by R. S. Thomas
There was an apple tree with a girl
under it loitering as though
for you. It was not for you, but
she accepted you for want of a better.
Among scanty possessions fear
was yours. Courage you borrowed
on short loan; set up house for the virtues
a wife brings. Venturing abroad
among the associated meannesses
you had all things in common.
Were you mobile? So was the age;
so were your standards, cheering
what yesterday was condemned
and tomorrow would be forgotten;
turning left, when you should have gone right,
to prove determinism to be in error.
And one came to your back door
all bones and in rags, asking the kiss
that would have transformed both you
and him; and you would not,
slamming it in his face, only
to find him waiting at your bed’s side.
Zero
What time is it?
Is it the hour when the servant
of Pharaoh’s daughter went down
and found the abandoned baby
in the bulrushes? The hour
when Dido woke and knew Aeneas
gone from her? When Caesar
looked at the entrails and took
their signal for the crossing
of the dividing river?
Is it
that time when Aneirin
fetched the poem out of his side
and laid it upon the year’s altar
for the appeasement of envious
gods?
It is no time
at all. The shadow falls
on the bright land and men
launder their minds in it, as
they have done century by
century to prepare themselves for the crass deed.
The Bank
Meditating upon gold
we prick the heart on its thorns.
Yellow, yellow, yellow hair
of the spring, the poet cries,
admiring the gorse bushes
by the old stone wall. But the maiden’s
hair overflows the arms
of the hero. Though you sit down
a thousand years, the echo
of the petals is inaudible
in the sunlight. Explain to me
why we use the same word
for the place that we store our money in,
and that other place where the gorse blows.
Revision
So the catechism begins:
‘Who are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who gave you that ignorance?’
‘It is the system that, when two people
meet, they combine to produce
the darkness in which the self
is born, a wick hungering
for its attendant flame.’
‘What will that
do for you?’
‘Do for me? It is the echo
of a promise I am meant
to believe in.’
‘Repeat that promise.’
‘Whoever believes in this fire,
although he lives, he shall die.’
‘You
blaspheme. The promises were made
by you, not to you. What do you learn
from them?’
‘I learn there are two beings
so that, when one is present, the other
is far off. There is no room
for them both.’
‘Life’s simpleton,
know this gulf you have created
can be crossed by prayer. Let me hear
if you can walk it.’
‘I have walked it.
It is called silence, and is a rope
over an unfathomable
abyss, which goes on and on
never arriving.’
‘So that your Amen
is unsaid. Know, friend, the arrival
is the grace given to maintain
your balance, the power which supplies
not the maggot of flame you desired,
that consumes the flesh, but the unseen
current between two points, coming
to song in the nerves, as in the telegraph
wires, the tighter that they are drawn.’
Similarities
I saw man staggering on his way
with his un-necessaries. Where
was he going? He turned on me
those hurt eyes that are bold
in their weakness, bruised by a question
he had not asked. Look,
he implied, sparing a glance
for the conjurors, the somersault
men, the mendicants with their caps brimming
with dead leaves.
And
the mothers were there, nursing
a dead child, and the rich endowing
a mortuary. While the youth with hair
on his chest flaunted a tin
cross.
Dance for me,
called the weak pipe, and the laughter
ascended to the rattle
of a cracked drum.
My masters,
the machine whined, putting the yawning
consciences to sleep.
It is intolerable,
I cried. But the face
that is life’s trophy stared at me
from the gallery, where it had been set
up, so that I became silent
before it, corrected by a resemblance.
AD 2000
The gyres revolve;
man comes to the confrontation
with his terror, with the imperative
of choice. Other compulsions are shown
for what they were. Time rinses its eyes
clean. From tyranny of the hand
we are delivered to the exigencies
of freedom, to the acknowledgement
by the unlimited of its limitations.
What power shall minister to us
at the closure of the century,
of the millennia? The god,
who was Janus-faced, is eclipsed
totally by our planet, by the shadow
cast on him by contemporary
mind. Shall we continue worshipping
that mind for its halo,
its light the mirage of its radiation?
Ritual
Not international
renown, but international
vocabulary, the macaronics
of time: μoïρα, desiderium,
brad, la vida
breve, despair – I am the bone
on which all have beaten out
their message to the mind
that would soar. Faithful
in translation, its ploy was to evade
my resources. It saw
me dance through the Middle
Ages, and wrote its poetry
with quilled pen. What
so rich as the language
to which the priests
buried me? They have exchanged
their vestments for white coats,
working away in their bookless
laboratories, ministrants
in that ritual beyond words
which is the Last Sacrament of the species.
Calling
The telephone is the fruit
of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. We may call
everyone up on it but God.
To do that is to declare
that he is far off. Dialling
zero is nothing other
than the negation of his presence.
So many times I have raised
the receiver, listening to
that smooth sound that is technology’s
purring; and the te
mptation
has come to experiment
with the code which would put
me through to the divine
snarl at the perimeter of such tameness.
Strands
It was never easy.
There was a part of us,
trailing uterine
memories, would have lapsed
back into Eden, the mindless
place. There was a part,
masochistic, terrifying itself
with a possibility – infinite
freedom in confrontation
with infinite love; the idea
of a balance, where we should come
to be weighed, lifting horrified
eyes to a face that was more
than human. And a part
amenable to the alternatives:
nature, mechanism, evolution,
bearers of a torch kindled
to illuminate primaeval
caves that has become electric,
the probing searchlight piercing
beyond the galaxies, shocking
the manipulator of it with its ability
to discover nothing, the ultimate
hole the intrepid reason
has dug for itself.
Must we
draw back? Is there a far side
to an abyss, and can our wings
take us there? Or is man’s
meaning in the keeping of himself
afloat over seventy thousand
fathoms, tacking against winds
coming from no direction,
going in no direction?
Countering
Then there is the clock’s
commentary, the continuing
prose that is the under-current
of all poetry. We listen
to it as, on a desert island,
men do to the subdued
music of their blood in a shell.
Then take my hand that is
of the bone the island
is made of, and looking at
me say what time it is
on love’s face, for we have
no business here other than
to disprove certainties the clock knows.
April Song
Withdrawing from the present,
wandering a past that is alive
in books only. In love
with women, outlasted
by their smiles; the richness
of their apparel puts
the poor in perspective.
The brush dipped in blood
and the knife in art
have preserved their value.
Smouldering times: sacked
cities, incinerable hearts,
and the fledgling God
tipped out of his high
nest into the virgin’s lap
by the incorrigible cuckoo.
The Window
Say he is any man
anywhere set before the shop window
of life, full of comestibles
and jewels; to put out his hand
is to come up against
glass; to break it is
to injure himself.
Shall he turn
poet and acquire them
in the imagination, gospeller
and extol himself for his abstention
from them?
What if he is not
called? I would put the manufacturers
there. Let them see the eyes
staring in, be splashed with the blood
of the shop-breakers; let them live
on the poet’s diet, on the pocket-money
of the priest.
I see the blinds
going down in Europe, over the
whole world: the rich with everything to
sell, the poor with nothing to buy it with.
Borders
Somewhere beyond time’s
curve civilisation lifted
its glass rim. There was
a pretence of light
for nations to walk by
through the dark wood, where history
wintered. Following I came
to the foretold frontier
where with a machine’s
instinct the guns’ nostrils
flared at the blooms held out
to them by the flower people.
Retirement
I have crawled out at last
far as I dare on to a bough
of country that is suspended
between sky and sea.
From what was I escaping
There is a rare peace here,
though the aeroplanes buzz me,
reminders of that abyss,
deeper than sea or sky, civilisation
could fall into. Strangers
advance, inching their way
out, so that the branch bends
further away from the scent
of the cloud blossom. Must
I console myself
with reflections? There are
times even the mirror
is misted as by one breathing
over my shoulder. Clinging
to my position, witnessing
the seasonal migrations,
I must try to content
myself with the perception
that love and truth have
no wings, but are resident
like me here, practising
their sub-song quietly in the face
of the bitterest of winters.
Questions
She should put off modesty
with her shift. Who said that?
Should one, then, put off belief
with one’s collar? The girl enters
the bed, enters the man’s
arms to be clasped between sheets
against the un-love that is all around.
The priest lies down alone
face to face with the darkness
that is the nothing from which nothing
comes. ‘Love’ he protests, ‘love’
in spiritual copulation
with a non-body, hearing the echoes
dying away, languishing under the owl’s curse.
What is a bed for? Is there no repose
in the small hours? No proofing of sleep’s
stuff against the fretting of stars, thoughts?
Tell me, then, after the night’s toil
of loving or praying, is there nothing
to do but to rise tired and be made
away with, yawning, into the day’s dream?
Looking Glass
There is a game I play
with a mirror, approaching
it when I am not there,
as though to take by surprise
the self that is my familiar. It
is in vain. Like one eternally
in ambush, fast or slow
as I may raise my head, it raises
its own, catching me in the act,
disarming me by acquaintance,
looking full into my face as often
as I try looking at it askance.
The Cast
‘Look up’ they said
at the rehearsal
of the film. ‘Higher, higher’ –
(preparing for the monster)
and the screaming began,
the nightmare
from which there is no waking.
Ah, vertical God,
whose altitudes are the mathematics
that confound us,
what is thought but the mind’s
scream as it hurtles
in free-fall down your immense
side, hurrying everywhere,
arriving nowhere but at the precipitousness
of your presence?
We weigh
nothing. Is it that you assess
us by our ability,
upside down as we are,
that you have left behind?
Court Order
‘My good fool’ he
who was a king
said, ‘come hither, perch
at my side; challenge
me to make some sport
with this word “Love”.’ I
did so, and was tumbled
into the world without
cap and bells, to end
up on a hard
shoulder, not laughing
with the rest who knew
that Friday, it being April,
was All Fools’ Day.
Nativity
The moon is born
and a child is born,
lying among white clothes
as the moon among clouds.
They both shine, but
the light from the one
is abroad in the universe
as among broken glass.
Jerusalem
A city – its name
keeps it intact. Don’t
touch it. Let the muezzin’s
cry, the blood call
of the Christian, the wind
from sources desiccated
as the spirit drift over
its scorched walls. Time
devourer of its children
chokes here on the fact
it is in high places love
condescends to be put to death.
History
In the morning among colonnades
a Greek radiance. At mid-day
time stood vertically between them
and the answer that was not
far off. At mid-day somewhere else
time was appalled, seeing its shadow
dislocated by a body the issues
of which were for the conversion
of a soldier. Civilisation rounded
towards its afternoon, the languid siesta
of brawn and muscle. The monks’ pupils
contracted through peering into
the reformed light. A vessel took off
into navigable waters to discover how mutinous
was the truth. As the sun went down
the lights came on in a million
laboratories, as the scientists attempted
to turn the heart’s darkness into intellectual day.
A Thicket in Lleyn
I was no tree walking.
I was still. They ignored me,
the birds, the migrants
on their way south. They re-leafed
the trees, budding them
