Blackening the white garments
in order to transfer
their radiance inwards;
Covering himself with estuary mud
in order to achieve the inner glory;
clothing the soul
In its shining garment
by defiling the outer:
he is changing skins,
He strips the old filth off,
the radiant new season begins;
the reek of fruct and filth
Was unbelievable and its look
unpredictable,
the monster-look,
The shambler clothed in tree-shit,
balsmic cascades,
the body-of-smell reborn;
Nevertheless, the clean twin still visits
drawing-rooms, not in his Hyde
but in his snowy Jekyll,
But an invisible forest enters the room too,
Hyde concealing himself
in bushes and swinging
From tree to tree;
silent Hyde; from his seed
spring great oaks.
THE PARADISE OF STORMS
Pepper and salt stubble, little
white crystals mixing with
tiny black ones, this crystalline
Scum expounds into its beard,
the waves of beard
flowing out of the skin
Ceaselessly, day and night, registering
by a small agitation of growth
as the trees do
The presence of women
and the growth-properties
of the weather.
Thus the beards, and the trees:
this one knows that a woman
waited under it for an hour today
During the rain; if we took
a slice of its trunk
and looked carefully
At the fattening of the cambium
which registers the shower we would see
a small figure with a furled
Umbrella. In a man
that would be a barbarity.
Can I read that lady
In the unfurling of my beard?
But the tree-rings should be read
without broaching the bark
For the perfume of a tree
compiles its experience
as it matures …
The great detective pauses
under the tree full of eyes
in the garden of the murder-house
And the name of the butcher
passes into his mind
like a whispering witness,
He lays his hand on the culprit’s shoulder
whose beard reeks bloody murder
and an at-last-I-am-caught-and
Can-rest blend of scents. Now
the paradise of storms passes on,
showering in every skin.
MOTH-ER
A sudden rose-garden in the bedroom.
I pad my way
through this labyrinth
To where she is.
As we kiss and touch our quick
windows open to the sky,
Which signal to her, finish.
Every dusk she eats a moth, it is
a winged key to the invisible,
It trembles on her tongue,
accepting her
as though she were the night
And the stars would bloom in her mouth
when this tiny
giving-of-all was enacted,
By moth-kiss, by moth-death. This
was her sin,
she had got her sins down
To this small murder
and the eating up of this
little star-map …
Her figure reclining in violin shape,
a little bonfire on the tongue,
her dozing body pulses
As though the skin were moths,
their tones. She
sees through her skin
With a moth’s eye and with
its radio tuned to moth-death,
the final broadcast …
Completely insupportable,
the quicksilver-flutter,
the burst of rank juice
Like a turpentine, like tasting
a painter’s brush in starlight …
Which paints stars
arranged in their cupolas
like whispering galleries
Crowded with white-faced watchers.
She licks this brush for luck:
the stars
Painted across the moth’s back
reappear in heaven.
Now her skin is soft
As as many moths as she’s consumed, fitted together
in galactic designs of touch;
this is the secret she gives to me,
The winged jewels built into a temple,
with her last breath
as conscious mind and the unconscious
Rush together, and the stench or perfume
in her last breath seeks above
its constellation of the Mother,
Moth.
NUDE DESCENDING72
The Saint has multiplied her limbs,
every thread of drapery a nerve
feeling into each corner of the room
As she descends the stairs, the nude, clothed
only in her vapours, her great
power-sleeves, even
In the banal condominium
now full of grace felt out
by her;
With each fresh step a new set
of feelers is created, or wings, for her
auric fields resemble
The gold grain of a moth-wing;
if we did not know that here
is a nude descending we would believe
We were in the presence of a queen of moths
and her perfumes which were also light
like clothes
And provisional ears and muslin
radio-dishes. Since
this gracious passing-through,
Epiphany, was mediated by the odours
we do not now need
any contrived pomps,
For each breath of air,
each lung-full,
is a palace.
MY PRINCE
His name translated meant
Infant Snow, Babysnow,
The Japanese Prince;
He was almost a young man, with
his olive oil skin
and his charcoal business suits;
I wanted him to be transparent,
and he was trying, not opaque
or too Japanese,
Since I was sweet
on his sister the Princess
which seemed to be plain sailing
In her mind: it was our uneasiness,
the young man’s and mine, which remained.
Would he become my friend
or would he stay completely
a Prince of Blood with no affections,
I would have liked such
A courtly friend; and what I had to offer, why,
his sister was sure of what that might be, even
if I wasn’t, and I was to
Marry her; why should the Prince
suspect us?
All we did, she and I
Was to sit together in one of the palace
halls, it was wonderful.
XXVIII
THE HARPER
(2006)
BALL LIGHTNING
A waterfall in a vaporous glade,
Ladders of vapour
propped against the apple-trees
Everywhere.
The devotion in the old dog’s face
as he gazes round and round
His mistress’s garden.
The pleasant, salt-silvered
old house.
The loaf on the slate shelf,
the patient ferment.
An agate ball of
lightning floats
Out of the charged orchard
like an apple-ghost
offering itself in turn
To our lips: house,
dog, lover, woman,
out of the girdle of trees
Shedding their windfalls
in shining cascades like waterfalls;
she got a look from it
That now she wears
random and swamping,
and so do I
In the smell of apple-mortality
which is sweet,
there are tears like windfalls
Dried on our cheeks;
this apple-mush, these tears
the real home of all,
Fruit, dog, woman, lover,
ceaseless waterfall and ancient house,
vaporous stairs that
Wait for our ascending.
CORNISH PERSEPHONE
The little Christmas tree asserts
its pagan presence
aglow with electric bulbs
In the shapes of flowers, dew, castles, St Nicolas,
all of them bursting light from within;
then, suddenly it takes hold
And becomes a person;
the pine-perfume lovingly reaches
out of it, soaking up
A tincture of radiation
from the small light-engines.
It is as though
The fairy on the peak,
the star welding at the tip of her wand,
has created the foliage
By rolling her green dress down,
and stands there,
with the tree her whole garment,
Gifts about her feet,
the star fissioning on her wand,
visiting us
In a green shape at the steep year’s end:
the Giantess in her lair,
the Cornish Persephone,
She spends the dark months
struggling towards us
with her light held up
Like a Christmas Tree, light-bursting.
She is away, or so it seems
during the New Year –
In March and most of April too
she is struggling towards us
through the mineral mire,
And through the oiled lakes underground
and through the cities of ore
more capacious far
Than the small towns of our Duchy;
our underworld is a Birmingham of rocks
through which she toils
Emerging at a mine-tip in flowers
on Goonhillie, St Day,
and as she rises it is like
An electricity you see because you feel it;
When she is with us
people live in sunlight
As the blessed do visible and invisible too
for the seven other months –
all trees shake their presence out:
Leaving her consort in the living rock,
she rises learned
from her imprisonment.
THE RAINBOW
The great reservoir
hangs up inside itself;
it reflects a sky
Corroded like zinc,
in its pewter-coloured surface
a small squall
Patches the water
into roughened metal:
you shall perceive
All the colours of the world
in the cold gust crossing:
to sip
At a tumbler of its water is
to set open a glass of dream.
A clew of sunbeams hangs
Suddenly in the brimming glass,
sipping this water at her lips
charged her
With its reflections,
moistened her yoni
with nude water,
And she felt a rainbow
of pleasure
shining through the squall
Within her,
up there,
and in her reservoir.
TRIAL BY MALLET
He was lean, fast-moving,
darkly-handsome,
wore white-and-black
Like me; I had to fight
this younger man
in the long and arch-roofed room
Like a storm-drain, ancient brick
scrawled over
with white lime crusts
And hedgehogged with pencil-stalactites.
It was raining solid rods,
water-curtains muffled
The entrance-arch, inside
the shelly pendules started
to drip clear water.
A third man in formal dress was present,
he carried, for the coup de grâce,
a lunar penknife blade,
Its small scythe flashing
in the ambiguous light
of two torches
Struck flaming in iron brackets.
We each grasped
the thick stems
Of the iron-bound mallets;
it was Trial by Mallet, I could see us
as we would be
If this duel began,
crushed bone creaming
in the black cloth it rent,
Two men moused by the cats-clawed mallets.
One of us demanded
a limit on the tally
Of blows, our umpire
grinned like that cat
and shook his head,
We could almost see the pleased tail swish
under his tailcoat;
this shared glimpse
Made me remember
that my opponent was also my friend,
near to a brother,
By trade a pilot
full of strategies, vitality, navigations,
so why did we plan to fight
In this storm-drain underground,
whose body was to be flushed
out to sea on the flood?
My friend, I thought,
the storm is coming on, with thunder, soon
we shall be fighting
Knee-deep in its torrents.
I caught his eye, and as one man
we turned towards the umpire
For answers, the mallets heavy
as our children’s heads.
TRUE WASP
On the twentieth of this November
I noticed wasps
eating a toad flattened by cars –
They were tearing away
strips of toad-skin
braided to the asphalt;
Later the same day I saw
a dead mouse opened by its own gas
with wasps studding its backbone:
It was their season,
turning horror to vigour;
turning eyes downwards
I saw wasps pinching
fine ginger crumbs
from a reclining dogturd;
By the sweet hum of the small power-station
I was caught in our mother the rain
and still the wasps came weaving
Between the drops slow as syrup,
never struck and always steady,
entering the machinery
To collect light from the cables,
winged vessels distilling sharp venom
in the great wasp
Nesting hum of the transformers
painted yellow and black, separating
bitterness from light.
CORE
We cannot hear the voice
of this machine,
they scan the unborn
With ultra-sound –
Will the foetus not be bonded
to this song,
Will inaudible whistles not
become its mother?
Is whistling at girls
With ultra-sound not wrong?
A transparent window opens
suddenly in their bellies
Disclosing a buddha-face
in shadows on a VDU
semaphoring its arms
Below the belt:
through the swiftly-transparent
muscle-skin walls
A sudden clear glass appears
and suspended there
the star
Of fivepoints shines
within the apple-womb
weaving her fingers,
Beating at her temple walls:
the Core;
or, the sixpointed male
Waving to us
through the skin and flesh.
AUTUMN LOVELETTER
The skin-of-the-earth-shining
as you walk towards the tree
which has exuded
A sheening envelope of sap;
it is like a door
opened in the trunk
And, inside the door,
something to drink.
I move closer, and think,
After Bunyan:
‘In this Land the Shining Ones
commonly walked,
Because it was
on the borders of heaven.’ The aroma
and the fragrance of new thoughts
Were perceptible in these designs
of balsams and barks …
What is a Grail-Winner?
Why, any man who frees the waters
in the woman by her consent, which means
he is a rainmaker
As she is. He knows
from a bad temper in the sky
that the rain will soon
Come down here: irritability
above the barley-fields
seldom persists, it relents
In heavy and opulent showers. The barley-beard
pierces every drop that falls …
A bird fighting its shadow
On a whitewashed wall,
coming at it
with beating wings, stabbing
Beak and claws …
that apple-tree’s fruit
with stars in its mansion
Shall serve as meat for all;
the thrush energetically
excavating the last ones
In the tree,
taking boxer’s stance on the apple-domes
and stabbing into them
With swift wet strokes …
at Maenporth the woman
climbs out of the plasm,
Out of the darkened tabernacles,
and there is
the golden-glow
Of the heroic skin, alive
with its inexcusable hazard. She
drops her soiled robes
As she comes, the black
off the golden glow,
the mudworks full
Of emergency eyes
that marvel at her form …
the nectar of the tree
Is flowing from the doorway
under the shining lintel:
any tree, mound,
Standing stone
can take you thus inside, if you have
Collected Poems Page 39
