so many years ago,
did I read your lesson right? did I see through
your phases to the real? your heaven, your hell
did I enquire properly into?
For years then I forgot you, I put you down,
ingratitude is the necessary curse
of making things new:
I brought my family to see me through,
I brought my homage & my soft remorse,
I brought a book or two
only, including in the end your last
strange poems made under the shadow of death
Your high figures float
again across my mind and all your past
fills my walled garden with your honey breath
wherein I move, a mote.
313
The Irish sunshine is lovely but a Belfast man
last night made a pass at my wife: Henry, who had passed out,
was horrified
to hear this news when he woke. The Irish sunshine
is lovely as it comes & goes. The country is full of con-men
as well as the lovely good.
Saints throng these shores, & ancient practices
continue in the dolmens, ruined castles
are standard.
The whole place is ghostly: no wonder Yeats believed in fairies
& personal survival. A trim suburban villa
also is haunted, by me.
Heaven made this place, also, assisted by men,
great men & weird. I see their shades move past
in full daylight.
The holy saints make the trees’ tops shiver,
in the all-enclosing wind. And will love last
further than tonight?
314
Penniless, ill, abroad, Henry lay skew
to Henry’s American fate, which was to be well,
have money in the bank
& be at home. He can’t think what to do
under this cluster of misfortune & hell,
he gave a last wave & sank
back on his rented pillow, sore at heart,
amazed. It’s time for cables to come to the rescue
but cables do not come.
He could have done with just a certain sum
of what was due him: plus the pain, there’s smart
& puzzlement too.
Pity his vigil, far away, done for
almost, & choiceless. The fickle Irish sky
shines down for a change,
stopping short of his pillow. His thought tore.
Were there any other gods he could defy,
he wondered, or re-arrange?
315
Behind me twice her necessary knight
she comes like one of Spenser’s ladies on
on a white palfrey
and it is cold & full dark in the valley,
though I haven’t seen a dragon for days, & faint moonlight
gives my horse footing till dawn.
My lady is all in green, for innocence
I am in black, a terror to my foes
who are numerous & strong.
I haven’t lost a battle yet but I am tense
for the first losing. I wipe blood from my nose
and raise up my voice in song.
Hard lies the road behind, hard that ahead
but we are armed & armoured & we trust
entirely one another.
We have beaten down the foulest of them, lust,
and we pace on in peace, like sister & brother,
doing that to which we were bred.
316
Blow upon blow, his fire-breath hurt me sore,
I upped my broad sword & it hurt him more,
without his talons at a loss
& dragons are stupid: I wheeled around to the back of him
my charger swift and then I trimmed him
tail-less.
Offering dragons quarter is no good,
they re-grow all their parts & come on again,
they have to be killed.
I set my lance & took him as I would,
in the fiery head, he crumpled like a man,
and one prophecy was fulfilled:
that thrice for Lady Valerie I would suffer
but not be wax from like a base-born duffer,
no no, Sir Henry would win.
until a day that was not prophesied,
having restored her lands. My love & pride
fixed me like a safety-pin.
317
My mother threw a tantrum on a high terrace
hurling down water-bombs on my brother & me,
none of which landed?
after a panic scene in a restaurant
& in the street: I had picked out for her a peach sweet
instead of one with a Catholic name.
Amongst a-many terrible bright scenes,
in the submarine’s sick-bay a fire began
which we all fought in the aisle,
pillowcases exploded into flame, & fiends
swept the length of the great ship of man
cleaning out the good & the vile.
Henry with joy lay down for his next bout of rest,
in happy expectation of the next
assault on his divided soul.
Does the validity of the dream-life suppose a Maker?
If so what a careless monster he must be, whole,
taking the claws with the purr.
318
Happy & idle, songless Henry swung
next spring, seeing his methodical toils fordone:
congratulate him.
Ha ha, money, money, money, rung
by rung, swaying in the seastorm, without sun,
eyeless in the spray & grim
he counts the anxious months to his arriving:
toils without surcease: wicked nights: ill dreams
wherein Valerie not to his side
(considering all the conditions) streams
and all his friends deserted from his striving
save two, skilled & wide
& wise: for them alone he sacked his brain
& for Miss Carver, who was ruth itself
& who will visit here
come spring: my wife will make her right as rain
and Henry’s work, on the Atlantic Shelf
will begin to disappear.
319
Having escaped, except in his dreams, many dooms
and it does not seem likely now that his old phantasy,
of having his left leg sawed off
at the knee, without anesthetic, will come off—
he can see & hear, convalescent Henry:
his house has many rooms
whereof from one he’ll cable his doctor if
they are about, after a final game of pingpong,
to take off his left leg
& flame the stump—that goes with the story—
& bandage it, & shriek a cripple Song,
& buy himself a peg:
peg-leg, peg-leg, his golden voice did aria
the better for his change, he could play pingpong
sitting down
& there was one leg no more could happen to—
I thrust a knife into it, it doesn’t hurt,
as they took it away downtown.
320
Steps almost unfamiliar toward his door
deep in night came. ‘I am a fierce old man’
Henry called out.
Was it his mother? Might it be a whore
out of his youth? Some foe—cold his blood ran—
forgotten in the crowd
female he’d known through hairy years come back
from Themiscyra come to Pussy-cat land
in helmets & miniskirts—
see them all down the Mall! But this attack
was singular: he waited: a soft hiss
bad to his ears, & hurts,
borne through the open transom to his wincing bed:
it was not her, nor her, nor her: was then it She
cold in steel & sworded
& unforgiving: Pentheselia dread!
His nerves hear the lock turn. ‘I am—’ cried Henry,
waking sweated & sordid.
321
O land of Connolly & Pearse, what have
ever you done to deserve these tragic masters?
You come & go,
free: nothing happens. Nelson’s Pillar blows
but the busses still go there: nothing is changed,
for all these disasters O
We fought our freedom out a long while ago
I can’t see that it matters, we can’t help you
land of ruined abbeys,
discredited Saints & brainless senators,
roofless castles, enemies of Joyce & Swift,
enemies of Synge,
enemies of Yeats & O’Casey, hold your foul ground
your filthy cousins will come around to you,
barely able to read,
friends of Patrick Kavanagh’s & Austin Clarke’s
those masters who can both read & write,
in the high Irish style.
322
I gave my love a cookie, as I said,
which she ate. ‘Apu-Apu’ was my dream.
My love was all in green,
as I said. ‘Unam Sanctam’ was my other dream,
in a chapel where none of my family could take degrees,
only start them, & mother was dead
I knelt at a shallow altar high on the right
where she had prayed. The carpet was blue-green.
The scholarly frame was French,
Goguel & Guignebert & the Ecole des Hautes Etudes:
I took my mother’s hand, which would never hold a degree,
and shook it, behind her back.
I gave my love a cookie, it was her fate
to be involved with Henry Pussycat,
I feel only pity for her.
I’ll spare her all I can, in Ireland & elsewhere,
It must have been that cookie which she ate,
never take cookies from cats.
323
Churchill was ever-active & crammed with glee,
Henry was morbid, inactive, & a child to Angst,
there the difference ends.
They both drank, heavily.
But that is not the reason why this witty
& sportive dinosaur is a hero to Henry & amongst
Henry’s friends, given a different turn of luck,
would valiantly have figured. Both wrote things down,
both thought on their feet,
and both spent the bulk of their long lives out of favour:
no bed of roses cushioned any frown
disabling their achievement:
Malice was their appointed air, & with defeat
they were fully familiar: in the end the grand triumph
came down like lightning on one
matchless, & now that’s over let’s see what will happen to the second
still in full tide, with a style stern wicked & sweet
and O much, so much to be done.
324
An Elegy for W.C.W., the lovely man
Henry in Ireland to Bill underground:
Rest well, who worked so hard, who made a good sound
constantly, for so many years:
your high-jinks delighted the continents & our ears:
you had so many girls your life was a triumph
and you loved your one wife.
At dawn you rose & wrote—the books poured forth—
you delivered infinite babies, in one great birth—
and your generosity
to juniors made you deeply loved, deeply:
if envy was a Henry trademark, he would envy you,
especially the being through.
Too many journeys lie for him ahead,
too many galleys & page-proofs to be read,
he would like to lie down
in your sweet silence, to whom was not denied
the mysterious late excellence which is the crown
of our trials & our last bride.
325
Control it now, it can’t do any good,
your grief for your great friend, killed on the day
he & his wife & three
were moving to a larger house across the street.
Our dead frisk us, & later they get better at it,
our wits are stung astray
till all that we can do is groan, bereft:
tears fail: and then we reckon what is left,
not what was lost.
I notice at this point a divided soul,
headed both fore & aft and guess which soul
will swamp & lose:
that hoping forward, brisk & vivid one
of which will nothing ever be heard again.
Advance into the past!
Henry made lists of his surviving friends
& of the vanished on their uncanny errands
and took a deep breath.
326
My right foot being colder than my left knee,
I put it on it: my right arm is under the pillow
which is vertical,
transverse never: my right cheek’s happy on it, stale
sweat developing over hours makes me changey,
I shift straight over on my back, see,
& my thoughts are different & more straightforward
than on my side, much less my seldom stomach:
half-dreams cease:
O yes, if Henry wants a little peace
in the vigils long he rights onto his back,
he can’t sleep but the horde
can’t get him either, on his back. Years fly
& yet this programme is sound:
fast on your side lie, pal, with one knee fast
under your chin, the horrid waking night, why,
it beats underground
(or I reserve my opinion).
327
Freud was some wrong about dreams, or almost all;
besides his insights grand, he thought that dreams were a transcript
of childhood & the day before,
censored of course: a transcript:
even his lesser insight were misunderstood & became a bore
except for the knowing & troubled by the Fall.
Grand Jewish ruler, custodian of the past,
our paedegogue to whip us into truth,
I sees your long story,
tyrannical & triumphant all-wise at last
you wholly failed to take into account youth
& had no interest in your glory.
I tell you, Sir, you have enlightened but
you have misled us: a dream is a panorama
of the whole mental life,
I took one once to forty-three structures, that
accounted in each for each word: I did not yell ‘mama’
nor did I take it out on my wife.
328
—I write with my stomach: Henry ruefully;
and my stomach is improved, I write with my purse
and long sums have come
from foreign places. I write here by the sea
& the gulls go over my gardens. I write terse
& the wastebaskets fill like home.
I write what I design, groaned mortal Henry.
Happiness was ours too but did not stay,
neither misery may.
The moneys & the tummy grew to a gale
wafting him onward where he would not ail
but invent endlessly.
‘I helped to wind the clock’ cried The O’Rahilly,
‘I come to hear it strike’—so in at the death
Henry required to be.
He b
rought his ancient brain, his faultless breath,
his liver & his lights, his grand energy,
& flourisht like a sycamore tree.
329
Henry on LSD was Henry indeed
pounds shillings pence, made a mountaining landscape
His foes were Parker green
All his relatives danced in shameless air
Coke came from his nose The Vatican was a grape
the baby’s animals tear
Blue flew the parents through the humid dusk,
they can’t arrange for the yellow collection of shells
whimper near the city centre
He told a dirty story, angry & brusque,
He ate black-eyed peas since there was nothing else
He looked everywhere for his mentor
His mentor found was black & ripe, a floater,
we’ll thread the eyes, argued the oldest one,
& bury it at sea
To get rid of the shroud put on Full the motor,
just a little hump, sink it in the rising sun,
abominable & impenetrable Henry.
330
The Twiss is a tidy bundle, chirped joyous Henry,
all other dreams forgotten. Acres of joy
spring when she strode the bike
behind her mother, all so near the sea
where never she has been. A little boy
is what is Daddy’s mike,
that which he seeks & fears ha ha. He’s supposed to fear,
since everyone else does, but actually he can’t make it.
He broadcasts freely.
Cantons of candy for the Little Twiss here.
She won a prize on board, one at the church,
at the supermarket
& in the hotel she was extravagantly admired,
I wonder it doesn’t turn her silly head,
the little baby.
Universal clouds, an Irish sky,
said what would be her fate, tears & a child
and a father old & wild.
331
This is the third. What have I more to say
except that I hope that in my dying hour
nobody will be ashamed of me:
May I not be scared then of that final void
into which I lapse, leaving all my power
& memory behind me.
There’s a lot of hair in Ireland, much of it red.