Of the living Moses echoed: For the Lord
Thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.
Rome,
March 9, 1974
POEMS WRITTEN FOR ST WINEFRED’S WELL
‘And If There Be No Beauty, If God Has Passed Some By’
WINEFRED:
And if there be no beauty, if god has passed some by
In beauty giving, what then? Hare lip, wall eye,
Limbs shrunken? Beauty’s giver will be blind to them,
Will cast them to the pit. What then?
Beauty is in the doing, beauty is not being
As for what you speak of – shining hair, feel of primrose skin,
For what they are, for what I have of them,
Were they but in my gift, you should have them freely.
‘Talk is Easy. Easiest for One Who’
OTHER WOMAN:
Talk is easy. Easiest for one who
Would madly shut them away,
Consign them to darkness
You speak of beauty in the ghost!
I would have beauty in the flesh.
I am not yet a ghost.
‘Thank You. Enough, Brother Teryth’
BEUNO:
Thank you. Enough, brother Teryth,
Please no ceremony.
My Lord Bishop to the world I may be.
Here I am back to being a boy with you.
In this farm of our father’s, the smell of that burning pearwood
Burns the years between – cancels Rome, Paris,
The learning that has bent my back – the laying on of hands,
the pastoral crook and mitre.
Am come home for ever, but – alas –
Only by proxy. Dirwan stays for the building of a chapel,
A centre for holy mass.
No more long trudging to Caws.
‘I Choose No Tail or Toy!’
WINEFRED:
I choose no tail or toy!
Truth – a light that outdoes this sun.
You will not understand –
You do not believe.
CARADOC:
I believe what I see, touch, grope, wrestle with,
What I possess, what I propose to possess
By a man’s right –
You are my right.
‘Say Nothing, Priest, Father, Mother’
CARADOC:
Say nothing, Priest, father, mother.
I have said all, done all.
This is Caradoc –
A chieftain of this valley.
THE PET BEAST
Pasiphae would pacify a lust
Grown beyond questioning.
In Daedalus she knew at length she must
Deposit trust:
This was a thing she durst not tell the king.
A wooden cow, she ordered, queenly. Why
Not, the pared artisan
Said inly, only bowing else. It is my
Part to comply.
He gathered tools and plywood and began.
Why not a maze made from a ball of string,
Why not a clockwork bird,
Or birds wrought of stale breadcrumbs that can sing?
Beyond questioning
A royal statue, statute, though absurd.
Minos the cold judged cases in his dreams.
Awake, lithe at his task,
The other whistled, sawing pliant beams.
Law is what seems,
The craftsman’s place to act and not to ask.
The queen was to be bedded and then shut in
(This was the queen’s idea)
A box she might confess unholy rut in.
The artist cut in
A door there with a small foramen here.
The king snored, a treeload of raven-calls
Cried fear. The painted cow
Was carried to the plain outside the walls.
Mobled in shawls,
The queen trod after, shivering somewhat now.
She crouched darkling waiting enwombed in wood,
Awake, asleep, adoze.
Moon rise on empty grass. She started, could
Through the eyed hood
See pleniluned the distant dust that rose.
She racked then on a sea whose spume was dust,
Its waves were snorts and roars. The white beast’s lust
Rent in one thrust
A womb grown sudden hands to grasp the seed.
Moonset. And from the ruin hoofed apart
She wanly signalled Come
To slaves whom not that act but prescient art
Hot as her heart
Had rendered cruelly and coldly dumb.
They bore her sleeping whither she must sleep
Next to the snoring king.
Daedalus had seen all, Daedalus must keep
Silence asleep
As dumbness. Daedalus had not seen a thing.
She was a queen of cautions. Covertly
Had seized his only son
Who, walled beyond the feasibility
Of recovery,
Would be a hostage till her time was done.
Or till no time. As human deeds were shut,
Dried flowers, in books of law,
So human will and love and pain were but
Raw stuff to cut
To the gods’ templates. That’s what men are for.
She had done the gods’ will anyway. And now
The royal days went on,
The king his cases, queen her casing how
She, calving cow,
Would fare if he observed she was far gone.
Myopic Minos, though, in books his eyes,
But dry each nether eye
After two daughters and no son. But wise
To recognise
Signs, changes, moods. And always spies to spy.
After three moon-rolls she announced she would
Spend winter in the south.
He nodded, nodded, said he understood.
The cold here. Good.
The thing within shot acid to her mouth.
SIGNS (DOGS OF PEACE)
Earth remains. The ancient houses of men
Stand or crumble, and then stand again,
But always with blind windows, slow to start
To bid goodbye to the young men who depart
Into the world, the world where now I lie
Smelling flower-smells and hearing from the sky
The vapid news of birds, repeating We
Can see the sea, can you too see the sea?
Nonsense. Still sea remains, the jagged teeth
Of hills beyond, the leagues and leagues beneath
Of frond and fishlife and, above, of men,
Who stand or crumble, and then stand again,
Building a little life of talk and wine
And wine and talk, wives, children. Come, a sign,
Give us a sign. And what shall it signify?
Nothing. Men must just signal or else die,
Erecting signs, ejecting signs, in stores
Purchasing signs and selling signs. Their pores
Sweat signs. But signs of what? Ah come, resign
Ourselves to this: a sign’s a sign’s a sign.
Or, if you will, signs lead to other signs –
Signposts mean signs lead to cities. See, the sun declines
From his high noon on this – a southern town,
The somnolence of afterlunch falls down
Gentle, like dust, on young, old, and young-old.
Cars move in stupor. Stories that are told,
Ideas put forward, all allophones
Of yawns. Unwilling as trundled stones.
The great dead and the little living move
Down time, down streets and prove – what do they prove?
That signs are signs and signs are signs again.
And dogs are as significant as men
.
Men move, and women move, beneath the groin
Of passages where quick and dead conjoin
Looking for signs to sign some cosmic letter.
Accept the universe – by God, you’d better.
Accept this town, cede victoriam
To horns that honk and honking cry I am.
To clanking girders, trufflings in the earth
To bring some new enormous sign to birth.
Signs ride the streets, unnoticed in the shouts
Of streetlife, see the daffodils put out
Their signs, the fruit upon the barrows too.
Be drunk with signs – what else is there to do?
Yet, if you would ask, ask what colours mean.
We mean ourselves no more, say red and green.
But try this – take us all, the flame, the sky,
The hue of flesh, the flash of the cat’s eye.
Mix all these colours even and, how odd,
The end’s a blank – or the white light of God.
Any word, any image, will do
To begin with. In the beginning was God.
Why not Dog? In other language God ought to be
Dnuh, enac, but it doesn’t
Work in the other languages. But in English, yes.
You can begin with God seen from the rear –
That strange view vouchsafed to some prophet or other –
Dog. Polytheism, polycynism – dogs. Looking up
Down, unable to separate the Godmade from the manmade
Artifact – all things equal – rooms, carpets, air,
Water, gravel, piano, curtain, dogs.
What makes men different from dogs? The hindleg habit,
So that forepaws may hold drinks, the hebetude of the
Sense of smell. A longer ritual before the act of
Coupling. Dogs mark out territory through
Golden libations. Men make cities.
‘AUGUSTINE AND PELAGIUS’
He came out of the misty island, Morgan,
Man of the sea, demure in monk’s sackcloth,
Taking the long way to Rome, expecting –
Expecting what? Oh, holiness, quintessentialized,
Holiness whole, the wholesome wholemeal of,
Holiness as meat and drink and air, in the
Chaste thrusts of marital love holiness, and
Sanctitas sanctitas even snaking up from
Cloacae and sewers, sanctitas the effluvium
From his Holiness’s arsehole. On the village road
Trudging, dust, birdsong, dirty villages,
Stops on the way at monasteries (weeviled bread,
Eisel wine), always this thought: Sanctitas.
What does thou seek in Rome, brother? The home
Of holiness, to lodge awhile in the
Sanctuary of sanctity, my brothers, for here
Peter died, seeing before he died
The pagan world inverted to sanctitas, and
The very flagged soil is rich with the bonemeal
Of the martyrs. And the brothers would
Look at each other, each thinking, some saying:
Here cometh one that only islands breed.
What can flourish in that Ultima Thule save
Holiness, a bare garment for the wind to
Sing through? And not Favonius either but
Sour Boreas from the pole. Not the grape,
Not garlic not the olive, not the strong sun
Tickling the manhood in a man, be he
Monk or friar or dean or
Burly bishop, big ballocks swinging like twin censers.
Only holiness. God help him, God bless him for
We look upon British innocence.
And the British innocence.
And the British innocent, hurtful of no man,
Fond of dogs, a cat-stroker,
Trudged on south – vine, olive, garlic,
Brown tits jogging while brown feet
Danced in the grapepress and the
Monstrous aphrodisiac danced in the heavens
Till at length he came to the outer suburbs and
Fell on his knees O sancta urbs sancta sancta
Meaning sancta suburbs and…
But wherever he went in Rome, it was always the same –
Sin sin sin, no sanctity, the whole unholy
Grammar of sin, syntax, accidence, sin’s
Entire lexicon set before him, sin.
Peacocks in the streets, gold dribbled over
In dark rooms, vomiting after
Banquets of ostrich bowels stuffed with saffron,
Minced pikeflesh and pounded larkbrain,
Served with a sauce headily fetid, and pocula
Of wine mixed with adder’s blood to promote
Lust lust and again.
Pederasty, podorasty, sodomy, bestiality,
Degrees of family ripped apart like
Bodices in the unholy dance. And he said,
And Morgan said, whom the scholarly called Pelagius:
Why do ye this, my brothers and sisters?
Are ye not saved by Christ, are ye not
Sanctified by his sacrifice, oh why why why?
(Being British and innocent) and
They said to him cheerfully, looking up
From picking a peahen bone or kissing the
Nipple or nates of son, daughter, sister,
Brother, aunt, ewe, teg: Why, stranger,
Hast not heard the good news? That Christ
Took away the burden of our sins on his
Back broad to bear, and as we are saved
Through him it matters little what we do?
Since we are saved once for all, our being
Saved will not be impaired or cancelled by
Our present pleasures (which we propose to
Renew tomorrow after a suitable and well-needed
Rest). Alleluia alleluia to the Lord for he has
Led us to two paradises, one to come and the other
Here and now. Alleluia. And they fell to again,
To nipple to nates or fish baked with datemince,
Alleluia. And Morgan cried to the sky:
How long O Lord wilt thou permit these
Transgressions against thy holiness?
Strike them strike them as thou once didst
The salty cities of the plain, as though
Phinehas the son of Eleazar the son of Aaron
Thou didst strike down the traitor Zimri
And his foul whore of the Moabite temples Cozbi
Strike strike. But the Lord did nothing.
He strode in out of Africa, wearing a
Tattered royal robe of orchard moonlight
Smelling of stolen apples but otherwise
Ready to scorch, a punishing sun, saying:
Where is this man of the northern sea, let me
Chide him, let me do more if
His heresy merits it, what is his heresy?
And a hand-rubbing priest, olive-skinned,
Garlic-breathed, looked up at the
Great African solar face to whine:
If it please you, the heresy is evidently a
Heresy but there is as yet no name for it.
And Augustine said: All things must have a name
Otherwise, Proteus-like, they slither and slide
From the grasp. A thing does not
Exist until it has a name. Name it
After this sea-man, call it after
Pelagius. And lo the heresy existed.
Pelagius appeared, north-pale, cool as one of
Britain’s summers, to say, in British Latin:
Christ redeemed us from the general sin, from
The Adamic inheritance, the sour apple
Stuck in the throat (and underneath his solar
Hide Augustine blushed). And thus, my load,
Man was set free, no longer bounden
In sin�
��s bond. He is free to choose
To sin or not to sin, he is in no wise
Predisposed, it is all a matter of
Human choice. And by his own effort, yea,
His own effort only, not some matter of God’s
Grace arbitrarily and capriciously
Bestowed, he may reach heaven, he may indeed
Make his heaven. He is free to do so.
Do you deny his freedom? Do you deny
That God’s incredible benison was to
Make man free, if he wished, to offend him?
That no greater love is conceivable
Than to let the creature free to hate
The creator and come to love the hard way
But always (mark this mark this) by his own
Will by his own free will?
Cool Britain thus spoke, a land where indeed a
Man groans not for the grace of rain, where
He can sow and reap, a green land, where
The God of unpredictable Africa is
A strange God.
Augustine said: If the Almighty is also Allknowing,
He knows the precise number of hairs that will fall to the floor
From your next barbering, which may also be your last.
He knows the number of drops of lentil soup
That will fall on your robe from your careless spooning
On August 5th, 425. He knows every sin
As yet uncommitted, can measure its purulence
On a precise scale of micropeccatins, a micropeccatin
Being, one might fancifully suppose,
The smallest unit of sinfulness. He knows
And knew when the very concept of man itched within him
The precise date of your dispatch, the precise
Allotment of paradisal or infernal space
Awaiting you. Would you diminish the Allknowing
By making man free? This is heresy.
But that God is merciful as well as allknowing
Has been long revealed: he is not himself bound
To fulfil knowledge. He scatters grace
Liberally and arbitrarily, so all men may hope,
Even you, man of the northern seas, may hope.
But Pelagius replied: Mercy is the word, mercy.
And a greater word is love. Out of his love
He makes man free to accept or reject him.
He could foreknow but refuses to foreknow
Any, even the most trivial, human act until
The act has been enacted, and then he knows.
So men are free, are touched by God’s own freedom.
Christ with his blood washed out original sin,
So we are in no wise predisposed to sin
More than to do good: we are free, free,
Free to build our salvation. Halleluiah.