GUARNERIUS
For a moment take into your two hands
The spacious violin, the precious Guarnerius;
Feel a tone in the wood as I speak
Which runs through into your fingertips,
Turning sound into touch, touch into sound;
Put your ear to it, as you would to a seashell;
The tone you feel is an echo of yourself in the instrument.
Like a shell on the shore it is always singing,
The chapelled and multi-mansioned instrument
Plays of its own accord.
Put it on the table; this woman-shape
Needs no maestro,
Sings to bats’ cries on the low-voiced wind.
The maestro dilates
Out of its auricles and atria
A cathedral of sound with a thousand altars;
And a million candleflames shattered by applause;
As he bows his head to the audience
The cathedral-ghost vanishes
Into the instrument like a genie into a bottle.
After the applause, laid
Into the shaped velvet of its case,
Open on the bedroom table, it still plays
Notes and tones, like a melodious house
Contracting in the cool night, as his triumph-heat
Fades; he brings his lady back to his bed, it plays
A thermo-acoustic tune which is hers as she enters,
And a sonata as she undresses, and an obbligato
As they music each other,
And it plays to them in their dreams
For the dreamstate can hear it;
It will play over and again his death-sigh;
It is a box carved in the shape
Of a windflow angel;
All the maestros who have ever used it
Play somewhere still in this hip-shaped box.
AT RICHMOND PARK
A coppice of strobing pillars and young deer running.
A major deer with twenty tines
And the face of an Original American.
The long grass by the road
Is full of reclining antlers.
The young does as they run
Seem made of glass because their markings
Are like the marks the wind presses
On the flowing grass;
A transparent deer-tapestry with eyes
Blown by the wind over the grass.
FISH
Ate mackerel last night;
Dreamed of fish.
Two great fish, taller than men,
Hitched to a fishmonger’s ceiling,
The tails still full and stout
Like mermaids’ tails,
The scaled carcasses entirely hitched
On two Spanish queries through the upper lips,
The technicolour entrails excavated
Out of the snowy caves of flesh,
But the eyes calm and dark
As though brooding on seas far away and depths unplumbed.
As the fishmonger spoke in overalls as white
As fishflesh of fish far bigger than these,
A rich man entered and bought them both,
Had his chauffeur heave them to the car;
One was silver as ocean, the other
Golden as the rich man’s abundant hair.
A PASSING CLOUD
I
They tell of thunder picked up on the teeth,
Or radio decoded on a filling, one’s mouth
Buffeted with Sousa; but this was a dull ache
Pouring from a black cloud, I could get
No message from this broadcast, I must have
This radio pulled. ‘No,’ said my father,
‘Keep your tooth, this is but a passing cloud.’ I knew
It was him, because that was the brand
Of cigarettes he smoked, ‘Passing Cloud’ by Wills, and
‘Yes,’ he said abruptly, ‘It’s me,’ and turned white;
By this token I knew he was dead,
Knew it again.
II
When I had flu I always sweated his smell; his two wardrobes
Were exhaling it from hanging woollen shoulders like a last breath,
This ancient eighty-four-year-old sandalwood was his presence now,
It soaked into me and travelled home and stayed some days,
Grief like flu; but I could close my eyes and use it as an Inn
To meet up with this wayfarer and imagine him.
III
The cat’s way is to spray
And then rub her head in the odour
Like a beautiful woman admiring her mirror-image,
Her portrait thick-painted in impasto pheromones;
This is a cat of magic and she lives
In smell-spirit land as the makers of De Retzke
Printing a black cat on their packets, understand.
That was the other brand he used to smoke
Spraying the tinted air like ostrich feathers,
A chieftain’s nose of nostril-plumes,
A rainmaker’s cloud he passed, admiring
The sensation in the mirror of the smoke,
The sooth-ing oracle and breaker of time,
The redolent satisfaction that snaps the chain
Into peace and the smell of him
Smoking somewhere quietly in the house.
IV
His presence fills the house when he is smoking,
His nature reaches into every cranny,
Into the carpets and eiderdowns and squads of suits;
The chain is broken now, finis,
And though I can smoke in his house now without consent
The smell of cigarettes does not bring him back,
As he is ashes and has been smoked and stubbed out
‘A passing cloud …’ so that time
For him never forges chains again.
V
Except I notice that being under the weather
I sniff my hand-back and his scent appears; my whole skin
And atmosphere remembers him, the rain falls
And my toothache turns to tears, while the world fills
With reflecting mirror-water fathered out of rain-smells.
CLIMAX FOREST
A neat sunlit room
Filled with country arts –
Needlework and quilts.
A backwoods school of architecture:
Frame, a wide porch,
Deep eaves, a heavy
Gently-pitched roof –
Perhaps the house
Of a sawmill operator
Predatory of the huge
Climax forest that once
Blanketed nearly all
Of North America, but
He living within its construct,
Flesh of its flesh.
It had been a beautiful
Day, and the beauty deepened.
In the orange light
The long grasses at the edge
Of the garden seemed spun
From gold. The two
Had promised not to speak. She
Got into bed and like a vast
Nesting bird settled on him. It became
Like watching the river
For hours, watching
All the places it had wetted.
BLACK BONES
That is a human skeleton under the cataract,
The jet bones shining in the white noise,
The black bones of a man of light;
It is a cascade that accepts
Human form from the bones
That have walked into it, and stand;
It must have been his method of death
To walk into a waterfall and be washed away,
Licked clean down to the jetting bones;
And the bones articulate the roar
Of the cataract that seems to speak
Out of the ribs and skull:
His white-haired sermon
from the pelting brow,
The unfathomable water-lidded sockets;
Clad in robes that are foam-opulent,
And never the same clothes twice.
STAINES WATERWORKS
I
So it leaps from your taps like a fish
In its sixth and last purification
It is given a coiling motion
By the final rainbow-painted engines, which thunder;
The water is pumped free through these steel shells
Which are conched like the sea –
This is its release from the long train of events
Called The Waterworks at Staines.
II
Riverwater gross as gravy is filtered from
Its coarse detritus at the intake and piped
To the sedimentation plant like an Egyptian nightmare,
For it is a hall of twenty pyramids upside-down
Balanced on their points each holding two hundred and fifty
Thousand gallons making thus the alchemical sign
For water and the female triangle.
III
This reverberates like all the halls
With its engines like some moon rolling
And thundering underneath its floors, for in
This windowless hall of tides we do not see the moon.
Here the last solids fall into that sharp tip
For these twenty pyramids are decanters
And there are strong lights at their points
And when sufficient shadow has gathered the automata
Buttle their muddy jets like a river-milk
Out of the many teats of the water-sign.
IV
In the fourth stage this more spiritual water
Is forced through anthracite beds and treated with poison gas,
The verdant chlorine which does not kill it.
V
The habitation of water is a castle, it has turrets
And doors high enough for a mounted knight in armour
To rein in, flourishing his banner, sweating his water,
To gallop along this production line of process where
There are dials to be read as though the castle library-
Books were open on reading-stands at many pages –
But these are automata and the almost-empty halls echo
Emptiness as though you walked the water-conch;
There are very few people in attendance,
All are men and seem very austere
And resemble walking crests of water in their white coats,
Hair white and long in honourable service.
VI
Their cool halls are painted blue and green
Which is the colour of the river in former times,
Purer times, in its flowing rooms.
VII
The final test is a tank of rainbow trout,
The whole station depends on it;
If the fish live, the water is good water.
VIII
In its sixth and last purification
It is given a coiling motion
By vivid yellow and conch-shaped red engines,
This gallery like the broad inside of rainbows
Which rejoice in low thunder over the purification of water,
Trumpeting Staines water triumphantly from spinning conches to all taps.
MY FATHER’S TRAPDOORS59
I
Father led me behind some mail-bags
On Paddington Station, my grief was intense,
I was a vase of flowing tears with mirror-walls,
He wore a hard white collar and a tight school tie
And a bristly moustache which is now ashes
And he took me behind the newsprint to kiss me hard,
The travelling schoolboy,
And his kiss was hungry and a total surprise.
Was it the son? Was it the uniform?
It was not the person, who did not belong
Not to father, no.
II
He drove a hole-in-one. It flew
Magnetised into its socket. He’d rummy out
While all the rest shuffled clubs from hearts.
He won always a certain sum on holiday
At any casino; called it his ‘commission’.
He could palm cards like a professional.
He had a sideboard of cups for everything
From golf and tennis to public speaking.
He took me to magic shows where people
Disappeared and reappeared through star-studded
Cabinets with dark doors, and magicians
Chased each other through disappearance after disappearance.
He sat down in front of my dead mother’s mirror
And disappeared himself, leaving
Only material for a funeral.
III
I looked behind the dressing-table
Among the clooties of fluff and the dust,
I looked under the bed and in the wardrobe
Where the suits hung like emptied mourners,
I looked through the shoes and the ironed handkerchiefs
And through a cardboard box full of obsolete sixpences,
I looked in the bathroom and opened the mirror,
Behind it was aspirin and dental fixative,
I looked through the drinks cabinet full of spirits,
And I found on the top of the chest-of-drawers
Where there was a photograph of my dead mother,
My living self and my accident-killed brother,
A neat plump wallet and a corroded bracelet watch
And a plate with one tooth which was hardly dry,
And I looked down the toilet and I turned
All the lights on and I turned them off,
But nowhere in the bedroom where he sat down
And fell sideways in a mysterious manner
Could I find how he did it, the conjurer
Had disappeared the trapdoor.
IV
It was easy to disappear me.
He was doing it all the time.
I did not return that bristly kiss.
On my fourth Christmas there were so many toys
I disappeared into them thoroughly,
There was a silver crane on my mother’s counterpane
It was faulty but I did not want it returned,
I have reappeared and so has it,
Nearby and grown-up in the Falmouth Docks,
And there was a conjurer’s set
With ping-pong balls that shucked their shells
From red to amber, amber to green,
With a black-white wand that would float,
And half-cards and split rings as tawdry
As going up on the stage among the trapdoors
And meeting Maskelyne close-up, his cuffs were soiled –
White tie and tails should be spanking clean,
My father’s would have been, and I hoped
The conjurer would not kiss me,
It would disappear me.
V
He could wave his wand casually
And I would reappear elsewhere;
Once in bed at ten cuddly with mother
He waved a wand in his voice
And I got out of the silken double-cabinet
For ever.
VI
The rough kisses come round the door.
I give rough kisses myself, I am as bristly.
I am not a woman or a little boy.
And I can frighten her or make her disappear
Temporarily so she has to go to find herself
Again in the mirror somewhere;
But having learned this I am careful not to do it.
I do it less than I did.
I did not ask for this bearded equipage.
VII
It has taken me a long while
To appreciate this wedding-tackle at its worth.
My father gave
it to me like a conjuring-set.
I do not use my wand to disappear you,
I am rather too fond of disappearing it myself,
But I also use it to empower us both,
It is the key to a wonderment openness
Like turning inside-out harmlessly
Among lights, turning
Over in bed into someone else.
VIII
The conjurer in his soup-and-fish
Vanishes into his cabinets,
His rival reappears, they cannot bear
To be together on the stage
Not while they’re dressed in their power
Of black whiteness with starched bows
And cuffs that make the hands flash
While explaining here’s a new trick:
The Chinese Cabinet.
It is a silk tent with a front door
As black and tall as Downing Street.
This must be a special trick, shall I expect
Mr Major to ride out on a white horse?
Three people with slant eyeliner have erected it,
They are dressed as spirits who seem
Of the one sex which is both sexes,
And this cabinet is not coffin-like,
No, not at all, what coffin
Would be painted with sun, moon and stars?
A Grand Mandarin with a little drum comes in,
And throws an explosive down as conjurers will
So that the tent shivers and collapses –
Yes, it is a wardrobe that has disappeared all the clothes,
The white tie and tails, the sponge-bag trousers, the soup-and-fish,
For someone is coming through stark naked
And it feels good to him
For he is laughing and the mandarin bows as if proud of him,
He who touches everywhere for all clothes are gone,
Why, he’s in the buff and happy as Jesus save that
His lean rod is floating out just as it should,
Floating like my own, pleased to be like him.
XXII
ABYSSOPHONE
Collected Poems Page 34
