New and Selected Poems (10 page)
II THE RAT’S VISION
The rat hears the wind saying something in the straw
And the night-fields that have come up to the fence, leaning their silence,
The widowed land
With its trees that know how to cry
The rat sees the farm bulk of beam and stone
Wobbling like reflection on water.
The wind is pushing from the gulf
Through the old barbed wire, in through the trenched gateway, past the gates of the ear, deep into the worked design of days,
Breathes onto the solitary snow crystal
The rat screeches
And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly
And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath
And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero
‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.
III THE RAT’S FLIGHT
The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
And the sleep-souls of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow –
That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried
The horned Shadow of the Rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs
While it supplants Hell.
Heptonstall
Black village of gravestones.
Skull of an idiot
Whose dreams die back
Where they were born.
Skull of a sheep
Whose meat melts
Under its own rafters.
Only the flies leave it.
Skull of a bird,
The great geographies
Drained to sutures
Of cracked windowsills.
Life tries.
Death tries.
The stone tries.
Only the rain never tires.
Skylarks
I
The lark begins to go up
Like a warning
As if the globe were uneasy –
Barrel-chested for heights,
Like an Indian of the high Andes,
A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,
But leaden
With muscle
For the struggle
Against
Earth’s centre.
And leaden
For ballast
In the rocketing storms of the breath.
Leaden
Like a bullet
To supplant
Life from its centre.
II
Crueller than owl or eagle
A towered bird, shot through the crested head
With the command, Not die
But climb
Climb
Sing
Obedient as to death a dead thing.
III
I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings
Rip in and out through your voicebox
O lark
And sing inwards as well as outwards
Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle
O lark
O song, incomprehensibly both ways –
Joy! Help! Joy! Help!
O lark
IV
You stop to rest, far up, you teeter
Over the drop
But not stopping singing
Resting only for a second
Dropping just a little
Then up and up and up
Like a mouse with drowning fur
Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall
Lamenting, mounting a little –
But the sun will not take notice
And the earth’s centre smiles.
V
My idleness curdles
Seeing the lark labour near its cloud
Scrambling
In a nightmare difficulty
Up through the nothing
Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,
As if it were too late, too late
Dithering in ether
Its song whirls faster and faster
And the sun whirls
The lark is evaporating
Till my eye’s gossamer snaps
and my hearing floats back widely to earth
After which the sky lies blank open
Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.
Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.
VI
All the dreary Sunday morning
Heaven is a madhouse
With the voices and frenzies of the larks,
Squealing and gibbering and cursing
Heads flung back, as I see them,
Wings almost torn off backwards – far up
Like sacrifices set floating
The cruel earth’s offerings
The mad earth’s missionaries.
VII
Like those flailing flames
The lift from the fling of a bonfire
Claws dangling full of what they feed on
The larks carry their tongues to the last atom
Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –
So it’s a relief, a cool breeze
When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out
And the sun’s sucked them empty
And the earth gives them the O.K.
And they relax, drifting with changed notes
Dip and float, not quite sure if they may
Then they are sure and they stoop
And maybe the whole agony was for this
The plummeting dead drop
With long cutting screams buckling like razors
But just before they plunge into the earth
They flare and glide off low over grass, then up
To land on a wall-top, crest up,
Weightless,
Paid-up,
Alert,
Conscience perfect.
VIII
Manacled with blood,
Cuchulain listened bowed,
Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)
Hearing the far crow
Guiding the near lark nearer
With its blind song
‘That
some
sorry
little
wight
more
feeble
and
misguided
than
thyself
Take
thy
head
Thine
ear
And
thy
life’s
career
from
thee.’
Pibroch
The sea cries with its meaningless voice
Treating alike its dead and its living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.
Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned
Like nothing in the Universe.
Created for black sleep. Or growing
Conscious of the sun’s red spot occasionally,
Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.
Over the stone rushes the wind
Able to mingle with nothing,
Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.
Or turns, as if the stone’s mind came feeling
A fantasy of directions.
Drinking the sea and eating the rock
A tree struggles to make leaves –
An old woman fallen from space
Unprepared for these conditions.
She hangs on, because her mind’s gone completely.
Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,
Nothing lets up or develops.
And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.
This is where the staring angels go through.
This is where all the stars bow down.
The Howling of Wolves
Is without world.
What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?
Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,
That they must live
Innocence crept into minerals.
The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.
The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.
It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.
It must feed its fur.
The night snows stars and the earth creaks.
Gnat-Psalm
When the gnats dance at evening
Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,
Scrambling their crazy lexicon,
Shuffling their dumb Cabala,
Under leaf shadow
Leaves only leaves
Between them and the broad swipes of the sun
Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun
From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments
Dancing
Dancing
Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write
Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles
Everybody everybody else’s yoyo
Immense magnets fighting around a centre
Not writing and not fighting but singing
That the cycles of this Universe are no matter
That they are not afraid of the sun
That the one sun is too near
It blasts their song, which is of all the suns
That they are their own sun
Their own brimming over
At large in the nothing
Their wings blurring the blaze
Singing
That they are the nails
In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god
That they hear the wind suffering
Through the grass
And the evening tree suffering
The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries
And the long roads of dust
Dancing in the wind
The wind’s dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain
And the cow dung villages huddling to dust
But not the gnats, their agility
Has outleaped that threshold
And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass
Dancing
Dancing
In the glove shadows of the sycamore
A dance never to be altered
A dance giving their bodies to be burned
And their mummy faces will never be used
Their little bearded faces
Weaving and bobbing on the nothing
Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken
And their feet dangling like the feet of victims
O little Hasids
Ridden to death by your own bodies
Riding your bodies to death
You are the angels of the only heaven!
And God is an Almighty Gnat!
You are the greatest of all the galaxies!
My hands fly in the air, they are follies
My tongue hangs up in the leaves
My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing
Your dancing
Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.