New and Selected Poems (12 page)

When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald.

When the curlew trawled in seadusk through a chime of wineglasses

When the swallow swooped through a woman’s song in a cavern

And the swift flicked through the breath of a violet

When the owl sailed clear of tomorrow’s conscience

And the sparrow preened himself of yesterday’s promise

And the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer upglare

And the bluetit zipped clear of lace panties

And the woodpecker drummed clear of the rotovator and the rose-farm

And the peewit tumbled clear of the laundromat

While the bullfinch plumped in the apple bud

And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun

And the wryneck crooked in the moon

And the dipper peered from the dewball

Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.

Hearing shingle explode, seeing it skip,

Crow sucked his tongue.

Seeing sea-grey mash a mountain of itself

Crow tightened his goose-pimples.

Feeling spray from the sea’s root nothinged on his crest

Crow’s toes gripped the wet pebbles.

When the smell of the whale’s den, the gulfing of the crab’s last prayer,

Gimletted in his nostril

He grasped he was on earth.

                                             He knew he grasped

Something fleeting

Of the sea’s ogreish outcry and convulsion.

He knew he was the wrong listener unwanted

To understand or help –

His utmost gaping of brain in his tiny skull

Was just enough to wonder, about the sea,

What could be hurting so much?

There was this man and he was the strongest

Of the strong.

He gritted his teeth like a cliff.

Though his body was sweeling away like a torrent on a cliff

Smoking towards dark gorges

There he nailed himself with nails of nothing

All the women in the world could not move him

They came their mouths deformed against stone

They came and their tears salted his nail-holes

Only adding their embitterment

To his effort

He abandoned his grin to them his grimace

In his face upwards body he lay face downwards

As a dead man adamant

His sandals could not move him they burst their thongs

And rotted from his fixture

All the men in the world could not move him

They wore at him with their shadows and little sounds

Their arguments were a relief

Like heather flowers

His belt could not endure the siege – it burst

And lay broken

He grinned

Little children came in chorus to move him

But he glanced at them out of his eye-corners

Over the edge of his grin

And they lost their courage for life

Oak forests came and went with the hawk’s wing

Mountains rose and fell

He lay crucified with all his strength

On the earth

Grinning towards the sun

Through the tiny holes of his eyes

And towards the moon

And towards the whole paraphernalia of the heavens

Through the seams of his face

With the strings of his lips

Grinning through his atoms and decay

Grinning into the black

Into the ringing nothing

Through the bones of his teeth

Sometimes with eyes closed

In his senseless trial of strength.

Looking close in the evil mirror Crow saw

Mistings of civilizations towers gardens

Battles he wiped the glass but there came

Mistings of skyscrapers webs of cities

Steaming the glass he wiped it there came

Spread of swampferns fronded on the mistings

A trickling spider he wiped the glass he peered

For a glimpse of the usual grinning face

But it was no good he was breathing too heavy

And too hot and space was too cold

And here came the misty ballerinas

The burning gulfs the hanging gardens it was eerie

When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel brown,

From the hatched atom

With its alibi self twisted around it

Lifting a long neck

And balancing that deaf and mineral stare

The sphinx of the final fact

And flexing on that double flameflicker tongue

A syllable like the rustling of the spheres

God’s grimace writhed, a leaf in the furnace

And man’s and woman’s knees melted, they collapsed

Their neck-muscles melted, their brows bumped the ground

Their tears evacuated visibly

They whispered ‘Your will is our peace.’

But Crow only peered.

                                     Then took a step or two forward,

Grabbed this creature by the slackskin nape,

Beat the hell out of it, and ate it.

Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies

In laughter

The steamer upends and goes under saluting like a Stuntman

In laughter

The nosediving aircraft concludes with a boom

In laughter

People’s arms and legs fly off and fly on again

In laughter

The haggard mask on the bed rediscovers its pang

In laughter, in laughter

The meteorite crashes

With extraordinarily ill-luck on the pram

The ears and eyes are bundled up

Are folded up in the hair,

Wrapped in the carpet, the wallpaper, tied with the lampflex

Only the teeth work on

And the heart, dancing on in its open cave

Helpless on the strings of laughter

While the tears are nickel-plated and come through doors with a bang

And the wails stun with fear

And the bones

Jump from the torment flesh has to stay for

Stagger some distance and fall in full view

Still laughter scampers around on centipede boots

Still it runs all over on caterpillar tread

And rolls back onto the mattress, legs in the air

But it’s only human

And finally it’s had enough – enough!

And slowly sits up, exhausted,

And slowly starts to fasten buttons,

With long pauses,

Like somebody the police have come for.

I am the hunted king

   Of the frost and big icicles

      
And
the
bogey
cold

      
With
its
wind
boots.
 

I am the uncrowned

   Of the rainworld

      
Hunted
by
lightning
and
thunder

      
And
rivers.
 

I am the lost child

   Of the wind

      
Who
goes
through
me
looking
for
something
else

      
Who
can’t
recognize
me
though
I
cry.
 

I am the maker

   Of the world

      
That
rolls
to
crush
 

      
And
silence
my
knowledge.
 

So finally there was nothing.

It was put inside nothing.

Nothing was added to it

And to prove it didn’t exist

Squashed flat as nothing with nothing.

Chopped up with a nothing

Shaken in a nothing

Turned completely inside out

And scattered over nothing –

So everybody saw that it was nothing

And that nothing more could be done with it

And so it was dropped. Prolonged applause in Heaven.

It hit the ground and broke open –

There lay Crow, cataleptic.

He sang

How the swan blanched forever

How the wolf threw away its telltale heart

And the stars dropped their pretence

The air gave up appearances

Water went deliberately numb

The rock surrendered its last hope

And cold died beyond knowledge

He sang

How everything had nothing more to lose

Then sat still with fear

Seeing the clawtrack of star

Hearing the wingbeat of rock

And his own singing

Once upon a time

God made this Elephant.

Then it was delicate and small

It was not freakish at all

Or melancholy

The Hyenas sang in the scrub: You are beautiful –

They showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions

Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations –

We envy your grace

Waltzing through the thorny growth

O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful

O ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness

Lift us from the furnaces

And furies of our blackened faces

Within these hells we writhe

Shut in behind the bars of our teeth

In hourly battle with a death

The size of the earth

Having the strength of the earth.

So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant’s tail

As like a lithe and rubber oval

He strolled gladly around inside his ease

But he was not God no it was not his

To correct the damned

In rage in madness then they lit their mouths

They tore out his entrails

They divided him among their several hells

To cry all his separate pieces

Swallowed and inflamed

Amidst paradings of infernal laughter.

At the Resurrection

The Elephant got himself together with correction

Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones

And completely altered brains

Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise.

So through the orange blaze and blue shadow

Of the afterlife, effortless and immense,

The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense,

And opposite and parallel

The sleepless Hyenas go

Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof

With a whipped run

Their shame-flags tucked hard down

Over the gutsacks

Crammed with putrefying laughter

Blotched black with the leakage and seepings

And they sing: ‘Ours is the land

Of loveliness and beautiful

Is the putrid mouth of the leopard

And the graves of fever

Because it is all we have –’

And they vomit their laughter.

And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze

About a star of deathless and painless peace

But no astronomer can find where it is.