Gaudete (18 page)

The coffin, spurred by its screws,

Took a wrong turning.

The earth can’t balance its load

Even to start.

The creaking heavens

Will never get there.

As for me

All I have

For an axle

Is your needle

Through my brains.

The grass-blade is not without

The loyalty that never was beheld.

And the blackbird

Sleeking from common anything and worm-dirt

Balances a precarious banner

Gold on black, terror and exultation.

The grim badger with armorial mask

Biting spade-steel, teeth and jaw-strake shattered,

Draws that final shuddering battle cry

Out of its backbone.

Me too,

Let me be one of your warriors.

Let your home

Be my home. Your people

My people.

Churches topple

Like the temples before them.

The reverberations of worship

Seem to help

Collapse such erections.

In all that time

The river

Has deepened its defile

Has been its own purification

Between your breasts

Between your thighs

I know well

You are not infallible

I know how your huge your unmanageable

Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist

As thin as a silk scarf, on your skull,

And how your pony’s eye darkened larger

Holding too lucidly the deep glimpse

After the humane killer

And I had to lift your hand for you

While your chin sank to your chest

With the sheer weariness

Of taking away from everybody

Your envied beauty, your much-desired beauty

Your hardly-used beauty

Of lifting away yourself

From yourself

And weeping with the ache of the effort

The sun, like a cold kiss in the street –

A mere disc token of you.

Moon – a smear

Of your salivas, cold, cooling.

Bite. Again, bite.

Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,

Like the flushed gossip

With the tale that kills

Sometimes it strengthens very slowly

What is already here –

A tree darkening the house.

The saviour

From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache

Like the sun

Which is itself cloudless and leafless

Was always here, is always as she was.

Having first given away pleasure –

Which is hard –

What is there left to give?

There is pain.

Pain is hardest of all.

It cannot really be given.

It can only be paid down

Equal, exactly,

To what can be no part of falsehood.

This payment is that purchase.

Looking for her form

I find only a fern.

Where she should be waiting in the flesh

Stands a sycamore with weeping letters.

I have a memorial too.

Where I lay in space

Is the print of the earth which trampled me

Like a bunch of grapes.

Now I am being drunk

By a singing drunkard.

A man hangs on

To a bare handful of hair.

A woman hangs on

To a bare handful of flesh.

Who is it

Reaches both hands into the drop

Letting flesh and hair

Follow if they can?

When the still-soft eyelid sank again

Over the stare

Still bright as if alive

The chiselled threshold

Without a murmur

Ground the soul’s kernel

Till blood welled.

And your granite –

Anointed –

Woke.

Stirred.