New and Selected Poems (22 page)
from
Seven Dungeon Songs
I
Dead, she became space-earth
Broken to pieces.
Plants nursed her death, unearthed her goodness.
But her murderer, mad-innocent
Sucked at her offspring, reckless of blood,
Consecrating them in fire, muttering
It is good to be God.
He used familiar hands
Incriminating many,
And he borrowed mouths, leaving names
Being himself nothing
But a tiger’s sigh, a wolf’s music
A song on a lonely road
What it is
Risen out of mud, fallen from space
That stares through a face.
II
Face was necessary – I found face.
Hands – I found hands.
I found shoulders, I found legs
I found all bits and pieces.
We were me, and lay quiet.
I got us all of a piece, and we lay quiet.
We just lay.
Sunlight had prepared a wide place
And we lay there.
Air nursed us.
We recuperated.
While maggots blackened to seeds, and blood warmed its stone.
Only still something
Stared at me and screamed
Stood over me, black across the sun,
And mourned me, and would not help me get up.
II
I
The earth locked out the light,
Blocking the light, like a door locked.
But a crack of light
Between sky and earth, was enough.
He called it, Earth’s halo.
And the lizard spread of his fingers
Reached for it.
He called it, The leakage of air
Into this suffocation of earth.
And the gills of his rib-cage
Gulped to get more of it.
His lips pressed to its coolness
Like an eye to a crack.
He lay like the already-dead
Tasting the tears
Of the wind-shaken and weeping
Tree of light.
IV
I walk
Unwind with activity of legs
The tangled ball
Which was once the orderly circuit of my body
Some night in the womb
All my veins and capillaries were taken out
By some evil will
And knotted in a great ball and stuffed back inside me
Now I rush to and fro
I try to attach a raw broken end
To some steady place, then back away
I look for people with clever fingers
Who might undo me
The horrible ball just comes
People’s fingers snarl it worse
I hurl myself
To jerk out the knot
Or snap it
And come up short
So dangle and dance
The dance of unbeing
V
If mouth could open its cliff
If ear could unfold from this strata
If eyes could split their rock and peep out finally
If hands of mountain-fold
Could get a proper purchase
If feet of fossil could lift
If head of lakewater and weather
If body of horizon
If whole body and balancing head
If skin of grass could take messages
And do its job properly
If spine of earth-foetus
Could unfurl
If man-shadow out there moved to my moves
The speech that works air
Might speak me
Tiger-Psalm
The tiger kills hungry. The machine-guns
Talk, talk, talk across their Acropolis.
The tiger
Kills expertly, with anaesthetic hand.
The machine-guns
Carry on arguing in heaven
Where numbers have no ears, where there is no blood.
The tiger
Kills frugally, after close inspection of the map.
The machine-guns shake their heads,
They go on chattering statistics.
The tiger kills by thunderbolt:
God of her own salvation.
The machine-guns
Proclaim the Absolute, according to morse,
In a code of bangs and holes that makes men frown.
The tiger
Kills with beautiful colours in her face,
Like a flower painted on a banner.
The machine-guns
Are not interested.
They laugh. They are not interested. They speak and
Their tongues burn soul-blue, haloed with ashes,
Puncturing the illusion.
The tiger
Kills and licks her victim all over carefully.
The machine-guns
Leave a crust of blood hanging on the nails
In an orchard of scrap-iron.
The tiger
Kills
With the strength of five tigers, kills exalted.
The machine-guns
Permit themselves a snigger. They eliminate the error
With a to-fro dialectic
And the point proved stop speaking.
The tiger
Kills like the fall of a cliff, one-sinewed with the earth,
Himalayas under eyelid, Ganges under fur –
Does not kill.
Does not kill. The tiger blesses with a fang.
The tiger does not kill but opens a path
Neither of Life nor of Death:
The tiger within the tiger:
The Tiger of the Earth.
O Tiger!
O Sister of the Viper!
O Beast in Blossom!
Orts
In
the
M5
Restaurant
Our sad coats assemble at the counter
The tyre face pasty
The neon of plaster flesh
With little inexplicable eyes
Holding a dish with two buns
Symbolic food
Eaten by symbolic faces
Symbolic eating movements
The road drumming in the wall, drumming in the head
The road going nowhere and everywhere
My freedom evidently
Is to feed my life
Into a carburettor
Petroleum has burned away all
But a still-throbbing column
Of carbon-monoxide and lead.
I attempt a firmer embodiment
With illusory coffee
And a gluey quasi-pie.
That
Star
That star
Will blow your hand off
That star
Will scramble your brains and your nerves
That star
Will frazzle your skin off
That star
Will turn everybody yellow and stinking
That star
Will scorch everything dead fumed to its blueprint
That star
Will make the earth melt
That star … and so on.
And they surround us. And far into infinity.
These are the armies of the night.
There is no escape.
Not one of them is good, or friendly, or corruptible.
One chance remains: KEEP ON DIGGING THAT HOLE
KEEP ON DIGGING AWAY AT THAT HOLE
Poets
Crowd the horizons, poised, wings
Lifted in elation, vast
Armadas of illusion
Waiting for a puff.
Or they dawn, singing birds – all
Mating calls
Battle bluff
And crazy feathers.
Or disappear
Into the grass-blade atom – one flare
Annihilating the world
To the big-eyed, simple light that fled
When the first word lumped out of the flint.
Grosse
Fuge
Rouses in its cave
Under faint peaks of light
Flares abrupt at the sun’s edge, dipping again
This side of the disc
Now coming low out of the glare
Coming under skylines
Under seas, under liquid corn
Snaking among poppies
Soft arrival pressing the roof of ghost
Creaking of old foundations
The ear cracking like a dry twig
Heavy craving weight
Of eyes on your nape
Unadjusted to world
Huge inching through hair, through veins
Tightening stealth of blood
Breath in the tunnel of spine
And the maneater
Opens its mouth and the music
Sinks its claw
Into your skull, a single note
Picks you up by the small of the back, weightless
Vaults into space, dangling your limbs
Devours you leisurely among litter of stars
Digests you into its horrible joy
This is the tiger of heaven
Hoists people out of their clothes
Leaves its dark track across the octaves
Children
new to the blood
Whose hot push has surpassed
The sabretooth
Never doubt their rights of conquest.
Their voices, under the leaf-dazzle
An occupying army
A foreign tongue
Loud in their idleness and power.
Figures in the flaming of hell
A joy beyond good and evil
Breaking their toys.
Soon they’ll sleep where they struck.
They’ll leave behind
A man like a licked skull
A gravestone woman, their playthings.
Prospero
and
Sycorax
She knows, like Ophelia,
The task has swallowed him.
She knows, like George’s dragon,
Her screams have closed his helmet.
She knows, like Jocasta,
It is over.
He prefers
Blindness.
She knows, like Cordelia,
He is not himself now,
And what speaks through him must be discounted –
Though it will be the end of them both.
She knows, like God,
He has found
Something
Easier to live with –
His death, and her death.
The Beacon
The
Stone
Has not yet been cut.
It is too heavy already
For consideration. Its edges
Are so super-real, already,
And at this distance,
They cut real cuts in the unreal
Stuff of just thinking. So I leave it
.
Somewhere it is.
Soon it will come.
I shall not carry it. With horrible life
It will transport its face, with sure strength,
To sit over mine, wherever I look,
Instead of hers.
It will even have across its brow
Her name.
Somewhere it is coming to the end
Of its million million years –
Which have worn her out.
It is coming to the beginning
Of her million million million years
Which will wear out it.
Because she will never move now
Till it is worn out.
She will not move now
Till everything is worn out.
TV
Off
He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass –