And sacrificed to geology, therefore
Is it any wonder that this stone
Became our patron?
Do you see a person here,
Or just a stone?
Do you see a person in the moonlight,
Or is the Moon just a round stone
With a hare carved on it
Flying without a shaft?
If It is just a stone, why
Does it fly, spreading
Magnetism like feathering wings
Whose beat you see reflected in the tides
Whose claws pluck at the water-margins?
I pause, and look up at the full disc.
Someone has carved a man there
Sitting safely in a boat
On its floodlit surface.
I kiss the head of the Gwennap Cross,
It is a hard and odorous stone
And tingling, but the smell in it
Is as though I kiss
The head of my baby with its rinsed mossy smell.
SALUTING WILLA
(The great boulder at the mouth of Boscastle harbour in N. Cornwall is sometimes known as ‘Willa’.)
The warship glides in like a malicious buffet of cutlery.
Willa’s petticoats are slamming under her stone dress
Like iron doors detonating deep within the rock,
Shuddering through the feet that tread her slate sills,
Her blow-hole smoking and saluting
That has buffed for centuries her inside corridors
With the sea’s rifling from which they shine like glass
As for military inspection. The warship’s personnel
Line their greymetal platforms at attention,
Salute with ship’s guns the rock that has been firing
Its cannon at high tide longer than artillery
Was ever thought of, or steel could float,
The hollow rock volleying from its caves
Returning thunder with thunder
Back to the buoyant anvil hammering
Among the windcells and the catspaws tautly anchored.
THE SIRE OF BRANCHES AND AIR
I
The sire of branches and air.
The low waters begin
To give off their cunny smell;
It means rain is near.
We have the emergency edifice,
The umbrella, which is a cross
Between a city suit and an office.
The moist wind bends the trees
Which have acquired presence
And their extra dimension
From this alluring smell
Forced through their budding branches
From hammered reservoirs like cold pewter shields
To which they add their own pinch of cunning.
They are threads of pulse
To which the breeze
Puts its own beating fingers
Gently, like a bearded physician.
II
The branches toss with such question,
And swell with such abandon,
I think each tree is a child at play,
It has donned the wind
Like a playsuit that thinks up games,
And falls thoughtfully into its quiet folds,
Then the resumed wind mounts
The stiff sire of branches,
It is a ghost trying on bodies,
Streaming over the land and letting them drop
After their battles.
A great face opens laughing
In that tree-head, and in that other
Head, the hair smarms flat as a seal.
I think that elsewhere this spectre also
Is a child; that somewhere in a nursery
Just over the treetops, a child’s
Sleeping body lies in its white bed,
Emptied of the small omnipotent ghost
That can overturn a countryside
Of leafy timbered rooms, like a burglar
Passing invisibly through green walls;
Now large pawmarks appear printed
Across the leafhead and satisfied
The spirit of the child condenses
From the muscles of wind,
Lays itself along the little body and
Shrugs its way back into the angelic countenance.
I open the nursery door on my way to bed,
There is a knowledgeable smell of rain;
I shut the window and notice how still
The cunning trees are on the ridge after the storm.
EARTH SHAKES AWAY ITS DEAD LIKE CRUMBS FROM A CLOTH
They have smoothed their mounds down,
The dead, they have healed the soil and gone;
All is smooth lawn, a trifle long.
Where there was once an orchard of stone,
They have left, however it was done,
Only a seeding lawn, a trifle long
That works in the wind like television:
Across grass pictures, viewless sprinters run,
The prints of an invisible force flying,
Every wing-beat distinct in the grain
Of winnowing stalk and shadowing stem.
They have picked up their skeletons,
The people of clay, they have walked in their bones,
Plucked up their gravestones and not scythed the lawns;
I cannot tell how it was done;
All vanished into grass, a little long.
They have pulled up their static stones,
Their texts, and tucked them under their arms,
They have gone off like borrowers in the evening,
In the twilight returning dull thick tomes;
I wish I knew how it was done,
The graven texts gone.
All that is left is a shivering lawn;
Under it I can’t tell where who was lain,
Or whether or how he is coming again,
The writing gone. Shadows hunt on the wind,
Calf-deep in cool grass I could hardly be stung
By these shadows of snakes, by these skimming scenes
Healed into a park; my feet laved in soft grasses
I wade through green streams.
Where are they hiding? I want to meet them
Now, before they are departed and quite gone.
Will they not be clean
And cool, like this wind-driven lawn,
And like the wind flying into the unknown,
Not by still text kept down, or solemn stone?
ROCK, EGG, CHURCH, TRUMPET
There is a churchy rock
Mothy with seagulls
Looking as it would fly
If only they would beat together
Their bread-mould pinions,
Fly like an angel of rock
With a stubble of wings;
Ripples pass over the rock
As though it were planted thick
With wheat that is mouldering.
The gulls mew-mew.
The rock that has indeed become a church
Is crazy with its wounds,
Having been sliced from the hill and
Blown up from it, and fitted together
On the same hill, a little higher:
The windows moan, the hinges shriek,
It is carved into weeping angels, it is
Thickly-set with their wings and open-mouthed guttering,
And is something between an egg and the rock;
Church is one of three kinds of feathered stone
That cannot fly. An egg is full of feathers,
A sealed stone globe, the pebble of a bird
That has roosted and will roost on a grey rock
That ripples its hide with feathers and shadows
In the creaming tide; and the church
Bellows with song attempting to take off
With the hymning engine of pewed people
Throbbing to us across the waves.
Stone is n
ot just such an inertia –
Look at the little gymnast
Swinging to music along parallel bars
On those long bones; listen to the Tibetan
Flute of bone and the shoulder-blade violin
Strung with gut, and the creamy violin
Held high in the claws of a feathered angel;
The stone moon carved with a hare
Swoops over the feathering sea
That beats like the one tidal wing of the world –
Pull the cold bone up to your lips, Trumpeter,
Bark out with your angel-breath laden with spirits!
THE CAVE41
He stands under a bright sky
With a rotten apple in his hand. It
Is a winged apple, for it is full
Of codling moths, and down the blackened
And webbed paths the seed still hangs
With its leafy corridors, its heaps
Of autumn fruit. The wings of the moth beating
Stir the leaves in the seed; the apple-egg
In his hand is struggling to hatch.
Every wing-beat is a new thought, then the thoughts
Speed from his hand and the sky is dark
With fringed wings and heavy apples, and the wings
Dip and he hears the deep breathing
Of the dead. After this, the conjurer in the head
Can develop his act. In it the clothes
Of the audience shall come to life, and strip
Themselves off the sitters, prance and dance
In the aisles, and the conjurer shall stand aside
And the clothes shall waft on to the stage
And clothes will pull chains of clothes out of hats,
Clothes will saw other clothes in half.
The naked audience, feeling their power
Stripped from them, their talking clothes, their
Eloquent masks and attitudes, shall sit
Attentive, naked as pips, while
The handless, headless, hollow clothes
Shall pull themselves through each others’ textures,
And pray with hollow sleeves held up, and sacrifice
By unbuttoning and falling off the air, and fly
Like moths and lie in heaps like leaves,
The conjurer thinks of his act, holding the winged fruit
In which the seeds sit watching the moths eat.
FULL MEASURES
I
People sailing down the river
In wooden vessels between the magnificent trees,
Leafy cisterns of river standing in their own shadow
Like avenues of barrels in cool cellars
That grope up to feel green in the skies,
River flowing upwards from miraculous bottles
Of willow contentedly rowing the river to God;
The true source hovering, blinding white, over the mountains;
And it is moving with a note, like great brown lorries
Of goods trains rumbling full of water, though it is
Like one long umber room of sequent chambers
Sliding through each other, which are pulses
Echoed from the rainy source, the rocks
It bounds down, the turfs that hold, one long room
Broadening and full of sunlit motes
And recapitulating ripples. Quantities have paused
To fill the trees, to construct shady paths
Before they volplane back to water in the flat
Veined drops of autumn. Other water
Pauses in its stages like passengers
Passing in wooden vessels between magnificent trees.
The sky’s bartender in blackening whitecoat
Prepares his biggest drops, full measures.
II
On the boat made out of trees I drink my beer
And hold it up to pledge the river; it matches,
It is mainly water, and stays a while in me
Rejoicing and transmitting visions
Of where it’s been, some of which I see. The ocean
Drinks at the river’s mouth, the sky
Bends down to sup the waves, and water
Runs invisibly up the wind-ladder
Disclosing as it flies great ice-ships,
Snow-rigged, spunglass frigates, until it is too heavy,
Can go no further, and returns barking,
A great hound of thunder. And on the evening river
Under the leaves the water flies
In winged drops with a sticker drinking
Freely from all a special heavy beer
Fermented in our veins for generations
Travelling in our veins like walking rivers.
FROM THE LIFE OF A DOWSER42
Water is bad for him, much too exciting.
He runs away to Cornwall and drinks
From the sparkling well, Fenten ow Clyttra.
As he lifts the tin cup he wonders,
Trembling like the water in the cup,
What it will show this time, after so long,
They have boiled his water, made him drink tea,
That is stunned water, but he believes it thinks
As it tumbles over rock, breaking white,
Or streams into the high air, breaking white,
Or lies below its lintels in old stone wells
Pondering like some long transparent god
Waiting to be consumed and joined to more of him.
The Dowser believes, looking into his cup
Where air-bubbles in the water cluster
On sheer mirrors like silver tods of grape
And feels like that god about to drink
Some vineyard that is moonlit. He shuts his eyes,
The water is cool, and tin-tasting,
A spectre of earthy darkness brushes by
His throat, and disappears. There is nothing more.
He gets up from his knees and brushes them, regards
The avenue of long grass in which he stands
That burrows into the hillside with at its end
The stone lintel to water like an open wardrobe
With clothes of light flung about the grass
The dew-sheen and the spidery coronets
Which shiver like those bubbles of the well,
And a triple stone head on the cross-beam leering.
Still nothing more. Maybe this
Is enough to dig a well into the hill for,
To sculpt it and process, to make pilgrimage,
But then, why here, when everywhere
I break some slate in a damp cutting and water springs,
Whenever I dig my garden down into the water-table,
Prod five finger-freshets in the ferny turf.
Water is everywhere, and I think with it,
And remember with it, inside this rock
(And raps his knuckle on his brow),
And speak with it, as the clouds make scenes
And scrolling pictures, like a god
Opening his mouth and bellowing through
Lips and beards of water, water streaming
Through him like a fall or force, when
The frowning clouds in white coats came for him
Like falls walking and he forgave them. Now water
Is still in him, and well, and pondering.
GRIMMANDERSON ON TRESCO
A pocket Moonbible by the lacy shore,
A Ladybible of God the Mother,
Of ultimogeniture: the lad
Freshest from the womb inherits
Nothing but fortune’s favour
And extraordinary companions
On the electrifying adventure.
These are not wrinkled scriptures
In fly-dirt size on india paper
Crisp as a fly’s wing; it is
A story-teller’s stout handbook
Of basic situations: the old king
Needs a wife, the great toad like
a wasted moon
Waxes Queen aboveground; the battered soldier
Steals a tinderbox, and has
Dogs with piercing sight at command;
A white snake tasted from a covered dish
Imparts to the breakfasting king bird-speech.
You do not cling to the scripture,
You improvise with spirit.
On a rock above the delta where I read it,
A fruitfly shares my apple with me,
Tastes my fingers and walks about my palm
With its bicycle-pump tongue.
It has a horny frame
Dwindling delicate as a tropical shell;
It is the self-same shell-stuff
As those beautiful thin million ears
Listening inside the Atlantic fetch.
It has cobbled spectacles it cannot take off.
On this dry day my friend
The painted conch with wings,
Sips, sips at my sweat-beads,
As thirsty I puncture my apple’s skin,
Drink its fountains of juice stored up for me,
Read Grimm’s bible by the spumy shore
Where fruitfly swaggering like an inheritor sups
Sweat-apples of my palm’s seamed thoroughfare.
RENFIELD BEFORE HIS MASTER43
(Renfield was the lunatic in Dr Seward’s asylum who assisted Count Dracula during his English expedition, and who loved to eat flies.)
I
He was eight when he started earning
His living in a silk factory;
The big bales, corded with twist,
The incipient peignoirs, the feminine slink.
Was he a spider at all, once?
The managing director nipped the nub
Of his silk-web, at his shiny long table
Sipping at telephones, and his workers, caught,
Buzzing and gossiping
At the endless benches of their lives along which
The silk slid in thin rivers.
II
He liked bouncing in the bales, sneezing into
Their dusty canvas hides like crabby shells –
Lying outstretched over them
Gripping the cordage with one’s hands
And one’s feet braced, one’s loins
Buried in some special penknifed silken gash, and one was
That male spider with a bellyful of silk oneself.
He would watch the canteen flies,
All possible silk, and at home
He kept in a pearly bottle choked with gossamer
Collected Poems Page 22
