Collected Poems 1931-74 (6 page)

Thy kingdom come. They say the prophet

In private house lies with his myth:

Sees strange particularities in flesh

That poison his beatitude.

Onlie begetter, shining one

We travel a same rare latitude

To fringe the Arctic Circle of the Word:

Carry no compass, flag to plant, but bone.

The ageless humour of the skeleton.

His myth is grace: no less our absolute,

Locust and honey, scrip and wallet. Woman

Can be a wilderness enough for body

To wander in: is a true human

Genesis and exodus. A serious fate.

She the last crucifixion on the Word.

We press on her as Roman on his sword.

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1939

From this glass gallows in famous entertainment,

Upside down and by the dust yellowed,

The hanged man considers a green county,

Hallowed by gallows on a high hill.

The rooks of his two blue eyes eating

A mineral diet, that smile not while

The invaders move: on the dark down there

Owls with soft scissors cherish him.

Yellower than plantains by the dust touched

These hands in their chamber-music turning,

As viol or cello, these might easily be

The sullen fingers of a fallen Charles.

So will the horseman speculate in his cloak,

The felloes of the wagon cease their screech,

While one widens the eye of the farm-girl

Telling how rope ripens on a high hill.

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1939

Hush the old bones their vegetable sleep,

For the islands will never grow old.

Nor like Atlantis on a Monday tumble,

Struck like soft gongs in the amazing blue.

Dip the skull's chinks in lichens and sleep,

Old man, beside the water-gentry.

The hero standing knee-deep in his dreams

Will find and bind the name upon his atlas,

And put beside it only an X marked spot.

Leave memory to the two tall sons and lie

Calmed in smiles by the elegiac blue.

A man's address to God is the skeleton's humour,

A music sipped by the flowers.

Consider please the continuous nature of Love:

How one man dying and another smiling

Conserve for the maggot only a seed of pity,

As in winter's taciturn womb we see already

A small and woollen lamb on a hilltop hopping.

The dying and the becoming are one thing,

So wherever you go the musical always is;

Now what are your pains to the Great Danube's pains,

Your pyramids of despair against Ithaca

Or the underground rivers of Dis?

Your innocence shall be as the clear cistern

Where the lone animal in these odourless waters

Quaffs at his own reflection a shining ink.

Here at your green pasture the old psalms

Shall kneel like humble brutes and drink.

Hush then the finger bones their mineral doze

For the islands will never be old or cold

Nor ever the less blue: for the egg of beauty

Blossoms in new migrations, the whale's grey acres,

For men of the labyrinth of the dream of death.

So sleep.

All these warm when the flesh is cold.

And the blue will keep.

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1939

I have nibbled the mystical fruit. Cover me.

Lest the prophetic fish follow and swallow me.

I dare not tread among the lilies

Though lambswool cover my footfall,

Though the adder call, the Word walk,

In the orchard voices follow, hands hallow me.

Thy will be done as it was in Eden.

We were a long time—I am afraid—

Naked among silver fish and shadows,

A long time and in silence naked. Only

The fountains falling, the hornet's drum

Calling, sunny and drunk with dew.

I am Adam, of singular manufacture,

A little clay, water, and prophetic breath;

On the waters of chaos a lamp of red clay.

The Word owns me. I have no armament

Only my fear of the walking Thing.

The rib follows me everywhere: and everywhere

A shadow follows the rib. Eve,

I am afraid. The Host walks and talks

In the baobab shade: the unknowable Thing

Is crossing the paths: the breath, woman,

Is on us: a white light: O cover me

From the unthinkable razor of thought

Whose whisper hangs over me.

Eve, we are in this thing to the very end,

You, your shadow, and shadowless Adam, I.

O rib and morsel of anguish, bone of contention,

After the thing has shone and gone,

After it enters the terrible wood,

We will win through, perhaps: cover us deep

Beyond clue with the leaves of the wood:

Be silent until it passes: and kiss me, kiss me.

Ah! but the apple, the apple was good!

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1939

Monday escapes destruction.

Record a vernal afternoon,

Tea on the lawn with mother,

A parochial interest in love, etc.

By the deviation of a hair,

Is death so far, so far, no further.

Tuesday: visibility good: and Wednesday.

A little thunder, some light showers.

A library book about the universe.

The absence of a definite self.

O and already by Friday hazardous,

To Saturday begins the slow reverse.

A Saturday without form. By midnight

The equinox seems forever gone:

Yet the motionless voice repeating:

‘Bless the hills in paradigms of smoke,

Manhair, Maidenhair meeting.'

But today Sunday. The pit.

The axe and the knot. Cannot write.

The monster in its booth.

At a quarter to one the mask repeating:

‘Truth is what is

Truth is what is Truth?'

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1939
 

Time marched against my egg,

But Saturn hatched it:

Furnished two rusty claws,

The antelope's logic:

While by the turtle's coma in summer

The new moon watched it.

Four seasons conspired

To poison my water: with scissors

A late spring lanced the bud,

Tightened the caul on my skull,

Lulled me in dragon's blood.

Sun withered this crucible head,

Wove me by a tragical loom.

Nine moons heard of my coming,

The drumming of mythical horses

On the walls of the womb.

Winter buried the eyes like talents.

Tightened the temple's bony ring,

And now the pie is opened,

Feathered the head of the owlet—

What shall the monster sing?

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1939

Who first wrapped love in a green leaf,

And spread warm wings on the egg of death,

That my heart was hatched like a smooth stone,

And love in a green leaf locked?

Pity was naked: who dried her feathers

By the ancient pillow with cold ankles?

(Pity, my friend, fell in with the scorpion:

Murder with his bottle took my sweet.)

Who found passion without a leg,

Shrieked like the canticle of a ghost?

A bat spat his blood in the nursery:

A vessel in darkness but without a compass.

Anger first opened the book of the egg,

A bible of broken boys and natural women.

The choir sang like a bee in a bush,

And hunger, the dog, hummed in his paws.

Now time is wrapped in a green bay-leaf,

And a Roman summer covers the underworld,

O remember the heart hatched like cold stone,

And love in a green leaf locked.

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939

Now when the angler by Bethlehem's water

Like a sad tree threw down his trance

What good was the needle of resurrection,

A bat-like soul for the father Adam,

But to bury in haystacks of common argument

The Fish's living ordinance?

A bleeding egg was the pain of testament,

Murder of self within murder to reach the Self:

The grapnel of fury like a husband's razor

Turned on his daughter in a weird enchantment

To cut out the iron mask from the iron man,

His double, the troubled elf.

Now one eye was the cyclop's monstrous ration,

But this face looked forward to Heliopolis,

Rehearsed its charm in other exilic lovers

God-bound near Eden on the crutches of guilt;

Aimed like a pistol through the yellow eyes—

Your heart and mine know the truth of this.

This we make to the double Jesus, the nonpareil,

Whose thought snapped Jordan like a dam.

Darling and bully with the bloody taws,

Both walked in this tall queen by the green lake.

Both married when the aching nail sank home.

Weep for the lion, kneel to the lamb.

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939

Here on the curve of the embalming winter,

Son of the three-legged stool and the Bible,

By the trimmed lamp I cobble this sonnet

For father, son, and the marble woman.

Sire, we have found no pardonable city

Though women harder than the kneeling nuns,

Softer than clouds upon the stones of pain,

Have breathed their blessings on a candle-end.

Some who converted the English oak-trees:

The harmless druids singing in green places.

Some who broke their claws upon islands:

The singing fathers in the boats of glory.

Some who made an atlas of their hunger:

The enchanted skulls lie under the lion's paw.

One innocent observer in a foreign cell

Died when my father lay beside his ghost.

Dumb poison in the hairy ear of kings

Can map the nerves and halt the tick of hearts.

The phoenix burning at his window-sill

Put peace around him like a great basin.

So whether the ocean curved beneath his dreams

On floors full of the sea-shell's music,

His privacy aims like a pointed finger:

Death grows like poison-ivy on a stick.

Truly his unruly going grows like a green wand

Between the broken pavements of the heart,

And all whose blood ticks fast at funerals

Must dread the tapping of the vellum drum.

Guilt can lie heavier than house of tortoise.

Winter and love, O desperate medicines,

Under the turf we bless the wishing spring,

The seed from the index-finger of the saint.

To the snow I sing out this hoarse prescription:

‘Sweet love, from the enduring geometric egg,

An embryo grinning in its coloured cap,

O I walk under a house of horn, seeking a door.'

The charming groans of ladies come to me

From the nursery sills of an invented climate:

My outlawed mother patient at the loom,

Behind her, oaks, their nude machinery,

The dark ones shining on their snowy tuffets.

I take this image on a screaming nib.

Here in the hollow curvature of the world,

Now time turns through her angles on a dial,

The unspeaking surgeon cuts beneath the fur,

And pain forever green winds her pale horn.

Make in the beautiful harbours of the heart,

For scholars sitting at their fire-lit puzzles,

The three-fold climate and the anchorage.

Make in the dormitory of the self

For sleepless murders combing out the blood

A blessing and an armistice to fear.

Though bankers pile debentures to the worm,

And death like Sunday only brings the owls

Though some must founder trying for the rock,

Bless mice and women in their secret places.

To you in high heaven the unattainable,

The surnamed Virgin, I lift a small scripture,

Brushed by the quill of a black boy's madness;

Pour one sweet drop of mercy on the mind!

You three, being holy and great linguists,

The oval singers of the Cretan eikon,

Give to the ghost your charity's ghostly shirt,

Defence by pity and a green captivity.

Consider: here the thorn crawled in the heart,

Here traitors laid an axe upon the root.

Grant like a bruise his sweetest homecoming,

Find laughing Hamlet sitting in a tree,

The silken duchess frowning at her baubles,

And swart Ophelia crooning at her lauds.

Winter and love are Euclid's properties.

The charm of candles smoking on a coffin

Like nursery years upon a birthday cake,

Teach, like the soft declensions of the term,

How dust being sifted from the sheet of nuns,

Returns beneath the swollen veil once more,

So women bend like trees and utter figs,

And children from their pillows prophesy.

The unnumbered garrison still holds the womb.

O suffer the mirages of the dazed ladies,

Give love with all its tributary patience

That when the case of bones is broken open,

The heart can bless, or the sad skin of saints

Be beaten into drum-heads for the truth.

Walk upon dreams, and pass behind the book.

Hamlet is nailed between the thieves of love.

Wear the black waistcoat, boy, for death is king,

His margin is a waxen candle-dip at night:

By day a grace-note in the mid of silence,

The gambler smiling in his royal sheet.

For this I put the obol in the lips.

For this I wear my sex beneath a towel.

I take the round skull of the nunnery girl

To bless until the tears break in the brain;

As those who by the Babylonian fable

Hung up their piercing harps beside the waters,

I hang my heart, being choked, upon a noun.

I hang her name upon this frantic pothook.

I close an hinge on the memorial days.

I perch my pity on an alp of silence.

Cold water took my pretty by the beard,

Flatter than glass she blew to the tongueless zone.

I learn now from nightingale on the spit

The science of the cowl and killing-bottle.

I hum now the harsh tune of the too finite swan,

Piping behind the ambush of my guilt.

My comfort smiled on me and gave me flowers:

Freckles, as on a sparrow's egg, and quiet faces.

The water strips her humour like a bean.

Barbarian ladies with their fingernails,

Strip off her simple reason like a wedding-dress.

She turns upon the pedals of her prison.

Pain hangs more bloody than the mystic's taws.

Down corridors of pain I follow patience,

Make notes behind the nerve-ends of the brain.

Lean, lean on the iron elbow of the armoured man,

Button the nipples on his coat of mercy,

The widow walking in a rubber mask!

Your murderer's napkin hangs upon a bush,

And the king who stiffens in a shirt of blood,

Too good, too grave to number with the crumbs,

Can leave an incubus to this winter castle.

Shoot back the lips like bolts upon your grace.

Make thimble of the mouth to suck your fly.

I cool my spittle on the smoking hook.

I take these midnight thoughts between a tong.

As husband is laid down beside the lute,

Widow and minstrel in a single cerement,

So I on the plinth of passing, shall I marry

The lunatic image in the raven frock?

The curved meridian of hazard like a bow

Paints on the air the dark tree of my death

Gums without ivory for the skeletal smile:

A natal joker squeaking in his crib.

Here birth and death are knitted by a vowel.

A mariner must sail his crew of furies

Beyond the hook of hazard to the oceanic lands.

His prayers will bubble up before the throne.

I, now, go, where the soliloquy of the sad bee

O numbs the nettles and the hieroglyphic stone.

On the stone sill of the embalming winter

I tell my malady by the wheel and the berry,

The hunters making their necklace on the hills.

The escaping dead hang frozen down like flags,

A breathing frost upon the eyeball lens

Blooms like still poison in a dish of quinces.

Spawn of the soft, the unwrinkled womb of queens,

I add my number to the world's defeated,

I learn the carrion's scientific torpor,

The five-day baby swollen with its gases,

The nun who fell from the ladder of Jacob.

My love hangs longer than the tongue of hound.

I kneel at the keyhole of death's private room

To meet His eye, enormous in the keyhole.

This pain goes deeper than the fish's fathom.

Peel me an olive-branch and hold it shining:

You have Ophelia smiling at her chess,

The suit of love gored by the courtier's fang.

You have my mother folded like a rag,

Whiter than piano-keys the canine smile.

The marble statues bleed if she walks by,

Pacing the margins of the chequerboard

Where the soft rabbit and her man in black

Play move for move, the pawn against the prince.

O men have made cradles of their loving fingers

To rock my youth, and I have slipped between,

Led like the magi to the child's foul crib,

To hear my hands nailed up between two thieves.

Then walk where roses like disciples can

Aim at the heart their innocent attention.

Where the apostle-spring beneath the cover

Of throstle and dove, loves in his green asylum.

Time shall bestow a pupil to the nipple,

A red and popular baby born for the urn.

For him I make a book by the moving finger-bone,

A rattle, cap and comedy of queens.

Then suckle the weather if the winter will not,

Seal down a message in a dream of spring,

More than this painful meditation of feet,

The frigid autist pacing out his rope.

The candle and the lexicon have picked your bones.

The tallow spills upon my endless bible.

To you by whom the sweet spherical music

Makes in heaven a tree-stringed oracle,

I bend a sonnet like a begging-bowl,

And hang my tabor from the greenest willow-wand.

Give to the rufus sons of Pudding Island

The stainless sheet of a European justice,

That death's pure canon smiling in the trees

Can lure the fabulous lion from his walks.

My ash I dress to dance upon the void,

My mercy in a wallet like a berry bright,

And when hemp sings of murder bless your boy,

The double fellow in the labyrinth,

Whose maps were stifled with him in the maze,

Whose mother dropped him like the seedless pod.

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1939