The desert full of sacrificial round-stones well-blooded,
Not seen, sensed only, tenants of the long unfinished poem –
Better a stroph or two in honour of the white king:
Oh gin, white king… oh what a lordly lover…
Making much of nothing… wrap oh wrap me into your ermines…
And here’s your shaving-water and your shoe-trees,
Braces and pommatum and your watch and key chains,
Also nine o’clock, sir, all safe sir –
but not your lover, sir –
Love, Death, Time, Weather
so’s your Englishman –
O go-for-a-sailor as it’s peace-time,
And shatter the context of the blue-red-white.
Say, do they touch at Colon, do they fetch up in the Toulon
Darse?
They do, they swing about – and it’s up to you.
After so many other afters is there no now?
But I don’t think the Poste Restante
Changes our inner geographies nor yet heals hearts,
Much, nor yet do time’s heels
Properly leaden heart’s spring buds under, nor now nor finally.
Man, your brief uncoiled ache flips back into place like a curl.
– Three, four… will my love come?
Late late, on morning’s wings
A-mourning what’s got, not held.
What’s held?
That hand on the bed-cover, that’s surely a finality,
In visible focus, punkt –
Held, or for later? (such things have been).
Had I no love I’d a-many,
I’m wrongly angrooved –
Eve and I of myself, how did I come to live in this place?
Shifting zones of the centre!
(But the north-wings calmly nebulate round the Philippine rice-gods –
This stamp to what collector?)
Between Time and Etc
Living in the past and the future
I see barrages and heart-breakings,
Sameness running by sameness, defied by difference,
Difference overcome, etc.
ETC’s large, is omnipresent;
The coming and going of ETC (new god).
What to think – and to whom hand it?
Yet Time is hardly ETC;
Through with time soon, on with ETC.
We depend on a word
… Dijon… Gueret… for our thought-lines, our Marches and summers.
On ‘Aima, or how-would-it-have-been granted certain considerations?’
On ‘I lay in a field and thought to go further’,
On ‘the perfect sonnet’,
On ‘death November 6’ – and deaths that are to be.
For before all ‘a synchronous comprehension of things’ is it not?
One hand on the telephone, one opening, say, a bill,
When the fact of each death first…
No need for pondering what you know and they must guess,
The gaps between, ghost-lines.
All of it so much one thing and another –
So in Venice
That repository of old ships
And the fan-bridge – if you linger by dates.
Everywhere the
Ephemeridae of nights, alone and not alone.
Beginning with Dowson, then ‘in Timon’s rage’,
Having it out with love and time…
Are we the real?
Started out of utmost improbability,
Putting it mainly between asterisks, falling into metres,
In a time of waiting (dost ever know any other time?)
I knew the apparent sweet and sharp of the lives of others,
Such obstinate credos as wave on wave,
The never samely repeated BLANK of each spring –
O landscape of the green field, gin bottle and intention,
Next year’s hot foot with his ‘As you were!’
Tell It, Glen
They lie, all those who say ‘The world is beautiful
Because it holds all things and time runs still
Over the crowns and corpses, both are one to him,
Sorrow and joy are one, for no man has his will.’
They lie, such times they say ‘We cannot bring
Disharmonies to concord, wars must be
Part of our progress, growth, machinery,
Strengthening our manhood, as one lops a tree.’
They lie, who say ‘Look for it to the sky,
Your happiness, life is a swathe of pain.’
They fail, who fashion then an ivory tower
With pride of despair or shuttering-in of brain.
Hast ever seen one climb an ivory tower
That has to work at filling every hour
With speed-up goods? And in the hours between
Shuffles his thoughts with heavy footsteps where
The sudden earth’s a soft or sullen green
By pathways to the pits, where that first flower,
When flowers come, seems half a bitterness,
Almost an idler’s jibe – For who can use
Such a joy who must be counting: shoes,
Miles, wages, dole, cuts, lay-off, mother’s face:
‘Go back tomorrow, son’ – and at that place
Pass this untroubled bud of liberty…
Did ‘God’ make man? Woman and man made me;
‘God’ must have made the flowers, for they are free;
Not I.
A living poet tells of one long dead,
A footloose singer came on spring’s first flower,
So blue it brought him tears for her who’d lain
Her body by another’s in that year,
That once was his, no longer now – He said
Merely: ‘It was so blue, it was herself again.’
We do not weep for love: we call for life,
– Let love come if it will – for meat and bread,
Man’s due and common rights; yes, and time to be
Aware of being alive before we’re dead.
Down in those mines under the sea itself.
Do you know what we look like, people, at twenty-three,
Some of us? Hollow-faced, ashen, sombre and scarred,
Lop-sided, shuffling, tooth-rotted – people, that’s me.
Glen is my name, Northumberland – out of work.
I did the Hunger March in thirty-four.
Now sit and think: no job. The dole drips pence.
Do I conclude: ‘Life’s this’ or ‘Is there more?’
And Also Faustus
Faust longed for a new world
And got it –
Ran through the transmogrifications of the pure intellect, its philosophies and appetites,
And came to the end of it.
Come, death, take me – quoth. Or was it the mercenary old deil’s contract that called ‘time’?
Whichever, it’s a despair-story.
What do you think, would Faustus have gotten it clear now?
Hitler would have destroyed him ‘with honours’:
‘Powerful man that…Make it a resounding example…’
He couldn’t have enregimented Doctor Faustus.
What do you think, would the Doctor have come down into the street,
As we say in France,
Preluded with laughter the vacillations of the bewildered intellectuals
(As no doubt he does now)
And set them his teasers?
Yet the Doctor could be claimed as the highest of the honourable ivory towers,
Gone in the head with too much study in the chase of the absolute…
(Claim him, thus will you never hold him.)
I think the Doctor would have come down into the street
In his black velvets with a touch of red at the throat
And fallen in step somewhere between the old seared comrades and
the young.
You wouldn’t have heard him sing but it’s he would have swung
the singing,
You mightn’t have seen him, that ageless and timeless, but very
much there,
The kind that deflects a bullet-on-the-way from its mark.
They can’t kill him anyway, and what he means…
How often History is a cruel march; how easily the desert becomes a cataclysm –
How often this year I think: Les morts et Faust avec nous.
Yes, It Is Spain
What is a bomb?
Something I can’t yet believe.
What is a tomb?
Something I can’t yet see.
And what is a wound in its wounding,
And the shot cutting a vein and the blood coming
Out of an eye, say, stabbed – are these things too for me?
Bitter, how bitter, do you remember in a certain by-now long ago,
Anger boiling through in tears on the foul London midnight stain.
18, 18, 18 – if a man, yes, I’d have been shifted over into it then,
Into the great-to-do, the last one, the Grande Guerre,
With some cross-eyed crossroad finger pointing at me
‘On!’ on to some bottomless pit for the long waiting and wondering:
‘Can you tell me what it’s about?’ till the hour’s coming
With its ‘Ready for death?’ ‘Hell no – ready for nothing’… that’s me.
You, man, mumbling that misplaced, ridiculous ‘a spot of bother’,
O brother contemporary, and some of you the salt of the earth –
What else could you do but go? We shall not forget you,
(And that’s a fact, humanly not officially said),
Not forgive the present Flanders-Poppy flaunting ahead towards the next one,
By La-Der-des-Ders into La Prochaine. I have not forgot my dead.
You think this is something new? No; this too becomes Spain,
All of it, all of it’s Spain, with the dial set at Revenge –
No past pageantry of wan mothers and lovers weeping,
Ruined, undone for ever, that Spain cannot avenge.
I’m of a mood tonight, boy, marked DO NOT TOUCH,
Though somebody, say, like Villon, may have the best of it,
Long dead and safe from the shells and cries and wounds,
And the scythes of war mowing ground for our latter-day tombs.
I’m of a mood with Bosch and Zola and Villon,
Who brooked no nonsense, who wrote and painted and said
Their NO against foolery, NO against lying, their NO to
The proud-fleshed fakir, their NO to the living-dead,
The popes and imposters, the critics pragmatic, the pomps – to
Prick irony into function by use of the heart and the fact –
Into the washtub with History, for the better showing of it;
Then, now, à la mode du temps – that the artist becomes the act.
Blake too – you’ll do well to remember that naked man’s announcement:
‘It is impossible, yes, for truth to be told so’s understood
And not be believed’. Great Blake is the Day of Judgement,
Vengeful, oppressive, peculiar – Blake’s all to the good.
Daddy Hogarth, and Faust, Shakespeare, Chaucer and Marlowe,
Goya, Heine and Daumier, and the long-exiled giant, Hugo,
Dante – what do you think they’d say to you, artist in hesitations?
Shall I call on these our dead for their answer? ‘Go,
Learn from the day’s ruins and tombs’ they say, ‘our trust’s in the people
Who fought against iron, Church and Bank, with naked fist, fight not in vain –
Every man to his battle, child; this is yours, understand it,
In that desert where blood replaces water – Yes, it is Spain.’
To Eat Today
In Barcelona today’s
air-raid came as we were
sitting down to lunch after
reading Hitler’s speech
in Nuremberg. The Press.
They come without siren-song or any ushering
Over the usual street of man’s middle day;
Come unbelievably, abstract, beyond human vision,
Codicils, dashes along the great maniac speech –
‘Helmeted Nüremberg nothing’, said the people of Barcelona,
The people of Spain – ‘ya sabemos, we have suffered all.’
You heroes of Nazi stamp, you sirs in the ether,
Sons of Romulus, Wotan – is the mark worth the bomb?
What was in it? salt, and a half-pint of olive,
Nothing else but the woman, she treasured it terribly,
Oil for the day folks would come, refugees from Levante,
Maybe with greens… one round meal… but you killed her,
Killed four children outside, with the house, and the pregnant cat.
Hail, hand of Rome, you passed – and that is all.
I wonder – do you eat before you do these things,
Is it a cocktail or is it a pousse-café?
Are you sitting at mess now saying ‘Visibility, medium.
We got the port or near it with half a dozen’, I wonder –
Or highing it yet on the home-run to Mallorca,
Cold at 10,000 up, cursing a jammed release…
‘Give it ’em, puta Madonna, here, over Arenys –
Per Bacco, it’s nearly two – bloody sandwich it’s made down there –
Aren’t we going to eat today, teniente? Te-niente?’
Driver in the clouds fuming, fumbler unstrapping death.
You passed; hate traffics on; then the shadows fall.
On the simple earth
Five mouths less to feed tonight in Barcelona.
On the simple earth
Men trampling and raving on an edge of fear.
Another country arming, another and another behind it –
Europe’s nerve strung like catapult, the cataclysm roaring and swelling…
But in Spain no. Perhaps and Tomorrow – in Spain it is HERE.
Pamiatnik – Memorial of Bittersweet
This is the place
Of indescribable expression, like the look on the face of a certain morning.
This is the house
Where so much of much, so much of nothing happens.
This is the day
And the night
And the dawn
And the tear
Coming out of the wine or the heart temporarily sterile.
This is the place of near-despair, the crucible of world-sorrows.
This is the place
Of the news-letter bleeding out a lynching;
Cell of ferocity, seam of defeat, zone of continuation.
This is the place of Spain-my-Spain –
These agonies, laced with individual sorrows.
This is the house of time withering away,
And time running, and time at a loss,
Like a foot forever on the stair, and the return of dying called winter.
It is no place of linked easy lovers;
Its temper is bittersweet, its pulse is called poetry,
Its heart is a roaring red, its conscience intransigent.
(O it can be soft and sweet too – how long how long, my darling?)
Here often sits December, with the wan drip of the month
Giving the blackout, when the peasants play at Brueghel on the roads.
It can hate and love and scorn in one, it is cruel;
It is a roaring red, I said, under its proud-necked sufficiency.
It sits in judgement on the creeping and racing of the century
Under the warring flags of victories and assassinations
And the waves rising and rising
Of the wrath of outraged humanity –
Judges, an
d fiercely finds wanting.
There is nothing we can do for it, nothing, oh nothing;
It hates us, it hates us, it hates us –
It is like me,
It is like life.
E O S
Come spring there might be armistice
Between half-loving warring two –
Can truth evolve from travesty?
I think our first’s our last solstice.
He will he will not, both – which most?
All-inconsistent, true to plan;
Take it or leave it while you may –
This is a three-in-the-morning man.
Between the book and bottle move,
The poltergeist is at the bar;
A ‘portrait of the man I love?’
Oh hound that bays an icy star.
Aurora boreal was our sign,
The red in the night explaining fear,
The drunken burn, the knife in the air,
The pashing mire and January wine.
Lie in this bed while yet you may,
Get you your most and I will mine;
To kill and to remake each day,
Such was part-lesson of the vine.
Kiss that holds out how should a tear?
Without the wave there is no strand.
What be these siltings in your earth,
This foreign body in my land…
What price the candle, what, the prize?
Act 1 – and last. The month has gone
Wasting fine substance every day;
We talk, we doubt; the hackles rise.
Meanwhile all fate climbs to the roof
Watching the iron cars grind on
And echoes: Heil. The Vienna strings
Are snapped, the iron chord bears down.
So died one land, while private spate
Selected Poems Page 15
