Collected Poems 1931-74 (5 page)

Numen
inest.
Only the stone puma,

Fluminous under the butter of candles,

Shares this fierce humour.

Little
man'
s
food
is
brief
barley.

His
patron
is
black
malt.

Afterwards
death
is
his
matron.

Bringing
musical
bread:

God
with
his
footwork

Bringing
musical
bread.

Dipped
in
the
heart'
s
dark
salt.

Friends, Humans, Englishmen!

Officer at the bar and gentleman in bed,

Kings in your counting-houses, clerks at cricket,

All you who play in this desperate game,

Hopes of the side, the tenth wicket,

Who will be certainly raised to the rank of aunt

In the new millennium: permit

The bromoid encomium of the harmonium,

Wear the heart at half-mast and signal

A feudal death of an old order,

The dissolving warrior in his iron hat.

Observe the soul's decorum: stand, my son,

Hymn number one.

Poor
Tom,
whose
hope
was
sterile
dust

Now
perches
on
an
angel's
thumb.

While
cherubims
with
silky
limbs

Around
him
hymn
and
hum.

My uncle has entered his soliloquy;

Under the black sigil the old white one

Kneels in the Lamb's blood,

Hymned by portentous crotchets,

Keeps his smart vigil.

Puma of powder-blue whose stony lip

Reflects the candles, with a mineral eye

Covets the blood, but does not dare to sip.

This man, my Romans, was a Roman,

A breaker of skyline, took first prize

In the regatta for men past menopause,

Passed through the eye of the needle, broke

The hug of the Great Bear, the hug

Of a glacier's hairy back and oxygen claws.

Spat on Orion, left his shoes in a church,

Hung a harp on every weeping willow,

Took tiffin by the Indian bulrushes, saw

The last deranged crater, swallowed the Word.

Shot his bolt in the Gobi.

Was left in the lurch,

Then like a Roman, fell upon his sword.

This prince, this bug, this human,

Who sleeps under the great cat sleeping,

Shares with the smiling paranoiac,

Shares with the baby in the creeping-suit,

An amniotic balance, the diver's grief.

Has followed a Roman nose past Mandalay,

Ladybird on a leaf.

Simple
addition,
simple
subtraction.

One
is
left
and
the
other
is
taken:

Simple
condition
but
multiple
fraction.

One
is
a
doll:
the
other
will
waken.

Simple
reflection,
simple
refraction.

Plus
or
minus,
but
never
just
ONE.

Simple
equation
but
multiple
action

Ten
little
nigger
boys:
now
there
are
none.

My uncle has entered his soliloquy.

The candles shed their fur.

O world be nobler for her sake.

The boys hang in the vestry, the days

Are drawing in. Blow out the flesh,

The three-score ten of candles,

This squalid birthday-cake.

Give us to God with slim and shining handles.

All this Peter and Paul knew,

Talked over in the nazarene evenings,

Walked over Galilee arm in arm,

Moved by no wires, by pure imagination.

The prophet who sat under the tall rock

Wrote in a small pure hand this canon

For stockbrokers to read at Cannon Street,

At the Metropole, around the Maypole,

Or smiling in the Ritz: perhaps to endow

An evening conversation at the Plough.

Cousin Judas, let us admit

It is the hour for affirmations,

Let us affirm the no-claim bonus,

The wages of sin, let us admit

Chaos itself as a form of order,

Bear the sinner's pretty onus,

Rediscover the taste of ashes,

Crucify the choirboys: and above all

Preserve the senseless trajectory,

The doom of the bobbin in the loom,

From the rectory to the priory,

From bed to refectory,

From little womb eke to little tomb.

In the name of the Great Whale, then,

Be hale and whole! Amen.

1943/
1938

And to-day death comes to the house.

To-day upon the waters, the sunset sail,

Death enters and the swallow's eye

Under the roof is no larger and darker

Than this scent of death.

A disciple crossed over by water.

The acorn was planted.

In the Ionian villa among the marble

The fountain plays the sea's piano,

And by the clock the geometric philosopher

Walks in white linen while death

Squats in the swallow's eye.

The dogs are muzzled. Lord,

See to the outer gate, our protection.

I rest between the born and the unborn.

The father, the mother, the baby unicorn

Intercede for me, attended the christening.

Exempt me.

I have friends in the underworld.

1943/
1
938

I, per se I, I sing on.

Let flesh falter, or let bone break

Break, yet the salt of a poem holds on,

Even in empty weather

When beak and feather have done.

I am such fiddle-glib strokes,

As play on the nerves, glance the bare bone

With the madman's verve I quicken,

Leaven and liven body's prime carbon,

I, per se I, alone.

This is my medicine: trees speak and doves

Talk, woods walk: in the pith of the planet

Is undertone, overtone, status of music: God

Opens each fent, scent, memory, aftermath

In the sky and the sod.

O per se O, I sing on.

Never tongue falters or love lessens,

Lessens. The salt of the poem lives on

Like this carol of empty weather

Now feather and beak have gone.

1943/
1938

Ride out at midnight,

You will meet your sun.

Into what arsenal now seem fallen

The germs of the plum and the peppercorn?

The born and the unborn will report

What poison licks the wheat,

Or in the melon's gold retort

Repeat what melody fattens the leopard

From his mother's dusky teat.

Ride out at midnight

And number the sparrows.

Who put great wings to the Ark?

Who gave the unicorn spurs?

Only the women with thighs like mackerel,

Nourish the germ of the man of sorrows,

Are true to their monsters.

Be you to yours.

1960/
1938

If I say what I honestly mean

It's only because

I honestly mean what I say.

Shall I renounce you for a new theme

Who are a warm green stone, green girl,

Warm in a white bone bed?

It is no victory to write you,

But to become you. Gnosis

By osmosis. Knowing in becoming.

Desire is quite heraldic yet—

A lion or griffin on a playing-card,

Or Fiat Voluntas, and a page of uncials.

What do we care, though? I imagine always

Someone much later to read us here.

Open this garish album of the flesh

Kept to horrify children,

Silence the late traveller,

Pore on us. Point. Stop eating. There!

An Ice Age you and me!

1980/
1938

You have been surely as a great moon.

There have been utterly drawn up

Frantic and magnetic liners, voyagers,

Ships in a doldrum, destroyers

Prowling a trade-route, gulls.

Even the amputated earth herself

Pours suicidal tidal water,

Ebbs upwards, up along homeward elastic

On the long tug wombward. Tides

Shine between your ribs, my moon's

White suicidal tides.

Everything is drawn in. Often

The known world will melt magnetic.

The glacier thaw and soften.

Then Man, Monkey, Microscope

Litter the long water lunatic.

No. The pale face offers no comment

On an uprooted cosmos. Only now

I can sniff gongs in the blood,

Drums in the water. Masks.

Rivers of seed flowing.

Moon of my blood

So suicidal a watch must be

As for the tidal world, for me,

Absolute ebb and flood.

1980/
1938

Delicate desire,

She moves in belly's soft pocket,

At the wrist, like worm turning,

Apprehending morning, meaning

In all things. Rivers.

As tongue to mouth

Or eye to socket.

The swan, the candid unicorn

Fear nothing, caged in myth:

Have all green history's page

To frolic on.

Delicate desire,

As knife-thrust upward from beneath,

Grant two deep

Having, holding, folding,

Fading and inclining,

Dance into sleep

As tongue to tongue,

As knife to sheath.

1980/
1937

Unblade the brighter passions one by one.

See, like swords shaken, angels' heels,

The bright things crowd upon us unawares.

Terrific toys the limbs like children cherish,

You in the night, I in the night—O falling.

Straws join on a collapsing flood and we

Pouring, forever pouring as we perish.

The night. Orion's black proscenium

Invites: and, mortal here, we perish

Whose face I shall not see nor thaw whose sperm.

Only I tell a mouth as cold as coin

Breast finger chilly as the loin I cherish.

Now what pale allegory hangs between the stars?

What mouth sips out the candles of the body?

See, here is war and yet I bring no weapon,

My theme is simply visionary paper.

Darling no message but the eventual

Limbs junction, sockets of pleasure turning.

No pomp but the visitor at the window, Orion.

O I carry no sword but the inevitable

Statuary dagger, the reaping sword alive,

Against my belly, under the belt of stars.

1980/
1938

A girl has four partners in heraldry,

Elbow, wrist, ankle, knee.

Four bone gates the body uses

In its delicate abuses.

Ink become wine! Wine be blood!

O spirit, the leopard, eat body's food!

Girl, girl, girl, you have become

A valley of dead saints' bones,

A volley of hollow words, words, words.

Lie still. Watch the great heavy,

The flashing coloured boxer, Night,

Gong back the paleface, Day.

Opal and extravagant as a cat.

Lastly the moon will wake in him, too,

The stiff victorious grin o' the skull.

1980/
1938

Call back the stars. They are too many, Lord.

Death takes us man by man. Old wars

Covet us with the trumpet, cover us. April

Gives in deceit her stammering flowers.

Desire like a doom, the boom boom of the surf

Tells us. The slow-motion dive of the pole star

To the rim of the morning, the meaning of things,

Builds your tent where we are.

How shall it be? Caught in the sun's red loom,

Be woven to rock, to water, a new manufacture.

By the moon drawn, a green dolphin,

Up into death sans fracture?

Answer. At wedding, at tea-time, in snow?

Or in the dog-days, surprised at an oar,

In a drawn breath

Shall see save me too near the fatal,

Your absolute and ghostly impact, Lord,

The white yacht—death?

1980/
1938

At last the serious days of summer

When from the red forge dancing,

The blacksmith sunshine hammers

New beaks for the flesh.

From the black mint

Steel for new flint.

State me no theme for misery. The season

Like a woman lies open, is folding,

Secret, growth upon growth. The black fig,

Desire, is torn again from the belly of Reason.

Our summer is gravid at last, is big.

All you, who know desire in these seas,

Have souls or equipment for loneliness, loneliness,

Lean now like fruitage. The Hesperides

Open. This is the limbo, the doldrum.

Seal down the eye of your cyclops,

Silence time's drum.

1943/
1938

The paladin of the body is rock,

Dark rock, the anonymous

Stark stone, the prime ingot.

This crystal of darkness is flesh.

Call on Him and the rock

Becomes flesh and the flesh

God. Rock is His pseudonym.

This black rock does not feel

The kiss of the rivet, man's iron

So the body's armature seems

Bone: but is really stone.

God in the marrow

Borrows the belly's zone,

Shatters the mind's great lock,

And there visible is the Sphinx,

Whatever one thinks. God

Prime in the black rock.

1980/
1938

The father is in death.

Let him now enter into the sun's attic,

Enter the floating chambers of the sea.

Who will bear witness how foreign,

How musical with the silence

And alphabets we three be?

The father is in death.

The shadow lobs at the western wall.

The wheel has a broken spoke.

O conjure, my brothers, the pelican

That its monstrous egg is not laid here

Lest dogs snap the poisoned yolk.

The father is strangled in his vine.

We will go sideways out of the house

Leaving only by the oven to nestle

A small rabbit on her perch-grass:

She is too soft a thing, too abhorred

A morsel for the twelve angers,

The pestle and mortar of the Lord.

1980/
1938