Chatter, is to plunge
Into a rubbish-tip of bright plastic and broken
Radio-sets still working though they
Have been thrown away; yet after a beer or two
It is eating one’s Good Food inside a Christmas Tree;
And this marvel is nothing
To the sonorous breathing of the horse
She rode yesterday skin to skin
Up to the vast water-note
Of the reservoir from which the horse
As from a harp plucked water; the ripples
Of his drink reached out easily to the far shore.
BOY’S PORRIDGE
I
She serves me my round plate of porridge
Pocked with craters. It is the Full Moon
I am eating, smiling up at Mum. ‘Where
Does porridge come from?’ ‘Down the chimney, son.’
‘Why morning porridge?’ ‘It is the Moon.
We don’t eat it at night. It is out of reach.’
The Moon like Santa Claus
Delivering sacks of cold porridge down the chimney.
II
My next-day’s breakfast plate riding high,
Brightening the clouds. Mother pins
Her moonstone to her collar to serve me
My boy’s porridge; like a full moon rising
Through maternal skies, it rides her breath.
There is cinder-snapping as the hearth-fire cools;
I go out into the night to watch the scudding
Ashes in the sky, and the round clinker riding
That burns with a cold fire. As I return
Hungry for porridge the sun rises over the sea:
Fleets of jellyfish bump in the tide
Like salty bubbles in moon-porridge
Set to boil on the hob.
WHEAL CUPID65
Thunder over lake, a beating
Of wings over the skin
Of the lake, two blue dragonflies
With thunder in their wings
Thunder; whose shaking
Is in the lake.
Two sky-skinned dragonflies
Bent like twin tempered blades
Shuddering, sip
From each other;
Tempered dragonflies reined
Into a smooth loop, thunder
Negotiated with wings
Darting, then stone-still;
Hoop spins over the lake;
The feet of the dragons
Running through thunder
Their lightning plashes everywhere.
ABATTOIR BRIDE
Slow-working in the slaughterhouse
On a showery day. He holds out
A bloody fillet in his icy hands.
I pop with sweat. Bleed out, sparkle!
There are flies like lacquered idols, skulls
The size of sand-grains humming like nuns,
Exquisite religious sculpture vibrating
To the note of that god-gong, the sun,
Flies carved again as with knives, risen
Out of the food-chest with ivory clasps,
Shut into the meat, it seems, by him let out
With his shining knives and his shadow of flies,
His marriage-property, sturdy and obscene.
And there is a leaf-marriage too, the sun lying
In panels and yellow shadows on the path,
The flies in intermediary shady swarms
Celebrating the marriage of meat and sun;
And this little rain marries all the leaves;
The sealed chamber, this vagina
Is like a bird flying
Through the rain, drenched,
Beak wide as a fledgling straining for the worm;
He has opened many creatures, this one
Opens itself, alive, without violation,
However loud the sun, with its darkening flies.
THEY COME
They come flickering down the lane
In their black-white,
White-black shirts and skirts
As the moon changes
White to black and back again,
White shirts, black waistcoats,
A lick of white petticoat
At the hem of a black skirt
Flickering down the lane,
The human flowers
Are black-white, white-black.
On the body, like amazement gathering,
The matters that arrive of themselves:
Hair breaks on chest, balls drop,
Voices break heartbreakingly, hips
Gather and round their pillars, and on the smooth chest
Tiny magnolias bud.
The homes turbulent
With strange new body-perfumes,
The black-and-white courtship moon-engine
Comes flickering down the lane.
How many of them meet there?
All? Or none? the white moonlight
Flickering through the branches.
‘Development,’ they say, as when you hold
A polaroid and watch the picture, the person
Stepping into the white space, like
The person you know stepping off the train
On to the platform; you saw him before
In his grandfather, his aunt.
The bones, white as photography
Hold the image of him for a certain time;
It fades off them to appear
Elsewhere, like a spirit, clothing itself
In black-white, white-black for the meeting in the lane.
XXIV
ORCHARD END66
(1997)
ORCHARD END
Apple-trees coralled behind
The warm stone walls that help
To ripen them. We discuss
In whispers the spiritous dark
Within the fruit, the boughs
Librating their poundage
Like heavy bosoms in a green shirt.
As an eye sleeps each apple
Sleeps in its seamless lid
Until I bite into the black, turning it
To white, saying
‘Let there be light.’
COLLECTED67
I toast Browning
As I drink up this
Apple-juice. On my plate
A stump of apple, slowly browning.
In the grill, the toast
Is browning, nicely.
He would have relished
This March morning
With the gusty showers
And the great rotund
Thunder-carriages rolling in
Over the brown and activated
Fields. Here comes a cart
Heaped with freshly-dug potatoes,
Earth-apples fresh from the field:
They are browner than brown can be
Because of their smell, which is like
A brown light. Each tuber
Is a lighted lamp of earthsmell,
Bob Browning! a lamp
In which burns the oil
Of distilled field. I return
To the huge brownstone hearth
And take up Browning’s
Collected bound in doe
And drink a glass of brown ale
To wash it down, brown
As the pelt of potatoes
Clotted with mothering
And greening from the brown
In tendrils ‘… With such hair too …
‘Used to hang and brush their bosoms …’
AT THE WINDOW ON THE WORLD
(King’s Head, Falmouth)
The King’s head, chopped off,
Has rolled to the foot of the stairs
The moss-moused stairs
That mount to the Church of Charles the Martyr,
North door.
Watching the whole world passing
In the window of the pub
From right to left to the Moor, from left to right
To th
e Docks, the beer calling out of them for me
A new compendium of humanity, how it walks,
Not what it says;
Sitting in the visionary window of the pub
Among the laughter, beer, mellow lights,
Everything friends and beer-coloured, watch out
Up the flight of stone steps to the tall dark doors
Which are open on blackness
Like a hole in the church rock for the people’s refuge
From such as I, where I sit in the Head of the King
Like a tipsy watchman,
For the bride and groom are signing the register in there,
Signing in the vestry twilight,
And as soon as the pen lifts from the last signature,
The bells call out.
On the church steps
Four bridesmaids in royal blue are hanging about.
The limousine has driven up shining and parked shining.
The fronts of the dresses of the bridesmaids
Are ruched like the hulls of marvellous fruit;
And I’ll drink to the Bride
Through the visionary window when she appears
As she does now and the bridesmaids in a simultaneous salute
Flare open their parasols of royal blue and twirl them about.
It was most sexual
When the Bride appeared
On the arm of her scarcely-noticeable groom, like
A great white bird folded on its perch,
Or like a waterfall out of a mountain
Manifests from the shadow of the granite porch –
Crystals ringing each like a bell itself –
And steps out and stands on the steps pouring white
Among her blue maidens whose dresses signify
That by the magic of the Bride
The whole earth can blossom in maidens
(This is the Spirit conceived in the depths
Which emerges after signing the register
Like light breaking out of the rock
Into the upper air as the flowers do everywhere)
Their floral dresses bloom in a long thoroughfare
The women of the family who now press forward
Like more flowers bursting from the rock;
As the bridesmaids live in their dresses
Unborn children live in the women’s fountains
Waiting to be born to the sound of bells and flowers
As the shining track of the Bride brushes past them.
Why on their way down the stairs from the hole in the churchrock
To the black and shining limousine do they turn back
And enter the pub, why does the wedding-party
Flow in and commandeer the bar and press
Towards my window with their shaving lotions and scents and grey toppers?
Why do these visions press towards my window,
How can I have deserved to be introduced to the Bride
Whose veil is pinned back to allow her smiles
Access to us all? Who am I
That they should come to see me, and to the sound of bells
(Which makes it difficult audibly to refuse drinks)
Offer me their electricity elixir
In champagne glasses that chime like handheld churchbells
And brim with bridal spume?
NUDE STUDIES III: THE SPELEOLOGISTS
The unclean and desperate interlopers
Filled the table, the nude men
Full of meat and sin,
Furnished with a formidable bottle
And a ferocious overbite, devouring
The curry omelettes; in their presence
All ghosts melt down to a pile
Of grease and rags.
The early-morning sapsuckers went on tapping
At the trees outside, finding the door of the forest
Into their banquets. A thrush,
Bloodying a worm, sang after,
Whistling in an almond-tree.
The party consisted of robust speleologists
Who had shaken off any demon’s nightgame
And penetrated the darkness on their own terms,
For whom the clock merely stitched
Its ticks through the night
Creating no stars.
The men were hungry because of yesterday,
When the limestone cliffs had cast a welcoming coolness.
The only thing was to banquet nude
On the strongest curries of meat
Transformed into liquid fire,
They needed to fill themselves with fire
And empty themselves
So that they became like the caverns
Lighted in their limestone guts with beating flambeaux;
They ate by curry-light in that solid nude encouragement
As if they could never be filled again
So extensive were their galleries
In the long crepuscular room smelling
Of woodshavings, curry and glue of craftsmanship,
Concrete and cockroaches, each penis
Stiff as a golden fingerstall. They guffawed
About the sale of underground
Building-plots. It was a room
In which a Bible brought in at once sprouted mildew.
SQUELETTE68
The dainty skeletals of feet
Are stepping down, and the shining shin-bones
Follow, and then the whole
Body of bones.
O tall skeleton
Crowned with extra bones
And further bones arranged about its person
Like the bones of a crinoline
Or a chandelier in four flounces
Stepping down the loft-ladder
Into the white-gloss corridor
Sheer as the interior of a bone
This is the squelette
Of an ex-wife so powerful she
Has bones left over and to spare
Or is remains of two people
Too fond ever to leave
Their intermingling, grinning
At it; surmounting all,
The mitre of small bones
Like those of a baby self
With the pendent skull
The size of an orange
That beats on the breastbone
As the bones stride; I follow
The bone-music like whetting knives,
These bones so white
Against the wall they’d be lost
But for the intercostal
Shadow-flicker that attends
Progress towards the white sash-window;
Its fingering bones grip
And fling up
It steps out
On to the black slant roof-slope
Slides down with a farewell wave
From the curious engine
Of one calcite hand;
It drops in a disarticulated
Bone-shower lightly on the green,
Green lawn, these bones land lightly,
And of their own accord
Separate, peck and coo
Now a white flock of doves.
I slide the easier way
Down the gutter-pipe,
I find my jacket-pocket
Brims with birdseed
Which I scatter to feed
The erstwhile bones;
They devour so hungrily.
Down the whitened corridors
More bones proceed to dovemaking, hitch
Their shinbones over the white windowsill,
They are all the same person, one adult
Skull, more bones than are needed,
None so dead they cannot proceed to doveship
And shake far-reaching ghost-breezes out of their pinions.
XXV
FROM THE VIRGIL CAVERNS
(2002)
ARRIVALS
The spider in her draughty great halls
hanging by her fists
/>
from the rafters,
A few dried leathers
and wings like cracked windshields
dangling from the radii;
Harley Davidson chassis without engines
hollow as bongoes;
washing machine in energetic renewal,
Revision, a cube of hasty
hurricane water hurrying,
a tornado shaking
In my father’s scullery
wearing white like his doctor
whose white coats
Have to be washed somewhere,
bring him close to the ghost
every rotation a whiteness;
My father turning up at Paddington
in his car, for a surprise,
smiling at his fingertips
Like a conjurer with his four-wheel cabinet
laughing at his traffic adroitness
like a conjurer
Producing himself from the shiny coachwork;
today he lost the way:
all the streets wept
So well know to him;
his knowledge went,
his engine stopped,
Emptied. I know
how it was,
he showed me something else
That belonged to both of us
with the engines stopped
and the halls draughty,
Close to the ghost;
his knowledge went, and mine followed,
catch it before
It leaves like a ghost,
on these stepped verses;
on these stairs met together,
These radii.
AT THE OLD POWERHOUSE
(Kingston on Thames)
A swan stretching
its neck like a javelin speeds
a couple of metres
Above the roughened river,
the stridor of its breath-shaped
wings like the creaking
Of a supple switch, a whipstock;
descending further, the swan steps
across the water in five
Giant strides, in five
mighty braking steps, settles
its own foldings
Among the waterfoldings, tucks
its wings into its armpits, shrugging
them in, and yachts onward
As a serenely-sailing ornamental waterbird
reborn out of the turbulent and draughty
air-voyager;
The river glitters like errant electricity
and a watermusic floats downstream,
a jazz funeral no less
With a band and a catafalque and a small black barge
full of golden instruments;
Collected Poems Page 36
