Down the small path to the winding marsh
Where the alders bend and lave their heads in mud
He visits for a predawn ritual prayer.
He hoods himself in that same alder-yeast of spring,
Makes of himself a sculptor’s rough of mud
With a clod face in which the live eyes beat, rehearsing
The entrance of the sun into the wood, the eye-bestowing;
In the marsh’s bubbling spring that feeds
The ferment from a rock, washes off the worst.
For breakfast, bacon
Like sea-sliced strata eaten in the bath.
The child, blood relative
Acting on his behalf in the future, God Willing,
Is learning to read by putting out
Long trains of coloured pictures: witch, jelly, giraffe;
She is also learning vocabulary, it seems,
By touching her Mother.
The ships are drawn up close to the shore;
Great felled trees, are they sleeping, or dead?
The ships are sleeping. The vine
Has smuggled a dew-scroll through the half-open window,
Is shooting arrows made of bees
On a bow made of flowers and bines. In the harbour
Men have busied themselves inside the whales
With their paring-tools; they are drawn up close to the shore
With open mouths and lighted bellies like the naves of churches.
With her, there is the time for playing horse
And the time for stringing pearls. Her blouse
Opens past the pearls into its vaults.
I wash the mud from my head; she says
‘You are all eyes.’
DRINK TO THE DUKE
The Duke of Burgundy, who represents
The drunkenness of battle,
With the deep purple of its soldiers,
Those bottles of hot blood
Caved in immense tuns
Under the battle-field, bottlefield,
Where it travels with its iron into the grapes;
Burgundy, you are drinking soldiers,
And have always done so –
And the Duke in his iron rage,
His moustache erect, his eyes bolting,
Reining his horse so she stands
Huge on her hind legs,
And the great insect carapace leaning sideways
With its white eyes in the coal-scuttle helmet
Glaring like the soul of a mantis,
And the noble sword scything down,
Uncorking you, drinking you by the neck.
GRAND BUVEUR I
Two barmaids play by squirting beer,
Soak each other from the taps; a miniature
Of champagne shaken by a bar-squire,
With his finger as a nozzle, leaps in spray so
The room floats with zest and spiritous dew
Like the holy Celonese festival of white-shirted girls
Squired by squirted coloured waters
So that soon everybody is rainbows after a ritual storm.
Drunkenness arrives
As in the darkroom
Fluttering in alchemical trays
The vision on red paper in black silver is suddenly complete;
Or as the dew
Forming with perfect bell-roundness
Like bells of glass in harmony
Rings echoes of itself on every grass-blade,
Harmony of lenses, each reflecting all,
Dew suddenly there like knowledge,
Over the surfaces of the brain the perfect nerve-drew
Arriving in the grey meadows of brain,
Like drunkenness, complete.
And the depth of his drinking suddenly fits
End to end like all the pints fastened
Into a glass-lined well that reaches through the years
He calls down it and echoes call him back
To a Sunday walk on a Somerset hill by an orchard
Where the boy lay down having bought cider
From Farmer Gregory, virgin cider
Harvested by virgins, purchased by them, and dreamed
A fabled animal pacing through the trees,
A deer with silver antlers between which spun the moon,
Pacing through the big dew of apples formed to perfection,
Every bristle of its pelt sharp, but within
The black dews steady in the violin velvet skull
His image trapped.
GRAND BUVEUR II
An impure
Draughty tourbillion opens in my throat
With the desire for a smoke. I resist
For a space, and only for a space, otherwise
The evening would be spoilt. The spirit of tobacco, sure,
Is a greater power than the individual cigarette,
And there is an abyss between immaculate and filthy,
Cause for rejoicing; I pollute myself carefully.
Drunk, and smoking, he sees
The qualities of things and not their consequences;
Friends, I was afraid, the swift-drawing flue
Of her white neck in the soot-hued dress
Is of such quality, and I cannot know
The consequences. The little pat
Of butter melted between her thighs,
The butter. I had the feeling of my seed
Rooting, a feeling of rotation
As of parachutes winding into groves
Of bamboo, thick-set, the summation.
She shakes the rain off the tree-pattern on her blouse,
She shines like a peacock in the wet,
In the rain, she flowers, her cigarette goes out,
As I tread in her stream
There is no space or time, my hand passes
Into her collar, a clean wet tourbillion.
MASTER PISS-ON-HIMSELF
(Universal Pissoir)
It is the garden
Of Master Piss-on-Himself
Who made the dew.
He causes the trumpets to roar
As he indicates the falls
Abounding in their multitudes.
His votives are the grassy shrines of tiles
In continuous baptism and imageless union
With the dew. He caused the lashing tempest.
He rounded the fat drops of the unctuous shower.
The wet turns all our rags to silk.
The rain rings lightly on the rims
As the squall drives through the belfries.
It is the park of Master Piss-on-Himself,
His groves are big grass whose mossy trunks
Glitter with peppery springs all night, all day.
LEGIBLE HOURS
The legibility of the evening,
The union of grapes,
We drink it and its spiritous consummation
In this brandy that shines in the dark within,
With the lamps blowing,
The flames like enraged tigers
Roaring in their thin glittering cages,
Ravenous oil-eaters.
The stinking shadows fly out of the wooden windows.
In the dawn, the brittle machine of salt,
The salt bread of the sea, fish for breakfast,
Feathery skeleton, pinion of the sea;
On the smooth-spun sand
Imprint of constellations,
Starcast of the brine, starfish.
Then the evening made legible
By the recording of a ghost
Or an opera of ghosts, the impress,
The mediumistic conches attending, the ear-shells,
The ghost’s whorls spinning in their skirts,
Her contractions and ululations,
Her abyssing to her still axle,
Her repeats, her expansion
To the night sky, circling,
The display and occultation
On the night air of her g
rave that turns.
The legibility of the house.
The courtyard tree,
Green harbour of ten thousand ships
Tending anchor, optical toy of deep shade;
Can you hear the light hum circling in echoes
Around the stream, and the reflections
Caught in the woods and the inextricable shadows
All combing one way, can you? and there!
As the tide turns the weir-sound changes
Its pictures and the tree-head lightens
In the legibility of the grape and the new morning.
GRAND BUVEUR X
To endeavour by drinking to condense
As far as possible the all-pervading
Mother-body of water, to become
One of her whole and rounded bald glisters.
As the web drinks the dew
And displays its coruscations
So the body brims
With burning internalised
Self-interest, like light in drops.
The mind becoming water skims
With transient patterns like the waterflies.
I stroke her web, says the fly,
Which is pearled with icons,
I stroke her glittering moisture,
I stroke her silk,
I am captivated
Says the falling-down
Glass-reversing brittle acrobat
Of the lipped trapezes that tilt
On slow ropes that have elbows.
LOCAL51
for G.M.
The Quiet Woman; the pub where men sat suckling
In the silence; a joke against wives. She was headless
Yet her benefits flowed; she was tongueless
Because we would not listen to her. A joke
Against drinkers. The Son it was
Who listened, whom the womb magnified from His dot,
Who entered shining with it, and returned, the Word
Arising always from the liquid mind, again,
There, as you see it, again there,
The Ever-Coming One, the same
Again, please.
The Ash outside the local is the tree of life
Because it hisses in the wind like serpents;
The midwife takes a stick of green ash
And thrusting one end into the fire
As it burns, receives the sap from the raw end into a spoon,
And gives it to the child for its first tipple;
That was a fortunate child who then could see
And remember with more than the five senses
Of Aristotle; and the lochial ash dropping
Its little veined keys into the warp of water.
His bedlinen upon rising smells of cucumber
And nothing more. Orion stands at ease,
Unbuckled, just above the horizon,
All the moored yachts swaying slightly,
Rattling their bolts and tackle on a tide
That tastes pleasantly, with a savour of cucumber;
Was this how a Saviour might taste?
In this light breeze that smells of cucumber,
The thousand trees that moan because they could be made
Into a hundred thousand yachts or violins.
This is his milestone, by the ash. The Moon
Sinks into it every midsummer. I lust
To sleep, and dream; out of the windows
I watch the misty dunes that are moored
And suddenly on a cold wind their low cloud clears
And their sands pour with its distillates,
The cool dunes, the immense quartz distilleries
Like a multifarious waterworks condense the dew,
Foaming suddenly with dew-brooks and freshets,
A gigantic fractionation. How can
Such beauties be tongueless! Listen,
The great dew condenses in the Quiet Woman’s belly,
The unborn child, the secret sharer of the bed,
The inward drinker of The Quiet Mother,
The child who when he is crowned will light the whole city.
XVI
IN THE HALL OF THE SAURIANS
(1987)
PNEUMONIA BLOUSES52
The iron ships come in with hellish music
They are dedicated to golden oils and engines
And explosive riveting, their hulls heal
To tattoos of guns or iron drums, riveting.
And they worship the horse-mackerel and the sardine,
And why not, it is a living,
And a multitudinous beauty, that brings the souls in.
You see the machine-shop glitter in the tin,
They are water-moths flocking in their thousands;
The packers fit the silver engines in
Laid down in olive oil that is golden;
The key unwinds. Girls
In pneumonia blouses greet the fishermen
Whose balls are brimmed with nitroglycerine of souls,
In each lacy belly the embryo buoyant
As a nenuphar. In the sunlight
The old stone watches sweet and yellow as honeycomb.
Holding the milky child
Is like holding sleep in a bundle,
Which seeps everywhere. There is still frost
In the early morning shadows like spirit-photographs
And like the lace of girls in pneumonia blouses
Ruffled as are the wakes of working boats, fishermen’s eyes
Open in all directions, but the shadows of night
Trawl them back again, the nets
Invisible in the black water.
HORSE LOOKING OVER DRYSTONE WALL53
for S.C.
A horse dips his nose into dry shadow
Gathered in the chinks like water.
He drinks the coastal dark
That dwells behind the wallstones
In the dry boulder caverns.
Light lies along his muzzle like a stone sheath.
From skull-darkness kin to the dry stone wall
The eyes watch like mirrors of stone;
This horse is half light, half dark,
Half flesh and half stone
Resting his silver muzzle on the shadowed wall
Like a horse made partly of the silver of clouds,
And partly it is a boulder with mane and nostrils
Watching over his wall the plentiful wild boulders
Maned with shaggy weed in galloping water which are kin,
Coralled boulders nostrilling under their manes and lathered with brine.
IN THE HALL OF THE SAURIANS
In the Hall of Saurians, the light worked the bones,
The shadows stamped. I was haunted
With the heads colossal in death.
My father brought me here
In his bright shadowless car,
His jewel which he drives everywhere
As a coffin is lined in white satin
Brilliant in the darkness, like mother of pearl.
The wall of the Insect Gallery is splashed
In a butterfly shape with all the British Lepidoptera
And there are five times as many moths shown
For the Shadow in these times
Is correspondingly more significant than the Light.
What goes on in the darkness sees by perfume.
They say that to go out in the noon
Is to lose one’s shadow,
To lose the moth of oneself.
My seed, my moth, was torn from me
Like gossamer in the wind
By the lady curator of all these bones,
Mistress of the Halls of Patterns of Death,
Keeper of the probable forms,
The underworld that is delivering constantly
The forms of life, at night like mud
That is a turreted museum, with endless galleries,
But at dawn, nevertheless,
The rainbow glid
es close to us across the water
Until we stand within its coloured shells,
Its sequent halls. This is our form
Of transport, the ecstasy of these halls,
The forms displayed. My father in his jewel
Scurries away among the beetles.
The corpse of London transforms in his mouth,
His tales make of it a winged thing
Full of custom and surprise.
But these are winged buildings
As we make love after hours
In the Hall of the Saurians, and the flickering light
Works the bones and the shadows stomp
As up to a campfire smoky with jungle moths
To warm themselves or crush it out.
HER SHIRT OPEN
The great batholith under the soil.
The line of farms followed the springs
That leapt from the edge of this batholith.
They had built the town
On the remains of the plain
That was the ancient harbour silted up,
The plain of fine grey soil
That is a mixture of tiny shells
And granite dust. Behind the town
Were the great grey granite quays
From which the buildings had been quarried.
You could join the sea-people still, it was said,
By following the salty path.
I felt so active
With these changes in the living places,
With the rain springing up all around me.
She slipped with me into the alley
Which smelt of the good rain,
All the narrow streets of the town
Wound to that alley.
The rocking tides of perfume
That sprang from every slate and stone,
And the mass of static
The sun had piled up by beating
On that old stone, played everywhere
In its patterns like a sunshine from the earth,
Invisible sunshine and upward rain,
From the torrential earth
Its electrics leapt up the rain,
The pylon of rain.
She opens her shirt, which is wet
And heavy with its drink like a superb silk,
And an eerie feeling superimposes
From the stone electricity and that vertical smile,
Like another music, or echoes
Exploring buildings not yet visible,
The metallic echoes of the slate-lined alley
Erotic and holy, as when we watched
The slow-growing sea-drowned grass
Collected Poems Page 28
