Collected Poems
Page 23
A lustrous great spider he fly-fed; he had become
Clever enough to snatch them on the wing
Wondering at how the beautiful webs
Could yet be spun out of the corrupt glues
That were the fly’s food; he mused upon
Those husks caught up in orrery rounds,
Emptied of all purpose, yet white
And winged as angels. He knew
The silk of his employment was spun by worms
Of a moth, and dreamed of feeding that moth
To his spider, the silk would be redistilled, radiant
With the light and pulsing beauty of all the trembling moths
That spin silk clothes for the babies of themselves
Wrapped and cross-clawed like an Egyptian Karast.
III
The butterfly or the sulphur-moth sucking at her weed
Is only one of the beauties; her transformation
To thin taut threads under the same sun on which the spider
Dances to eat her is another of them,
The skeletal patterns of cracked shadows in the sun;
And the beauty of the crabby lichen-back
That chucks her loins from side to side
Like Lola Montez, and tiptoes out
To wrap on tautened lines her prey in bales,
Is yet another, as he thinks
Drowsily of sleep, that great spider
Bending down to suck his soul from his face,
Kissing face to face, and turning it
Into that sensitive web which fills the nightworld
And catches fluttering dreams for nourishment;
So Renfield’s madness or peculiarity
That loved the creaures so
The rest of us despise, led him
Fearlessly into the night of dreams,
Young silk-factor, where he met the master, Vlad,
Who fed him endlessly from thin soft hands.
IV
Who fed him endless streams of drops on wings
Like mother’s milk, choice flies, and told him:
‘Be that spider whom you fear, I, Vlad Dracula,
Will so transform you, as you wish,’ and showed him how
Life flows in liquid drops, through fangs,
Creature to creature, in chains of drops like webs,
And whose work he did, so long as he was strong,
Guiding the young white girls to dance
Upon the webs without being caught by Death,
Raising them to drink as It did, spiderly,
Until fly-swatting Van Helsing clapped his fat palms
Smack and said ‘No more of those,’ wiping hands
Stained from the stake down immaculate spun hose.
ORCHARD WITH WASPS
The rouged fruits in
The orchard by the waterfall, the bronzed fruits,
The brassy flush on the apples.
He gripped the fruit
And it buzzed like a gong stilled with his fingers
And a wasp flew out with its note
From the gong of sugar and scented rain
All the gongs shining like big rain under the trees
Within the sound of the little waterfall
Like a gash in the apple-flesh of time
Streaming with its juices and bruised.
Such a wasp, so full of sugar
Flew out within the sound
Of the apple-scented waterfall,
Such a gondola of yellow rooms
Striped with black rooms
Fuelled with syrups hovering
At the point of crystal,
Applegenius, loverwasp, scimitar
Of scented air and sugar-energy
Shining up his lamp-tree tall and devious
Given utterly to its transformations
From sharp-scented flowers to honey-gongs,
Giver and taker of pollination-favours,
A small price for such syrups and plunderings,
Its barky flesh, its beckoning fruit,
Its deep odour of cider and withering grasses,
Its brassy bottles and its Aladdin gold-black drunks.
THE LAUNDROMAT AS PRAYER-WHEEL
I
The whirling pole bound up in linen,
The Lord of the Dancing Axle-tree;
There is a resurrection with a loud synoptic cry.
We move from place to place like shadows of the whiteness
Of these garments which seem woven of light
As they draw out of the mechanical sepulchre.
It is the night of the Mystery of White Shapes,
The angel is here, a splendid presence, like electricity in linen,
I fold the double sheet up, I wrestle with its wings.
The dazzling garments like dead bodies light the tombs
Of resurrection-devices, washing-machines in lines,
There are dancers full of water in the drums
That dance their twisty music to the coins,
Elastic celebrants treading in the tombs
Unwinding reels of flickering ghost-films.
The tumbling shirts are scalded fresh,
The hankies fluttering
Like the leaves of a white oak in a blowy cave.
The ghosts that appear in sheets!
Whisk the sheets aside, and what is under? Puffed water,
Geist, Gischt, gust or swimming foam.
When the neutron bomb explodes, it is the garments that survive.
A spotless white shirt falls shuddering to the floor,
A muslin gown settles peacefully to the grass.
He is clad in a cloud of fresh clothing warm and dry.
A really white shirt feels white when your eyes are shut.
The coffin-maker of Nazareth was a snow-white carpenter.
II
The superiority and glamour of a candid white garment.
As though wrapped in light, like a white-washed house,
I study the radiance of my shirt with my eyes shut,
As though wrapped in lightning, among the thunderstorms.
Men clothe themselves in dark in imitation of the clouds,
They darken their white clothing to show obedience
To the natural courses, the tinctured farmer bends
Over his muddy fields as the rain-clouds do.
Toiling in mud will not reproduce the lustre
Of low clouds as will acacia or indigo.
The naked body is vile, and lacking in speech,
The clothed flesh belongs to a man of eloquence
Whose skin of alertness converses with the hugs,
The featherings of movement, whose skin
Instructs him that a garment is a reservoir
Soaked in strength, and fabric a tunic of kisses
Like the heavenly tube through which the earth flies,
Arraying to their seasons, echoing.
Even the rain is white, and has a white belly,
Is affable, and clasps the gowned body
With its soaking grip in lighthouses of lustre.
LECTURE OVERHEARD
A great white ear floating in the sky, listening. I say
That your hair is but the beauty of ashes of blood
Passed out through your skin. I tell you how
We all live in our manacles which are
The food-chains forged by the sea.
Light Pours on to the brine, and the little creatures
Which are green dust thrive there, to be eaten
By the larger: small creates the great.
We munch the daft-eyed herring of that union,
We lift the salty waves of its flesh off the hairy bones.
The great tree of water flourishes over the sea
And begins walking on its visible roots
And then rain storms over all the land.
Holes are blown in houses, and their roof-scales
Lifted off the hairy tim
bers. It lightens and
Dissolved nitrates leach into the soil, the great
Thunder-voice utters fertility. In its echoes
Rings of trees spread out and protect our land
From the leaky repeated visits of the white water-engines
Of dazzling rain cranked out of the depths.
Grass spreads its tablecloths, and the cattle feast,
Our feast feasts. We pocket ourselves
Under open stone books and gravestones
But our substances distil in needlework
Of water back to the sea and there become
Dust-creatures and the shock-eyed salmon.
I have carved a large spider in wood
I have incised its globular body with the food-chains
Which wreathe about its jaws. See, the spider is hinged
At the edge of its carapace – open it – there is
A little carving of a baby, smoothly-grained,
Nestling deep in its spider-box, the future
Nested in the spider. The great white ear
Passes on, having overheard. We listen to the sea
Which renews, you can hear the reversal
Coming and going, with its sighs. The great ships
Pass by in chains, loaded with provisions.
GUNS AND WELLS
I
The artillery-men wait upon the big gun,
They have its banquet piled
And ready in greased pyramids,
They serve the long fat shells like cannelloni,
The gun munches with an explosion.
Molten tears silver our countenances,
Vomit of metal plates the cornfields,
Men blow away like smoke in the ringing brisants.
No doing of mine, says chef-commandant,
I feed the guns only when they are hungry.
II
She tells me the polished skull of a traitor
Lurks in this well still,
His comrades gave rough justice,
Over the parapet laid his bare neck,
Cutlass-sliced that smuggling head,
Which dropped like a boulder
And is down there to this day, she said,
Polished nearly to nothing,
Bobbing in the well-spring,
Folding and unfolding in the polishing water,
Almost glass, and papery-thin,
Ascending, descending on variable cool water,
Nodding upon a current which is a spine,
Spinning like a film of faintest shadow
Or flexile churchwindow,
Reflating when rain fattens the spring;
Then a sunbeam
Strikes down the brick shaft
And there gazes upwards, revolving in the depths,
A golden face; then the sun
Goes in and the water goes on polishing.
THE WHITE, NIGHT-FLYING MOTHS CALLED ‘SOULS’
I
Their bodies all uncanny slime and light,
I brush silvery maggots off my white bible.
We are copies of each other. Bound in leather
The book crawls among us with a loud voice,
Dead men’s matter wormed into chapters
Between the first communion doeskins.
Worms are the messengers rustling in the print with quills,
Masters of God’s word, the bible bookworms;
We are dead men’s matter, gene-edited,
Say God’s bibles, covered with worms.
II
The moths flutter at the candles like clothed ladies,
Like long ladies in Assyrian gauzes;
The moonbeams twine through the flowers creating nectars,
The moths sip, and reclothe the moonbeams in light leathers
And dusty gauzes like Assyrians for their dances,
And these moonbeam moths sup at the candles
Like soft explosions.
The sunshine falls on meat, creating liquors
The blackflies sip
Dressing bright sun in greasy leathers,
Tight shining leathers, and like Assyrian dragons
Trample on my bible-hide and kneel roaring
At top pitch, dabbing with their suctions.
The little bony flies come to the Bible
Because it reeks of sacrifice. O God,
Burnt offerings like blue candles of the ghats
Twirl in smokes of fat to Your motionless courts,
And we brushed the stout Baal-zebub flies away
That wished to wing Your meat, and clothe it, God,
In white maggot-skin, like bibles. The Lord’s talon
Out of thunder slashes meat, scorches off the skin
Like opening His book, and He snuffs the odour,
Clothing the meat-nectar in the Lord God; and Who
Brings His own untouched flesh to His pregnant Bride?
III
The wireless at midnight gives out its hum
Like a black fly of electricity, folded in wings.
A moth like a tiny lady dances to the set,
This hum is light to her, a boxed warm candle,
This set has inner gardens full of light.
Our baby, like a moth, flutters at its mother,
Who mutters to her baby, uttering milk
That dresses itself in white baby, who smiles
With milky creases up at the breast creating
Milky creases, and milk-hued water
Hangs in the sky, waiting for its clothes,
Like a great white ear floats over us, listening
To the mothy mother-mutter, or like a sky-beard smiles
And slips into its thunderous vestry and descends
In streaming sleeves of electrical arms
To run in gutters where it sucks and sings.
SONG
I chuck my Bible in the parlour fire.
The snake that lives behind the bars there
Sucks at the black book and sweats light;
As they burn together, the codex
Flips its pages over as if reading itself aloud
Memorising its own contents as it ascends curtseying
Like crowds of grey skirts in the chimney-lift,
In particles of soot like liberated print.
The vacant text glows white on pages that are black.
The stars, those illustrious watchers
Arranged in their picture-codes
With their clear heartbeats and their eager reading stares
Watch the guest ascend. Around us in the parlour
The inn-sign creaks like rowlocks.
The drinkers glower as my book burns,
Their brows look black
Like open books that turning thoughts consume.
Then all at once
With a gesture identical and simultaneous
Of reaching through the coat right into the heart
They all bring out their breast-pocket bibles
Like leather coals and pile them in the fire
And as they burn the men begin to sing
With voices sharp and warm as hearth-flames.
The black pads turn their gilded edges and
The winged stories of the angels rise
And all that remains is our gathering’s will
Which assembles into song. Each man sings
Something that he has overheard, or learnt,
Some sing in tongues I do not understand,
But one man does not sing. I notice him
As my song takes me with the others. He is
Setting down the words in rapid shorthand
In a small fat pocketbook with gilded edges.
PHEROMONES
(Pheromones are ‘external chemical messengers’ given off by the body. They are said to communicate profound emotional and physiological effects from person to person.)
Dreaming of a dog, whose nostrils
Are his lightless e
yes, means
Murder and riches; under the sunshine
Blazers bright as bluebells
With brass buttons yellow as butter;
The strong light
Shooting down the polished walking-sticks,
Running in sticks and streams,
Calls like trumpets
To the game;
The sea hedgehogged in gold,
Frogged in it, like a great blue blazer:
The great doorman with the labouring heart.
In this heat your scent is a snapshot,
Your spoor streams from you like a fragrant picture.
Your fingers
Sniff down your glass and walk into my lap.
It is so hot
My sex is a shelled snail,
And I excuse myself from You
For my nostrils wish to savour
The self-scent of my own sex
This gathering promotes,
And so my smelling fingers tremble first
At the eternal curry-smell of the brass handle
Of the metal of trumpets of the Gents
That it never loses or ever could lose;
Doubtless a dog would know its master
For over the brass in thinnest films are laid
The identities of all who have here touched themselves.
I bend my nose to the knob, for I swear
The champion of tennis employs this place;
I would know his sweat anywhere
After that magical game:
He filled the court with the odours of his perfect game,
Excellent musk, wiping his handle;
Let the trumpets call his prize!
I enter and am girded with personalities,
Long ghost snailing from the bowls
And gutters; my own genius mingles with that
Of the champion and the forty-seven assorted
Boozers I can distinguish here in silent music,
In odorous tapestries. In this Gents
We are creating a mingled
Essence of Gent whose powers
To the attuned nose
Are magnificent indeed
And shall affect the umpires
Who shall agree with what their noses
Tell them strides viewless from the urinal
Where the gentlemen sacrifice into stone bowls
In silent trance. Oh how
The tennis champion strikes pheromones
Under my guard with his far-sighted nose;
He has brought us to heat which calls him