An ultimate segment of Irishmen are dead.
Climb over the tombs
to find the gay living at your feet, the intellectual girl
with good legs & fingers at her brow, listening to a whirl
of talk from her companions:
Yeats listened once, he found it did him good,
he died in full stride, a good way to go,
making them wonder what’s missing,
a strangeness in the final notes, never to be resolved,
Beethoven’s, Goya’s: you had better go to the Prado
downstairs, to see on what I am insisting.
332
Trunks & impedimenta. My manuscript won’t go
in my huge Spanish briefcase, some into a bag.
Packing is an India’s women’s,
I wonder every time how I manage it
& I have done it thirty-four times, by count.
It’s time to settle down-O
but not yet. I want to hear the interminable sea
and my spiritual exercises for other civilizations
are well under weigh.
Ships I love, & on ships strangers: Yvette Choinais,
the little man from Cambridge with the little beard
padding about alone barefoot with a little book.
Him Henry never met, but Mlle Choinais
he self-met & swung with on the penultimate day:
O there was a fearful loss,
we could have talked the whole week’s journey through
parmi some chaste chat about me & you
and of not being married at twenty-seven the semi-cross
333
And now I’ve sent, custodian of Songs,
many to some: which will surprise them,
though they’d all askt.
As for the rest, Henry sounds like eighty Viet Congs
in their little sweet ears: no stratagem
with which he has been tasked
will ever bring those babies into camp,
hurrah: will never bring. Henry’s listeners
make up a gallant few,
as I have said before: bring nearer the lamp,
we’ll find them out, with lightning, in the torrents
that are merely Henry’s due
and are good to the land: merciful rain
beats back & forth, completing the destruction of his roses.
He woke & rose again
to circumambulate the least of houses
where he found no damage, save to the flowers
which were only by rental ours.
334
Thrums up from nowhere a distinguisht wail,
the griefs of all his grievous friends, and his,
startling Ballsbridge,
our sedate suburb, the capital of What Is,
a late September fly goes by, learned & frail,
and Cemetery Ridge
glares down the years of losses to this end
that the note from my bank this morning was stampt with Sir Roger Casement,
no ‘Sir,’ just the portrait & years:
about whom Yeats was so wrong
This distinguisht & sensitive man lived in the grip
of a homosexual obsession, even the ‘tools’ of native policemen
excited him.
Yeats knew nothing about life: it was all symbols
& Wordsworthian egotism: Yeats on Cemetery Ridge
would not have been scared, like you & me,
he would have been, before the bullet that was his,
studying the movements of the birds,
said disappointed & amazed Henry.
335
In his complex investigations of death
he called for a locksmith, to burst the topic open
where so many friends have gone
It’s crowded there, or lonely, I can’t say which,
no messages return, they preserve silence
including the great author of The Leopard.
Whom Henry never met: he would have liked to do
& they could have talked about Shakespeare & Stendhal
for sunny weeks
After a great while Henry would murmur: I honour you
(with emphasis his life have seldom demanded, pal):
great men can spring on us in a second:
our heads must be held ready for a nod,
encountering a mystery: I nod to Rolfe
& all the other unpopulars
including that worst career, whose was it? God’s
I seem to remember, he makes me wish I had taken up golf
or the study of the stars.
336
Henry as a landlord made his eight friends laugh
but Henry laughed not: the little scraggly-bearded jerk
has not paid his rent for two months:
a commercial xxxx, with two children:
if they couldn’t afford the house, why move into it?
Grrrrrr.
This passion bothered his importunate thought
three thousand miles away & made him wild
with complicated rage:
at the jerk, at himself for a fool, at all mathematicians
except Weyl & Einstein who walked off with his umbrella
leaving his even shabbier own.
I say I’ll have the law on scraggly-beard
and he will pay both through his nose & ass,
I’ll blacklist him.
But what a bore it is, being a landlord:
so help me Christ, it’s worse than a hasty Mass
or a tuneless hymn.
337
The mind is incalculable. Greatly excited
to learn from his ex-fiancée, a widow,
that she had remarried
I patted the husband on the shoulder and
abruptly my happy thought became financial:
my god, said Henry to himself,
as they shook hands, that suit cost two hundred dollars!
That lucky fellow, with such a bride & such a down-soft tweed!
Vile envy did not enter his soul
but whisked around the corners all-right. Wow.
Henry missed his chance: he sat down to read
& write, missing the whole
girl or lady & the remarkable tweed.
Shall he put in play again the broad esteem
in which his work was held
agonized? his lonely & his desperate work?
O yes: he would not trade: moments of supreme joy jerk
him on, his other loves quelled & dispelled.
338
According to the Annals of the Four Masters
the West Doorway of the Nuns’ Church, Clonmacnoise,
was completed in 1167.
Henry was at that strange point still in Heaven
and so were all his readers. Adrienne & William
slept in possibility,
their wits unwakened, and so did Delmore & Randall
& every reader else upon the earth
or under it.
In a happy proto-silence they or we all waited.
In fact it may be said our breath was bated
waiting for the adventure of sin.
Which took us some one way & some another
like a British traveller in the airport at Bangkok
sweatless among the Orient
reading precisely a dark-blue World’s Classics—
I’ll bet he loved his father & his mother
which was almost more than Henry could make.
339
A maze of drink said: I will help you through the world.
It is not worse than Hobbes said, nor as bad.
Though he was a thoughtful man.
Aubrey has done him for us forever. The flag unfurled
by the American Embassy each morning lifts my heart,
Henry was a shameless patriot.
At the flagstaff head the fine fla
g cracked like a whip
slatting the halyards. Diplomatic brains
I suppose unfurl
each morning, so difficult are our relations with Ireland,
the other Massachusetts. Strong winds are tossing Irish trees
& putting my heart in a whirl.
The greenhouse door was left open. Seagulls were screeching.
Across his face came a delicious breeze.
The gale was through.
Cats-paws of wind still ruffled the black water.
One gold line along the rubbingstrake
signalled a beauty.
340
The secret is not praise. It’s just being accepted
at something like the figure where you put your worth
anywhere on the bloody earth,
especially abroad. We must keep our spirits up
anyhow. Of course, praise is nice too,
particularly when it comes to a stop.
When it comes to a stop, so one can think ‘Yes, that happened.’
It’s not so good while going on: an element of incredulity
enters & dominates.
The shadows of the grey ash on my page,
I can’t get out of this either to youth or age,
I’m stuck with middle.
Such hard work demands such international thanks
besides better relations with one’s various banks,
slightly better.
So many have forgotten me, I forget some
and there will never come a congregation
to see needing Henry home.
341
The Dialogue, aet. 51
Imperishable Henry glared at the map
of the monastic remains in Ireland & felt threatened.
(His wife gave it him: 7/6).
He felt declared, well, out of bounds, say; crap.
The soul’s unreal! will you have your death unsweetened
or must I trot out again these stones & sticks
to be companion in ‘your’ pilgrimage?
Perishable Henry groaned, familiar too well
with the routines of decay.
His body knew it had to suffer, and rage
contorted its anti-Buddhist features. Still,
the body is having its day.
The body is having its day, & so is Henry:
winning tributes, given prizes, made offers, & such.
Only the terrible soul
had no inkling of what was to come for he,
he stood by his instinct & it was not much—
I hear the Devil likes them whole.
342
Fan-mail from foreign countries, is that fame?
Imitations & parodies in your own,
translations?
Most of the relevant prizes, your private name
splashed on page one, with a photograph alone
or you with your lovely wife?
Interviews on television & radio
on various continents, can that be fame?
Henry could not find out.
Before he left the ship at Cobh he was photographed,
I don’t know how they knew he was coming
He said as little as possible.
They wanted to know whether his sources of inspiration
might now be Irish: I cried out ‘of course’
& waved him off with my fountain pen.
The tender left the liner & headed for shore.
Cobh (pronounced Khōve) approached, our luggage was ready,
and anonymously we went into Customs.
A lone letter from a young man: that is fame.
343
Another directory form to be corrected.
Henry did one years & years agone for Who’s Who,
wasn’t that enough?
Why does the rehearsal of the public events of his life
always strike him as a list of failures, pal?
Where is childhood,
from which he recovered, & where are the moments of love?
his three-day drunk at the fête of St Tropez?
his inn-garden in Kyoto?
his moments with Sonya? the pool-apron in Utah whereon he lay
the famous daughter? of the famous mother? O
there were more than enough whereof
to whet an entry, rather than this silliness
of jobs, awards, books. He took a hard look
at the programme of the years
and struck his hardened palms across his ears
& ‘Basta!’ cried: I should have been a noted crook
or cat in a loud slum yes.
344
Herbert Park, Dublin
Were you góod tó him? He was not to you:
I know: it was in his later years
when he could not be good to anybody:
pain & disorder, baseless fears,
malign influences
ruled his descending star,
which crowds today my thought from observation
of this most beautiful of parks since Bombay
on this éxquisite October Sunday,
the great bright green spaces under the fine sun,
children & ducks & dogs, two superb elms,
the scene Henry overwhelms.
We traverse a trellis, magisterial.
A little is rolling over & over on the turf, my own.
That dreadful small-hours hotel death mars all.
Did you leave him all alone,
to that end? or did he leave you, to seek
frailty & tremor, obsessed, mad & weak?
345
Anarchic Henry thought of laying hands
on Henry: haw! but the blood & the disgrace,
no, no, that’s out.
They cut off, in Attic law, that hand from the body
and burying it elsewhere. That I understands,
quickly is what leaves this avenue unused
and I have never discussed with anyone amused
this,
which has filled out many conversaziones
on several continents: relevant experts
say the wounds to the survivors is
the worst of the Act, the worst of the Act! Sit still,
maybe the goblins will go away, leaving you free,
your breath coming normally,
all quarrels made up, say it took twenty letters
some to his inferiors, two to his betters
so-called, pal.
346
Henry’s very rich American friends
drifted through Henry’s lean establishment
on the way to salmon-fishing 60 miles north,
on the Fane, & the Irish theatre
and all these friends were almost equally interesting,
the wives even more so than the vivid husbands.
A 13-pounder, two feet long, taking up his whole back,
gaffed we saw, and a very pretty fish.
We caught nothing.
It is in the nature of Henry to catch nothing,
but not of Ed’s: crept into his phantastic optimism
a definite note of lack.
But that good man, stranded with all his dough,
uncertain, having travelled many paths,
of his vocation, FREE,
seemed once or twice to be wanting guidance O
which nobody can give: he is too free,
he needs the limitations of Henry.
347
The day was dark. The day was hardly day.
Forgestic Henry, with no more to say,
gloomed at his big front window,
& saucy lawn with gentians hard to see
and brooded on his almost endless destiny
with a birthday to come O.
Hankered he less for youth than for more time
to adjust the conflicting evidence, the ‘I’m—
immortal-&-not’ rou
tine,
Pascal, Spinoza, & Augústine,
Kafka & all his tribe, living it out alone,
Mary Baker Eddy’s telephone
in her vault with a direct line to the Monitor:
it ain’t rung yet, pal, nor has Christ returned,
according to the World Almanac
which I read less for what it say than for
what’s missing: the editor of the Atlantic burned,
for instance, & Christ came back.
348
700 years? It’s too soon to decide,
an anti-instant of God’s anti-time: Dante & Rimbaud
with all their problems.
But each dug down for himself a definite hole
in a definite universe which he could bring to mind
structured, unlike the oblongs
Henry & his surviving friends now truly confront
when a whore can almost overthrow a government
on front pages all over the world
& be a big star afterward: not a woman:
a woman’s brow might in that spot be pearled,
her pimp killed himself
she pursued her career, whore Keeler: married & had a child.
Perhaps we ought to forgive her? Reformed perhaps?
Can anyone reach that stupidity of sin?
Complacent, laughing, as in America we have Lana Turner
whose daughter killed her mother’s gangster lover, to
an access of box-office.
349
The great Bosch in the Prado, castles in Spain,
zen gardens in Kyoto, a tarn in Utah,
pads all over Manhattan,
Henry observed, & the salmon-fishing on the Fane
nearly at the bitter border between the North & South,
& dinner at LaPérouse au gratin,
Henry entranced watched, & the Berkeley Hills
& years of Harvard Yard: Henry got around.
I can’t say it improved him
but unquestionably it gave him some to think about:
the temple complex at Bhuwaneshwar,
phantasies where nobody reproved him!
He rested on his laurels after a ski-lift
that showed him four or seven states: he hoped to die
on the down into the void,
his seat so small it had no toilet paper,
while the mountains smiled, at Henry in mid air