings in the oil along his back
He is a youthful messenger
I anoint his chest
He is one of the facetious learned folk
Silky
It is my learning
I tweak his nipple
The county thunders
White oil
Displaces my
Black mirror.
THE TERRIBLE JESUS
It is the terrible Jesus
He walks on water because he hates its touch
He hates his body to touch everything as water does
(As Orpheus sang from the river of his body)
The ulcers close as he passes by
This is because he rejects ulcers
Anything raw and open, anything underskin
He rejects it or covers it with a white robe
He fasted forty days as long as he could because he hated food
And hated those who gave him food
And put worlds of feeling into his mouth
Lucifer came and tempted him out of natural concern
For this grand fellow starving in the desert
But would he pass the world through him
Like anyone else? Not at all.
He came back from the tomb because death
Looked like hell to him which is another thing
He won’t do, die, not like everyone else.
Nor sleep with the smooth ladies.
Instead he goes up to heaven and hopes
For less participation there in those empty spaces
But from there he calls down to us
And I know those cries are calls of agony since there
All the sweet astrology-stars pierce his skin
It is worse than earth-death that destiny starlight for those