The Heart Is Strange (7 page)

all Loves becoming, none to flag upon.

Such Mozart made,—an ear so delicate

he fainted at a trumpet-call, a child

so delicate. So merciful that sight,

so stern, we follow rapt who ran a-wild.

Marriage is the second music, and thereof

we hear what we can bear, faithful & mild.

Therefore the streaming torches in the grove

through dark or bright, swiftly & now more near

cherish a festival of anxious love.

Dance for this music, Mistress to music dear,

more, that storm worries the disordered wood

grieving the midnight of my thirtieth year

and only the trial of our music should

still this irresolute air, only your voice

spelling the tempest may compel our good:

Sigh then beyond my song: whirl & rejoice!

The Nervous Songs

YOUNG WOMAN’S SONG

The round and smooth, my body in my bath,

If someone else would like it too.—I did,

I wanted T. to think ‘How interesting’

Although I hate his voice and face, hate both.

I hate this something like a bobbing cork

Not going. I want something to hang to.—

A fierce wind roaring high up in the bare

Branches of trees,—I suppose it was lust

But it was holy and awful. All day I thought

I am a bobbing cork, irresponsible child

Loose on the waters.—What have you done at last?

A little work, a little vague chat.

I want that £3.10 hat terribly.—

What I am looking for (
I am
) may be

Happening in the gaps of what I know.

The full moon does go with you as yóu go.

Where am I going? I am not afraid . .

Only I would be lifted lost in the flood.

THE SONG OF THE DEMENTED PRIEST

I put those things there.—See them burn.

The emerald the azure and the gold

Hiss and crack, the blues & greens of the world

As if I were tired. Someone interferes

Everywhere with me. The clouds, the clouds are torn

In ways I do not understand or love.

Licking my long lips, I looked upon God

And he flamed and he was friendlier

Than you were, and he was small. Showing me

Serpents and thin flowers; these were cold.

Dominion waved & glittered like the flare

From ice under a small sun. I wonder.

Afterward the violent and formal dancers

Came out, shaking their pithless heads.

I would instruct them but I cannot now,—

Because of the elements. They rise and move,

I nod a dance and they dance in the rain

In my red coat. I am the king of the dead.

A PROFESSOR’S SONG

(. . rabid or dog-dull.) Let me tell you how

The Eighteenth Century couplet ended. Now

Tell me. Troll me the sources of that Song—

Assigned last week—by Blake. Come, come along,

Gentlemen. (Fidget and huddle, do. Squint soon.)

I want to end these fellows all by noon.

‘That deep romantic chasm’—an early use;

The word is from the French, by our abuse

Fished out a bit. (Red all your eyes. O when?)

‘A poet is a man speaking to men’:

But I am then a poet, am I not?—

Ha ha. The radiator, please. Well, what?

Alive now—no—Blake would have written prose,

But movement following movement crisply flows,

So much the better, better the much so,

As burbleth Mozart. Twelve. The class can go.

Until I meet you, then, in Upper Hell

Convulsed, foaming immortal blood: farewell.

THE CAPTAIN’S SONG

The tree before my eyes bloomed into flame,

I rode the flame. This was the element,

Forsaking wife and child, I came to find,—

The flight through arrowy air dark as a dream

Brightening and falling, the loose tongues blue

Like blood above me, until I forgot.

. . Later, forgetting, I became a child

And fell down without reason and played games

Running, being the fastest, before dark

And often cried. Certain things I hid

That I had never liked, I leapt the stream

No one else could and darted off alone . .

You crippled Powers, cluster to me now:

Baffle this memory from my return,

That in the coldest nights, murmuring her name

I sought her two feet with my feet, my feet

Were warm and hers were ice and I warmed her

With both of mine. Will I warm her with one?

THE SONG OF THE TORTURED GIRL

After a little I could not have told—

But no one asked me this—why I was there.

I asked. The ceiling of that place was high

And there were sudden noises, which I made.

I must have stayed there a long time today:

My cup of soup was gone when they brought me back.

Often ‘Nothing worse now can come to us’

I thought, the winter the young men stayed away,

My uncle died, and mother broke her crutch.

And then the strange room where the brightest light

Does not shine on the strange men: shines on me.

I feel them stretch my youth and throw a switch.

Through leafless branches the sweet wind blows

Making a mild sound, softer than a moan;

High in a pass once where we put our tent,

Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.

—I no longer remember what they want.—

Minutes I lay awake to hear my joy.

The Lightning

Sick with the lightning lay my sister-in-law,

Concealing it from her children, when I came.

What I could, did, helpless with what I saw.

Analysands all, and the rest ought to be,

The friends my innocence cherished, and you and I,

Darling,—the friends I qualm and cherish and see.

. . The fattest nation!—wé do not thrive fat

But facile in the scale with all we rise

And shift a breakfast, and there is shame in that.

And labour sweats with vice at the top, and two

Bullies are bristling. What he thought who thinks?

It is difficult to say what one will do.

Obstinate, gleams from the black world the gay and fair,

My love loves chocolate, she loves also me,

And the lightning dances, but I cannot despair.

The Long Home

bulks where the barley blew, time out of mind

Of the sleepless Master. The barbered lawn

Far to a grey wall lounges, the birds are still,

Rising wind rucks from the sill

The slack brocade beside    the old throne he dreams on.

The portraits’ hands are blind.

Below these frames they strain on stones. He mumbles . .

Fathers who listen, what loves hear

Surfacing from the lightless past? He foams.

Stillness locks a hundred rooms.

Louts in a bar aloud, The People, sucking beer.

A barefoot kiss. Who trembles?

Peach-bloom, sorb-apple sucked in what fine year!

I am a wine, he wonders; when?

Am I what I can do? My large white hands.

Boater & ascot, in grandstands

Coups. Concentrations of frightful cold, and then

Warm limbs below a pier.

The Master is sipping his identity.

Ardours & stars! Trash humped on trash.

The incorporated yacht, the campaign cheque

Signed one fall on the foredeck

Hard on a quarrel, to amaze    the fool. Who brash

Hectored out some false plea?

Brownpaper-blind, his morning passions trailed

Home in the clumsy dusk,—how now

Care which from which, trapped on a racing star

Where we know not who we are! . .

The whipcord frenzy curls, he slouches where his brow

Works like the rivals’ failed.

Of six young men he flew to breakfast as,

Only the magpie, rapist, stayed

For dinner, and the rapist died, so that

Not the magpie but the cat

Vigil upon the magpie stalks, sulky parade,

Great tail switching like jazz.

Frightened, dying to fly, pied and obscene,

He blinks his own fantastic watch

For the indolent Spring of what he was before;

A stipple of sunlight, clouded o’er,

Remorse a scribble on    the magic tablet which

A schoolboy thumb jerks clean.

Heat lightning straddles the horizon dusk

Above the yews: the fresh wind blows:

He flicks a station on by the throne-side . .

Out in the wide world, Kitty
—wide

Night—
far across the sea
. . Some guardian accent grows

Below the soft voice, brusque:

‘You are: not what you wished but what you were,

The decades’ vise your gavel brands,

You glare the god who gobbled his own fruit,

He who stood mute, lucid and mute,

Under peine forte et dure to will his bloody lands,

Then whirled down without heir.’

The end of which he will not know. Undried,

A prune-skin helpless on his roof.

His skin gleams in the lamplight dull as gold

And old gold clusters like mould

Stifling about his blood, time’s helm to build him proof.

Thump the oak, and preside!

An ingrown terrible smile unflowers, a sigh

Blurs, the axle turns, unmanned.

Habited now forever with his weight

Well-housed, he rolls in the twilight

Unrecognizable    against the world’s rim, and

A bird whistles nearby.

Whisked off, a voice, fainter, faint, a guise,

A gleam, pin of a, a. Nothing.

—One look round last, like rats, before we leave.

A famous house. Now the men arrive:

Horror, they swing their cold    bright mallets, they’re breaking

Him up before my eyes!

Wicked vistas! The wolves mourn for our crime

Out past the grey wall. On to our home,

Whereby the barley may seed and resume.

Mutter of thrust stones palls this room,

The crash of mallets. He    is going where I come.

Barefoot soul fringed with rime.

A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away

Your letter came.—Glutted the earth & cold

With rains long heavy, follows intense frost;

            Snow howls and hides the world

We workt awhile to build; all the roads are lost;

Icy spiculae float, filling strange air;

No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where,

            And when was it one crossed?

            You have been there.

I too the breaking blizzard’s eddies bore

One year, another year: tempted to drop

            At my own feet forlorn

Under the warm fall, frantic more to chop

Wide with the gale until my thought ran numb

Clenching the blue skin tight against what white spikes come

            And the sick brain estop.

            Your pendulum

Mine, not stilled wholly, has been sorry for,

Weeps from, and would instruct . . Unless I lied

            What word steadies that cord?

Glade grove & ghyll of antique childhood glide

Off; from our grown grief, weathers that appal,

The massive sorrow of the mental hospital,

            Friends & our good friends hide.

            They came to call.

Hardly theirs, movement when the tempest gains,

Loose heart convulses. Their hearts bend off dry,

            Their fruit dangles and fades.

—Solicitudes of the orchard heart, comply

A little with my longing, a little sing

Our sorrow among steel & glass, our stiffening,

            That hers may modify:

            O trembling Spring.—

Immortal risks our sort run, to a house

Reported in a wood . . mould upon bread

            And brain, breath giving out,

From farms we go by, barking, and shaken head,

The shrunk pears hang, Hölderlin’s weathercock

Rattles to tireless wind, the fireless landscape rock,

            Artists insane and dead

            Strike like a clock:

If the fruit is dead, fast. Wait. Chafe your left wrist.

All these too lie, whither a true form strays.

            
Sweet when the lost arrive.

Foul sleet ices the twigs, the vision frays,

Festoons all signs; still as I come to name

My joy to you my joy springs up again the same,—

            The thaw alone delays,—

            Your letter came!

New Year’s Eve

The grey girl who had not been singing stopped,

And a brave new no-sound blew through acrid air.

I set my drink down, hard. Somebody slapped

Somebody’s second wife somewhere,

Wheeling away to long to be alone.

I see the dragon of years is almost done,

Its claws loosen, its eyes

Crust now with tears & lust and a scale of lies.

A whisky-listless and excessive saint

Was expounding his position, whom I hung

Boy-glad in glowing heaven: he grows faint:

Hearing what song the sirens sung,

Sidelong he web-slid and some rich prose spun.

The tissue golden of the gifts undone

Surpassed the gifts. Miss Weirs

Whispers to me her international fears.

Intelligentsia milling. In a semi-German

(Our loss of Latin fractured how far our fate,—

Disinterested once, linkage once like a sermon)

I struggle to articulate

Why it is our promise breaks in pieces early.

The Muses’ visitants come soon, go surly

With liquor & mirrors away

In this land wealthy & casual as a holiday.

Whom the Bitch winks at. Most of us are linsey-