The Heart Is Strange (6 page)

Spectral as men once met or crucified,

And kind. Until the sun sets you are safe.

A prey to your most awkward reflection,

Loose-limbed before the fire you sit appalled.

And think that by your error you have called

These to you. Look! the light will soon be gone.

Excited see from the window the men fade

In the twilight; reappear two doors down.

Suppose them well acquainted with the town

Who built it. Do you fumble in the shade?

The key was lost, remember, yesterday,

Or stolen,—undergraduates perhaps;

But all men are their colleagues, and eclipse

Very like dusk. It is too late to pray.

There was a time crepuscular was mild,

The hour for tea, acquaintances, and fall

Away of all day’s difficulties, all

Discouragement. Weep, you are not a child.

The equine hour rears, no further friend,

Intolerant, foam-lathered, pregnant with

Mysterious grave watchers in their wrath

Let into tired Troy. You are near the end.

Midsummer Common loses its last gold,

And grey is there. The sun slants down behind

A certain cinema, and the world is blind

But more dangerous. It is growing cold.

Light all the lights, heap wood upon the fire

To banish shadow. Draw the curtains tight.

But sightless eyes will lean through and wide night

Darken this room of yours. As you desire.

Think on your sins with all intensity.

The men are on the stair, they will not wait.

There is a paper-knife to penetrate

Heart & guilt together. Do it quickly.

Parting as Descent

The sun rushed up the sky; the taxi flew;

There was a kind of fever on the clock

That morning. We arrived at Waterloo

With time to spare and couldn’t find my track.

The bitter coffee in a small café

Gave us our conversation. When the train

Began to move, I saw you turn away

And vanish, and the vessels in my brain

Burst, the train roared, the other travellers

In flames leapt, burning on the tilted air

Che si cruccia, I heard the devils curse

And shriek with joy in that place beyond prayer.

World-Telegram

Man with a tail heads eastward for the Fair.

Can open a pack of cigarettes with it.

Was weaving baskets happily, it seems,

When found, the almost Missing Link, and brought

From Ceylon in the interests of science.

The correspondent doesn’t know how old.

Two columns left, a mother saw her child

Crushed with its father by a ten-ton truck

Against a loading platform, while her son,

Small, frightened, in a Sea Scout uniform,

Watched from the Langley. All needed treatment.

Berlin and Rome are having difficulty

With a new military pact. Some think

Russia is not too friendly towards London.

The British note is called inadequate.

An Indian girl in Lima, not yet six,

Has been delivered by Caesarian.

A boy. They let the correspondent in:

Shy, uncommunicative, still quite pale,

A holy picture by her, a blue ribbon.

Right off the centre, and three columns wide,

A rather blurred but rather ominous

Machine-gun being set up by militia

This morning in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Apparently some miners died last night.

‘Personal brawls’ is the employers’ phrase.

All this on the front page. Inside, penguins.

The approaching television of baseball.

The King approaching Quebec. Cotton down.

Skirts up. Four persons shot. Advertisements.

Twenty-six policemen are decorated.

Mother’s Day repercussions. A film star

Hopes marriage will preserve him from his fans.

News of one day, one afternoon, one time.

If it were possible to take these things

Quite seriously, I believe they might

Curry disorder in the strongest brain,

Immobilize the most resilient will,

Stop trains, break up the city’s food supply,

And perfectly demoralize the nation.

11 May 1939

The Animal Trainer (2)

I told him: The time has come, I must be gone.

It is time to leave the circus and circus days,

The admissions, the menagerie, the drums,

Excitements of disappointment and praise.

In a suburb of the spirit I shall seize

The steady and exalted light of the sun

And live there, out of the tension that decays,

Until I become a man alone of noon.

Heart said: Can you do without these animals?

The looking, licking, smelling animals?

The friendly fumbling beast? The listening one?

The standing up and worst of animals?

What will become of you in the pure light

When all your enemies are gone, and gone

The inexhaustible prospect of the night?

—But the night is now the body of my fear,

These animals are my distraction! Once

Let me escape the smells and cages here,

Once let me stand naked in the sun,

All their performances will be forgotten.

I shall concentrate in the sunlight there.

Said the conservative Heart: These animals

Are occupation, food for you, your love

And your despair, responsibility:

They are the travellers by which you live.

Without you they will pace and pine, or die.

—What soul-delighting tasks do they perform?

They quarrel, snort, leap, lie down, their delight

Merely a punctual meal and to be warm.

Justify their existence in the night!

—The animals are coupling, and they cry

‘The circus
is
, it is our mystery,

It is a world of dark where animals die.’

—Animals little and large, be still, be still:

I’ll stay with you. Suburb and sun are pale.

—Animals are your destruction, and your will.

Desire Is a World by Night

The history of strangers in their dreams

Being irresponsible, is fun for men,

Whose sons are neither at the Front nor frame

Humiliating weakness to keep at home

Nor wince on principle, wearing mother grey,

Honoured by radicals. When the mind is free

The catechetical mind can mince and tear

Contemptible vermin from a stranger’s hair

And then sleep.

                             In our parents’ dreams we see

Vigour abutting on senility,

Stiff blood, and weathered with the years, poor vane;

Unfortunate but inescapable.

Although this wind bullies the windowpane

Are the children to be kept responsible

For the world’s decay? Carefully we choose

Our fathers, carefully we cut out those

On whom to exert the politics of praise.

Heard after dinner, in defenceless ease,

The dreams of friends can puzzle, dazzle us

With endless journeys through unfriendly snow,

Malevolent faces that appear and frown

Where nothing was expected, the sudden stain

On spotless window-ledges; these we take

Chuckling, but take them with us when we go,

To study in secret, late, brooding, looking

For trails and parallels. We have a stake

In this particular region, and we look

Excitedly for situations that we know.

—The disinterested man has gone abroad;

Winter is on the by-way where he rode

Erect and alone, summery years ago.

When we dream, paraphrase, analysis

Exhaust the crannies of the night. We stare,

Fresh sweat upon our foreheads, as they fade:

The melancholy and terror of avenues

Where long no single man has moved, but play

Under the arc-lights gangs of the grey dead

Running directionless. That bright blank place

Advances with us into fearful day,

Heady and insuppressible. Call in friends,

They grin and carry it carefully away,—

The fathers can’t be trusted,—strangers wear

Their strengths, and visor. Last, authority,

The Listener borrow from an English grave

To solve our hatred and our bitterness . .

The foul and absurd to solace or dismay.

All this will never appear; we will not say;

Let the evidence be buried in a cave

Off the main road. If anyone could see

The white scalp of that passionate will and those

Sullen desires, he would stumble, dumb,

Retreat into the time from which he came

Counting upon his fingers and his toes.

The Moon and the Night and the Men

On the night of the Belgian surrender the moon rose

Late, a delayed moon, and a violent moon

For the English or the American beholder;

The French beholder. It was a cold night,

People put on their wraps, the troops were cold

No doubt, despite the calendar, no doubt

Numbers of refugees coughed, and the sight

Or sound of some killed others. A cold night.

On Outer Drive there was an accident:

A stupid well-intentioned man turned sharp

Right and abruptly he became an angel

Fingering an unfamiliar harp,

Or screamed in hell, or was nothing at all.

Do not imagine this is unimportant.

He was a part of the night, part of the land,

Part of the bitter and exhausted ground

Out of which memory grows.

                                                 Michael and I

Stared at each other over chess, and spoke

As little as possible, and drank and played.

The chessmen caught in the European eye,

Neither of us I think had a free look

Although the game was fair. The move one made

It was difficult at last to keep one’s mind on.

‘Hurt and unhappy’ said the man in London.

We said to each other, The time is coming near

When none shall have books or music, none his dear,

And only a fool will speak aloud his mind.

History is approaching a speechless end,

As Henry Adams said. Adams was right.

All this occurred on the night when Leopold

Fulfilled the treachery four years before

Begun—or was he well-intentioned, more

Roadmaker to hell than king? At any rate,

The moon came up late and the night was cold,

Many men died—although we know the fate

Of none, nor of anyone, and the war

Goes on, and the moon in the breast of man is cold.

A Poem for Bhain

Although the relatives in the summer house

Gossip and grumble, do what relatives do,

Demand, demand our eyes and ears, demand us,

You and I are not precisely there

As they require: heretics, we converse

Alert and alone, as over a lake of fire

Two white birds following their profession

Of flight, together fly, loom, fall and rise,

Certain of the nature and station of their mission.

So by the superficial and summer lake

We talk, and nothing that we say is heard,

Neither by the relatives who twitter and ache

Nor by any traveller nor by any bird.

Canto Amor

Dream in a dream the heavy soul somewhere

struck suddenly & dark down to its knees.

A griffin sighs off in the orphic air.

If (Unknown Majesty) I not confess

praise for the wrack the rock the live sailor

under the blue sea,—yet I may You bless

always for hér, in fear & joy for hér

whose gesture summons ever when I grieve

me back and is my mage and minister.

—Muses: whose worship I may never leave

but for this pensive woman, now I dare,

teach me her praise! with her my praise receive.—

Three years already of the round world’s war

had rolled by stoned & disappointed eyes

when she and I came where we were made for.

Pale as a star lost in returning skies,

more beautiful than midnight stars more frail

she moved towards me like chords, a sacrifice;

entombed in body trembling through the veil

arm upon arm, learning our ancient wound,

we see our one soul heal, recovering pale.

Then priestly sanction, then the drop of sound.

Quickly part to the cavern ever warm

deep from the march, body to body bound,

descend (my soul) out of dismantling storm

into the darkness where the world is made.

. . Come back to the bright air. Love is multiform.

Heartmating hesitating unafraid

although incredulous, she seemed to fill

the lilac shadow with light wherein she played,

whom sorry childhood had made sit quite still,

an orphan silence, unregarded sheen,

listening for any small soft note, not hopeful:

caricature; as once a maiden Queen,

flowering power comeliness kindness grace,

shattered her mirror, wept, would not be seen.

These pities moved. Also above her face

serious or flushed, swayed her fire-gold

not earthly hair, now moonless to unlace,

resisted flame, now in a sun more cold

great shells to whorl about each secret ear,

mysterious histories, white shores, unfold.

New musics! One the music that we hear,

this is the music which the masters make

out of their minds, profound solemn & clear.

And then the other music, in whose sake

all men perceive a gladness but we are drawn

less for that joy than utterly to take

our trial, naked in the music’s vision,

the flowing ceremony of trouble and light,