----- whose body has opened Night after night Harbouring loneliness, Cancelling the doubts Of which I am made, Night after night Taste me upon you. Night and then again night, And in your movements The bed's shape is forgotten. Sinking through it I follow, Adrift on the taste of you. I cannot speak clearly about you. Night and then again night, And after a night beside you Night without you is barren. I have never discovered What alchemy makes Your flesh different from the rest, Nor why all that's commonplace Comes to seem unique, And though down my spine one answer leaks It does not bother to explain itself.
The nerves tense up and then: You have gone to sleep. Something not anchored in love drifts out of reach. You have gone to sleep, or feign sleep, It does not matter which. Into the voice leaks bitterness. The throat dries up, the tongue Swells with complaints. Once sleep was simply sleep. The future stretched no further than The pillow upon which your head was resting, There were no awkward questions in the world, No doubts caused love to fade To a numbed kiss or howl, Or caused trust to vanish. You have gone to sleep.A moment ago I found Your mouth on mine was counterfeit. Your sleep is full of exhaustions, I cannot calm you, There is no potion to wake you. Do what I will, say what I will, It is a sleep from which I am exiled. You have gone to sleep, A planet drifts out of reach. If I spoke all night it would be no use, You would not wake, And silence, like words, you would no doubt Mistake for ignorance. So sleep. Across our window's small patch of Heaven The stars like sheep are herded, And like a satellite objective time Circles calendars and mocks The wounds we think are huge. Sleep, don't be so tense. There is no longer a need of barriers, No need of dumb defence. You are understood. This night is the last on which there will be Any kind of pretence. Tomorrow something else might wake What's gone to sleep.
Your back is long and perfect, it is clear. It moves away from me, it moves away, I watch it going. In the morning I watch you gather up longings mistakenlyscattered. I watch you gather up your face, your body, watch till another creature walks about, dressed and impatient. You contained all there need be of love, all there need be of jubilance and laughter you contained it. and now you are its opposite, you talk of going as if going were the smallest matter. There do not have to be reasons for such changes, there do not have to be. In the morning bodies evaporate and nothing can quite hold them together. Suddenly everything changes. Less than a second passes and nothing's the same. Something that clung a moment ago lets go as if all its clinging meant nothing. Now in the bathroom the razors wait like a line of little friends, they glow as much as roses, they glow, glow with pain, with their own electricity, they glow with darkness. When you have gone they will turn their heads in my direction. Inquisitive and eager they will welcome me, but I will not listen. I will try your vanishing trick and manage, I will manage to feel nothing.
She loves him, she loves him not, she is confused: She picks a fist of soaking grass and fingers it: She loves him not. The message passing from her head to heart Has in her stomach stopped, She cannot quite believe the information is correct: She loves him not. She knows her needs and yet There is no special place where they can rest. To be loved alone is not enough, She feels something has been lost. She picks a fist of soaking grass. Her world is blank, she thinks perhaps it's meaningless.
Dressed you are a different creature. Dressed you are polite, are discreet and full of friendships, Dressed you are almost serious. You talk of the world and of all its disasters As if they really moved you. Dressed you hold on to illusions. The wardrobes are full of your disguises. The dress to be unbuttoned only in darkness, The dresses that seems always about to fall from you, The touch-me-not dress, the how-expensive-dress, The dress slung on without caring. Dressed you are a different creature. You are indignant of the eyes upon you, The eyes that crawl over you, That feed on the bits you've allowed To be naked. Dressed you are imprisoned in labels, You are cocooned in fashions, Dressed you are a different creature. As easily as in the bedrooms In the fields littered with rubble The dresses fall from you, In the spare room the party never reaches The dresses fall from you. Aided or unaided, clumsily or easily The dresses fall from you and then From you falls all the cheap blossom. Undressed you are a different creature.
You ask for a poem. I offer you a blade of grass. You way it is not good enough. You ask for a poem. I say this blade of grass will do. It has dressed itself in frost, It is more immediate Than any image of my making. You say it is not a poem, It is a blade of grass and grass Is not quite good enough. I offer you a blade of grass. You are indignant. You say it is too easy to offer grass. It is absurd. Anyone can offer a blade of grass. You ask for a poem. And so I write you a tragedy about How a blade of grass Becomes more and more difficult to offer, And about how as you grow older A blade of grass Becomes more difficult to accept.
One afternoon you meet a young girl. She smiles at you, It's summer and on the lakes the boats seem to burn. She wears a dress through which you can see, Half-hidden by embroidered butterflies, Her breasts, small and perfect. She is attentive; she is going nowhere and shows How much she likes you. Your routines fade again. The hedges smell good and glitter. She is easy to get on with. Not for a long time has someone opened with such obvious pleasure. You are glad it is summer, and can lounge in parks Or fall into rooms where she questions nothing. For a moment she terrifies you with her freedom, She's all over you laughing, The dress she looked so good in earlier falls, Unashamedly, like petals. Thenin the evening the butterflies are worn again. You joke about them, And when she laughs everything is changed - She is young and then is not so young. You understand her freedom, how (like the butterflies) It belongs to certain seasons, certain weathers. You are obsessed. You ask her to stay, but it's evening and she says 'It's not possible.' For one day only on your life Was this butterfly embroidered.
Blundering again, I found myself in a strange neighbourhood. I walked into a cul-de-sac at the end of which A familiar wall was waiting. Behind me was a mess, a maze of spiritual failures, Of blunderings nothing could alter. To put right again all that had gone wrong Was a dream I did not care for. I sat on a stone beside the wall. Memories spawned, their secrets stung me. To wile away the time till some improbable event occured I took out my history and examined it. On moss beside the stone I laid my ambitions; The awkward affaires, the imperfect insights. To see them was a potion of kinds, A way of understanding. Beside the wall I made up fantasies. I was sure all other streets led to neighbourhoods from which All longings were banished, Where at night in the bright halls People danced like may-flies, Where everything that ever ached had been replaced By sensation too brief for pain. Believing the wall real I sat behind it scheming. Unintelligent dreamer, buffon, I finally dreamed A route through its bricks and found A familiar wall was waiting.
When she has gone you go in to town. You have learnt the places where the lonely go, you know their habits, their acts of indifference practised so efficiently. You have learnt how those who are hardly children Can be most open, how the most obviously sensual Tire you with questions; You have learnt How inside them all Terror is waiting. At certain times the galleries close;in certain areas the supermarkets fill with strangers. At certain times the bars swell with gossip, then people tire and look around. Like one from another place and time You've stepped through this ritual knowing How on each face the promises are hollow, How scarce any spontaneous greetings. When she has gone you go into town. But in no other face can you trace her, In other bodies can be found Only an echo of her. You know the places where the lonely go, You know their habits, their acts of indifference Practised so efficiently.
On a toilet wall the graffiti's bleak ----- 'FUCK A STRANGER TONIGHT' Reads a message not there last week. Other slogans, names and boasts Seem jaded compared with this Advice scrawled by Anonymous. But the graffiti evokes an image of the crowd, The lost, androgynous animal That longs for kindness then reveals A different nature on toilet walls. Yet let's give its authors credit enough To understand how the night Breeds in its drunken scribblers Things wrongly written that are right.
At night someone drifts through these walls At night someone stands beside me saying Get Up Get up from sleep, from the warm lull Get Up There is somewhere else to go Leave the womb behind you, The womb in mint condition, Leave it. Leave it to its own fate, Its prune fate. Get Up. The pillows smell of strangers; All night the sheets howl. Get Up From the dead bed, From the bed your mouth slaughtered. You stink of nightmares, Get Up, There is somewhere else to go, Somewhere not sucked dry, Somewhere that does not terrify. Get Up, The heart has gone fat and blind. While you slept Paradise shrank to a single leaf. Nightly and inevitably I reach into the darkness to touch him, And touching only my own flesh, I creep in terror from the bed's grave. Get Up, No doubt through these walls at night Your own stranger drifts, Invisible to me, mouthing the same message; Let's get up, We have listened so often saying nothing That we have become the phantoms.
All day I have spent building this web, This necessary extension strung between Objects unfamiliar and uncertain. Over those things to which it is anchored I have no power. My trust must be explicit. So far I have caught rain, sunlight, Particles of leaf, and things so small They cannot satisfy. At night in a crack between concrete I dream of catching something so immense It would shake the web's centre; Awkward and meat-ridden, its wings Would snap and dullen my creation. Of such an event I am terrified, For such an event I am longing.
I was sitting thinking of our future and of how friendship had overcome so many nights bloated with pain; I was sitting in a room that looked on to a garden and a stillness filled me, bitterness drifeted from me. I was as near paradise as I am likely to get again. I was sitting thinking of the chaos we had caused in one another and was amazed we had survived it. I was thinking of our future and of what we would do together, and where we would go and how, when night came burying me bit by bit, and you entered the room tremling and solemn-faced, on time for once.
She grew careless with her mouth. Her lips came home in the evening numbed. Excuses festered among her words. She said one thing, her body said another. Her body, exhausted, spoke the truth. She grew careless, or beacame without care, Or panicked between both. Too logical to suffer, imagining Love short-lived and "forever" A lie fostered on the mass to light Blank days with hope, What she meant to me wassoon diminished. I too had grown careless with my mouth. Habit wrecked us both, and wrecked We left the fragments untouched, and left.
The morning has a hole in its side, It rolls through the grass like a wounded bear, Over and over it goes, clutching its wound, Its wound fat with sorrow. I feel nothing for the morning, I kneel in the early grass and stare out blankly; I stare at the blank leaves, The leaves fat with sorrow. Morning, the birds have come to patch you up. They will bandage you with grass. Morning, you are so tired. Your eyes look terrible. I remember how once You were so eager to begin life, Dressed in glittering frost you strolled Nonchalantly down the avenues. O Morning, it was bound to happen; You grasp at the wet branches, the spikey thickets. Over and over you roll, the years pouring out of you. I wipe a razor clean of flowers, ignore the birds, and their insistent shouting of 'Assassin'.
You lose your love for her and then It is her who is lost, And then it is both who are lost, And nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be. In a very ordinary world A most extraordinary pain mingles with the small routines, The loss seems huge and yet Nothing can be pinned down or fully explained. You are afraid. If you found the perfect love It would scald your hands, Rip the skin from your nerves, Cause havoc with a computed heart. You lose your love for her and then it is her who is lost. You tried not to hurt and yet Everything you touched became a wound. You tried to mend what cannot be mended, You tried, neither foolish nor clumsy, To rescue what cannot be rescued. You failed, And now she is elsewhere And her night and your night Are both utterly drained. How easy it would be If love could be brought home like a lost kitten Or gathered in like strawberries, How lovely it would be; But nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.
I packed a suitcase. I put dust in it. And then more dust. I packed bits and pieces Of what was still living. I packed a suitcase. A heart howled inside it. A face stared up from it, Its tongue wagging in the dust. With each passing second The complaints it made Seemed more obsolete. I packed a suitcase full of dust. I went outside. I was afraid people would stop me and ask Why I was travelling about with dust. There seemed nowhere to go But to another place of dust. I do not want dust. My blood is slow and full of dust. And your kiss is dust. I do not want dust. Your breath has changed Pollen into dust. I do not want dust. Swearing fidelity to all That is clean and free of dust I pack a suitcase full of dust.
It is absurd not knowing where to go. You wear the streets like an overcoat. Certain houses are friends, certain houses Can no longer be visited. Old love-affairs lurk in doorways, behind windows Women grow older. Neglection blossoms. You have turned down numerous invitations, Left the telephones unanswered, said 'No' To the few that needed you. Stranded on an island of your own invention You have thrown out messages, longings. How useless it is knowing that where you want to go Is nowhere concrete. The trains will not take you there, The red buses glide past without stopping, No taxis are available.
For people who have nowhere to go in the afternoons, for people who the evening banishes to small rooms, for good peple, people huge as the world. For people who give themselves away forgetting what it is they are giving, and who are never reminded. For people who cannot help being kind to the hand bunched in pain against them. For inarticulate people, people who invent their own ugliness, who invent pain, terrified of blankness; and for people who stand forever at the same junctions waiting for the chances that have passed. And for people who lie in ambush for themselves, who invent toughness as a kind of disguise, who, lost in their narrow and self- defeating worlds, carry remorse inside them like the plague; and for the self-seeking self lost among them I hazard a poem.
It's evening and the streets are cold again. The cars go past in such a hurry you'd think The world full of emergencies. The young men and women no longer parading Hurry from the supermarkets, Feigning a lack of caring their tins Glow with loneliness. Leaves gone, scents gossip of previous winters. And what did we do then? Were the florists' windows stuffed with bright icy flowers? Were the sirens as persistent, the parks as barren? Whose hand was held, whose face Did we swear never to forget? As always the rooms are damp, the furniture ancient. Yet among the drabness is a light, self-created. The wine stains on the carpet emerge as roses, The fridge becomes a grotto. We fill our heads with dreams still. In this season we are all that blossoms.
When I think ofher sparkling face And of her body that rocked this way and that, When I think of her laughter, Her jubilance that filled me, It's a wonder I'm not mad. She is away and I cannot do what I want. Other faces pale when I get close. She is away and I cannot breathe her in. The space her leaving has created I have attempted to fill With bodies that numbed upon touching, Among them I expected her opposite, And found only forgeries. Her wholeness I know to be a fiction of my making, Still I cannot dismiss the longing for her; It is a craving for sensation new flesh cannot wholly calm or cancel, It is perhaps for more than her. At night above the parks the stars are swarming. The streets are thick with nostalgia; I move through senseless routine and insensitive chatter As if her going did not matter. She is away and I cannot breathe her in, I am ill simply through wanting her.
And sometimes it happens that you are friends and then You are not friends, And friendship has passed. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself. And sometimes it happens you are loved and then You are not loved, And love is past. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself into the grass. And sometimes you want to speak to her and then You do not want to speak, Then the opportunity has passed. Your dreams flare up, they suddenly vanish. And also it happens that there is nowhere to go and then There is somewhere to go, Then you have bypassed. And the years flare up and are gone, Quicker than a minute. So you have nothing. You wonder if these things matter and then They cease to matter, And caring is past. And a fountain empties itself into the grass.
Because we passed grief to and fro toying with it, I have shut the door of this room, I have shut out everyone else's pain until I can cope with my own; tonight I'm confused enough. For too long I have been one of this city's strays, yelping for attention, part of that mass disfigured through self-inflicted pain, its flesh washed by exhaustion. Because there is no pill or science to dimiss the darkness that is given like a gift I have shut the door of this room; but that too is a mistake of kinds, for the room is in darkness, and sinking deeper into it the mistake becomes obvious.
Not all that you want and ought not to want Is forbidden to you, Not all that you want and are allowed to want Is acceptable. Then it gets late on And things change their value. You are tired. You feel the ground with your hands. A single blade of grass appears before your eyes. It flashes on and off, a remnant of paradise. And then perhaps you will remember What you have forgotten to remember, What should have been so easy remembering. You will recall the hut in the morning, And how the foot-prints were flooded with frost, And how a weed and a pebble were caught once On a cow's lip, And perhaps how on a tremendous horse A small boy once galloped off, And how it was possible to do All that now seems impossible, All you ever wanted.
Sleepy, you had nothing to tell me. Yet in such moments was no song Nor sound nor laugh nor anything so pure As the silence with which you presented me. Split over into oblivion and then spilt back again, You came back speechless. O planet face! I still smell the forest in your neck! Still taste the stream in your mouth! And your kiss that dropped on to my skin like rain Still shivers there!
When I went out I stole an orange I kept it in my pocket It felt like a warm planet Everywhere I went smelt of oranges Whenever I got into an awkward situation I'd take the orange out and smell it And immediately on even dead branches I saw The lovely and fierce orange blossom That smells so much of joy When I went out I stole an orange It was a safeguard against imagining There was nothing bright or special in the world
Time to uproot again, there's much to be cancelled; Your dreams, like useless trinkets, have come to nothing. Across the harbour the lights have dullened, In the town rain's scattered petals. You are vague now about what things matter. The years have ceased to preen themselves in front of mirrors, The cafes do not always glitter, the women sit Big-eyed and drained of laughter. From their breasts you have detached your dreams, They would have aged there. You have shrugged of the moments in your life When things have begun to matter, Preferring to remain weightless, Adrift in places where nothing has yet happened. Believing there are better things than the best, Brighter things than the brightests, You have alighted like a butterfly on insubstantial flowers, Here wasted your life in conversations with yourself, Moved so long within your own shadow That no weight can be felt, no commitments made. Over all the world the rain falls like an answer.
You have dreamt so often of what you would do If your life were irrevocably changed That when you are forced finally from the route best understood And on to another, less obvious way, You think at first fantasy will sustain you. Sink then dreamer into what might have been! For though on the brilliant branch The brilliant fruit still clings It is no longer reached with ease, And its dazzle's frightening.
She said, 'Come from the window, Dreamer, do not drift too far from me; In other rooms the party's growing old. Leave off star-gazing for a time, Leave Heaven to dance alone. Come from the window; Dreamer, unlike myself, Heaven left alone will not grow bored. The wonder you seek there You yourself when younger formed'. And she was right. Though our longings do not end with what she says, She was right. Without her help Night would have been simply night, The stars of little consequence, and not very bright.
It's hard to tell what bird it is Singing in the misty wood, Or the reason for its song So late after evening's come. When all else has dropped its name Down into the scented dark Its song grown cool and clear says Nothing much to anyone, But catches hold a whisper in my brain That only now is understood. It says, rest your life against this song, It's rest enough for anyone.
'Suckablood, Suckablood, where have you been?' 'I've been in the brain of a Dreaming Machine.' 'Suckablood, Suckablood, what did you there?' 'Itaught it of sorrow and loss,pain and despair.' 'Suckablood, Suckablood, were the lessons much fun?' 'I spoke sombrely of all that is soon come and soon gone.' 'Suckablood, Suckablood, does it know what you've done!?' 'I think it has some inkling of what has begun.' 'If it wants no more lessons, then what's to be done?' 'Don't worry, to me I am sure it will come.' 'Suckablood, Suckablood, what if it's late?' 'Then in the grave my lessons will keep.'
Late at night I sat turning the pages, half-looking for the lines I had once read astonished at their simplicity. Late at night I sat turning the pages, my tongue uprooting minature lights, infatuated with what it hoped to become. I sat turning the pages ignoring the voices that asked, 'What answers can be found by simply turning the pages, late at night turning the pages looking for the lines you once read?, While the future amassed its griefs and the things left undone squabbled and multiplied I sat turning the pages, And slowly I learned how to abandon the future and leave it less crowded, and I understood how there is nothing complicated in this world that is not of my own making, and how for years I had lived under the scrutiny of the blind, believing they could see me best. I lacked confidence not in what I was but in what others considered me. Now I am glad I lacked such confidence, and sat late at night turning the pages half-looking for the lines I had once read, astonished at their simplicity.
All day I will think of these cities floating fragile across the earth's crust and of how they are in need of a drop of magic blood All day I will think of snow and the small violets like a giant's blood splashed at random on the earth All day I will stroll about hoping for a drop of unclouded blood to fall into my veins I need my body to move loose through the world Need my fingers to touch the skin of children adrift in their temporary world Beneath their dreaming is a drop of blood refusing the sun's heat a drop of blood more pure than any other blood I need to walk through the pale light that occupies the world and believe it when a drop of blood says Listen, paradise is never far away and simpler than you think it I need to sever all connection with the habits that make the heart love only certain things I need a drop of magic blood for that a drop of unclouded blood
Falling into the green and outstretched palm of the world the messenger is visible and is heard to sing: "Today I bring you good news, the same good news as ever: Down by the wide lakes the giant suns have risen, Lighting the sails of boats going outwards forever. Today I bring you good news, the same good news as ever: Autumn's sailors, disappearing over the rim of the world, Are not lost nor drowned nor crying. Their mouths are stuffed with apples. Their bodies are cool as the morning's grasses. Their lungs are opened up like flowers. And today I bring you strange news, the same strange news as ever: This country will never be lost, Every morning it is born afresh, Every morning it is born forever, Yet the children who cross it laughing (O the strangest of mammals!) Will not return if their sight is ruined. And today I bring you good advice, simple advice the same as ever: You must celebrate the morning in your blood, For nothing dies there, nothing ends, Over and over again you must invent yourselves, True magicians, riding the senses of dust, Know that with this gift you're blest.'
You missed the sunflowers at their height, Came back when they were bent and worn And the gnats, half-froze, fell one by one Into the last of the sprawling marigolds. And as if linked to some spider thread Made visible only because of rain, You sat and watched the day come light And hope leapt back into your brain, And suddenly this surprising earth No longer clouded, was known again, And all you had thought lost you found Was simply for a time mislaid.
I have gone out, making a pathway through the morning, Gone out, ankle-deep in silence, Never to come back this way. My brain wears a lining of frost, it sparkles, My way is clear enough. Call memory forest, and all the things that ever stunned, The roots of that forest, Fed by voices so previous The rain cannot shake them out, nor seasons cancel. The stas are alive in me, They go about like drunken satellites. I'm obsessed, and the obsessions gladden. I have gone to where the ant goes, To where the bird whistles. I follow the vast pathway a snail makes, Drift unaware through the white dandelions. Through negligence most friendships have faded, But what does it matter? There was never one place I belonged in. I sing of how home is the place not yet visited, Built out of longings, mapped out by accidents.
I tried to find my voice, a voice lost In a night thickened by paranoia, In a night crowdedout by doubts It could not articulate. I had to let go of it through negligence, As at a carnival one lets go a child's hand. I rummaged through a jumble sale of bodies, Listened to advice devoid of meaning; My voice was like a moth, iis few colours Worn to exhaustion. It was drunk and lost, it was battered And flung everywhere. I tried to find it in the beds Of solemn girls disguised as women, I tried to find it amoung the men I envied. I searched for it amoung its own inventions. I had arranged my life around that voice. Absurdly relied on it to explain Who and what I was, As if either mattered. In strange towns I used it to advantage. Whatever it could fish out from the night I accepted. No matter; it was the one voice I let delude me. Maybe it was getting the better of me, Maybe it was envious and screamed at times, Certainly it said things of which I'd grown ashamed But I forgave its blindness and tantrums Hoping it would change. And now it is beyond change. My mouth cannot find it. I have lost it; and no longer wish it back. In winter I will make a voice out of snow, In spring I will make a voice out of flowers, In summer and autumn I will make a voice With what is at hand. The complaints it carried like credentials are misplaced And its mouthful of reasons are blown away, And its mouthful of tragedies Have become light as dandelion seeds.
It's hard to guess what brought me here, Away from where I've hardly ever been and now Am never likely to go again. Faces are lost, and places passed At which I could have stopped And stopping, been glad enough. Some faces left a mark; And I on them might have wrought Some kind of charm or spell To make their futures work, But it's hard to guess How one thing on another Works an influence. We pass- And lit briefly by one another's light Think the way we go is right.
As all is temporary and is changable, So in this bed my love you lie, Temporary beyond imaginings; Trusting and certain, in present time you rest, A world completed. Yet already are the windows freaked with dawn; Shrill song reminds Each of a separate knowledge; Shrill light might make of love A weight both false and monstrous. So hush; enough words are used: We know how blunt can grow such phrases as Only children use without Awareness of their human weight. There is no need to impose upon feelings Yesterday's echo. I love you true enough; Beyond this, nothing is now expected.
These songs were begun one winter When on a window thick with frost Her finger drew A map of all possible directions, When her body was one possibility among Arbitrary encounters And loneliness sufficient to warrant A meeting of opposites. How easily forgotten then What was first felt - An anchor lifted from the blood, Sensations intense as any lunatic's, Ruined by unaccustomary events, Let drop because of weariness.
I met herearly in the evening The cars were going home I was twenty-four and dreaming My head was full of shadows her brightness cancelled Beneath her dress her breasts were pushing It was early in the evening Spring was only a few streets away In the closed parks the leaves were trying The pubs had nothing to give us Early in the evening When the street railings were burning There was nothing much to do but to be together She drifted into sleep early in the evening Her head was on the pillow The sun that fell about her Drifted in the window Early in the evening Some birds still sang on rooftops Their hearts could have fitted into egg-cups It was early in the evening The sky was going purple Her dress lay on a chair by the window Early in the evening she had shook it from her He was awake and was dreaming Her head was free of shadows Her belly was glowing I had never imagined a body so loving I had never imagined a belly so golden Early in the evening we had amazed one another While the offices were closing And couples grabbed at telephones And all the lines were reaching Early into evening There was nothing much to do then And nothing better either
Now that the summer has emptied and laughter's warned against possessions, and the swans have drifted from the rivers, like one come back from a long journey no longer certain of his country or of its tangled past and sorrows, I am wanting to return to you. When love-affairs can no longer be distinguished from song and the warm petals drop without regret, and our pasts are hung in a dream of ruins, I am wanting to come near to you. From now the lark's song has grown visible and all that was dark is ever possible and the morning grabs me by the heart and screams, 'O taste me! Taste me please!' And so I taste. And the tongue is nude, the eyes awake; the clear blood hums a tune to which the world might dance; and love which often lived in vaguer forms bubbles up through sorrow and laughing, screams: 'O taste me! Taste me please!
Because there were no revelations at hand And the day being dark The numerous prophets were elsewhere abiding their time, I went down to some pool's edge Where various streams were mixing And met there a bird with a mouthful of songs. It fed them to a fish the pool contained; To the grass also, and then to the trees It fed its songs. I wanted to go back and tell them all Of what had been found. But the day was dark, And because no revelations were supposed to be at hand I stayed there alone. And standing on the luminous grass Though there was no prayer in my brain I spoke with the fish then and found The lack of anything revealed to be A revelation of a kind.
Coming back one evening through deserted fields when the birds, drowsy with sleep, have all but forgotten you, you stop, and for one moment jerk alive. Something has passsed through you that alters and enlightens: O realization of what has gone and was real; a bleak and uncoded message whispers down all the nerves: 'You cared for her! For love you cared!' Something has passed a finger through all your abstract reasoning. From love you sheltered outside of Love but still the human bit leaked in, stunned and off-balanced you. Unprepared, struck so suddenly by another's identity how can you hold on to any revelation? You have moved too carefully through your life! - always the light within you hooded by your own protecting fingers.
I will give you a poem when you wake tomorrow. It will be a peaceful poem. It won't make you sad. It won't make you miserable. It will simply be a poem to give you when you wake tomorrow. You will find it under your pillow. When you open the cupboard it will be there. You will blink in astonishment, shout out, 'How it trembles! Its nakedness is startling! How fresh it tastes!' We will have it for breakfast; on a table lit by loving, at a place reserved for wonder. We will give the world a kissing open when we wake tomorrow. We will offer it to the sad landlord out on the balcony. To the dreamers at the window. To the hand waving for no particular reason we will offer it. An amazing and most remarkable thing, we will offer it to the whole human race which walks in us when we awake tomorrow.
Coming back one evening through deserted fields when the birds, drowsy with sleep, have all but forgotten you, you stop, and for one moment jerk alive. Something has passsed through you that alters and enlightens: O realization of what has gone and was real; a bleak and uncoded message whispers down all the nerves: 'You cared for her! For love you cared!' Something has passed a finger through all your abstract reasoning. >From love you sheltered outside of Love but still the human bit leaked in, stunned and off-balanced you. Unprepared, struck so suddenly by another's identity how can you hold on to any revelation? You have moved too carefully through your life! - always the light within you hooded by your own protecting fingers.
I will give you a poem when you wake tomorrow. It will be a peaceful poem. It won't make you sad. It won't make you miserable. It will simply be a poem to give you when you wake tomorrow. You will find it under your pillow. When you open the cupboard it will be there. You will blink in astonishment, shout out, 'How it trembles! Its nakedness is startling! How fresh it tastes!' We will have it for breakfast; on a table lit by loving, at a place reserved for wonder. We will give the world a kissing open when we wake tomorrow. We will offer it to the sad landlord out on the balcony. To the dreamers at the window. To the hand waving for no particular reason we will offer it. An amazing and most remarkable thing, we will offer it to the whole human race which walks in us when we awake tomorrow.
Probably it is too early in the morning ; Probably you have not yet risen And the curtains float like sails against the window. But whatever, whatever the time, the place, the season, here I am again at your door, bringing a bunch of reasons why I should enter. Probably it is too early inside you yet for you to gatner together what you are and speak; but whatever , whatever the time, the place, the season, it is certainly good to have come this far, to know what Iam and not mistrust. The earth has many hands and doors upon which these hands are knocking. There are chairs for some on which to sit more patient than the rest, and here I am again, and again am knocking, holding a fist of paranoia, dressed to kill, clean dustless and idiotic. I might be thought mad, insane or stupid; my belief in you might be totally unfounded; it might be called utterly romantic, but what the hell? Here I am again, and again am knocking. But probably it is too early; probably I'm too eager to come rushing towards you, impatient to share what glows while there is still what glows arond me. I bang on the door of the world. You are asleep behind it. Ibang on the door of the world as on my own heart a world's been hammering
The morning's got a sleepy head; it brings parcels of mist, dreams freshly woven, bright mad gifts it's left on their pillows. They move together, slower even than the sun that's above the wood rising. Learning not to hurry or by-pass the smallest of sensations, they go to where lusy and tenderness are words, andwords are meaningless. They've reason for wanting to follow each other out across the morning out to where the hazel opens and the grass is softest flame. Forever is one light behind them that filled a summer, spilt over into autumn with aches that dropped when each had lost the need to care quite hard enough. Things go too quickly or else they dullen; quick as the autumn marigold skates the borders of whitening grass, things go and nothing seems replaced. Tte gap one makes in leaving is not filled. The morning's got a sleepy head;it brings parcels of mist, dream's freshly woven, bright bad tears it's left on their pillows.
And as to its whereabouts, who knows? The first love's well vanished, or sunk at least beneath an ocean I made, made out the clouds I became when all round me bruised itself. It's not like it where in the same world's I inherit, just hidden for the time; no, it seems well vanished through traces of what it wore round itself are seen at times:tatters caught on nails, season blown.
He sees beyond her face another face. It is the one he wants. He stares at it in amazement; There is nothing anywhere quite like it. There is nothing else that's wanted. She sees beyond his face another face. It stares at her in amazement. She stares back, equally amazed. Just why, she can't quite answer. She simply wants it. These faces have been waiting now A long time to be introduced. If only the faces in front Would do something about it.
For no other reason than I love him wholly I an here; for this one night at least The world has shrunk to a boyish breast On which my head, brilliant and exhausted, rests, And can know of nothing more complete. Let the dawn assemble all its guilts, its worries And small doubts that, but for love, would infect This perfect heart. I am as far beyond them as the sun. I am as far beyond them as is possible.
On the warm grass enclosed now by dull light and silence your thoughts have fallen. Only one bird that will insist on jabbering breaks what calm has come over you. All worries, pains, all things that you owned and were broken by are reduced to this impassiveness. For long now no one has brought giant sorrows; small worries vanish, spill out from you. How quiet it is possible to grow ! Then why this want, this reaching out; why the regrets then ? The outgoing song ?
Coming towards me with no special reason in mind and your grin big with happiness that falls, puzzling my plans... The small things that have gathered round me move now at your foot's sound on the pathway. Have I gone crazy then, moving likewise ? What did we ever own that hadn't the quality of seasons, their numerous dyings ? With no special reason in mind, your life full with loving, your tongue and mouth whispering across nude snowfalls.
She might have said, if words Were more her medium than touch: 'Near you is one Frighteningly real who cannot plan; Whose heart's a cat from which Your habits dart like birds; Who had no weight until you gave False lust and words like "lost" A chance to twist My body into complicated shapes.'
Without understanding any pain but that which inside her anyway is made, this creature singled out creates havoc with intelligence.& heart is daft, is some crazy bird let loose and blind that slaps against the night and has never anywhere to go.And when a tongue's about to speak some nonsense like 'Love is weak, or blind, or both', then comes this crazy bird, pecks at it like a worm.
Disgusted by the weight of his own sorrow I saw one evening a stranger open wide his coat and taking out from under it his heart throw the thing away. Away over therailings, out across the parks, across the lakes and the grasses, as if after much confusion he had decided not to care but to move on lightly, carelessly, amazed and with a grin upon his face that seemed to say, 'Absurd how easy that was done.'
I caught a train that passed the town where you lived. On the journey I thought of you. One evening when the park was soaking You hid beneath the trees, and all around you dimmed itself as if the earth were lit by gaslight. We had faith that love would last forever. I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.
In the morning I opened the cupboard and found inside it a pair of wings, a pair of angel's wings. I was not naive enough to believe them real. I wondered who had left them there. I took them out the cupboard, brought them over to the light by the window and examined them. You sat in the bed in the light by the window grinning. 'They are mine' , you said ; You said that when we met you'd left them there. I thought you were crazy. Your joke embarrassed me. Nowdays even the mention of the word angel embarrasses me. I looked to see how you'd stuck them together. Looking for glue, I plucked out the feathers. One by one I plucked them till the bed was littered. 'They are real, ' you insisted, no longer smiling. And on the pillow your face grew paler. Your hands reached to stop me but for some time now I have been embarrassed by the word angel. For some time now in polite or conservative company I have checked myself from believing anything so untouched and yet so touchable had a chance of existing. I plucked then till your face grew even paler; intent on proving them false I plucked and your body grew thinner. I plucked till you all but vanished. Soon beside me in the light, beside the bed in which you were lying was a mass of torn feathers; glueless, unstitched, brilliant, reminiscent of some vague disaster. In the evening I go out alone now. You say you can no longer join me. You say without wings it is not possible. You say ignorance has ruined us, disbelief has slaughtered. You stay at home listening on the radio to sad and peculiar music, who fed on belief, who fed on the light I'd stolen. Next morning when I opened the cupboard out stepped a creature, blank, dull, andtoo briefly sensual it brushed out the feathers gloating.
Sleeping beside you I dreamt I woke beside you; waking beside you I thought I was dreaming. Have you ever slept beside an ocean? Well yes, it is like this. The whole motion of landscapes, of oceans is within her. She is the innocence of any flesh sleeping, so vulnerable no protection is needed. In such times the heart opeans, contains all there is, there being no more than her. In what country she is I cannot tell. But knowing- because there is love and it blots out all demons- she is safe, I can turn, sleep well beside her. Waking beside her I am dreaming. Dreaming of such wakings I am to all loves senses woken.
In someplace further on you seek A sympathy that will ignite A rose with its dying. A dreamer by whose dreams Love is made cankerous, You do not accept easily Its comings and goings. As in all things one nature dictates What energy is needed To thrive, even among starlight, So in you more intricate seasons Plow at the blood. Some knowledge you tried so hard Through pain to find One night while you slept, Undetected, entered. Becalmed spider, caught up within your own kill You do not notice how the web By a bird is shaken.
I play my instrument, now like a lark, perhaps like a nightingale, now perhaps like the laughter of some girl ready for anything. I play, not so much to astonish, but to play. Then what trickery is it, what act of absurd fate that the hero has chosen this moment to arrive? He will try to overshadow me, with his love-myth that blossoms on the hearts of couples too dreamy to notice; he will attempt to undermine me. Surely outside the courts, surely in the streets among the fairgrounds and markets, among the drunken troubadours and sailors, I would outshine him? Heroes would look foolish there. They belong adrift on oceans where no one can contradict them and monsters need not always happen. What absurdity then that he comes when I have least need of him? With my playing I have caught the attention of the whole crowd and among them several I've wanted.
You are no longer afraid. You watch, still half asleep, How dawn ignites a room; His rough head and body curled In awkward fashion can but please. His face is puffed with sleep; His body distant from your own Has by the dawn been changed, And what little care you had at first Within one night has grown. You smile at how those things that troubled you Were quick to leave, At how in their place has come a peace, A rest once beyond imagining. Your bodies linked, you hardly dare to move; A new thought has now obsesses your brain: "Come the light, He might again have changed." And what you feel You are quick to name, And what you feel You are quick to cage. You watch, still half asleep, How dawn mishapes a room; And all your confidence by the light is drained And still his face, His face is still transformed.
Seeing as yet nothing is really well enough arranged, the dragonfly will not yet sing nor will the guests ever arrive quite as naked as the tulips intended. Still, because once again I am wholly glad of living, I will make all that is possible step out of time to a land of giant hurrays ! where the happy monsters dance and stomp darkness down. Because joy and sorrow must finally unite and the small heart- beat of sparrow be heard above jet-roar, I will sing not of tomorrow's impossible paradise but of what now radiates. Forever the wind is blowing the white clouds in someone's pure direction; In all our time birdsong has teemed and couples known that darkness is not forever. In the glad boat we sail the gentle and invisible ocean where none have ever really drowned.
This evening at least I do not care where the journey will be ending; only a landscape softened now by song and slow rain fills me. The rest of things, her body crushed against the whitest pillows, regrets and the more concrete failures are exiled and done with. There is nowhere specially to get to. The towns are identical, each one passed takes deeper into evening what sorrows I've brought with me. In my head some voice is singing a song that once linked us; it has ceased to be of importance; another song might replace it. Now only my gawky shadow occupies these roads going nowhere that by small towns are linked and that by darkness are cancelled.
When through absence into sudden beds You fall to ward Off darkness and to share For habit's sake some human warmth, If who is now gone in dream returns To ignite some loss and make The hand that reaches seem Blind, ignorant of your suffering, Then, with a larger sympathy than once you owned, Must you now turn, elst all dark is yours And beds, forever blind, Will make within them wars. Whatever's touched, shoulder, thigh or breast, With some uncommon pain will burn When for love you're asked to pay in kind, And find you are not large enough to turn.
Everything I lost was found again. I tasted wine in my mouth. My heart was like a firefly; it moved Through the darkest objects laughing. There were enough reasons why this was happening But I never stopped to think about them. I could have said it was your face, Could have said I'd drunk something idiotic, But no one reason was sufficient, No one reason was relevant; My joy was gobbled up by dull surroundings But there was enough of it. A feast was spread; a world Was suddenly made edible. And there was forever to taste it.
Tonight I will not bother you with telephones Or voices speaking their cold and regular lines; I'll write no more notes in crowded living- rooms Saying what and how much has changed, But fall instead to silence and things known. There is no frantic hurry to love Or press on another one's own dream. This much I know has changed, What was once wild is calmed, And quieter now behind the brain May throw more light on things; And what starved for love survives Whatever breast it hunted down. When tired of things you scream, throw up Sorrow that's become a physical pain, I'll not try and comfort you with words That add little but darkness to ourselves But with the body speak, its senses known; For what faith I have is buried in your breast Or dreams alone in quiet streets; It has no rage or philosophy, No wish to change other than the nearest shapes. Taking what love comes makes All that comes much easier; Something buried deep selects what our shapes need; The smaller habits it allows to breathe then fade, Leaving the centre clean. Tonight I will not bother you with excuses. If owning separate worlds pain Comes more easily and hurt Remains a common part of us, Then silence is best; it will allow All doubts to strip themselves.
Into your body has laeked this message. No conscious actions, no broodings Have brought the thought upon you. It is time to take into account What has gone and what has replaced it. Living yourlife according to no plan, The decisions are numerous and The ways to go are one. You stand between trees this evening; The cigarette in your cupped hand Glows like a flower. The drizzle falling seems To wash away all ambition. There are scattered through your life Too many dreams to entirely gather. Through the soaked leaves, the soaked grasses, The earth-scents and distant noises This one thought is re-occurring: It is time to take into account what has gone, To cherish and replace it. You learnt early enough that celebrations Do not last forever. So what use now the sorrows that mount up? You must withdraw your love from that Which would kill your love. There is nothing flawless anywhere, Nothing that has not the power to hurt. As much as hate, tenderness is the weapon of one Whose love is neither perfect or complete.
Do not let me win again, not this time, Not again.I've won too often and know What winning is about.I do not want to possess; I do not want to.I will not want you. Every time a thing is won, Every time a thing is owned, Every time a thing is possessed, It vanishes. Only the need is perfect, only the wanting. Tranquillity does not suit me; I itch for disasters. I know the seasons;I'm familiar with Those things that come and go, Destroy, build up, burn and freeze me. I'm familiar with opposites And taste what I can. But still I stay starving. It would be easy to blame an age, Blame fashions that infiltrate and cause What was thought constant to change. But what future if I admitted to no dream beyond the one From which I'm just woken? Already in the wood the light grass has darkened. Like a necklace of deaths the flowers hug the ground; Their scents, once magically known, Seem now irretrievable.
At the very beginning of an important symphony, while the rich and famous were settling into their quietly expensive boxes, a man came crashing through the crowds, carrying in his hand a cage in which the rightful owner of the music sat, yellow and tiny and very poor; and taking onto the rostrum this rather timid bird he turned up the microphones, and it sang. 'A very original beginning to the evening, ' said the crowds, quietly glancing at their programmes to find the significance of the intrusion. Meanwhile at the box office, the organizers of the evening were arranging for small and uniformed attendants to evict, even forcefully, the intruders. But as the attendants, poor and gathered from the nearby slums at little expense, went rushing down the aisles to do their job they heard, above the coughing and irritable rattling of jewels, a sound that filled their heads with light, and form somewhere inside them there bubbled up a stream, and there came a breeze on which their youth was carried. How sweetly the bird sang! And though soon the fur-wrapped crowds were leaving their boxes and in confusion were winding their way home still the attendants sat in the aisles, and some, so delighted at what they heard, rushed out to call their families and friends. And their children came, sleepy for it was late in the evening, very late in the evening, and they hardly knew if they had done with dreaming or had begun again. In all the tenement blocks the lights were clicking on, and the rightful owner of the music, tiny and no longer timid, sang for the rightful owners of the song.
Mayakovsky, sitting at the window one afternoon, Half-crazy with sorrow, Your soul finally shipwrecked, What if you decided to be foolish, To be neither cynical nor over-serious, In fact, not to care ? Would Russia have changed much? The snows melted in Siberia? The bright posters propagate a different message? Would the winter birds, numbed in their trees, Not have fallen? Would they have re-raised their heads singing? These years later I sit at a window in London and see The same events occuring; Quieter, more subtly now Are the prisons fed, the warrants issued. And the end still seems the same, The outcome inevitable. And no matter how much I care, Having both love and hatred, I still see the stars turn negative, And the last residents of London Crumble among the plagued allotments Crying out, Crying with disbelief and amazement.
She's pulled down the blinds now, she's locking the door, a unicorn's just stepped down from the wall; naked as snow on the eiderdown it's rested its head and its horn. She's pulled down the blinds now, it's warmer inside, naked she crosses the room; the eiderdown's blue and her hair is blonde and white is the unicorn. Dreaming, though both far from sleep, both head and body spin around, and humming deep into her veins moves now the unicorn. Frightened once by normal flesh her body disallowed ordinary shapes to entertain her, even buried deep in dreams --- for touched too soon in hurrying rooms, the walls, forests they became, and into myth she faded, leaf-eyed; birds sang inside her brain. She's pulled down the blinds now, she's locked the door, fists bunched tight against a wall; the eiderdown's blue and her hair is blonde and red now the unicorn.
I woke this morning to find an albatross staring at me. Funny, it wasn't there last night. Last night I was alone. The albatross lay on the bed. The sheets were soaking. I live miles from any coast. I invited no mad sailors home. I dreamt of no oceans. The bird is alive, it watches me carefully. I watch it carefully. For some particular reason I think Maybe we deserve one another. It's sunny outside, spring even. The sky is bright; it is alive. I remember I have someone to meet, Someone clear, someone with whom I'm calm, Someone who lets things glow. As I put on my overcoat to go out I think that maybe afterall I don't deserve this bird. Albatrosses cause hang-ups. There's not much I can do with them. I can't give them in to zoos. The attendants have enough albatrosses. Nobody is particularly eager to take it from me. Maybe, I think, the bird's in the wrong house. Maybe it meant to go next door. Maybe some sailor lives next door. Maybe it belongs to the man upstairs. Maybe it belongs to the girls in the basement. It must belong to someone. I rush into the corridor and shout: "Does anyone own an albatross? Has anyone lost it? There's an albatross in my room!" I'm met by an awkward silence. I know the man upstairs is not happy. I know the girls in the basement wander lost among the furniture. Maybe they're trying to get rid of it And won't own up. Maybe they've palmed the albatross off on me. I don't want an albatross; I don't want this bird; I've got someone to meet, Someone patient, someone good and healthy, Someone whose hands are warm and whose grin Makes everything babble and say yes. I'd not like my friend to meet the albatross. It would eat those smiles; It would bother that patience; It would peck at those hands Till they turned sour and ancient. Although I have made albatross traps, Although I have sprayed the thing with glue, Although I have fed it every poison available, It still persists in living, This bird with peculiar shadows Casts its darkness over everything. If I go out it would only follow. It would flop in the seat next to me on the bus, Scowling at the passengers. If I took it to the park it would only bother the ducks, Haunt couples in rowing boats, Tell the trees it's winter. It would be patted by policemen as they gently asked: "Have you an albatross licence?" Gloom bird, doom bird, I can do nothing about it. There are no albatross-exterminators in the directory; I looked for hours. Maybe it will stay with me right through the summer, Maybe it has no intentions of leaving. I'll grow disturbed with this bird never leaving, This alien bird with me all the time. And now my friend is knocking on the door, Less patient, frowning, A bit sad and angry. I'll sit behind this door and make noises like an albatross. A terrible crying. I'll put my mouth to the keyhole and wail albatross wails. My friend will know then I have an albatross in my room. My friend will sympathize with me, Go away knowing it's not my fault I can't open the door. I'll wait here; I might devise some plan: It's spring and everything is good but for this. This morning I woke with an albatross in my room. There's nothing much I can do about it until it goes away.
I thought the tree was rather ordinary until yesterday when seven girls in orange swim-wear climbed into its branches. Laughing and giggling they unstrapped each other, letting their breasts fall out, running fourteen nipples along the branches. I sat at my window watching. 'Hey, ' I said, 'what are yous doing up there?' 'We are coaxing out the small green buds earlier than usual, ' said the first. Then the second slid down the tree - amazing how brown the body was- and naked she lay on the dead clumpy soil for an hour or more. On rising there was a brilliant green shape of grass and the beginning of daisies. 'Are you Spring?' I asked. 'Yes, ' she replied. 'And the others also, they are Spring.' I should have guessed. What other season permits such nakedness? The others came in through the window then. All the dust the room had gathered vanished. They are the happy gardeners; their long backs bend to gather cartloads of sadness and take it elsewhere. They'll walk among us making our touch perfect. Their beauty more awkward than even the topmost models, they'll take our hearts to the laundry and there'll be but joy in whatever rooms we wake. We'll love all in that country where couples glow brilliant and the craziest amongst them find in their bodies a promise of laughter.
It must be upsetting to be a prophet. It must be embarrassing. Specially around now, specially now, It must be unnerving. What can a prophet say? How can he not look ridiculous? It's not a time for prophets, specially now, specially around now. Who'd believe him anyway? Who'd believe it if he said numerous miracles are about to happen. We live in a time without miracles. Maybe that's why it's embarrassing. In a smug time, in a time without astonishment, in a time that's done away with wonder. It must be unnerving. It must be upsetting also to have much of passion, to move through a city, awake, jubilant, to move when all about disasters are occurring. What can you do then, what can you possibly do besides accept your own freakishness? And of course you would accept it, You would accept it wholly if you knew the outcome, If you knew somewhere there was a prophet to forecast the outcome.
In the dormitories the well-bred meat is tucked away. Safely for the evening the rich little balls of meat are tucked away. Outside in the drive-way the master's Rolls also sleeps, a fat beetle among the trees, shiny and silent it sleeps. In the dormitories the well-bred meat moves from the blankets. Delighted to be left alone, in hushed voices it chatters, excited by the darkness. You can hear the meat rustle out of its nightwear. Tiptoeing round the beds, the quiet meat playing. Some portions, disdainful of the giggles and the daring, listen deep into invention. On itself the meat will practise daring games. The lanky meat, the coy meat, the round and innocent meat, curious to discover why it is so excitable.
In those rooms I became more distant than ever. Where once I went with my head down, Mumbling answers to obscure questions, I felt a total stranger. Poem-freak! I felt I'd perverted imagination. I had no real answers. I'd left my brain at home preserved in lime. Like a dumb canary let out of its cage I'd found another cage. It did not suit me. In my beak the invitations melted. Standing there I shook from sleep What into sleep escaped I glanced around the books for friends, Found only breasts dressed in the latest fashion. Those for who I sang were not there. But were instead outside, and laughing drunk Climbed railings in some public park, Not caring where it was they went. Outside again I was alive again. I begged my soul to be anonymous, to breathe Free of obscure ambitions and the need To explain away any song.
I stretch beside the body of morning. A lark's in my fist. In the clear lake's bottom My feet are resting. My hair, blown outwards, is wrapped round clouds. I do not stalk anything. Centre-ways between ground and lightning My stomach rumbles. My sight is not blocked by mountains. I can gaze into the sun forever. I bestow everything upon everything: land, Oceans, air-streams and seasons, The rest. I don't know where I get it all from. There is something in the background whispering That has never stopped whispering, Letting me be; Under the camouflage of planets It wags a tongue. I stretch beside the body of morning, The pressure that shapes a rose: Solid, to the senses at least, Tangible. The valleys hung upside down Wait now till I am recognized.
One evening when the streams ran loudly I went into a wood with two friends Whose differences and arguments were genuine. I had no idea what it was they were hunting. One shouted out that the trees were glowing; The other disagreed, insisted Nothing had begun yet. Between their arguments I wandered saying nothing; In my head some minor pain was growing. Aware now of the contradictions Their blood inherits, Of the forces that through them were moving, Fifteen and uncertain, I was smacked awake by loving. Maybe some parable we'd found Has set our heads alight. Adventurous children, What did we hope to find, Not long before all directions vanished And the leaves, glowing with both frost and sunlight, Fell invisible about us?
It's nearly completed... I walk down the road a little drunk, not thinking of as much as undressing the girls going on before me. It's nearly completed. I've believed enough in all the webs of beauty, the soft evenings, the tastes and sweet noises; I've believed in them. But what does that alter? Like the grass that is restless and would go to where the wind does, I wish to go, a stream, a river, a continuousdancer knowing nothing, on no particular stage, without audience. The dreams, the possessions, the long bodies already surrendered the longings that build their houses in tomorrow, they're all in sack and tied up together. Fling them away then...They're chains now. Or bottle up the memories, the bright bubbles; drink them in the evening when you're restless. You'll soon be warm and drowsy. It's nearly completed... The blood brims with oxygens; it reflects in the flesh that leves have illuminated; it burns, burns deeply; it's nearly completed.
Some pretty little thoughts, some wise little songs, some neatly packed observations, some descriptions of peacocks, of sunsets, some fat little tears, something to hold to chubby breasts, something to put down, something to sigh about, I don't want to give you these things. I want to give you meat, the splendid meat, the blemished meat. Say, here it is, here is the active ingredient, the thing that bothers history, that bothers priest and financier. Here is the meat. The sirens wailing on police-cars, the ambulances alert with pain, the bricks falling on the young queens in night-parks demand meat, the real thing. I want to give you something that bleeds as it leaves my hand and enters yours, something that by its rawness, that by its bleeding demands to be called real. In the morning when you awake, the sheets are blood-soaked. For no apparent reason they're soaked in blood. Here is the evidence you have been waiting for. Here is the minor relevation. A fly made out of meat lands on a wall made out of meat. There is meat in the pillows we lie on. The eiderdowns are full of meat. I want to give it you share the headache of the doctor bending irritated by the beds as he deals out the hushed truth about the meat, the meat that can't be saved, that's got to end, that's got to be tossed away. You can strip the meat, you can sit on it, you can caress and have sex with it - the thing that carries its pain around, that's born in pain, that lives in pain, that eats itself to keep itself in pain. My neighbours driving away in their cars are moody and quiet and do not talk to me. I want to fill their cars with meat, stuff it down their televisions, leave it in the laundromat where the shy secretaries gather. Repetitive among the petals, among the songs repetitive, I want the stuff to breathe its name, the artery to open up and whisper, I am the meat, the sole inventor of paradise. I am the thing denied entrance into heaven, awkward and perishable, the most neglected of mammals. I am the meat that glitters, that weeps over its temporariness. I want the furniture to turn into meat, the door handle as you touch it to change into meat. The meat you are shy to take home to mother, the meat you are, gone fat and awkward. Hang it above your bed, in the morning when you awake drowsy, find it in the wash-basin. Nail it to the front door. In the evening leave it out on the lawns. The meat that thinks the stars are white flies. Let the dawn traveller find it among hedgerows, waiting to offer itself as he passes. Leave it out among the night-patrols and the lovers. Leave it between the memorandums of politicians. Here is the active ingredient; here is the thing that bothers history, that bothers priest and financier. Pimply and blunt and white, it comes towards you with its hands outstretched. How you love the meat.
One night I went through the telephone book name by name. I moved in alphabetical order through London Plundering living-rooms, basements, attics, Brothels and embassies. I phoned florists' shops and mortuaries, Politicians and criminals with a flair for crime; At midnight I phoned butchers and haunted them with strange bleatings, I phoned prisons and zoos simultaneously, I phoned eminent surgeons at exactly the wrong moment. Before I was half-way through the phone book My finger was numb and bloody. Not satisfied with the answers I tried again. Moving frantically from A to Z needing confirmation That I was not alone I phoned grand arsonists who lived in the suburbs And rode bicycles made out of flames. No doubt my calls disturbed people on their deathbeds, Their death rattles drowned by the constant ringing of telephones! No doubt the various angels who stood beside them Thought me a complete nuisance. I was a complete nuisance. I worried jealous husbands to distraction And put various Casanovas off their stroke And woke couples drugged on love. I kept the entire London telephone system busy, Darting from phone booth to phone booth The Metropolitan phone-squad always one call behind me. I sallied forth dressed in loneliness and paranoia - The Phantom Connection. Moving from shadow to shadow, Rushing from phone booth to phone booth till finally I sought out a forgotten number and dialled it. A voice crackling with despair answered. I recognised my own voice and had nothing to say to it.
So I studied telephone constantly. I wrote great and learned papers on the meaning of telephones. I wondered what the last dispatch rider thought galloping past the telephone wires, his body full of stale arrows. I wondered what it would have been like if Caesar had had a telephone. I thought of nothing but telephones. Night after night I invented numbers. I placed trunk-calls to non-existent cities. Jesus! I received so many weird replies. I wondered if the dead would like a telephone. Perhaps we should plant phones in graves so that the dead might hold endless conversations gulping in the warm earth. Telegrams and telephones, and not an ounce of flesh between them only so much pain. I began to consider them my enemy. I joined underground movements dedicated to their overthrowal. I vowed absurd vows, I sacrificed daisies. My hands were bloody with pollen. I can imagine the night when waking from a nervous sleep you find the telephone has dragged itself up the stairs one at a time and sits mewing, the electronic pet waiting for its bowl of words. * Hello! Hello! It's the evening phone-in show! You've an abscess on the heart? A tumour on the soul?\You're sleepless with grief? You're in pain, you feel insane? Neglected? Rejected? Youfeel like a freak, You feel bleak? Lost your wife last week? You're alone? Dying on your own? Cancer crawls up the spine? Well, fine! Don't worry, don't care. I'm on the air! I'm DJ Despair, I reek of the right answers! * It is so far from the beginninig of telephones. I thought of how it felt to be connected for the first time, to be fifteen and uncertain while her mother says: 'Hang on'. O the ecstasy of waiting for her to come down from her young room and answer! The pinkness of telephones and the fragrance of telephones And the innocence and earnestness of telephones! I'm sure those wires still cross paradise, still fresh in the crushed ice of Yes! Nothing in that conversation has changed. She is still bemused at his agony as he struggles with the language of telephones. O to be connected so! Before shadows passed over the wires, before trivia weighed them down, when they trilled like sparrows and their voices were bright. * Where does God hide his telephone number? No doubt the clergy have committed that number to memory. Kneeling in their celestial phone booths they phone him late at night while the lambs are suffering. For the telephone is hard to resist For it brings joy and misery without distinction For the telephone is blameless For it is a blessing to the hypochondriac Both 'Help' and 'No' are in the word telephone. And would it have made much difference if Faustus had had a telephone? Whose number was on Marilyn Monroe's lips the last time she felt too tired? What went wrong? I was listening to the grave gossip. Terror leaked from the mouth's pit. In telephone exchanges the world over The numbers are dying, Vast morgues where the operators sleep-walk among the babble, Where the ghost phones lament for all the calls that went wrong. Death owns everyone's telephone number. And the night? How many telephone numbers does the night possess? The night has as many telephone numbers as stars.
'All things pass, Love and mankind is grass' - Stevie Smith Must she always walk with Death, must she? I went out and asked the sky. No, it said, no, She'll do as I do, as I do. I go on forever. Must she always walk with Death, must she? I went and asked the soil. No, it said, no, She'll do as I do, as I do. I will nourish her forever. Must she always walk with Death, must she? I listened to the water. No, it said, no. She'll do as I do, as I do. I will cleanse her forever. Must she always walk with Death, must she? No, said the fire, She'll burn as I burn, as I burn. She will be in brilliance forever. O but I am not Death, said Death slyly, I am only no longer living, Only no longer knowing exorbitant grief. Do not fear me, so many share me. Stevie elemental Free now of the personal, Through sky and soil And fire and water Swim on, Blake's purest daughter!
He went on a journey to where he imagined the need for journeys would have ended. Much he saw and would have liked to have owned was guarded by monsters. It didn't surprise him. Yet that he had conjured them himself, out of fear, out of absurd jealousies, was unknown to him. No wiser from that journey all he learned was now best to destroy monsters. Many have vanished, but listen - much of what they guarded and that he wanted has vanished with them.
He fell in love with a lady violinist, It was absurd the lengths he went to to win her affection. He gave up his job in the Civil Service. He followed her from concert hall to concert hall, bought every available biography of Beethoven, learnt German fluently, brooded over the exact nature of inhuman suffering, but all to no avail - Day and night she sat in her attic room, she sat playing day and night, oblivious of him, and of even the sparrows that perched on her skylight mistaking her music for food. To impress her, he began to study music in earnest. Soon he was sidmissing Vivaldi and praising Wagner. He wrote concertos in his spare time, wrote operas about doomed astronauts and about monsters who when kissed, became even more furious and ugly. He wrote eight symphonies taking care to leave several unfinished, It was exhausting. And he found no time to return to that attic room. In fact, he grew old and utterly famous. And when asked to what he owed his burning genius, he shrugged and said little, but his mind gaped back until he saw before him the image of a tiny room, and perched on the skylight the timid skeletons of sparrows still listened on.
When something vanished from her face, When something banished its first light It left a puzzle there, And I wanted to go to her and say, 'It is all imagining and will change, ' But that would have been too much a lie, For beauty does reach some king of height And those who hunger for her now tomorrow might Have a less keen appetite.
An interpretation of Baudelaire's prose poem, The Drunken Song People are sober as cemetery stones! They should be drunk, We should all be drunk! Look, it'snearly night time and the sober news Comes dribbling out of television sets - It should be drunken news, If only it were drunken news! Only festivals to report and the sombre death of one ancient daisy. It's time to get drunk, surely it's time? Little else matters; Sober the years twist you up, Sober the days crawl by ugly and hunched and your soul- it becomes like a stick insect! I've spent so much time in the company of sober and respectable men, And I learned how each sober thought is an obstacle laid between us and paradise. We need to wash their words away, we need to be drunk, to dance in the certainty that drunkenness is right. So come on, let's get drunk, let's instigate something! Let's get drunk on whatever we want- on songs, on sex, on dancing, on tulip juice or meditations, it doesn't matter what- but no soberness, not that! It's obscene! When everything you deluded yourself you wanted has gone you can get drunk on the loss, when you've rid yourself of the need for those things back then you will be light, you will be truly drunk. For everything not tied down is drunk- boats and balloons, aeroplanes and stars- all drunk. And the morning steams with hangovers, and the clouds are giddy and beneath them swallows swoop, drunk, and flowers stagger about on their stems drunk on the wind. Everything in Heaven's too drunk to remember hell. And the best monsters are drunken monsters, trembling and dreaming of beanstalks too high for sober Jack to climb, and the best tightrope walkers are drunken tightrope walkers, a bottle in each hand they stagger above the net made of the audience's wish for them to fall. Drunk, I've navigated my way home by the blurry stars, I've been drunk on the future's possibilities and drunk on its certainties, and on all its improbabilities I've been so drunk that logic finally surrendered. So come on no matter what time it is no matter where it is in the room you hate in the green ditch bloated with spring, beside the river that flows with its million little tributaries into a million little graves, it doesn't matter- it's time to get drunk. If one night of oblivion can wash away all the petty heartache then fine, reach for that ancient medicine. And if you wake from drunkenness don't think too much about it, don't stop to think. Don't bother asking clocks what time it is, don't bother asking anything that escapes from time what time it is, for it will tell you as it runs, leap-frogging over all obstacles, Why idiot, don't you know?It's time to get drunk! Time not to be the prisoner of boredom or cemetery stones! Be drunk on what you want, Be drunk on anything, anything at all but please- Understand the true meaning of drunkenness!
And what if Romeo, lying in that chapel in Verona, miserable ans spotty, at odds with everything, what if he'd had a revelation from which Juliet was absent? What if, just before darkness settled the arguments between most things, through a gap in the walls he'd seen a garden exploding, and the pink shadow of blossom shivering on stones? What if, unromantic as it seems, her mouth, eyes, cheeks and breasts suddenly became ornaments on a frame common as any girls? Could he still have drunk that potion had he known without her the world still glowed and love was not confined in one shape alone? From the prison the weary imagine all living things inhabit how could either have not wished to escape? Poor Romeo, poor Juliet, poor human race!
Or, The Ground-Floor Tenant's Only Poem What on earth are you about? I've hardly stopped to work that one out. I don't know why- I'm about blood of course, and love, About sex and death, About fear and half-hearted tenderness- At a clouded intellect I've hurled All the cliched answers in the world, But mostly it's the day to day Trivia of getting by That drains the energy to wonder why the question's even asked. Who are you? Where from? And why? Like a plastic Buddha I have sat Besuited under mindless trees, And thinking of the mindless lilies in their fields I've mused a bit and then Been confused a bit and then Still left unsolved such mysteries. Don't get me wrong- I'm not convinced there is such a thing As a wholly complacent man, All face a private terror now and then, And nightly through most bedroom walls Something uninvited crawls. Who? What? Whither? Why? I do not know nor very often care, And as I walk, averagely mindless through the sunny air, I leave the questions hanging there, And try my best not to despair; And try my best not to despair.
She received a parcel through the post. It had everything she wanted inside it. Sometimes when she touched it a planet-sized man would come to the door and say exactly the right kind of thing. The parcel kept her happy. Provided all she needed. Her children blossomed, grew fat and pink and healthy. The hig-rise which she lived shrank, became a neat house- a swing on the lawn, a driveway, etc. A bill for the parcel arrived on Monday On tuesday came a reminder. On Wednesday came a solicitor's letter. On Thursday came a court order. On Friday the jury gave a verdict. On saturday the parcel was taken. Most days Alice can be seen in the high-rise, mouth twisted, weeping.
The bird is paranoiac. It thinks the leaves are trash piled up around it. It sings as if it were a criminal, feeding the silence and then retreating. Headlights roaming through the trees Supportits delusions. In the darkness the drab bird broods: 'Surely all this singing is keeping Important people awake? Rising from an irritated bed Tomorrow a Minister will declare war On some unfortunate province, And somewhere a tired businessman will make The wrong decision and cities Will be thrown into chaos.' In distant mansions The guard-dogs multiply like rabbits. God's bigots stalk one another, Bull-necked or starry-eyed, They deal in baby-jam. In the branches the drab bird sings. Absurd and cliched as it sounds In the branches a bird is singing, singing with mindless persistency The one song it knows. From the night and from antiquity It has dragged up a single jewel. Somewhere in a city, in a city Cordoned by fear A fistful of feathers believes Its song has summoned up demons. It listens to the wail of sirens. Headlights roaming through the trees Support its delusions.
A festival is to be held during which A competition is to be held during which Work that exalts the free spirit of this land May be submitted. The judges can be chosen from among yourselves The honours to be awarded are numerous, The prizes to be awarded are numerous. You may write or paint exactly what you wish, You may say exactly what you wish About the free spirit of this land. Work in bad taste will be disqualified. Anonymous entries will be ferreted out. Those who do not enter will be considered Enemies of the free spirit of this land. From now on the festival is tobe an annual event.
A Melodrama After a night of drunken revelry our hero makes a discovery O what a terrible fate it must be To be trapped all night inside the Poetry Society. To be alone with a vase of grey flowers, leather chairs and bookshelves stuffed With other people's sorrows. He considers his fate What a terrible fate for the industious poet To stand at the third floor window writing !qleH on the glass, having nothing but pigeons To witness his plight. The door is jammed, Nomatter how much he pushes it it won't open, For on the other side someone has cunningly stacked A pile of dead mayflies. He broods upon his mentors and realises taste and cunning are called for And what an awful decision it must be Choosing what valume to throw through the glass. Would Keats land more gently than Donne? Would the inspired crowd howl for Blake? O surely to throw McGonagal out Would be the safest bet! Devoid of inspiration, he doubts the significance of grey flowers Trapped thus, what can the poor poet write? The vase of grey flowers alone Is unworthy of a poem. The view from the window is too daunting a prospect And his own sufferings Are rather minimal. Illustrious ghosts gossip among the bookcases Would Shakespeare have suffocated him with beauty? Would Coleridge have overwhelmed him with opium saying 'Hey kid, sniff this, it's ancient dope!' Would poor John Clare have threatened him with a pitchfork? Left him in a madhouse homesick for visions? Would he have drowned in Gray's Elegy, Picked Wordsworth's daffodils and sold the lot in the market-place? Our hero is rescued and the poem concluded All night he will wander fretting in the gloomy rooms of the Poetry Society, Until in the morning dear John Betjeman rises above the roof of Marlborough Railway Station disguised as the sun, And a thousand librarians, all heavily disuised as Philip Larkin, Come, jangling the keys to his absurd dilemma.
In the Bowels of Cornell University, Or: The True Confessions Of A Manuscript Sniffer Deep down in the library vaults protected by verse-loving Dobermann Pinschers I stumbled upon the literary remains of William Wordsworth. What paradise deep in those pristine catacombs to fondle the remains of Emily Dickinson! To run cold and licentious eyes over the liqiud prose of Virginia Woolf, to stoke, sick with passion, a bundle of mildewed manuscripts from a Northamptonshire asylum. And what joy it was to tour those vaults where, by the stench of of the still fresh air, I could tell I was among the more recent acquisitions of Cornell! It was here I came upon the newly interred left eye of Robert Lowell, an eye that still blinked out in serious astonishment. And here in a special vault reserved for new mythologies I saw an exact replica of a Belsize Park gas oven, and in a jar next to it, preserved in brine, the tarry lings of Auden wheezed on in exasperation. Here too I unearthed the mummified corpse of some long dead beauty; a tag around thethroat informed me, 'About this creature much great poetry was written.' And among the limbs and bloodless bits of human junk I discovered the greatest of all treasures: the decomposed kidneys of Dylan Thomas smuggled at great expense from a New York morgue. Thus does poetry survive in Academia. Might I suggest in future the bodies of all dying authors are wrapped in their manuscripts and frozen and preserved in zoos and funfairs so that the student of literature might study under more realistic conditions the state of the battered and bartered and lovely human soul.
At a dinner party in aid of some unsufferable event I sit opposite my favourite enemy. 'How's the cabbage?' he smiles. 'Fine, ' I say, 'How's your novels?' Something nasty has started. On the chicken casserole the hairs bristle. On the hostess the hairs bristle. She glances down the dinner table her eyes eloquent as politicians.' 'Do you find the dumplings to your liking?' she asks, 'Do you find themjuicy?' 'Fine, ' I say, 'How's your daughter?' She chokes on the melon. After supper he's back again, Wits sharpened on the brandy. He folds his napkin into the shape of a bird, 'Can you make this sing?' he gloats, 'Would you say it's exactly poetry?' Ah, but I'm lucky this evening! In a tree outside a nightingale burst into fragments. It flings a shrapnel of song against the window. My enemy ducks, but far too slowly. It is not always like this. My enemies are more articulate, The nightingale, utterlyunreliable.
The Minister kneeling on the floor hunched over the home politics page slobbering pink fingers counting the column inches given his ghost-written speech on how best to decapitate the landscape the hostess well-feathered house stuffed with finery the little poet rasping out the tough sonnet the morose social worker wearing last year's most expensive fashion as some kind of penance the charming young publisher the charmed financier the nouveau poor sucking up the atmosphere theblack writer of revolutionary pamphlets the priest holding forth from the plush armchair on man's fall from paradise glib mimic living in light's echo the neat journalists the purveyors of wound-cream the high-class gossip merchants the sour novelists the past and present beauties the landlords of Bedlam the manipulators of ghost-culture all history's goblins agile among the contradictions were stunned into an embarrassed silence when from his pocket the guest of honour produced a few crumpled and unexplained petals and wept with exhaustion.
If I could choose the hour in which Death chooses me, And the way in which It will make its arbitary choice, I can think of nothing better than To fall asleep near midnight in a boat As it enters a new port, In a boat With a clarity of stars above And below it, And all around me Bright music and voices laughing in A language not known to me. I'd like to go that way, Tired and glad, With all my future before me, Hungry still for the fat And visible globe.
And the one throwing the lifebelt, Even he needs help at times, Stranded on the beach, Terrified of the waves.
Or, What The Poem Lacked 'How he got to the point of thinking this sort of thing was a poem is a good and appalling question...' -Donald Davie Of course they were right: The poem lacked a certain tightness, Its inventions were chaotic. In the bleak farmhouse Rimbaud remembering the jewelled spider webs, The smoking pond, the banished sideshows. Of course they were right: The poems were not fit to be taken seriously, Mere candyfloss, the efforts of a stablehand. In Rome coughing up the rose-shaped phlegm Keats taking the final opiate, the nightingale suddenly obsolete. Of course they were right: He could have found all he wrote In the dustbins he emptied. Where's Hyatt now? Still drinking the blind wine? Ghost-junk still flowing in ghost-veins? Of course they were right: So much of what she wrote was doggerel, mere child's play. In a London suburb Stevie, Blake's grandchild, fingering a rosary made of starlight. Of course they were right: In all the poems something went astray, Something not quite at home in their world, something lost. It was something to do with what the poem lacked saved it from oblivion, a hunger nothing to do with the correct idiom In which to express itself but a need to eat a fruit far off from the safe orchard, reached by no easy pathway or route already mapped.
One night a poem came to a poet. From now on, it said, you must wear a mask. What kind of mask? asked the poet. A rose mask, said the poem. I've used it already, said the poet, I've exhausted it. Then wear the mask that's made Of the nightingale's song, use that mask. But it's an old mask, said the poet, It's all used up. Nonsense! said the poem, it is the perfect mask. Nevertheless, try on the God mask- Now that mask illuminates Heaven. But it is a tired mask, said the poet, And the stars crawl about in it like ants. Then try on the troubadour's mask, or the singer's mask, Try on all the popular masks. I have, said the poet, but they fit so awkwardly. Now the poem was getting impatient, It stamped its foot like a child. It screamed, Then try on your own face! Try on the one mask that terrifies you, The amsk no one else could possibly use, The mask only you can wear out! He tore at his face till it bled. This mask? he asked, this mask? Yes, said the poem, why not? But he was tired even of that mask. He had lived too long with it. He tried to separate himself from it. Its scream was muffled, it wept, It tried to be lyrical. It wriggled into his eyes and mouth, Into his blood it wriggled. The next day his friends did not recognise him, The mask was utterly transparent. Now it's the right mask, said the poem, The right mask.
I saw the skeleton in everyone And noticed how it walked in them, And some, unconscious that Grinning Jack Abided his time inside their flesh Stared back, and wondered what I saw. The way they dressed, a boil on a face, Their vanities were small and obvious- Woman wore their coldest masks and men Looked elsewhere and thought perhaps I was some friend they'd dropped. But I did not know them well enough to say It's Grinning Jack I see today, Not your beauty or your ugliness, Nor how fresh you seem, nor how obvious The chemical decay, But the skeleton that every man Ignores as calmly as he can, Who'll kiss us on the cheek and blow The floss oftemporary things away. It's Grinning Jack I see today, And once seen he'll never go away.
I'll scrub the doorstep till it blinds you, I'll polish the candlesticks till they burn, I'll crawl across the carpet And suck up all your dirt. Though the cast-off clothes you gave me Are much too grand to wear I'll don them in the bedroom, And no doubt I'll weep there. I'll wash the shit from your toilet, The stiffness from your sheets. Madam, thank you for employment. Can I come again next week? 'Sweetheart.' said the banker's wife, 'I too know of despair, I think about it often In my house in Eaton Square.' 'Sweetheart, ' said the doctor, 'I've no advice today.' Pain had made him indifferent. He turned his head away. Among a pile of nightmares I heard a woman scream. 'Hush, ' said the psychiatrist, 'It is a common dream.' There are many kinds of poverty, My mother knows them well. She sits and counts them in a tenement A mile or so from hell.
The Dodo came back. It took off its hat. It took off its overcoat. It took off its dark glasses and put them in its suit pocket. It looked exhausted. I made sure the doors were locked. I turned off several lights. I got the blood from the fridge and injected it. Next I sneaked into the garden and buried a manuscript containing The History of Genetic Possibilities. I washed my fingerprints from things. I took a Bible down from the shelf. Opening it at Genesis I sat waiting. Outside, people not from the neighbourhood were asking questions.
Today they've been feeding Brer Rabbit. They've coaxed him down from the hillside, hidden the furgloves, the rabbit-feet, the coats worn by ugly women have for today at least been banned from the market. 'It's Kindness to Rabbits Week, ' they explain, 'Skinbag, let's fatten you! Everyone will want to know you, Everyone will want to stroke you. Imagine the comfort! Imagine the bunnies you could get into!' Today they are being charitable to Brer Rabbit. They feed him with lettuce and carrots, offer fine plates artistically set with flowers, they show him the most comfortable hutches, the plastic burrows, the new, grass-free hillsides. Brer Rabbit doesn't mind. He eats and says nothing. He is the one rabbit who will never stay, who will never grow quite fat enough. He will be away by nightfall, when under the glittering kerosene lamps the fat bunnies are hung and skewered and all manner of freaks parade between the meat stalls and the apples.
Brer Rabbit goes to the ball dressed as a dandy. He feels good this evening. Magnanimous towards all creatures, he cannot understand why the dancers shy away from him. What social misdemeanour is it now that they stiffen at? He's eaton the lice. He's washed off the stench of burrows. The myxomatosis scabs are healed. What's left to complain about? He dances to whatever tune's available, the fox trot, the tango; his green suit becomes him, inhis lapel the baby's foot looks charming.
Brer Rabbit watches a sparrow. It jumps up and down, a furious little sparrow. Its beady eyes stare at him. It snarls from behind leaves, on the branches it sharpens its beak. If only it could get at him it would gobble him up, this sparrow, light as a sunbeam, as temporary as vision.
Brer Rabbit arrives at the rainbow's ending, stunned, frightened of its brilliance. He dips a paw into the colours expecting much to happen, but nothing changes. He tries to drink the colours, but again nothing. With a blade of grass he saws through the spectrum, he tackles each separate colour, each glowing beam is gone through, its points examined. And still nothing is understood, the reason for its brilliance eludes him. Brer Rabbit arrives at the rainbow's ending. He digs into the ground, the turf smells of morning, it befriends him. He ruffles the soil, digs down exposing intricate insects, peculiar stones, but still no bits of gold reward him. And while Brer Rabbit digs, while he hunts befuddled through a maze of tree-roots above ground clouds are appearing. Deeper and deeper digs the rabbit. Abandoning light abandoning leaf abandoning treasure
So Brer Rabbit re-enters the burrow. All day he's been in the world of fantasy, but now below the drenched allotment he is at home again. Through the walls of his burrow rain leaks, the tunnels turn liquid; his fur mud-soaked he screams his hatred of make-believe. All day he's been bunnying about- smiling benevolently with the toy shop dummies, wandering through the nursery all winsome and innocent. Now that above ground the children sleep cocooned in love for him something drops away and sweetness is no longer bearable. Soon enough those children will grow old. Brer Rabbit climbs into his shroud. He waits to haunt them.
Brer Rabbit sends out messages; 'All's finished here. In the burrow memory falls away until There is nothing to cling on to.' He digs for some image, for some route back To a time when company existed. He comes up with nothing. He watches how frost melts from the apples, Thinks how the world might be empty, thinks How old plagues might have settled. 'Once I breakfasted on roses, I gossiped with tulips, I invited friends home, Got them drunk on the brilliant petals! But then the clouds swarmed, They sucked up colour. All went. Blank poppies, small memories of redness. Little rags, without essence.' He sniffs trhe mist to trace a scent, But there is no difference now Between enemy and flower. Daily his brain tightens. On the leaves he has written his messages; They darken then vanish. From the dandelions he has unhooked his longings; On the wind that changes pollen into dust They drift, then vanish. He sinks down the long burrow frightened. Brer Rabbit changes. He becomes the ants' banquet, A focal-point for the flies' reunion. Into the landscape his brown fur merges. Soon without fear or shape he will run Through tunnels of fern and campion, Down trackways that have for centuries led From door to green door Brer Rabbit will be flowing.
John Poole's bullying the angels. In Paradise the cherubs are shivering with fear, When his big nasty shadow stomps past their curls droop. What's John Poole doing in Paradise, Smashed on the queer stuff? How the hell did he get in? Well, he was that kind of person. He scared policemen And loved rabbitsand battered women and loved rabbits. Maybe that's how he got in. He loved rabbits more than the cherubs. He said so, strolling towards Paradise in a threatening sort of way.
How good it would be to be lost again, Night falling on the compass and the map Turning to improbable flames, Bright ashes going out in the ponds. And how good it would be To stand bewildered in a strange wood Where you are the loudest thing, Your heart making a deafening moise. And how strange when your fear of being lost has subsided To stand listening to the frogs holding Their arguments in the streams, Condemning the barbarous herons. And how right it is To shrug off real and invented grief As of no importance To this moment of your life, When being lost seems So much more like being found, And you find all that is lost Is what weighed you down.
When the mule sings the birds will fall silent. From among them they will choose a messenger.. It will fly to the court of the Emperor And bowing with much decorum Will complain bitterly. And the Emperor, who had long ago banished all cages, Who intil that moment had been astonished By the birds' flight and by their singing, Will throw open the windows and listening Will detect in the mule's song Some flaw of which he is paricularly fond, And he will say to the bird, 'O stupid thing! Let the mule sing, For there has come about a need of change, There is a hinger now For different things.' This is the mule's favourite dream. It's his own invention. Deep in his brain's warren it blossoms.
H.H. 'What's the story about? B.P. 'About a mouse that gets eaten by an eagle.' H.H. 'Poor mouse.' B.P. 'No, the mouse becomes part of the eagle.' H.H. 'Lucky mouse. Perhaps I'll be that lucky.' Perhaps next time he will be a musician playing in a hall in which a few children fidget and dream while the crowd regrets What cannot help but pass. Or perhaps he will be something a snowdrift's buried and that's not found again, or the contradiction of blossom on a stunted apple-tree. Perhaps, but all I know for certain is that already some friends are in their graves, and for them the world is no longer fixed in its stubborn details. Astonished in moments of clarity to realise how all that surrounds me has passed again and again through death, I still strut without understanding between an entrance of skin and an exit of soil. It is too much to expect he will come back in the same form, molecule by sweet molecule reassembled. When the grave pushes him back up into the blood or the tongue of a sparrow, when he becomes the scent of foxglove, becomes fish or glow-worm, when as a mole he nuzzles his way up eating worms that once budded inside him, it's too much to expect that I'll still be around. I'll not be here when he comes back as a moth with no memory of flames. It is a dubious honour getting to know the dead, knowing them on more intimate terms, friends who come and go in what at the last moment seems hardly a moment. And now as one by dreamless one they are dropped into the never distant, dreamless grave, as individual memory fades and eye-bewildering light is put aside, we grow more baffled by this last gift of the days they are denied.
Alone, tired, exhausted even by what had not yet happened, passing a cemetery on the outskirts of London I saw as angel dip its hand into a grave and pull out a fistful of cherry-blossom.
I rescued a bee from a web last night. It had been there several hours, Numbered by the cold it could hardly fight A spider half its size, one programmed To string a web across the fattest flowers And transform the pollen into bait. My sympathy I know now was misplaced, It had found the right time in which to die. I saved it while light sank into grass And trees swelled to claim their space; I saved it in a time of surface peace. Next morning as I watched the broken web gather light Seeing it ruined in the grass I understood That I had done more harm than good, And I felt confused by that act Of egocentric tenderness. I called it love at first, then care, Then simple curiosity, But there was a starker reason for such sympathy. It is that one day I too will be caught out in the cold, And finding terror in there being no help at hand Will remember how once I tried to save a bee- Though I hope the same mess is not made of me.
Trying to get back before night hid the way And the path through Sharpham Wood was lost I still found time to stop, and stopping found A different path shining through the undergrowth. It was real enough- A sun that had been too high to light The underside of leaves had sunk, And ground level rays had lit The tiny roots of things just begun. Just now begun! To think on this half-way through what time is left! Among the dead and glittering brambles on the path The miracle is obstinate. There is no 'going back', no wholly repeatable route, No rearranging time or relationships; no stopping Skin from flaking like a salmon's flesh. Yet no end of celebration need come about, No need to say, 'Such and such a thing is done and gone'- The mistake is in the words, and going back Is just another way of going on.
There is a place where the raspberries burn And the fat sparrows snore in peace; Where apples have no fear of teeth, And a tongue not used to dust Sings of something never lost; It is a place not far away. It takes a lot of trust to reach, And a spell only lovecan teach.
If you arrive outside Paradise and find entrance is by invitation only and that anyway from the ledger your name is missing, do not despair. At the back of Paradise in the huge wall that surrounds that place is a small door; God and all his angels have forgotten it. If something goes wrong and Heaven ignores you, if what you are is paraded before you and mocked do not despair, you have got too near for your schemes to be abandoned. If you are told to go away, to Hell, to the blankness already experienced, you simply sneak round the wall to the small door at the back of Heaven, your give it a bit of a push, and wriggle like a snake you squeeze yourself in. And if you ever get hungry no doubt somewhere you will find an apple tree, and fruit to share quite generously.
But if you enter without rapture or without such hopes as make hoping actual, you might as well not enter- 'Now' is weighed down by 'ago', sight's overloaded and the smell of earth burdened by memory. What use dragging the body and all its loose desires and its ghost-connections through days wounded by doubting, the purpose is ecstasy- believe in it, undo the mischief night's wardens have created. This is the message I leave myself- Yet so hard to rise out the trap of befuddled longings! Habit hauls in its net, bulging with Death's cartographers.
For Liz Kylle I met them in bars and in railway stations and Imet them in borrowed rooms and at bright gatherings, and often enough I met them with misgivings and doubts, and misinterpreted what they said or did not understand at all, or understood so well no explanations seemed needed. And still, for all this, I kept on losing them. And changes took place and things that had seemed extraordinary and out of reach became life's most obvious gifts, and the world slowed down, and I began to meet them less and less. Then I learned how the exodus from this placeis not scheduled- at times the young leave before the old and the old are left gaping at their fortune. Looking through a book containing the names they have abandoned I realise that as from today I haven't fingers enough to count the graves in which they are exiled.
So many were spreading darkness as if it were light, they were broadcasting their sickness and their ghosts hoping they would go, but needing them; they were digging up the mummified gods and pulling at their spines to make them gibber. One of Death's little camp followers I went along with them, chattering sombrely, my back to the sunlight, arse about face, my sight permanently fixed in important shadows. There came a time I believed the future mapped, that everything was arranged- except for the daily trivia there seemed nothing left to plan, and though it was still a mystery what route I'd take and with what cool or lush flesh I'd wake, I believed what I was was in the blood, that for good ro bad the chemistry of incident and memory was fixed. Then I learnt how to throw away the tragic books, I began ignoring the philosophies that wilted at the grave's edge; the smell of grass became revelation enough. I needed a new philosophy, a new god, a bright god, a light, sun-splashed god. A god that can gobble up the sickness and the ghosts, a god that can blow grief away as if grief were a feather. Out of such things I have began to assemble a prayer.