Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;
Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.
LUNCH-HOUR BLUES
His ears discount the ragged noise,
His nose, the tangled smell;
His eyes when prodigies go past
Look up, but never dwell.
His tongue not even registers
The juices of his plate,
His hands (some other eater’s hands?)
Will not communicate.
He’s thrown the senses from their seat,
As Indian heroes do –
An act more notable were not
The mind unseated too.
O yogey-bogey lunching man,
Lunch on, against the bill –
Your service to the ascetic rule
And to the chiming till.
HOTEL BED AT LUGANO
Even in hotel beds the hair tousles.
But this is observation, not complaint –
‘Complaints should please be dropped in the complaint-box’ –
‘Which courteously we beg you to vacate
In that clean state as you should wish to find it.’
And the day after Carnival, today,
I found, in the square, a crimson cardboard heart:
‘Anna Maria’, it read. Otherwise, friends,
No foreign news – unless that here they drink
Red wine from china bowls; here anis-roots
Are stewed like turnips; here funiculars
Light up at dusk, two crooked constellations;
And if bells peal a victory or great birth,
That will be cows careering towards the pail.
‘It is not yet the season,’ pleads the Porter,
‘That comes in April, when the rain most rains.’
Trilingual Switzer fish in Switzer lakes
Pining for rain and bread-crumbs of the season,
In thin reed-beds you pine!
A-bed drowsing,
(While the hair slowly tousles) uncomplaining…
Anna Maria’s heart under my pillow
Provokes no furious dream. Who is this Anna?
A Switzer maiden among Switzer maidens,
Child of the children of that fox who never
Ate the sour grapes: her teeth not set on edge.
PROGRESSIVE HOUSING
At history’s compulsion
A welcome greeted once
All gross or trivial objects
That reached, by grand endurance,
Their bicentenary year.
But not two thousand years
Gould sanctify this building
With bat-and-ivy ruin,
Or justify these furnishings
As woe-begone antiques.
No doubt it is good news
That the spell of age is lifted,
The museums’ greed rebuked:
Yet might this not have come about
Less nastily perhaps?
LEDA
Heart, with what lonely fears you ached,
How lecherously mused upon
That horror with which Leda quaked
Under the spread wings of the swan.
Then soon your mad religious smile
Made taut the belly, arched the breast,
And there beneath your god awhile
You strained and gulped your beastliest.
Pregnant you are, as Leda was,
Of bawdry, murder and deceit;
Perpetuating night because
The after-languors hang so sweet.
THE FLORIST ROSE
This wax-mannequin nude, the florist rose,
She of the long stem and too glossy leaf,
Is dead to honest greenfly and leaf-cutter:
Behind plate-glass watches the yellow fogs.
Claims kin with the robust male aeroplane
Whom eagles hate and phantoms of the air,
Who has no legend, as she breaks from legend –
From fellowship with sword and sail and crown.
Experiment’s flower, scentless (he its bird);
Is dewed by the spray-gun; is tender-thorned;
Pouts, false-virginal, between bud and bloom;
Bought as a love-gift, droops within the day.
BEING TALL
Long poems written by tall men
Wear a monstrous look; but then
Would these do better to write short
Like poets of the midget sort?
Here is no plea for medium height
In poets or what poets write:
Only a trifle to recall
The days when I had grown too tall,
When jealous dwarfs leered up at me
From somewhere between shoe and knee.
I grinned them my contempt and fear,
Stooping till our heads came near.
Then all I wrote, until in rage
I whipped them off the path and page,
Bent like a hook this way and that –
And who could guess what I was at?
But rage was not enough to teach
My natural height and breadth and reach:
It wanted love with kindly phlegm
To shrink my bones and straighten them.
AT FIRST SIGHT
‘Love at first sight,’ some say, misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.
But friendship at first sight? This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches and then blushes.
RECALLING WAR
Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean,
The track aches only when the rain reminds.
The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood,
The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm.
The blinded man sees with his ears and hands
As much or more than once with both his eyes.
Their war was fought these twenty years ago
And now assumes the nature-look of time,
As when the morning traveller turns and views
His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill.
What, then, was war? No mere discord of flags
But an infection of the common sky
That sagged ominously upon the earth
Even when the season was the airiest May.
Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out
Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard.
Natural infirmities were out of mode,
For Death was young again: patron alone
Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.
Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight
At life’s discovered transitoriness,
Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind.
Never was such antiqueness of romance,
Such tasty honey oozing from the heart.
And old importances came swimming back –
Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head,
A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call.
Even there was a use again for God –
A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire,
In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning.
War was return of earth to ugly earth,
War was foundering of sublimities,
Extinction of each happy art and faith
By which the world had still kept head in air,
Protesting logic or protesting love,
Until the unendurable moment struck –
The inward scream, the duty to run mad.
And we recall the merry ways of guns –
Nibbling the walls of factory and church
Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees
Like a child, dandelions with a switch.
Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill,
Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall:
A sight to be recalled in elder days
When learnedly the future we devote
To yet more boastful visions of despair.
X
Detective, criminal or corpse –
Who is the I of the story?
Agreed, the first stage of a narrative
Permits mystification – the I
Rainbowing clues and fancies.
That is the time of drawing-room charades:
Each mask resembles every other mask,
And every beard is false.
But now the story hardens and grows adult:
By the beginning of the final chapter
Holmes and Moriarty are distinct,
The corpse at least not either’s –
I joins merrily in the man-hunt
With a key to the code.
The great K.C. is briefed at last,
The Judge is trying on his sternest wig,
The public queueing up with camp-stools.
Do you dare to tell us, I, at this late hour,
That who you are still waits decision?
Malice Aforethought or Unfit to Plead?
PARENT TO CHILDREN
When you grow up, are no more children,
Nor am I then your parent:
The day of settlement falls.
‘Parent’, mortality’s reminder,
In each son’s mouth or daughter’s
A word of shame and rage!
I, who begot you, ask no pardon of you;
Nor may the soldier ask
Pardon of the strewn dead.
The procreative act was blind:
It was not you I sired then –
For who sires friends, as you are mine now?
In fear begotten, I begot in fear.
Would you have had me cast fear out
So that you should not be?
TO CHALLENGE DELIGHT
Living is delight –
Lovers, even, confess it;
And what could compare
With the pain these suffer?
Delight is all repeating –
Doves coo, cats purr, men sing.
‘Challenge delight, of purpose,
And you pull Nature’s nose
In self-spite, you slap her face
In the portico of her palace,
Exchange her sportive sun
For a black perfection.’
Thus hardly anybody
Will make delight his study.
Its meaning to know
Would be emptier than sorrow,
That Sunday morning respite
From a hard week of delight.
TO WALK ON HILLS
To walk on hills is to employ legs
As porters of the head and heart
Jointly adventuring towards
Perhaps true equanimity.
To walk on hills is to see sights
And hear sounds unfamiliar.
When in wind the pine-tree roars,
When crags with bleatings echo,
When water foams below the fall,
Heart records that journey
As memorable indeed;
Head reserves opinion,
Confused by the wind.
A view of three shires and the sea!
Seldom so much at once appears
Of the coloured world, says heart.
Head is glum, says nothing.
Legs become weary, halting
To sprawl in a rock’s shelter,
While the sun drowsily blinks
On head at last brought low –
This giddied passenger of legs
That has no word to utter.
Heart does double duty,
As heart, and as head,
With portentous trifling.
A castle, on its crag perched,
Across the miles between is viewed
With awe as across years.
Now a daisy pleases,
Pleases and astounds, even,
That on a garden lawn could blow
All summer long with no esteem.
And the buzzard’s cruel poise,
And the plover’s misery,
And the important beetle’s
Blue-green-shiny back….
To walk on hills is to employ legs
To march away and lose the day.
Tell us, have you known shepherds?
And are they not a witless race,
Prone to quaint visions?
Not thus from solitude
(Solitude sobers only)
But from long hilltop striding.
TO BRING THE DEAD TO LIFE
To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now,
And now his withered hopes;
Subdue your pen to his handwriting
Until it prove as natural
To sign his name as yours.
Limp as he limped,
Swear by the oaths he swore;
If he wore black, affect the same;
If he had gouty fingers,
Be yours gouty too.
Assemble tokens intimate of him –
A seal, a cloak, a pen:
Around these elements then build
A home familiar to
The greedy revenant.
So grant him life, but reckon
That the grave which housed him
May not be empty now:
You in his spotted garments
Shall yourself lie wrapped.
TO EVOKE POSTERITY
To evoke posterity
Is to weep on your own grave,
Ventriloquizing for the unborn:
What wreaths and junketings!’
And the punishment is fixed:
To be found fully ancestral,
To be cast in bronze for a city square,
To dribble green in times of rain
And stain the pedestal.
Spiders in the spread beard;
A life proverbial
On clergy lips a-cackle;
Eponymous institutes,
Their luckless architecture.
Two more dates of life and birth
For the hour of special study
From which all boys and girls of mettle
Twice a week play truant
And worn excuses try.
Alive, you have abhorred
The crowds on holiday
Jostling and whistling – yet would you air
Your death-mask, smoothly lidded,
Along the promenade?
ANY HONEST HOUSEWIFE
Any honest housewife could sort them out,
Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
Is it any mystery who are the sound,
And who the rotten? Never, by her lights.
Any honest housewife who, by ill-fortune,
Ever engaged a slut to scrub for her
Could instantly distinguish from the workers
The lazy, the liars, and the petty thieves.
Does this denote a sixth peculiar sense
Gifted to housewives for their vestal needs?
Or is it failure of the usual five
In all unthrifty writers on this head?
DEFEAT OF THE REBELS
The enemy forces are in wild flight.
Poor souls (you say), they were intoxicated
With rhetoric and banners, thought it enough
To believe and to blow trumpets, to wear
That menacing lie in their shakos.
Enough: it falls on us to shoot them down,
The incorrigibles an
d cowards,
Where they shiver behind rocks, or in ditches
Seek graves that have no headstones to them –
Such prisoners were unprofitable.
Now as our vanguard, pressing on,
Dislodges them from village and town,
Who yelling abandon packs and cloaks,
Their arms and even the day’s rations,
We are not abashed by victory,
We raise no pitying monument
To check the counter-stroke of fortune.
These are not spoils: we recognize
Our own strewn gear, that never had been robbed
But for our sloth and hesitancy.
THE GRUDGE
Judging the gift, his eye of greed
Weighed resentment against need.
Resentment won, for to receive
Is not so blessèd as to give:
To give is to undo a lack.
Nor could the gift be deeded back
But with vile ingratitude –
And gifts, like embassies, he viewed
As if enclaves of foreign ground.
Nor could a compromise be found
Between the giver’s thoughtfulness
And his own more-than-thanklessness.
The gift held neither bribe nor blame
But with cruel aptness came,
Disproving self-sufficiency –
That cloaked-in-silence misery
Which had, itself, no gifts to make,
Grudged to bend, and would not break.
NEVER SUCH LOVE
Twined together and, as is customary,
For words of rapture groping, they
‘Never such love,’ swore, ‘ever before was!’
Contrast with all loves that had failed or staled
Registered their own as love indeed.
And was this not to blab idly
The heart’s fated inconstancy?
Better in love to seal the love-sure lips,
For truly love was before words were,
And no word given, no word broken.
When the name ‘love’ is uttered
(Love, the near-honourable malady
With which in greed and haste they
Each other do infect and curse)
Or, worse, is written down….
Wise after the event, by love withered,
A ‘never more!’ most frantically
Sorrow and shame would proclaim
Such as, they’d swear, never before were:
True lovers even in this.
THE HALFPENNY
His lucky halfpenny after years of solace