With a white eye, who takes all things away,
Comes and stares from the corner of my bed
If I could turn. My nails and my hair loosen,
The stiff flesh lurches and flows off like blood.
Grateful the surf of death drawing back under
(Offshore to fan out, vague and dark again)
My legs, my decayed feet, cock and heart.
If I were rid of them, somehow propped up . .
My vivid brain alone with a little vermilion!
The Pacifist’s Song
I am the same yes as you others, only—
(Also for mé the plain where I was born,
Bore Her look, bear love, makes its mindless pull
And matters in my throat, also for me
The many-murdered sway my dreams unshorn,
Bearded with woe, their eyes blasted and dull)
Only I wake out of the vision of death
And hear One whisper whether man or god
‘Kill not … Your ill from evil comes … Bear all’;—
Only I must forsake my country’s wrath
Who am earth’s citizen, must human blood
Anywhere shed mourn, turning from it pale
Back to the old and serious labour, to
My restless labour under the vigilant stars,
From whom no broad storm ever long me hides.
What I try, doomed, is hard enough to do.
We breed up in our own breast our worse wars
Who long since sealed ourselves Hers Who abides.
Surviving Love
The clapper hovers, but why run so hard?
What he wants, has,—more than will make him ease;
No god calls down,—he’s not been on his knees
This man, for years, and he is off his guard.
What then does he dream of
Sweating through day?—Surviving love.
Cold he knows he comes, once to the dark,
All that waste of cold, leaving all cold
Behind him hearts, forgotten when he’s tolled,
His books are split and sold, the pencil mark
He made erased, his wife
Gone brave & quick to her new life.
And so he spins to find out something warm
To think on when the glaze fastens his eyes
And he begins to freeze. He slows and tries
To hear a promise: ‘After, after your storm
I will grieve and remember,
Miss you and be warm and remember.’
But really nothing replies to the poor man,
He never hears this, or the voice he hears
(He thinks) he loses ah when next appears
The hood of the bell, seeing which he began.
His skull rings with his end,
He runs on, love for love.
The Lightning
Sick with the lightning lay my sister-in-law,
Concealing it from her children, when I came.
What I could, did, helpless with what I saw.
Analysands all, and the rest ought to be,
The friends my innocence cherished, and you and I,
Darling,—the friends I qualm and cherish and see.
. . The fattest nation!—wé do not thrive fat
But facile in the scale with all we rise
And shift a breakfast, and there is shame in that.
And labour sweats with vice at the top, and two
Bullies are bristling. What he thought who thinks?
It is difficult to say what one will do.
Obstinate, gleams from the black world the gay and fair,
My love loves chocolate, she loves also me,
And the lightning dances, but I cannot despair.
V
Rock-Study with Wanderer
‘Cold cold cold of a special night’
Summer and winter sings under the beast
The ravished doll Hear in the middle waste
The blue doll of the west cracking with fright
The music & the lights did not go out
Alas Our foreign officers are gay
Singers in the faery cities shiver & play
Their exile dances through unrationed thought
Waiting for the beginning of the end
The wedding of the arms Whose charnel arms
Will plough the emerald mathematical farms
In spring, spring-flowers to the U. N. send?
* * *
Waiting I stroll within a summer wood
Avoiding broken glass in the slant sun
Our promises we may at last make good
The stained glass shies when the cathedral’s won
Certainly in a few years call it peace
The arms & wings of peace patrol us all
The planes & arms that planes & arms may cease
Pathos (theanthropos) fills evenfall
When shall the body of the State come near
The body’s state stable & labile? When
Irriding & resisting rage & fear
Shall men in unison yet resemble men?
Detroit our heart When terribly we move
The sea is ours We walk upon the sea
The air is ours Hegemony, my love,
The good life’s founded upon LST
The twilight birds wake A paralysis
Is busy with societies and souls
Whose gnarled & pain-wild bodies beg abyss
Paraplegia dolorosa The world rolls
A tired and old man resting on the grass
His forehead loose as if he had put away
Among the sun & the green & the young who pass
The whole long fever of his passionate day
. . To the dark watcher then an hour comes
Neither past nor future, when the chuffing sea
Far off like the rough of beast nearby succumbs
And a kind of sleep spreads over rock & tree
Nightshade not far from the abandoned tomb
Hangs its still bells & fatal berries down
The flowers dream Crags shadows loom
The caresses of the animals are done
Under faint moon they lie absorbed and fair
Stricken their limbs flow in false attitudes
Of love Dovetailed into a broken mirror
Stained famous glass are, where the watcher broods
All wars are civil So the thing will die
Your civilization a glitter of great glass
The lusts have shivered you are shaken by
And step aside from in the moonlit grass
Stare on, cold riot of the western mind
Rockwalking man, what can a wanderer know?
Rattle departing of his friend and kind
And then (the widow sang) sphincter let go
* * *
Draw draw the curtain on a little life
A filth a fairing Wood is darkening
Where birdcall hovered now I hear no thing
I hours since came from my love my wife
Although a strange voice sometimes patiently
Near in the air when I lie vague and weak
As if it had a body tries to speak . .
I must go back, she will be missing me
Whether There Is Sorrow in the Demons
Near the top a bad turn some dare. Well,
The horse swerves and screams, his eyes pop,
Feet feel air, the firm winds prop
Jaws wide wider until
Through great teeth rider greets the smiles of Hell.
Thick night, where the host’s thews crack like thongs
A welcome, curving abrupt on cheek & neck.
No wing swings over once to check
Lick of their fire’s tongues,
Whip & chuckle, hoarse insulting songs.
Powers immortal, fixed, intractable.
Only the lost soul jerks whom they joy hang:
Clap of remo
rse, and tang and fang
More frightful than the drill
An outsize dentist scatters down a skull;
Nostalgia rips him swinging. Fast in malice
How may his masters mourn, how ever yearn
The frore pride wherein they burn?
God’s fire. To what qui tollis
Stone-tufted ears prick back towards the bright Palace?
Whence Lucifer shone Lucifer’s friends hail
The scourge of choice made at the point of light
Destined into eternal night;
Motionless to fulfil
Their least, their envy looks up dense and pale.
. . Repine blackmarket felons; murderers
Sit still their time, till yellow feet go first,
Dies soon in them, and can die, thirst;
Not lives in these, nor years
On years scar their despair—which yet rehearse . .
Their belvedere is black. They believe, and quail.
One shudder racks them only, lonely, and
No mirror breaks at their command.
Unsocketed, their will
Grinds on their fate. So was, so shall be still.
The Long Home
bulks where the barley blew, time out of mind
Of the sleepless Master. The barbered lawn
Far to a grey wall lounges, the birds are still,
Rising wind rucks from the sill
The slack brocade beside the old throne he dreams on.
The portraits’ hands are blind.
Below these frames they strain on stones. He mumbles . .
Fathers who listen, what loves hear
Surfacing from the lightless past? He foams.
Stillness locks a hundred rooms.
Louts in a bar aloud, The People, sucking beer.
A barefoot kiss. Who trembles?
Peach-bloom, sorb-apple sucked in what fine year!
I am a wine, he wonders; when?
Am I what I can do? My large white hands.
Boater & ascot, in grandstands
Coups. Concentrations of frightful cold, and then
Warm limbs below a pier.
The Master is sipping his identity.
Ardours & stars! Trash humped on trash.
The incorporated yacht, the campaign cheque
Signed one fall on the foredeck
Hard on a quarrel, to amaze the fool. Who brash
Hectored out some false plea?
Brownpaper-blind, his morning passions trailed
Home in the clumsy dusk,—how now
Care which from which, trapped on a racing star
Where we know not who we are! . .
The whipcord frenzy curls, he slouches where his brow
Works like the rivals’ failed.
Of six young men he flew to breakfast as,
Only the magpie, rapist, stayed
For dinner, and the rapist died, so that
Not the magpie but the cat
Vigil upon the magpie stalks, sulky parade,
Great tail switching like jazz.
Frightened, dying to fly, pied and obscene,
He blinks his own fantastic watch
For the indolent Spring of what he was before;
A stipple of sunlight, clouded o’er,
Remorse a scribble on the magic tablet which
A schoolboy thumb jerks clean.
Heat lightning straddles the horizon dusk
Above the yews: the fresh wind blows:
He flicks a station on by the throne-side . .
Out in the wide world, Kitty—wide
Night—far across the sea . . Some guardian accent grows
Below the soft voice, brusque:
‘You are: not what you wished but what you were,
The decades’ vise your gavel brands,
You glare the god who gobbled his own fruit,
He who stood mute, lucid and mute,
Under peine forte et dure to will his bloody lands,
Then whirled down without heir.’
The end of which he will not know. Undried,
A prune-skin helpless on his roof.
His skin gleams in the lamplight dull as gold
And old gold clusters like mould
Stifling about his blood, time’s helm to build him proof.
Thump the oak, and preside!
An ingrown terrible smile unflowers, a sigh
Blurs, the axle turns, unmanned.
Habited now forever with his weight
Well-housed, he rolls in the twilight
Unrecognizable against the world’s rim, and
A bird whistles nearby.
Whisked off, a voice, fainter, faint, a guise,
A gleam, pin of a, a. Nothing.
—One look round last, like rats, before we leave.
A famous house. Now the men arrive:
Horror, they swing their cold bright mallets, they’re breaking
Him up before my eyes!
Wicked vistas! The wolves mourn for our crime
Out past the grey wall. On to our home,
Whereby the barley may seed and resume.
Mutter of thrust stones palls this room,
The crash of mallets. He is going where I come.
Barefoot soul fringed with rime.
A Winter-Piece to a Friend Away
Your letter came.—Glutted the earth & cold
With rains long heavy, follows intense frost;
Snow howls and hides the world
We workt awhile to build; all the roads are lost;
Icy spiculae float, filling strange air;
No voice goes far; one is alone whirling since where,
And when was it one crossed?
You have been there.
I too the breaking blizzard’s eddies bore
One year, another year: tempted to drop
At my own feet forlorn
Under the warm fall, frantic more to chop
Wide with the gale until my thought ran numb
Clenching the blue skin tight against what white spikes come.
And the sick brain estop.
Mine, not stilled wholly, has been sorry for,
Weeps from, and would instruct . . Unless I lied
What word steadies that cord?
Glade grove & ghyll of antique childhood glide
Off; from our grown grief, weathers that appal,
The massive sorrow of the mental hospital,
Friends & our good friends hide.
They came to call.
Hardly theirs, moment when the tempest gains,
Loose heart convulses. Their hearts bend off dry,
Their fruit dangles and fades.
—Solicitudes of the orchard heart, comply
A little with my longing, a little sing
Our sorrow among steel & glass, our stiffening,
That hers may modify:
O trembling Spring.—
Immortal risks our sort run, to a house
Reported in a wood . . mould upon bread
And brain, breath giving out,
From farms we go by, barking, and shaken head,
The shrunk pears hang, Hölderlin’s weathercock
Rattles to tireless wind, the fireless landscape rock,
Artists insane and dead
Strike like a clock:
If the fruit is dead, fast. Wait. Chafe your left wrist.
All these too lie, whither a true form strays.
Sweet when the lost arrive.
Foul sleet ices the twigs, the vision frays,
Festoons all signs; still as I come to name
My joy to you my joy springs up again the same,—
The thaw alone delays,—
Your letter came!
New Year’s Eve
The grey girl who had not been singing stopped,
And a brave new no-sound blew through acrid air.
&n
bsp; I set my drink down, hard. Somebody slapped
Somebody’s second wife somewhere,
Wheeling away to long to be alone.
I see the dragon of years is almost done,
Its claws loosen, its eyes
Crust now with tears & lust and a scale of lies.
A whisky-listless and excessive saint
Was expounding his position, whom I hung
Boy-glad in glowing heaven: he grows faint:
Hearing what song the sirens sung,
Sidelong he web-slid and some rich prose spun.
The tissue golden of the gifts undone
Surpassed the gifts. Miss Weirs
Whispers to me her international fears.
Intelligentsia milling. In a semi-German
(Our loss of Latin fractured how far our fate,—
Disinterested once, linkage once like a sermon)
I struggle to articulate
Why it is our promise breaks in pieces early.
The Muses’ visitants come soon, go surly
With liquor & mirrors away
In this land wealthy & casual as a holiday.
Whom the Bitch winks at. Most of us are linsey-
woolsey workmen, grandiose, and slack.
On m’analyse, the key to secrets. Kinsey
Shortly will tell us sharply back
Habits we stuttered. How revive to join
(Great evils grieve beneath : eye Caesar’s coin)
And lure a while more home
The vivid wanderers, uneasy with our shame?
Priests of the infinite! ah, not for long.
The dove whispers, and diminishes
Up the blue leagues. And no doubt we heard wrong—
Wax of our lives collects & dulls; but was
What we heard hurried as we memorized,
Or brightened, or adjusted? Undisguised
We pray our tongues & fingers
Record the strange word that blows suddenly and lingers.
Imagine a patience in the works of love
Luck sometimes visits. Ages we have sighed,
And cleave more sternly to a music of
Even this sore word ‘genocide’.
Each to his own! Clockless & thankless dream
And labour Makers, being what we seem.
Soon soon enough we turn
Our tools in; brownshirt Time chiefly our works will burn.
I remember: white fine flour everywhere whirled
Ceaselessly, wheels rolled, a slow thunder boomed,
And there were snowy men in the mill-world
With sparkling eyes, light hair uncombed,
And one of them was humming an old song,
Sack upon sack grew portly, until strong