at his age, in these places.
Scrubbing out his fear,—
the knowledge that they will take off your hands,
both hands; as well as your both feet, & likewise
both eyes,
might be discouraging to a bloody hero
Also you stifle, like you can’t draw breath.
But this is death—
which in some vain strive many to avoid,
many. It’s on its way, where you drop at
who stood up, scrunch down small.
It wasn’t so much after all to lose, was, Boyd?
A body.—But, Mr Bones, you needed that.
Now I put on my tall hat.
82
Op. posth. no. 5
Maskt as honours, insult like behaving
missiles homes. I bow, & grunt ‘Thank you.
I’m glad you could come
so late.’ All loves are gratified. I’m having
to screw a little thing I have to screw.
Good nature is over.
Herewith ill-wishes. From a cozy grave
rainbow I scornful laughings. Do not do,
Father, me down.
Let’s shuck an obligation. O I have
done. Is the inner-coffin burning blue
or did Jehovah frown?
Jehovah. Period. Yahweh. Period. God.
It is marvellous that views so differay
(Father is a Jesuit)
can love so well each other. We was had.
O visit in my last tomb me. —Perché?
—Is a nice pit.
83
Op. posth. no. 6
I recall a boil, whereupon as I had to sit,
just where, and when I had to, for deadlines.
O I could learn to type standing,
but isn’t it slim to be slumped off from that,
problems undignified, fiery dig salt mines?—
Content on one’s back flat:
coming no deadline—is all ancient nonsense—
no typewriters—ha! ha!—no typewriters—
alas!
For I have much to open, I know immense
troubles & wonders to their secret curse.
Yet when erect on my ass,
pissed off, I sat two-square, I kept shut his mouth
and stilled my nimble fingers across keys.
That is I stood up.
Now since down I lay, void of love & ruth,
I’d howl my knowings, only there’s the earth
overhead. Plop!
84
Op. posth. no. 7
Plop, plop. The lobster toppled in the pot,
fulfilling, dislike man, his destiny,
glowing fire-red,
succulent, and on the whole becoming what
man wants. I crack my final claw singly,
wind up the grave, & to bed.
—Sound good, Mr Bones. I wish I had me some.
(I spose you got a lessen up your slave.)
—O no no no.
Sole I remember; where no lobster swine,—
pots hot or cold is none. With you I grieve
lightly, and I have no lesson.
Bodies are relishy, they say. Here’s mine,
was. What ever happened to Political Economy,
leaving me here?
Is a rare—in my opinion—responsibility.
The military establishments perpetuate themselves forever.
Have a bite, for a sign.
85
Op. posth. no. 8
Flak. An eventful thought came to me,
who squirm in my hole. How will the matter end?
Who’s king these nights?
What happened to … day? Are ships abroad?
I would like to but may not entertain a friend.
Save me from ghastly frights,
Triune! My wood or word seems to be rotting.
I daresay I’m collapsing. Worms are at hand.
No, all that froze,
I mean the blood. ‘O get up & go in’
somewhere once I heard. Nowadays I doze.
It’s cold here.
The cold is ultimating. The cold is cold.
I am—I should be held together by—
but I am breaking up
and Henry now has come to a full stop—
vanisht his vision, if there was, & fold
him over himself quietly.
86
Op. posth. no. 9
this august court will entertain the plea
Not Guilty by reason of death.
I can say no more except that for the record
I add that all the crimes since all the times he
died will be due to the breath
of unknown others, sweating in their guilt
while my client Henry’s brow of stainless steel
rests free, as well it may,
of all such turbulence, whereof not built
Henry lies clear as any onion-peel
in any sandwich, say.
He spiced us: there, my lord, the wicked fault
lodges: we judged him when we did not know
and we did judge him wrong,
lying incapable of crime save salt
preservative in cases here below
adduced. Not to prolong
87
Op. posth. no. 10
these hearings endlessly, friends, word is had
Henry may be returning to our life
adult & difficult.
There exist rumours that remote & sad
and quite beyond the knowledge of his wife
to the foothills of the cult
will come in silence this distinguished one
essaying once again the lower slopes
in triumph, keeping up our hopes,
and heading not for the highest we have done
but enigmatic faces, unsurveyed,
calm as a forest glade
for him. I only speak of what I hear
and I have said too much. He may be there
or he may groan in hospital
resuming, as the fates decree, our lot.
I would not interrupt him in whatever, in what
he’s bracing him to at all.
88
Op. posth. no. 11
In slack times visit I the violent dead
and pick their awful brains. Most seem to feel
nothing is secret more
to my disdain I find, when we who fled
cherish the knowings of both worlds, conceal
more, beat on the floor,
where Bhain is stagnant, dear of Henry’s friends,
yellow with cancer, paper-thin, & bent
even in the hospital bed
racked with high hope, on whom death lay hands
in weeks, or Yeats in the London spring half-spent,
only the grand gift in his head
going for him, a seated ruin of a man
courteous to a junior, like one of the boarders,
or Dylan, with more to say
now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.
You’d think off here one would be free from orders.
I didn’t hear a single word. I obeyed.
89
Op. posth. no. 12
In a blue series towards his sleepy eyes
they slid like wonder, women tall & small,
of every shape & size,
in many languages to lisp ‘We do’
to Henry almost waking. What is the night at all,
his closed eyes beckon you.
In the Marriage of the Dead, a new routine,
he gasped his crowded vows past lids shut tight
and a-many rings fumbled on.
His coffin like Grand Central to the brim
filled up & emptied with the lapse of light.
Which one will waken him?
O she must startle like a fallen gown,
content with speech like an old sacrament
in deaf ears lying down,
blazing through darkness till he feels the cold
& blindness of his hopeless tenement
while his black arms unfold.
90
Op. posth. no. 13
In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,
of liberations, and beloved faces,
such as now ere dawn he sings.
It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,
to give up the old world, but he could try;
let it all rest, have a good cry.
Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing
cannot restore one instant’s good to, rest:
he’s left us now.
The panic died and in the panic’s dying
so did my old friend. I am headed west
also, also, somehow.
In the chambers of the end we’ll meet again
I will say Randall, he’ll say Pussycat
and all will be as before
whenas we sought, among the beloved faces,
eminence and were dissatisfied with that
and needed more.
91
Op. posth. no. 14
Noises from underground made gibber some,
others collected & dug Henry up
saying ‘You are a sight.’
Chilly, he muttered for a double rum
waving the mikes away, putting a stop
to rumours, pushing his fright
off with the now accumulated taxes
accustomed in his way to solitude
and no bills.
Wives came forward, claiming a new Axis,
fearful for their insurance, though, now, glued
to disencumbered Henry’s many ills.
A fortnight later, sense a single man
upon the trampled scene at 2 a.m.
insomnia-plagued, with a shovel
digging like mad, Lazarus with a plan
to get his own back, a plan, a stratagem
no newsman will unravel.
V
92
Room 231: the forth week
Something black somewhere in the vistas of his heart.
Tulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood
to be a tulip and desire no more
but water, but light, but air.
Yet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,
& suffocation called, dream-whiskey’d pour
sirening. Rosy there
too fly my Phil & Ellen roses, pal.
Flesh-coloured men & women come & punt
under my windows. I rave
or grunt against it, from a flowerless land.
For timeless hours wind most, or not at all. I wind
my clock before I shave.
Soon it will fall dark. Soon you’ll see stars
you fevered after, child, man, & did nothing,—
compass live to the pencil-torch!
As still as his cadaver, Henry mars
this surface of an earth or other, feet south
eyes bleared west, waking to march.
93
General Fatigue stalked in, & a Major-General,
Captain Fatigue, and at the base of all
pale Corporal Fatigue,
and curious microbes came, came viruses:
and the Court conferred on Henry, and conferred on Henry
the rare Order of Weak.
—How come dims one these wholesome elsers oh?
Old polymaths, old trackers, far from home,
say how thro’ auburn hair titbits of youth’s grey climb.
I have heard of rose-cheekt but the rose is here!
I bell: when pops her phiz in a good crow.
My beauty is off duty!—
Henry relives a lady, how down vain,
spruce in her succinct parts, spruce everywhere.
They fed like muscles and lunched
after, between, before. He tracks her, hunched
(propped on red table elbows) at her telephone,
white rear bare in the air.
94
Ill lay he long, upon this last return,
unvisited. The doctors put everything in the hospital
into reluctant Henry
and the nurses took it out & put it back,
smiling like fiends, with their eternal ‘we.’
Henry did a slow burn,
collapsing his dialogue to their white ears
& shiny on the flanges. Sanka he drank
until his memories blurred
& Valerie was coming, lower he sank
and lovely. Teddy on his handlebars
perched, her. One word he heard
insistent: ‘on.’ He railed a stale abuse
upon his broad shortcomings, then lay still.
That middle-sized wild man was ill.
A hospital is where it all has a use,
so is a makar. . So is substantial God,
tuning in from abroad.
95
The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I’d asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.
A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.
I saw the point of Loeb
at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,
baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound
attend while he is cooked
until with trembling hands hoist I my true
& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains—
it’s the texture & the thought—
but I will like them now, spooning at you,
my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains
lose heart and the sun flames out.
96
Under the table, no. That last was stunning,
that flagon had breasts. Some men grow down cursed.
Why drink so, two days running?
two months, O seasons, years, two decades running?
I answer (smiles) my question on the cuff:
Man, I been thirsty.
The brake is incomplete but white costumes
threaten his rum, his cointreau, gin-&-sherry,
his bourbon, bugs um all.
His go-out privilege led to odd red times,
since even or especially in hospital things get hairy.
He makes it back without falling.
He sleep up a short storm.
He wolf his meals, lamb-warm.
Their packs bump on their ’-blades, tan canteens swing,
for them this day my dawn’s old, Saturday’s IT,
through town toward a Scout hike.
For him too, up since two, out for a sit
now in the emptiest freshest park, one sober fling
before correspondence & breakfast.
97
Henry of Donnybrook bred like a pig,
bred when he was brittle, bred when big,
how he’s sweating to support them.
Which birthday of the brighter darker man,
the Goya of the Globe & Blackfriars, whom—
our full earth smiled on him
squeezing his old heart with a daughter loose
(hostages they áre)—the world’s produced,
so far, alarms, alarms.
Fancy the chill & fatigue four hundred years
award a warm one. All we know is ears.
My slab lifts up its arms
in a solicitude entire, too late.
Of brutal revelry gap your mouth to state:
Front back & backside go bare!
Cats’ blackness, booze, blo
ws, grunts, grand groans.
Yo-bad yōm i-oowaled bo v’ha’l lail awmer h’re gawber!
—Now, now, poor Bones.
98
I met a junior—not so junior—and
a-many others, who knew ‘him’ or ‘them’
long ago, slightly,
whom I know. It was the usual
cocktail party, only (my schedule being strict)
beforehand.
I worked. Well. Then they kept the kids away
with their own questions, over briefest coffee.
Then kids drove me to my city.
I think of the junior: once my advanced élève,
sweetnatured, slack a little, never perhaps to make,
in my opinion then, it.
In my opinion, after a decade, now.
He publishes. The place was second-rate
and is throwing up new buildings.
He’ll be, with luck, there always. —Mr Bones,
stop that damn dismal. —Why can’t we all the same
be? —Dr Bones, how?
99
Temples
He does not live here but it is the god.
A priest tools in atop his motorbike.
You do not enter.
He does not enter.
Us the landscape circles hard abroad,
sunned, stone. Like calls, too low, to like.
One submachine-gun cleared the Durga Temple.
It is very dark here in this groping forth
Gulp rhubarb for a guilty heart,
rhubarb for a free, if the world’s sway
waives customs anywhere that far
Look on, without pure dismay.
Unable to account for itself.
The slave-girl folded her fan & turned on my air-conditioner.
The lemonade-machine made lemonade.
I made love, lolled,
my roundel lowered. I ache less. I purr.
—Mr Bones, you too advancer with your song,
muching of which are wrong.
100
How this woman came by the courage, how she got
the courage, Henry bemused himself in a frantic hot
night of the eight of July,
where it came from, did once the Lord frown down
upon her ancient cradle thinking ‘This one
will do before she die
for two and seventy years of chipped indignities