Collected Poems 1931-74 (33 page)

Sweet sorrow, were you always there?

I did not recognise

At first the grave tilt of the head,

Or the meek dark eyes.

To share my deepest joy with you

I sought you—but you seemed to hide

Far in the mindless canyons of your love

Which lay for you, like me, near suicide.

That rainbow over Joyce's tower

Was another rare deceit,

Raising once more those vaulting hopes

You soon proved counterfeit.

1973/
19
73

The old men said: to wet the soul with wine or urine

Then stretch it like choice kid over a drumhead,

Tapping on the cartridge of words one might

Encapsulate the truth of something latent

In time, in destiny, in natural lore,

A caricature of simple intuitions. Giving back.

The old men said: you might arrive at last

To pierce behind the mask, for evermore

Match passion and clarity—that hopeless task.

1973/
1973

Thumb quantum

Thumb quantum

The fingerdrum drubs, the fingerdrum taps,

We rise into the navy sky

The islands booming with skulls.

With her a feast of white figs,

Cold water crystal on sand beaches,

A late moonrise seeming impromptu.

One could happily die here, perhaps one has,

Too little said about these matters.

One almond-eyed medusa nods

Her fine blond Circassian hair

Twisted up in the shape of an acorn.

With eyes pistachio green to grey,

Like an enamel medal of ancient Greece,

But verifiable and kind to touch.

1973/
1973

Transparent sheath of the dead cicada,

The eyes stay open like a dead Jap,

Financially no spongy parts to putrefy

Simply snap off the scaly integument of mica.

You could make a tiny violin of such a body,

Lanterns for elves, varnish into brooches

And wear by lamplight this transparent stare of noon,

In gold or some such precious allegorical metal,

Which spells out the dead wine which follows soon.

1973/
1973

Time spillers, pain killers, all such pretty women,

Whose tribal name so nearly rhymes with semen.

In dull male dough they infiltrate their leaven,

Which, though the spawn of hell, tastes like pure heaven.

Time wasters, food tasters, bachelor haters,

They hunt with the science of the great predators.

In their mad dreams of one-and-onliness

They feel the self-murder of Kant's loneliness.

Critics of Pure Reason they don't reck,

The quivering kiss, the bullet in the neck.

1973/
1973

That last summer quite definitely the dead

Began to outnumber the living in his village.

He would always remember the month exactly,

Hopes capsized and grey hairs abounding.

And so the dead with all their precious talk

Stacked up inside them, loaves of whole wit,

Long roes of gossip or pomegranate seeds

Of poetry peeping out of wounds, decamped.

Gone the vainglory of beautiful

Skin and regular teeth when the sun brought out

The wine's brown perfume on the rocks

Of old blood mellowed in Adam's evils.

In this small walled garden, apricots falling,

He stirred about in the embers of his time

Under a sky the colour of elephant hide.

He now knew she did not like his house

Nor his style of life buried in the hills,

With monotony, the artist's only aliment.

Silences bruised by the echoes of dead talk,

Foliage of voices, fists of forgotten applause.

No, she did not like the place at all.

Cold will be the wind now, dark the storms,

Ending of a visionary delight. Why to care?

His art would marry the image it deserved,

As a sculptor's hand breaking the soft clay

Of old desires; mind you, the very same hand

That broke the dark bread to model hunger,

A presage of the faultless child in him.

1980/
1974

In all this summer dust O Vincent

You passed through my loyal mind,

And I saw the candlepower of stored light,

Like water in the humps of camels or in

Canopies of fire smouldering in volcanoes

Like ancient prostitutes or doges.

Memory giving the ikon of love a morbid kiss!

It doesn't matter; in the silent night

Fragrant with the death of so many friends, poets,

The major darkness comes and art beckons

With its quiet seething of the writer's mind.

Your great canvas humming like a top.

But the terror for me is that you didn't realise

That love, even in inferior versions, is a kind

Of merciful self-repair. O Vincent you were blind.

Like some great effluent performer

Discharging whole rivers into hungry seas.

I do not mean the other kind of love,

Born in newspapers like always exchanging

Greasy false teeth. Not of that kind.

In these shining canvases I commend

A fatal diagnosis of light, more light;

Famous last words to reach the inessential.

They seem to assume that death is unnecessary

And in discreet images make ethical strife stationary,

Signposting always desires at bay.

Goodness! It is canny in its way.

Because the irritation of light leads onwards

Towards blindness which is truth, an unknowing,

And the constraints of unlucky companionship

Hinder like a foolish marriage. One must act.

It is no good explaining things with unction,

You will never get beyond their primal function.

But you directly saw the splendour of the

Dying light redeemed. Have mercy on us!

You went mad, they say, the companionship

Of angels grew too loud to bear. You felt

That what was done was quite beyond repair.

So madness, why not? An irrational respect

For tin or pincushions, a whole architecture.

The girl you loved was grave yet debonair

Like the French whore I live with I suppose.

And dying of self-importance is the usual thing;

The creed of loneliness is all that's left,

And art, the jack o'lantern to console and punish.

All this I saw in a patch of dust at St Remy

During the fatal year of 1974.

1980/
1974

So back to a Paris grubby as a bowel

Where mated to some second-hand man

In foreign loves recycled by the moon

You'll be some night the countess of somewhat;

A cocktail face beheaded by the smile.

Wanted as orchids may be in a season

Then left as cool as the perfumed marbles of Rome.

In some default of reason you may hurt

For tunes the small particulars recall.

The globe is mighty but not limitless

And fame will prevent him from being ever loved,

While age will stare you out of ownership.

Allowance made for all self-pitying muses

Stare from the wide shipwreck of your bed

And stealthily awake, your version make,

Count down the stars towards the death of time.

1980/
1974

A reptile of ancient stars winking,

The rectangles of lost casements

But in which country now, remember.

Such simple conceptions can capsize.

It would cost heavy postage to signal.

Yet the magnitude of the sky,

The Pleiades arise in frozen spray,

The magnitude of the night sky,

The magnitude is never: it's simply all here.

So lying alone, thinking, in deep grass

It doesn't matter much if the mind is

Howling at the moon, or the old

Jackal of a fading earth: expressing sorrow.

Lonely product of a ninepenny womb,

Full of a fierce psychic reticence

One gladiator of the simple sense

Carving out poetry for his tomb.

Listen, the cloud-stampede goes south

In the lumber of a sunset red,

The skeleton keys of fireflies soon

Will prick the ancient dark again—

Deforming logic which was once

Harmonious but now out of tune.

You make me feel all loose at the roots;

Then comes illness, the most acute form

Of mental laziness to hide oneself in;

The very precious icy feeling for

One person, issue of matter, breathing,

And wearing a final skin, will trade

Everything for it always, even reason.

1980/
1974