Where he with mower, scythe or hook goes out
To fight the grass and lay a growing fever,
Volcanic for another, dead to me;
Meek is the ghost, a banked furnace the man.
Take any time – this autumn day will serve,
Ripe with grassed fruit, raw with departing wings,
When I, whom in my youth the season tempted
To oceanic amplitudes, bend down
And pick a rotting apple from the grass.
From every here and now a thread leads back
Through faithless seasons and devouring seas:
New blooms, dead leaves bury it not, nor combers
Break it – my life line and my clue: the same
That brought him safe out of a labyrinth.
So I, the consort of an absent mind,
The emerald lost in a green waste of time,
The castaway for whom all space is island –
To follow, find, escape, this thread in hand,
Warp myself out upon the swelling past.
2
Take any joy – the thread leads always on
To here and now: snow, silence, vertigo;
His frozen face, a woman who bewails not
Only because she fears one echoing word
May bring the avalanche about her ears.
Take any joy that was – here it remains,
Corruptless, irrecoverable, cold
As a dead smile, beneath the cruel glacier
That moved upon our kisses, lambs and leaves,
Stilled them, but will not let their forms dissolve.
O tomb transparent of my waxen joys!
O lifelike dead under the skin of ice!
O frozen face of love where my one treasure
Is locked, and the key lost! May I not share
Even the bare oblivion of your fate?
But dare I throw the past into one fire,
One burning cry to break the silence, break
The cataleptic snows, the dream of falling?
Last night I thought he stood beside my bed
And said, ‘Wake up! You were dreaming. I am here.’
3
Take any grief – the maggot at the nerve,
The words that bore the skull like waterdrops,
The castaway’s upon the foam-racked island,
The lurching figures of a mind’s eclipse –
I have felt each and all as love decayed.
Yet every grief revives a fainting love.
They are love’s children too; I live again
In them; my breast yearns to their innocent cruelty.
If only tears can float a stranded heart,
If only sighs can move it, I will grieve.
The pleasured nerve, the small-talk in the night,
The voyaging when isles were daisy-chains,
The dance of mere routine – if I could reach them
Again through this sick labyrinth of grief,
I would rejoice in it, to reach them so.
Alas, hull-down upon hope’s ashen verge
Hastens the vessel that our joined hands launched,
Stretching my heart-strings out beyond endurance.
Ah, will they never snap? Can I not climb
The signal hill, and wave, and mean goodbye?
Ending
That it should end so! –
Not with mingling tears
Nor one long backward look of woe
Towards a sinking trust,
A heyday’s afterglow;
Not even in the lash and lightning
Cautery of rage!
But by this slow
Fissure, this blind numb grinding severance
Of floe from floe.
Merciless god, to mock your failures so!
Heart and Mind
Said Heart to Mind at the close of day,
I was older than you, yet I led you astray
Fancying I knew each twist and turn of our way,
Said Heart to Mind.
The blind would still have been leading the blind
Whichever of us had held the sway,
Answered the pensive Mind.
I was younger than you, the Mind went on,
Yet you carried me through the fire of noon
And the chilling shades: of all I encountered, none
Was stronger than you.
Said Heart, I could feed upon dust or rue,
But you, the daintiest eater, have shown
What a rational diet can do.
So queer a partnership never was sealed –
A sceptic hungry for truth revealed,
A fool to his rule-of-thumb vision unreconciled
From the very start:
No wonder we almost pulled apart,
Envious each of his comrade’s field,
Pursued the plaintive Heart.
No marriage is proof against travail or bliss,
Spoke Mind. How uniting can be the abyss,
How chafing the bond between all earth’s denizens – this
Is what marriages prove.
And this we have learnt from our seasoned love –
When heart and mind agree, they kiss
Over an opening grave.
A Failure
The soil was deep and the field well-sited,
The seed was sound.
Average luck with the weather, one thought,
And the crop would abound.
If harrowing were all that is needed for
Harvest, his field
Had been harrowed enough, God knows, to warrant
A record yield.
He gazed from a hill in the breezy springtime:
That field was aflow
With wave upon wave like a sea’s green shallows
Breathing below.
He looked from a gate one summer morning
When the mists uprolled:
Headland to headland those fortunate acres
Seemed solid gold.
He stood by the field as the day of harvest
Dawned. But, oh,
The fruit of a year’s work, a lifetime’s lore,
Had ceased to grow.
No wickedest weather could thus have turned,
As it were overnight,
His field to so wan and weedy a showing:
Some galloping blight
From earth’s metabolism must have sprung
To ruin all;
Or perhaps his own high hopes had made
The wizened look tall.
But it’s useless to argue the why and wherefore.
When a crop is so thin,
There’s nothing to do but to set the teeth
And plough it in.
The Unwanted
On a day when the breath of roses
Plumpened a swooning breeze
And all the silken combes of summer
Opened wide their knees,
Between two sighs they planted one –
A willed one, a wanted one –
And he will be the sign, they said, of our felicities.
Eager the loins he sprang from,
Happy the sheltering heart:
Seldom had the seed of man
So charmed, so clear a start.
And he was born as frail a one,
As ailing, freakish, pale a one
As ever the wry planets knotted their beams to thwart.
Sun locked up for winter;
Earth an empty rind:
Two strangers harshly flung together
As by a flail of wind.
Oh was it not a furtive thing,
A loveless, damned, abortive thing –
This flurry of the groaning dust, and what it left behind!
Sure, from such warped beginnings
Nothing debonair
Can come? But neither shame nor panic,
Drugs nor sharp despair
Could uproot that untoward thing,
&nb
sp; That all too fierce and froward thing:
Willy-nilly born it was, divinely formed and fair.
The Sitting
(FOR LAURENCE COWING)
So like a god I sit here,
One of those stone dreamers quarried from solitude,
A genius – if ever there was one – of the place:
The mountain’s only child, lips aloof as a snow-line,
Forearms impassive along the cloud-base of aeons,
Eyes heavy on distance –
Graven eyes that flinch not, flash not, if eagles
Clap their wings in my face.
With hieratic gestures
He the suppliant, priest, interpreter, subtly
Wooing my virtue, officiates by the throne.
I know the curious hands are shaping, reshaping the image
Of what is only an image of things impalpable.
I feel how the eyes strain
To catch a truth behind the oracular presence –
Eyes that augur through stone.
And the god asks, ‘What have I for you
But the lichenous shadow of thought veiling my temple,
The runnels a million time-drops have chased on my cheek?’
And the man replies, ‘I will show you the creed of your bone, I’ll draw you
The shape of solitude to which you were born.’
And the god cries, ‘I am meek,
Brushed by an eagle’s wing; and a voice bids me
Speak. But I cannot speak.’
The god thinks, Let him project, if
He must, his passionate shapings on my stone heart,
Wrestle over my body with his sprite,
Through these blind eyes imagine a skin-deep world in perspective:
Let him make, if he will, the crypt of my holy mountain
His own: let even the light
That bathes my temple become as it were an active
Property of his sight.
O man, O innocent artist
Who paint me with green of your fields, with amber or yellow
Of love’s hair, red of the heart’s blood, eyebright blue,
Conjuring forms and rainbows out of an empty mist –
Your hand is upon me, as even now you follow
Along the immortal clue
Threading my veins of emerald, topaz, amethyst,
And know not it ends in you.
Statuette: Late Minoan
Girl of the musing mouth,
The mild archaic air,
For whom do you subtly smile?
Yield to what power or prayer
Breasts vernally bare?
I seem to be peering at you
Through the wrong end of time
That shrinks to a bright, far image –
Great Mother of earth’s prime –
A stature sublime.
So many golden ages
Of sunshine steeped your clay,
So dear did the maker cherish
In you life’s fostering ray,
That you warm us today.
Goddess or girl, you are earth.
The smile, the offered breast –
They were the dream of one
Thirsting as I for rest,
As I, unblest.
The Revenant
Out of the famous canyon
Deeper than sleep,
From the nerveless tarn of oblivion
She climbed. Dark was the slope,
And her companion
Gave not one love-glance back to brighten it.
Only the wind-chafed rope
Of melody held her
To him that haled her
Lifeward, praising the fire and delight in it.
On the gist of that lay or its burden
Legend is dumb.
How else, though, with love-looks forbidden
Could he say, ‘Come back to me, come’ –
Could he touch the long-hidden
Spring of a shade unfleshed, unfertilized
Than by singing, oh, crust and crumb,
Bark, sap, flesh, marrow –
Life’s all, in the narrow
Ambit of sense flowering, immortalized?
Glimmering tall through the gloom
In her phantom garment,
Like a daffodil when its stem
Feels trembling the first endearment
Of amorous bloom,
She palely paused, on the verge of light again.
One step to break from her cerement,
Yes, daffodil-rayed
From the mould of the shade –
No revenant now, a golden wife again.
Had death become then, already,
A habit too strong
For her to break? The steady
Pulsing of Orpheus’ song
– Though lightwards led he –
Grew faint in her. She wept for astonishment,
Feared she could never belong
To life, be at home there,
Find aught but harm there,
Till that last step seemed less a birth than a banishment.
What strand of his love was the weak one,
Or how it befell
That a song which could melt the Dark One,
Death’s granite lord, with its spell
Saved not his meek one,
Moved not his meek one to step from the last of her
Terrors, no man may tell.
He felt the cord parting,
The death-wound smarting:
He turned his head but to glimpse the ghost of her.
So, as a pebble thrown
From a cliff face, soaring
Swerves back, less like a stone
Than a bird, ere it falls to the snoring
Surf, she was gone.
Reluctant her going: but the more bitterly
Mocked were his love, his imploring –
That the gods spoke
As seldom they speak
On matters of life and death, non-committally.
The House-Warming
Did you notice at all as you entered the house,
Your dove-treed house,
Traces of one who was there before you
Imagining roseate company for you,
While the locked rooms lay in a drowse?
One there was who paced to and fro,
To and fro
Through the empty house with an occupied air,
Veiled in the passage, soft on the stair,
And kept its heart aglow.
Did you feel, when first you stepped in the hall,
Stepped in the hall,
A note of warmth like a weir’s deep humming?
A message marked ‘To await her coming’
Written on hearth and wall?
One had been there for better or worse,
Better or worse,
Curtaining, carpeting, lighting all
Your rooms with a love ineffaceable;
And still in the night he stirs.
Fear him not. He is but a shade,
A homely shade
For no dread signs or haunting cast:
Not a phantom risen like spray from the past,
But a ghost by the future made.
Love enmeshed in his own folly –
Mischance or folly –
Expiates a deed for ever undone,
Weeps for all that it could have won
Of living together wholly.
Such is the tenant you’ll have beside you,
Often beside you
Through the spoilt Junes when a gusty rain
Strums fitful arpeggios on the pane,
The dawns when light is denied you.
But here may you find, for all his fretting
And gaunt regretting,
Between the dove-tops and the weir’s
Undying fall, how broken years
Can sing to a new setting.
Meeting
> Did I meet you again?
Did I meet you again in the flesh we have come to know,
That evening of chorusing colours a week ago?
Or was it delusion wrung from a faulted brain
When we seemed enveloped in love like naked dunes
Effaced by a seventh wave’s onrush and undertow?
Did I meet you again?
Though I meet you again,
Though I meet you a thousand times, surely the crest
Of our quickening, breaking love can never be blessed
With so generous a reach and radiance as fired it then.
Since meetings must have their peak, and the luckiest matings
Fade from golden to drab, perhaps it is best
Not to meet you again.
If I met you again,
Met you again after years of extinct days,
Oh, from dry air such a dance of aureate sprays
Would break and freshly figure the lost refrain
That a tremor would wring my heart’s rock, and I’d sigh,
‘Two loves which might have bloomed at the zenith always
Are meeting again.’
The Heartsease
Do you remember that hour
In a nook of the flowing uplands
When you found for me, at the cornfield’s edge,
A golden and purple flower?
Heartsease, you said. I thought it might be
A token that love meant well by you and me.
I shall not find it again
With you no more to guide me.
I could not bear to find it now
With anyone else beside me.
And the heartease is far less rare
Than what it is named for, what I can feel nowhere.
Once again it is summer:
Wildflowers beflag the lane
That takes me away from our golden uplands,
Heart-wrung and alone.
The best I can look for, by vale or hill,
A herb they tell me is common enough – self-heal.
Is it far to go?1
Is it far to go?
Complete Poems Page 27
