Modernist Canadian Poets
28th Apr 2014Posted in: Modernist Canadian Poets
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The Hangman Ties the Holly
[2 blank pages]
Anne Wilkinson
THE
HANGMAN
TIES THE
HOLLY
TORONTO • MACMILLAN • 1955
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COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1955
BY
ANNE WILKINSON
All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.
Printed in Canada
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TO MY MOTHER
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CONTENTS
ONE OR THREE OR TWO
Who has the cunning to apprehend Even everyday easy things Like air and wind and a fool Or the structure and colour of a simple soul? New laid lovers sometimes see, In a passion of light; A man, alone, Perfecting his night vision May be struck by dark And silenced into sight. But lovers sign false names Unless their love is fable; A man, alone, Is unapproachable; The dome of his observatory May cap a hill Or crouch in the wind of prairie Who can tell? Or whether far away is near And blocks our view Or if one joined to one Makes ONE or three or two? [page 1]
‘I was born a boy, and a maiden, a plant and a bird, and a darting fish in the sea’—Empedocles
I live in only one of innumerable rooms When I damp the fire with purposeful breath, Stare at ash, sharpen My pencil on stone at a cold hearth Or flick the dust on good white genesis of paper, Flocking the air with rhymes for death, soft As the fluff of sleep or witched by broom— Sticks, rough with rattle tall tales of bones. Yet always I huff out the flame with breath as live And green as Irish grass, recalling the gills Of my youth when I was a miner Deep in the hills of the sea. I was a poet then. Boldly I carried my light Through all the pressure of black water. My blood was cold with fire for I swam In the glimmer of a self-ignited lantern. And I was born a boy for I bore a boy And walked with him in the proud And nervous satrapy of man— Though who can hide the accent of a mother tongue? And I was a maiden all forlorn A long long time ago. But the time for maidens is said to be brief And I do not remember it otherwise— A time of bells, with the crystal Tinkle of grief To indicate the supersonic moment Pitched an octave higher than the heart’s belief. [page 2] And I was born a plant. My lettuce life Was sunny as the leaf is green. I linger still in daymares of my flowering era— If I blazed no light, I caught and held its sheen, Tangled the moon in man, submissive in my flora. For mine is a commonwealth of blood, red And sluiced with recollection. Portage From the sea is in the salt of my sweat, My roots are running with the juice of stems When pale for home they grope for a touch of earth. Boy and maiden meander through the dendrous veins Of everyone under the sun But who has been a bird? Featherless our pilots know their mammoth stretch Pinned precarious to naked skin. What child, from white verandah steps Heaving his gravity with angel faith Has not cried his tears on concrete And on concrete learned His kind has no primeval right to wings? Empedocles presumed Olympic Sire; Out of a Goddess by a God. Beside him put his peer, The man who stands, knowing he swam in mud. [page 3]
THE PRESSURE OF NIGHT
The pressure of night is on her, She lies stiff against her saviour sleep. Vicious as a scratch her cry ‘I love the light, I’ll have no traffic With the nigger world of night’. And her white flesh creeps. But night is, and blazed with eyes. Night has no shudder in Its whole dark hemisphere of skin And night replies ‘I am your shepherd lover, Root of daisy and the seed of clover, I am the poet’s pasture.’ But she lies dumb Ice and fire die tepid on her tongue Scorched with cold, the unbeliever Resists her saviour. [page 4]
LENS
1
The poet’s daily chore Is my long duty; To keep and cherish my good lens For love and war And wasps about the lilies And mutiny within. My woman’s eye is weak And veiled with milk; My working eye is muscled With a curious tension, Stretched and open As the eyes of children; Trusting in its vision Even should it see The holy holy spirit gambol Counterheadwise, Lithe and warm as any animal. My woman’s iris circles A blind pupil; The poet’s eye is crystal, Polished to accept the negative, The contradictions in a proof And the accidental Candour of the shadows; [page 5] The shutter, oiled and smooth Clicks on the grace of heroes Or on some bestial act When lit with radiance The afterwords the actors speak Give depths to violence, Or if the bull is great And the matador And the sword Itself the metaphor.
2
In my dark room the years Lie in solution, Develop film by film. Slow at first and dim Their shadows bite On the fine white pulp of paper. An early snap of fire Licking the arms of air I hold against the light, compare The details with a prehistoric view Of land and sea And cradles of mud that rocked The wet and sloth of infancy. A stripe of tiger, curled And sleeping on the ribs of reason Prints as clear As Eve and Adam, pearled With sweat, staring at an apple core; [page 6] And death, in black and white Or politic in green and Easter film, Lands on steely points, a dancer Disciplined to the foolscap stage, The property of poets Who command his robes, expose His moving likeness on the page.[page 7]
STRANGERS
The juxtaposition of strangers, Charged, when strangeness claps A lightning recognition, Clears the sticky senses, Humid from a hot-house vision. Empty of heirlooms, free From bric-bras of identity Their vowels pray in Solomon song And the mongol child of grief Dies a day in their arms; A blaze of time tat is not here Or past or in the space to come Till, human, they close in and crack The abstract of the unfamiliar room. Though iris of the eye is blind To the death of the strangers, Pupils see their deputies, Lovers mocking their kind In a game they know by head And play with wit Below the hiding spirit.[page 8]
SWIMMING LESSON
He found her Tied with ropes of kelp In shallow water. A good Seamaritan he beached His body, knelt and cut The weeds that bound her to an arc About the land’s tail end of rock. Then seaward over the swell He climbed the cliffs of spray But braked his fins and turned When she called over the wind ‘I’ll drift from shore and drown, I’m buoyant only when I swim In shallow water.’ He listened, drifting, while She told a tyrant’s tale; Step-motherly with threat Of octopus and squid She’d bound her slavish toes To shell and sand and pebble Tethered by the tide To bays about the shore. ‘I float in home-eroded caves,’ she sighed, My faint head weak Above the horseplay, High-capped white effrontery of waves.’ ‘All animals can swim,’ he said, ‘In the swimming season; Children wet with birth Remember to their dying dust The lost aquarium of Eden.’[page 9] ‘Not if they were dark in the well When they were weaned,’ she answered him, ‘My lungs are full, I choke On memory of water; I live by shallow seas Where I can hear the landlubber Dig the rib and soil of laughter.’ ‘Earthbound dunce,’ he said, And there on rock, in merman’s sense, Became her master (He was dyed a teacher— Not in wool But bright in silk and nylon To his driver’s soul). ‘Come,’ he said, ‘you’ll swim With all four fins, You’ll duck your head; Your eyes will open on A world of fish and flora And our own green notion Planting rosemary and thyme In acres red with herring Under a sky of ocean.’ And though she did not holy believe She’d lost the hellfire of her disbelief And moved, a sleeping swimmer, As he steered her out To where the sea rolled bass with whales And there were no more walls. Awash and knots away The breakers whinnied on the sands; Fields of moonripeseawheat [page 10] Fed by currents in her blood Swayed to the tug and slack Of Polar streams On the warm gulf seam of love. On the seventh day from land He whispered through a crevice in the roar ‘Now I’ll let you go and we will swim In fathoms deeper than the need for breath,’ And she, accepting, drowned and swam And happily lived ever waterward.[page 11]
EASTER SKETCHES, MONTREAL
1
South of North Men grow soft with summer, Lack the winter muscles Set to tauten at the miracle; Boom and shrapnel, March of Easter, loud Where guns of ice salute The cracking god. Vision dims where flowers Blur the lens But here, intemperate The ropes of air Whip the optic nerve Till eyes are clean with crying For the melting hour When flocks of snow stampede And rocks are spit by spring And intimations of fertility In water ring. Southof North Men grow deaf with summer, Sound is muffled by the pile of lawns, But where the air is seeded fresh And skies can stretch their cloudy loins To the back of the long north wind The ear is royally pitched And hears the dying snows Sing like swans. [page 12]
2
Where campanile of rock steeples the town Water bells the buoy of all our birthdays; Rivers swell in tumbling towers of praise, Ice in aqua risen hails The bearing down in labour of the sun. And after sun, guards of northern lights Stand their swords; green fires kindled By the green shoots in our wood Cut the natal cord, Freeing the animal sensual man with astral Spears of grass. Cerebral ore conceives when pollen Falls from heaven in a buzz of stars And time and the rolling world Fold the birthday children in their arms.
3
North of South Winter is Jehovah, we The Jobs who scold the frosty Lord Till wings of weather Clap the air And crows unfrock the melting God. [page 13] On our nativity The mellowed sun is grown, A man to kill our father, A sun with breath so warm It seeds the body of our summer. [page 14]
ALLELUIA
No fanfare of flowers But an almost inaudible Clatter of bells As the last icicle falls And rivers ride again And warn their banks To warn the woods And the waking worm Of the coming Passion of our Soil, An oratorio rehearsed by treble birds But bursting bass from earth. O hear The vegetable kingdom swell And life explode, The sound upheaved about our ears By cabbages and cauliflower And the gangly stalks of fresh risen corn And radishes newborn And row on row of cheering lettuces Proclaiming their authentic green.[page 15]
GREEK ISLAND
These male and muscled hills trace their line Back to the smoking draughtsmanship of Zeus And in the hollows curved about the coves The tender olive grows And lemon sows the air with irony, Spicing the languor of the bridal orange. And bees sing here and the breathing sea Inhales the breath of flowers And hungry children cast their nets For a catch of gods, Scenting, in fumes of salt and honey, Things to come and the NOW in all things past.[page 16]
IN JUNE AND GENTLE OVEN
In June and gentle oven Summer kingdoms simmer As they come And flower and leaf and love Release Their sweetest juice. No wind at all On the wide green world Where fields go stroll- Ing by And in and out An adder of a stream Parts the daisies On a small Ontario farm. And where, in curve of meadow, Lovers, touching, lie, A church of grass stands up And walls them, holy, in. Fabulous the insects Stud the air Or walk on running water, Klee-drawn saints And bright as angels are. Honeysuckle here Is more than bees can bear And time turns pale And stops to catch its breath And lovers slip their flesh [page 17] And light as pollen Play on treble water Till bodies reappear And a shower of sun To dry their languor. Then two in one the lovers lie And peel the skin of summer With their teeth And suck its marrow from a kiss So charged with grace The tongue, all knowing Holds the sap of June Aloof from seasons, flowing. [page 18]
ITALIAN PRIMITIVE
A narrow virgin droops In newborn blue, Lips folded in, lines following The path of stilted tears, Medieval mother of men Holding inept hands Her little manikin. Enamel butterfly and bee, The polished bear, sing Beside the bearing olive tree. [page 19]
ONCE UPON A GREAT HOLIDAY
I remember or remember hearing Stories that began ‘Once upon a great holiday Everyone with legs to run Raced to the sea, rejoicing.’ It may have been harvest Sunday Or the first Monday in July Or rockets rising for young Albert’s queen. Nobody knows. But the postman says It was only one of those fly-by-days That never come back again. My brother counted twenty suns And a swarm of stars in the east, A cousin swears the west was full of moons; My father whistled and my mother sang And my father carried my sister Down to the sea in his arms. So one sleep every year I dream The end of Ramadhan Or some high holy day When fathers whistle and mothers sing And every child is fair of face And sticks and stones are loving and giving And sun and moon embrace. A unicorn runs on this fly-by-day, Whiter than milk on the grass, so white is he. [page 20]
A CHILD CAN CLOCK
A child can clock An era on the arc Of a day in the sun A boy is young When he holds the pale of dawn Smoking in his arms, A youth, when waved with fear The smoke’s consumed By the climbing fire. A man is high as noon When he can see Ahead to trees whose shadows Lie in sleeping dragons On the lawn Or easy turn and touch The shrinking shade Where morning Withers on the grass And he is old when Counterclockwise into clown He tumbles on [page 21] The dial of earth And dying blows a puff Of dandelion Envy greens his eyes As the flighty seed Soars then falls to birth [page 22]
THE RED AND THE GREEN
Here, where summer slips Its sovereigns through my fingers I put on my body and go forth To seek my blood. I walk the hollow subway Of the ear; its tunnel Clean of blare Echoes the lost red syllable. Free from cramp and chap of winter Skin is minstrel, sings Tall tales and shady Of the kings of Nemi Wood. I walk an ancient path Wearing my warmth and singing The notes of a Druid song In the ear of Jack-in-the-Green. But the quest turns round, the goal, My human red centre Goes whey in the wind, Mislaid in the curd and why of memory. Confused, I gather rosemary And stitch the leaves To green hearts on my sleeve; My new green arteries [page 23] Fly streamers from the maypole of my arms, From head to toe My blood sings green, From every heart a green amnesia rings. [page 24]
ITEMS OF CHAOS
On a Tuesday quiet road A bird flew into my windshield; By a barley field A bullet broke the glass; a toad Lived all its summer in a bird’s nest; A storm escaped the cloudy throat Of a man possessed And thundered round the town. A Monday murder under a lilac tree Gained a short renown But only because the flowers Tumbled, purple, down Bewildering the sense With fragrance Poured on a common crime. A twoheaded boy, Sunday born, Made the news this week. About his single neck Authority has hung a disk, Identifying and abstracting grief. The father drives a truck, The mother is mild And knows not why from wither Or the double hunger Of her two-faced child. Some say goblins. Others swear A ring around the moon When she conceived her son Bewitched the way of genes. The moon has no opinion, [page 25] The father’s pride is broken, Doctors are no wiser. ‘Variations from the norm Are plentiful,’ they say, ‘But not explicable.’ Sabbath voices drone ‘In the sight of God, ALL His works are beautiful.’ [page 26]
TIGERS KNOW FROM BIRTH
My bones predict the striking hour of thunder
And water as I huddle under
The tree the lightning renders
I’m hung with seaweed, winding in its caul
The nightmare of a carp whose blood runs cold,
A crab who apes my crawl
My lens is grafted from a jungle eye
To focus on the substance of a shadow’s
Shadow on the sky
My forest filtered drum is pitched to hear
The serpent split the grass before the swish
Is feather in my ear
I’ve learned from land and sea of every death
Save one, the east rest, the little catnap
Tigers know from birth [page 27]
DIRGE
Who killed the bridegroom? I, said the bride, With a nail in his pride, I killed the bridegroom. Who killed the bride? I, said the groom, I fashioned her tomb, I killed the bride. Who saw them die? I, said the ice, In my cold embrace, I saw them die. Who caught their blood? I, said the sea, It ebbed back to me, I caught their blood. Who’ll be chief mourner? I, said the fire, I’ll mourn for desire, I’ll be chief mourner. Who’ll carry the coffin? I, said the wind, Till the two poles bend, I’ll carry the coffin. [page 28] Who’ll toll the bell? We, said the lovers, For all whom love severs, We toll the bell. [page 29]
MISER’S GRACE
What amputation Of the sod To hack it out To stretch the dead How angular We make the snow When putting down The bones we knew A miser’s grace To fill with lead The breathing earth That gave us bread [page 30]
TOPSOIL TO THE WIND
We have mislaid ourselves, purposely As a child mislays a burden; As if in miracle of treason Pastures willingly, Threw topsoil to the wind. We gnaw the forked and brittle Bone of wish and call it food, Party every hour to murder At the altar of our adulthood. In aisles between the graves we waste The landed fish, our flesh. Our hearts, unrisen, yield a heavy bread. [page 31]
PASTORAL
Let the world go limp, put it to rest, Give it a soft wet day and while it sleeps Touch a drenched lead; Roll a stone where the skin’s aware on your palm, Stretch long and latitudinal on sand And smell the salt drugged steaming of the sea, Breathe sudden shock, Drench the flesh in fonts of memory Before you turn Uncurl prehensile fingers from the tree, Cut your name on bark, search The letters for your lost identity.[page 32]
ON A BENCH IN A PARK
On a bench in a park Where I went walking A boy and girl, Their new hearts breaking Sat side by side And miles apart And they wept most bitterly. ‘Why do you mourn,’ I asked, ‘You, who are barely born?’ ‘For gold that is gone,’ Said the girl, ‘I weep distractedly.’ I turned to the youth, ‘And you?’ ‘For what I have not gained,’ he cried, ‘Possessing her I lost myself and died.’ And so we sat, a trio Tuned to sobs, And miles to go And miles and miles apart Till they, amazed That one as old as I Had juice enough for tears, Dried their streaming eyes To ask the cause of mine.[page 33] I told of the grit I’d found In a grain of truth, Mentioned an aching tooth Decayed with fears And the sum of all I’d lost In the increased tax on years. They yawned and rose And walked away. I moved To go but death sat down. His cunning hand Explored my skeleton.[page 34]
SOUTH, NORTH
Countries where the olive And the orange ripen Grow their men On slopes unpuritan; Joy a food Deserving rites of measure. Where winter pulls the blind A bliss as keen— On native stone of sin Cold men whet their pleasure Cussed by the black north wind. [page 35]
I AM SO TIRED
I am so tired I do not think Sleep in death can rest me So line my two eternal yards With softest moss Then lengths of bone won’t splinter As they toss Or pierce their wooden box To winter Do not let the children Pass my way alone Lest these shaking bones Rattle our their fright At waking in the night [page 36]
CHRISTMAS EVE
Close as brothers are or breathing I am tied to men whose mourning Wears out benches in the park; My shadow mates with shadows Where they trespass On the fenced and guarded acres of the heart. They stack the litter of their discontent On private property. I order them to pick up skin and go But sit and stare When, paper thin, they stand on cardboard feet And ask me, ‘Where?’ We shake our heads and scald our eyeballs In community of tears. Then one among them speaks, ‘Tonight is Christmas Eve; Tattered and torn my tongue, My heart is hanging On the ill will of a thorn; But if my head can rob A neighbour of his joy I’ll be a thief of feeling, Steal his love and wrap A red, illicit toy.’ A felon speaks, ‘Tonight is Christmas Eve And derelicts are bitten White with grief. But look! enchanted children cry To see the blizzard blacken [page 37] Where the flakes come tumbling On the evil in my eye.’ The chorus sings ‘Tonight is Christmas Eve, What shepherd guides the sheep? The saviour in our sinews Is he dead or only nodding Out his forty winks of sleep? Noel Noel Hullo goodbye The day salutes goodwill.’ Terror strains my mercy And I yell ‘Go home before I call the...’ ‘Madam, home is where we die,’ They grin and sigh, ‘And we can die as well as not In your walled garden plot.’ I shut my eyes and build my hands In dikes about my ears (I am the priest the church the steeple All the people Riddled with the peak and mob of fear); I sing song in my head, ‘Tinsel angels guard my bed, The house is warm, The witch is chained to the barn, God rest us merry gentlemen.’ [page 38]
CAROL
I was a lover of turkey and holly But my true love was the Christmas tree We hung our hearts from a green green bough And merry swung the mistletoe We decked the tree with a silver apple And a golden pear, A partridge and a cockle shell And a fair maiden No rose can tell the fumes of myrrh That filled the forest of our day Till fruit and shell and maid fell down And the partridge flew away Now I swing from a brittle twig For the green bough of my true love hid A laily worm. Around my neck The hangman ties the holly. [page 39]
LITTLE MEN SLIP INTO DEATH
Little men slip into death As the diver slides into water With only a ripple To tell where he’s hidden. Big muscles struggle harder in the grave. The earth is slow to settle on their bones, Erupting into mounds or sprouting flowers Or giving birth to stones. And how to stand a tombstone With the ground not quiet yet, And what to say, what not to say When moss is rooted and the stone is set? [page 40]
ON THE DEATH OF A YOUNG POET
How can an old man Talk with the young? The weight of his secret Stops the pulse of tongue The young are saying Men die too soon Who die while their words Uphold the noon The young are grieving A young man’s death An old man knows Whom the gods bless [page 41]
WHEN WOUND IS FRESH
When wound is fresh She bathes in blood To cleanse the pain Then fragile mesh Of sentient skin Shuts pulsing vein Day after day The graft, o thin, Is grief to touch So strange the way Of healing She wonders why This convalescence Calls itself relief. Now scar is thick Her tongue, compulsive Hunts a redder Wound to lick. [page 42]
DAILY THE DRUM
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling…it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’—GEORGE ELIOT
1
Daily the drum is burst It is not only or foremost The din of squirrel hearts Or the spangled noise of grass These are simple sounds Like bird love, Not the sound we die of.
2
On the other side of silence I can hear the bones Of bold and trembling girls Clacking castanets In dance of fire and fear And who is dear enough When young men cry And hailstones break the panes That glaze the lovers’ eye, Or terror’s tin scream rises, Not from a throat But from the key that locks The sickness in the mouth? The service at our graves Comes clear, and bells, [page 43] But who can bear The hidden grinding mirth When etiquette conceals The date and nature of our death? And every hour a child’s Black coal of trouble Picks at the poet’s ear Sharper than any other, For child and poet wind A one-day clock. ‘NOW,’ It strikes, ‘NOW is forever.’ These are the sounds that murder. [page 44]
BOYS AND GIRLS
Boys and girls come out to play In air, in water; All together, duck, dive, somersault, Push the waves about as if they owned A cool blue liquid fortune; Then, mysteriously, For no one gives a signal, They climb the ladder, throw Their spongy selves on silver dock. The pale boards darken round their bodies Where the water runs. The plumpness on the girls is new And not yet of them; Awkwardly as the farmer’s boy His Sunday suit They wear a flounce of hips, The prickling breasts. Their minds have gone away to sleep In a far country; Nothing IS, except to tease And nurse them into women. They do not speak to boys unless to jeer, And sit apart, But out of the corners of their eyes They look at them incessantly. Boys are proud, groin A phoenix, fire and ash And new-found agony; Minds are here, not stars away And fine nerves sing [page 45] Like wire stretched from pole to pole In a prairie wind; Nowhere are they cradled In a warmth of fat So they must tremble, boast, Insult the lolling maidens, Girls they hate Whose bodies swim in their veins, Whom somehow they must touch. Mysteriously, again, For no one gives a signal, It’s water time. Pink girls rise and run, sticky As foam candy at a fair, Shriek and mimic fear When the crowing boys push Into the quivering lake The girls they’ll kiss next year. [page 46]
THREE POEMS ABOUT POETS
1
Poets are fishermen crying ‘Fresh catch from sleep, Fresh as the mackerel sky Or a salmon’s leap Is the catch we offer. Come buy, come buy!’
2
Poets are cool as the divers who wander The floor of the sea; Their eyes are aquariums, swimming With starfish and stranger. Dark waters breed the phantoms They haul in their nets to the sun And sun is the power That glisters their scales with meaning.
3
Poets are leapers, the heels of their sprung feet Clearing the hurdles of sleep. See how they run! Muscled with rhythm And fleshed fair and rosy with vowels. They’re pulling the tunnel out into the light, Did you ever see such a sight in your life As three new poems? [page 47]
LETTER TO MY CHILDREN
I guided you by rote— Nipple to spoon, from spoon To knife and fork, And many a weak maternal morning Bored the breakfast hour With ‘manners make the man’, And cleanliness I kissed But shunned its neighbour, Puzzled all my days By the ‘I’ in godliness. Before you turn And bare your faultless teeth at me Accept a useless gift, apology, Admit I churched you in the rites Of trivia And burned the family incense At a false god’s altar. If we could start again, You, newbegotten, I A clean stick peeled Of twenty paper layers of years I’d tell you only what you know But barely know you know, Teach one commandment, ‘Mind the senses and the soul Will take care of itself, Being five times blessed.’ [page 48]
FOR DINAH, THE ADENEYS’ CAT
Thirty elongated seconds By the sun We stared, the cat and I, Strangers, cool and crouched Behind unwinking green Till flick Along the spine, a whip Of recognition cut Our masks of fur and skin, Cat o’nine tails with a sting Neither hinted at By curl of lip Or spitting tongue. Then one cat turned With poise of air And washed a spotless paw, The other took a tortoiseshell comb And almost yawned As she combed her tatless hair. [page 49]
AFTER GREAT SHOCK
1—Physical Findings
In slow motion body moves, Fingers clumsy as a brood of thumbs, Legs on the loose and stumbling And the voice crying ‘O dear why should this matter be.’ Thigh and shin burn blue with bumping Stove and desk and angles of the dead, Lips move awkwardly as young And unloved girls, Elbows swell, broken On confusion of banged doors; Tears dictate their gush and their withholding. No ink yet graphs the movement of the heart.
2—Prognosis
If tissue shrinks and head, aloft once more Pilots the body, proud Between its world of matter, A poet’s point will trace the trough And pitch of pain, a cardiogram Abstracted from the shaken centre. [page 50]
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Her coral remnants lie Where fishes keep their watch by night And move transparent fins In hollows of her delicate drift-bones. From ivory pelvis spring Her strange sea changeling children; In sockets deep with six lost layers of sight The sea fans open. [page 51]
POEM IN THREE PARTS
1
Those behind me Those about me Millions crowding to come after me Look over my shoulder. Together we consider The merit of stone (I hold a stone in my hand for all to see) A geologist tells the time it has endured Endurance, a virtue in itself, we say, Makes its own monument. We pause, resent The little span A miser’s rule Inched out for man But blood consoles us Can be squeezed from us Not from stone. Saying this fools no one A sudden bluster of words Claims for human seed A special dispensation Foxes and flowers and other worthies All excluded. Immediately sixteen creeds Cry out to be defended— A state of emergency exists; [page 52] Flying buttresses Revolving domes, a spire extended By the spirit of A new and startling growth of thorns Skies in Asia catch On uptilted wings of temples In the Near East the talk is of stables.
2
Above-below the din A few quiet men Observe the cell’s fragility How Monday’s child Makes Tuesday’s vegetable And Wednesday petrifies The leaf to mineral While Friday sparks the whole in fire And Sunday’s elements disperse And rise in air.
3
The stone in my hand IS my hand And stamped with tracings of A once greenblooded frond, Is here, is gone, will come, Was fire, and green, and water, Will be wind. [page 53]
TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
One man prayed ‘Hold your nuclear Sun On the Right hand of heaven,’ Another cried, ‘The God of Power belongs On the Left hand with the chosen.’ As was to be expected Neither received a reply. But how could they admit? Forging God’s signature Each sat down And composed a holy writ. The two books were so similar They might have been written by brothers; For absolution both proposed Last rites, flood-lit. [page 54]
TO A SLEEP ADDICT
Turn your compass from The point of sleep. Let the fixed pole wait. Why hurry the traveller home? The track is short so beat The racing blood For when its foaming dries No whip can make you bleed. The linen that covers us At last, is cold and worms Are hatched in shadows Of our human arms. Speak now For we must hold our peace When resurrection springs From the crook of an ulna And slithers through the grass. [page 55]
WHERE CLIFFS, REFLECTED, COWER
Where cliffs, reflected, cower I see the image of a stranger In a sheltered pool. He clings to crumbling Ledge and the clatter Of three pebbles, loosed and tumbling, Drowns the edgy grief Of fingernails and the torn quick Pleading for his life. I hear him sigh. Fatigue lets go And up he comes, though he comes crashing down Where hawks are crowned, and kingly Feed on the delicate ways of flesh Then sharpen jaded beaks On a jag of bone. Below the clouds but far Above his head the hawks are lagging. I would cry my heart around And stretch it to a wide red net To catch the falling stranger in. I’d hold him still and stunned But safe from vultures and the titter Of small birds Waiting for his thud Of matter on the ground. [page 56] But my red boasted net Is less than air, the mesh Too weak with words To bear his weight Or frighten off the plunge Of preying birds. Shorn of grace I stare at the mocking pool And throw a stone To break the image of his fall And my cold face And the white gull bearing our souls away. [page 57]
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