New and Selected Poems (27 page)

The salmon were just down there –

Shivering together, touching at each other,

Shedding themselves for each other –

Now beneath flood-murmur

They peel away deathwards.

                                                     January haze,

With a veined yolk of sun. In bone-damp cold

I lean and watch the water, listening to water

Till my eyes forget me

And the piled flow supplants me, the mud-blooms

All this ponderous light of everlasting

Collapsing away under its own weight

Mastodon ephemera

Mud-curdling, bull-dozing, hem-twinkling

Caesarean of Heaven and Earth, unfelt

With exhumations and delirious advents –

                                      Catkins

Wriggle at their mother’s abundance. The spider clings to his craft.

Something else is going on in the river

More vital than death – death here seems a superficiality

Of small scaly limbs, parasitical. More grave than life

Whose reflex jaws and famished crystals

Seem incidental

To this telling – these tidings of plasm –

The melt of mouthing silence, the charge of light

Dumb with immensity.

                                  The river goes on

Sliding through its place, undergoing itself

In its wheel.

                                   I make out the sunk foundations

Of dislocated crypts, a bedrock

Time-hewn, time-riven altar. And this is the liturgy

Of Earth’s advent – harrowing, crowned – a travail

Of raptures and rendings. Perpetual mass

Of the waters

Wells from the cleft.

                                  This is the swollen vent

Of the nameless

Teeming inside atoms – and inside the haze

And inside the sun and inside the earth.

It is the font, brimming with touch and whisper,

Swaddling the egg.

                               
Only
birth
matters

Say the river’s whorls.

                                     And the river

Silences everything in a leaf-mouldering hush

Where sun rolls bare, and earth rolls,

And mind condenses on old haws.

The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely ripened

Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles

For some large containment. Lobed glands

Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.

This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.

Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,

The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,

Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold

Distilled only enough to be different

From the olive lode of her body,

The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger

With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye

Behind her eye, paler, blinder,

Inward. Her buffalo hump

Begins the amazement of her progress.

Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin – concession

To fish-life – secretes itself

Flush with her concealing suit: under it

The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel

As her belly is, a dulled pearl.

Strangest, the thumb-print skin, the rubberized weave

Of her insulation. Her whole body

Damascened with identity. This is she

Suspends the Sargasso

In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell

Sealed from event, her patience

Global and furthered with love

By the bending stars as if she

Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone

In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,

The nun of water.

Where does the river come from?

And the eel, the night-mind of water –

The river within the river and opposite –

The night-nerve of water?

Not from the earth’s remembering mire

Not from the air’s whim

Not from the brimming sun. Where from?

From the bottom of the nothing pool

Sargasso of God

Out of the empty spiral of stars

A glimmering person

Just before the curtain falls in the river

The Damselfly, with offstage, inaudible shriek

Reappears, weightless.

Hover-poised, in her snake-skin leotards,

Her violet-dark elegance.

Eyelash-delicate, a dracula beauty,

In her acetylene jewels.

Her mascara smudged, her veils shimmer-fresh –

Late August. Some sycamore leaves

Already in their museum, eaten to lace.

Robin song bronze-touching the stillness

Over posthumous nettles. The swifts, as one,

Whipcracked, gone. Blackberries.

                                                      And now, lightly,

Adder-shock of this dainty assassin

Still in mid-passion –

                                   still in her miracle play:

Masked, archaic, mute, insect mystery

Out of the sun’s crypt.

                                       Everything is forgiven

Such a metamorphosis in love!

Phaedra Titania

Dragon of crazed enamels!

Tragedienne of the ultra-violet,

So sulphurous and so frail,

Stepping so magnetically to her doom!

Lifted out of the river with tweezers

Dripping the sun’s incandescence –

                                                        suddenly she

Switches her scene elsewhere.

              (Find him later, halfway up a nettle,

              A touch-crumple petal of web and dew –

              Midget puppet-clown, tranced on his strings,

              In the nightfall pall of balsam.)

He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,

Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,

Half under a tangle of brambles.

After his two thousand miles, he rests,

Breathing in that lap of easy current

In his graveyard pool.

About six pounds weight,

Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –

But already a veteran,

Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it’s over!

So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!

Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s beauty-dress,

Her life-robe –

Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,

Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –

An autumnal pod of his flower,

The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,

With the sea-going Aurora Borealis

Of his April power –

The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –

Ripened to muddy dregs,

The river reclaiming his sea-metals.

In the October light

He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.

Death has already dressed him

In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,

Mapping the completion of his service,

His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body

A fungoid anemone of canker –

Can the caress of water ease him?

The flow will not let up for a minute.

What a change! from that covenant of polar light

To this shroud in a gutter!

What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!

His living body become death’s puppet,

Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes

He haunts his own staring vigil

And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,

And the humiliation of the role!

And that is how it is,

That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour,

That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,

And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty

In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,

Body simply the armature of energy

In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,

The salt mouthful of actual existence

With strength like light –

Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.

This chamber of horrors is also home.

He was probably hatched in this very pool.

And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows

Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car tyres, bottles

And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.

People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.

If boys see him they will try to kill him.

All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,

The epic poise

That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient

In the machinery of heaven.