New and Selected Poems (16 page)
Evening Thrush
Beyond a twilight of limes and willows
The church craftsman is still busy –
Switing idols,
Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses,
Out of old bits of churchyard yew.
Suddenly flinging
Everything off, head-up, flame-naked,
Plunges shuddering into the creator –
Then comes plodding back, with a limp, over cobbles.
That was a virtuoso’s joke.
Now, serious, stretched full height, he aims
At the zenith. He situates a note
Right on the source of light.
Sews a seamless garment, simultaneously
Hurls javelins of dew
Three in air together, catches them.
Explains a studied theorem of sober practicality.
Cool-eyed,
Gossips in a mundane code of splutters
With Venus and Jupiter.
Listens –
Motionless, intent astronomer.
Suddenly launches a soul –
The first roses hang in a yoke stupor.
Globe after globe rolls out
Through his fluteful of dew –
The tree-stacks ride out on the widening arc.
Alone and darkening
At the altar of a star
With his sword through his throat
The thrush of clay goes on arguing
Over the graves.
O thrush,
If that really is you, behind the leaf-screen,
Who is this –
Worn-headed, on the lawn’s grass, after sunset,
Humped, voiceless, turdus, imprisoned
As a long-distance lorry-driver, dazed
With the pop and static and unending
Of worms and wife and kids?
The Harvest Moon
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie in the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And earth replies all night, like a deep drum.
So people can’t sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!
And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.
Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry ‘We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.
Leaves
Who’s killed the leaves?
Me, says the apple, I’ve killed them all.
Fat as a bomb or a cannonball
I’ve killed the leaves.
Who sees them drop?
Me, says the pear, they will leave me all bare
So all the people can point and stare.
I see them drop.
Who’ll catch their blood?
Me, me, me, says the marrow, the marrow.
I’ll get so rotund that they’ll need a wheelbarrow.
I’ll catch their blood.
Who’ll make their shroud?
Me, says the swallow, there’s just time enough
Before I must pack all my spools and be off.
I’ll make their shroud.
Who’ll dig their grave?
Me, says the river, with the power of the clouds
A brown deep grave I’ll dig under my floods.
I’ll dig their grave.
Who’ll be their parson?
Me, says the Crow, for it is well known
I study the bible right down to the bone.
I’ll be their parson.
Who’ll be chief mourner?
Me, says the wind, I will cry through the grass
The people will pale and go cold when I pass.
I’ll be chief mourner.
Who’ll carry the coffin?
Me, says the sunset, the whole world will weep
To see me lower it into the deep.
I’ll carry the coffin.
Who’ll sing a psalm?
Me, says the tractor, with my gear-grinding glottle
I’ll plough up the stubble and sing through my throttle.
I’ll sing the psalm.
Who’ll toll the bell?
Me, says the robin, my song in October
Will tell the still gardens the leaves are over.
I’ll toll the bell.
from
Autumn Notes
III
The chestnut splits its padded cell.
It opens an African eye.
A cabinet-maker, an old master
In the root of things, has done it again.
Its slippery gloss is a swoon,
A peek over the edge into – what?
Down the well-shaft of swirly grain,
Past the generous hands that lifted the May-lamps,
Into the Fairytale of a royal tree
That does not know about conkers
Or the war-games of boys.
Invisible though he is, this plump mare
Bears a tall armoured rider towards
The mirk-forest of rooty earth.
He rides to fight the North corner.
He must win a sunbeam princess
From the cloud castle of the rains.
If he fails, evil faces,
Jaws without eyes, will tear him to pieces.
If he succeeds, and has the luck
To snatch his crown from the dragon
Which resembles a slug
He will reign over our garden
For two hundred years.
IV
When the Elm was full
When it heaved and all its tautnesses drummed
Like a full-sail ship
It was just how I felt.
Waist-deep, I ploughed through the lands,
I leaned at horizons, I bore down on strange harbours.
As the sea is a sail-ship’s root
So the globe was mine.
When the swell lifted the crow from the Elm-top
Both Poles were my home, they rocked me and supplied me.
But now the Elm is still
All its frame bare
Its leaves are a carpet for the cabbages
And it stands engulfed in the peculiar golden light
With which Eternity’s flash
Photographed the sudden cock pheasant –
Engine whinneying, the fire-ball bird clatters up,
Shuddering full-throttle
Its three-tongued tail-tip writhing
And the Elm stands, astonished, wet with light,
And I stand, dazzled to my bones, blinded.
V
Through all the orchard’s boughs
A honey-colour stillness, a hurrying stealth,
A quiet migration of all that can escape now.
Under ripe apples, a snapshot album is smouldering.
With a bare twig,
Glow-dazed, I coax its stubborn feathers.
A gold furred flame. A blue tremor of the air.
The fleshless faces dissolve, one by one,
As they peel open. Blackenings shrivel
To grey flutter. The clump’s core hardens. Everything
Has to be gone through. Every corpuscle
And its gleam. Everything must go.
My heels squeeze wet mulch, and my crouch aches.
A wind-swell lifts through the oak.
Scorch-scathed, crisping, a fleeing bonfire
Hisses in invisible flames – and the flame-roar.
An alarmed blackbird, lean, alert, scolds
The everywhere slow exposure – flees, returns.
VI
Water-wobbling blue-sky-puddled October.
The distance microscopic, the ditches brilliant.
Flowers so low-powered and fractional
They are not in any book.
I walk on high fields feeling the bustle
Of the million earth-folk at their fair.
Fieldfares early, exciting foreigners.
A woodpigeon pressing over, important as a policeman.
A far Bang! Then Bang! and a litter of echoes –
Country pleasures. The farmer’s guest,
In U.S. combat green, will be trampling brambles,
Waving his gun like a paddle.
I thought I’d brushed with a neighbour –
Fox-reek, a warm web, rich as creosote,
Draping the last watery blackberries –
But it was the funeral service.
Two nights he has lain, patient in his position,
Puckered under the first dews of being earth,
Crumpled like dead bracken. His reek will cling
To his remains till spring.
Then I shall steal his fangs, and wear them, and honour them.
A Cranefly in September
She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart
Across mountain summits
(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)
But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings
And ginger-glistening wings
From collision to collision.
Aimless in no particular direction,
Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming
Of whatever it is, legs, grass,
The garden, the county, the country, the world –
Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest
Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.
She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest
In which, for instance, this giant watches –
The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.
Her jointed bamboo fuselage,
Her lobster shoulders, and her face
Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,
And the simple colourless church windows of her wings
Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.
Everything about her, every perfected vestment
Is already superfluous.
The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet
Are a problem beyond her.
The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate
To plot her through the infinities of the stems.
The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor
Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications
Like other galaxies.
The sky’s Northward September procession, the vast soft armistice,
Like an Empire on the move,
Abandons her, tinily embattled
With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain.
from
GAUDETE
Collision with the earth has finally come –
Collision with the earth has finally come –
How far can I fall?
A kelp, adrift
In my feeding substance
A mountain
Rooted in stone of heaven
A sea
Full of moon-ghost, with mangling waters
Dust on my head
Helpless to fit the pieces of water
A needle of many Norths
Ark of blood
Which is the magic baggage old men open
And find useless, at the great moment of need
Error on error
Perfumed
With a ribbon of fury
*
Once I said lightly
Once I said lightly
Even if the worst happens
We can’t fall off the earth.
And again I said
No matter what fire cooks us
We shall be still in the pan together.
And words twice as stupid.
Truly hell heard me.
She fell into the earth
And I was devoured.
*