Has never viewed your northern paradise
Nor watched its queen tending her jewelled boughs,
But always from the same sick quarter blows.
DANCE OF WORDS
To make them move, you should start from lightning
And not forecast the rhythm: rely on chance,
Or so-called chance for its bright emergence
Once lightning interpenetrates the dance.
Grant them their own traditional steps and postures
But see they dance it out again and again
Until only lightning is left to puzzle over –
The choreography plain, and the theme plain.
A BLIND ARROW
Though your blind arrow, shot in time of need
Among the shadowy birches, did indeed
Strike, as you knew it must, the assassin’s heart,
Never disparage a trained bowman’s art.
THE OLEASTER
Each night for seven nights beyond the gulf
A storm raged, out of hearing, and crooked flashes
Of lightning animated us. Before day-break
Rain fell munificently for the earth’s need….
No, here they never plant the sweet olive
As some do (bedding slips in a prepared trench),
But graft it on the club of Hercules
The savage, inexpugnable oleaster
Whose roots and bole bunching from limestone crannies
Sprout impudent shoots born only to be lopped
Spring after Spring. Theirs is a loveless berry….
By mid-day we walk out, with naked feet,
Through pools on the road, gazing at waterfalls
Or a line of surf, but mostly at the trees
Whose elegant branches rain has duly blackened
And pressed their crowns to a sparkling silver.
Innumerable, plump with promise of oil,
The olives hang grass-green, in thankfulness
For a bitter sap and bitter New Year snows
That cleansed their bark….
Forgive me, dearest love,
If nothing I can say be strange or new.
I am no child of the hot South like you,
Though in rock rooted like an oleaster.
THE SEPTUAGENARIAN
Youth is the ruggedest burden that can score
Your septuagenarian shoulder:
If you should threaten, as before, to powder
Rocks with bare heels, or rend the oak asunder
With naked fingers, you can now no more
Plead youthful benefit of metaphor.
Such unsubstantiated boasts will be
Substantial evidence of senility.
NON COGUNT ASTRA
Come, live in Now and occupy it well.
Prediction’s no alternative to forethought
Despite at least four hundred arts of scrying
The dubious future, such as to study birds,
Or bull’s guts, or sheep droppings, or wine lees
In an alabaster cup. True, the most ancient,
Most exact discipline, astrology,
Comes hallowed by a college of gowned mantics
Who still cast horoscopes only by stars
Apparent to the still unaided eye –
And of whom a few, the best, focus their powers
On exact horary configurations, then
At an agreed moment brusquely sweep away
Zodiacal signs, conjunctions, trines,
And reinduce a pure, archaic vision;
Yet disregard all false astrologers
Who dare lay greedy or compulsive hands
On the stars you sped at your nativity
Along their courses and forbad to canker
The rose of love or blunt the blade of honour:
No public hangmen these, but servants chosen
To wear bright livery at your house gate;
And favour you the more, the less you fear them.
SONG: SWORD AND ROSE
The King of Hearts a broadsword bears,
The Queen of Hearts, a rose –
Though why, not every gambler cares
Or cartomancer knows.
Be beauty yours, be honour mine,
Yet sword and rose are one:
Great emblems that in love combine
Until the dealing’s done;
For no card, whether small or face,
Shall overtrump our two
Except that Heart of Hearts, the Ace,
To which their title’s due.
ENDLESS PAVEMENT
In passage along an endless, eventless pavement,
At the glazed eyes flickering past, will remain aware
Of his own, assured, meticulous, rustic tread –
As if pavement were pebbles, or rocks overgrown by grasses;
And houses, trees with birds flying overhead.
IN DISGUISE
Almost I welcome the dirty subterfuges
Of this unreal world closing us in,
That present you as a lady of high fashion
And me as a veteran on the pensioned list.
Our conversation is infinitely proper,
With a peck on either cheek as we meet or part –
Yet the seven archons of the heavenly stair
Tremble at the disclosure of our seals.
A MEASURE OF CASUALNESS
Too fierce the candlelight; your gentle voice
Roars as in dream: my shoulder-nooks flower;
A scent of honeysuckle invades the house,
And my fingertips are so love-enhanced
That sailcloth feels like satin to them.
Teach me a measure of casualness
Though you stalk into my room like Venus naked.
IN TIME OF ABSENCE
Lovers in time of absence need not signal
With call and answering call:
By sleight of providence each sends the other
A clear, more than coincidental answer
To every still unformulated puzzle,
Or a smile at a joke harboured, not yet made,
Or power to be already wise and unafraid.
THE GREEN CASTLE
The first heaven is a flowery plain;
The second, a glass mountain;
The third, likewise terrestrial,
Is an orchard-close unclouded
By prescience of death or change
Or the blood-sports of desire:
Our childhood paradise.
The next three heavens, known as celestial,
Are awkward of approach.
Mind is the prudent rider; body, the ass
Disciplined always by a harsh bit,
Accepts his daily diet of thorns
And frugal, brackish water;
Holds converse with archangels.
The seventh heaven, most unlike those others,
We once contrived to enter
By a trance of love; it is a green castle
Girdled with ramparts of blue sea
And silent but for the waves’ leisured wash.
There Adam rediscovered Eve:
She wrapped him in her arms.
An afterglow of truth, still evident
When we had fallen earthward,
Astonished all except the born blind.
Strangers would halt us in the roadway:
‘Confess where you have been.’
And, at a loss, we replied stumblingly:
‘It was here, it was nowhere –
Last night we lodged at a green castle,
Its courtyard paved with gold.’
NOT TO SLEEP
Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy,
Counting no sheep and careless of chimes,
Welcoming the dawn confabulation
Of birds, her children, who discuss idly
Fanciful details o
f the promised coming –
Will she be wearing red, or russet, or blue,
Or pure white? – whatever she wears, glorious:
Not to sleep all the night long, for pure joy,
This is given to few but at last to me,
So that when I laugh and stretch and leap from bed
I shall glide downstairs, my feet brushing the carpet
In courtesy to civilized progression,
Though, did I wish, I could soar through the open window
And perch on a branch above, acceptable ally
Of the birds still alert, grumbling gently together.
THE HEARTH
Here it begins: the worm of love breeding
Among red embers of a hearth-fire
Turns to a chick, is slowly fledged,
And will hop from lap to lap in a ring
Of eager children basking at the blaze.
But the luckless man who never sat there,
Nor borrowed live coals from the sacred source
To warm a hearth of his own making,
Nor bedded lay under pearl-grey wings
In dutiful content,
How shall he watch at the stroke of midnight
Dove become phoenix, plumed with green and gold?
Or be caught up by jewelled talons
And haled away to a fastness of the hills
Where an unveiled woman, black as Mother Night,
Teaches him a new degree of love
And the tongues and songs of birds?
THAT OTHER WORLD
Fatedly alone with you once more
As before Time first creaked:
Sole woman and sole man.
Others admire us as we walk this world:
We show them kindliness and mercy,
So be it none grow jealous
Of the truth that echoes between us two,
Or of that other world, in the world’s cradle,
Child of your love for me.
THE BEDS OF GRAINNE AND DIARMUID
How many secret nooks in copse or glen
We sained for ever with our pure embraces,
No man shall know; though indeed master poets
Reckon one such for every eve of the year,
To sain their calendar.
But this much is true:
That children stumbling on our lairs by chance
In quest of hazel-nuts or whortleberries
Will recognize the impress of twin bodies
On the blue-green turf, starred with diversity
Of alien flowers, and shout astonishment.
Yet should some amorous country pair, presuming
To bask in joy on any bed of ours,
Offend against the love by us exampled,
Long ivy roots will writhe up from beneath
And bitterly fetter ankle, wrist and throat.
RAIN OF BRIMSTONE
Yet if they trust by lures or spells
To exorcize the tall angel,
Love, from this ancient keep by us
Now long frequented,
And if frustration turns their wits,
So that they bawl in hell’s fury
Battering at our gate all night
With oaken cudgels,
Are we to blame for sparing them
The voice of truth which they deny us?
Should we not darkly leave the town
To its rain of brimstone?
CONSORTIUM OF STONES
The stones you have gathered, of diverse shapes,
Chosen from sea strand, lake strand, mountain gully:
Lay them all out on a basalt slab together
But allow intervals for light and air,
These being human souls; and reject any
With crumpled calceous edges and no feature
That awakes loving correspondence.
Start at this pair: blue flint, grey ironstone,
Which you ring around with close affinities
In every changeless colour, hatched, patched, plain –
Curve always answering curve; and angle, angle.
Gaps there may be, which next year or the next
Will fill to a marvel: never jog Time’s arm,
Only narrow your eyes when you walk about
Lest they miss what is missing. The agreed intent
Of each consortium, whether of seven stones,
Or of nineteen, or thirty-three, or more,
Must be a circle, with firm edges outward,
Each various element aware of the sum.
THE BLACK GODDESS
Silence, words into foolishness fading,
Silence prolonged, of thought so secret
We hush the sheep-bells and the loud cicada.
And your black agate eyes, wide open, mirror
The released firebird beating his way
Down a whirled avenue of blues and yellows.
Should I not weep? Profuse the berries of love,
The speckled fish, the filberts and white ivy
Which you, with a half-smile, bestow
On your delectable broad land of promise
For me, who never before went gay in plumes.
BROKEN NECK
‘Some forty years ago or maybe more,’
Pronounced the radiologist, ‘you broke
Your neck: that is to say, contrived to fracture
Your sixth cervical vertebra – see here,
The picture’s clear – and between sixth and seventh
Flattened this cartilage to uselessness:
Hence rheumatism. Surely you recall
Some incident? We all do foolish things
While young, and obstinately laugh them off –
Till they catch up with us in God’s good time.
Let me prescribe you a Swiss analgesic
Which should at least….’
Love, I still laugh it off
And all Swiss mercenary alleviations,
For though I broke my neck in God’s good time
It is in yours alone I choose to live.
O
‘O per se O, O per se O!’,
The moribund grammarian cried
To certain scholars grouped at his bedside,
Spying the round, dark pit a-gape below:
‘O per se O!’
WOMAN OF GREECE
By your knees they rightly clasp you,
Strong sons of your bed,
Whom you get, kneeling; and bear, kneeling;
Kneeling, mourn for dead.
THE COLOURS OF NIGHT
The Moon never makes use of the Sun’s palette.
Admire her silvery landscapes, but abstain
From record of them: lest you be later tempted
To counterfeit the dangerous colours of Night
Which are man’s blood spurted on moving cloud.
BETWEEN TRAINS
Arguing over coffee at the station,
Neither of us noticed her dark beauty,
Though she sat close by, until suddenly
Three casual words – does it matter what they were? –
Spoken without remarkable intonation
Or accent, so bewildered him and me,
As it were catching the breath of our conversation,
That each set down his coffee-cup, to stare.
‘You have come for us?’ my lips cautiously framed –
Her eyes were almost brighter than I could bear –
But she rose and left, unready to be named.
TO THE TEUMESSIAN VIXEN
Do not mistake me: I was never a rival
Of that poor fox who pledged himself to win
Your heart by gnawing away his brush. Who ever
Proved love was love except by a whole skin?
THE HUNG WU VASE
With women like Marie no holds are barred.
Where do they get the gall? How can they do it?
She stormed out, slamming the hall door so ha
rd
That a vase on the gilt shelf above – you knew it,
Loot from the Summer Palace at Pekin
And worth the entire contents of my flat –
Toppled and fell….
I poured myself straight gin,
Downing it at a gulp. ‘So that was that!’
The bell once more…. Marie walked calmly in,
Observed broken red porcelain on the mat,
Looked up, looked down again with condescension,
Then, gliding past me to retrieve a glove
(Her poor excuse for this improper call),
Muttered: ‘And one thing I forgot to mention:
Your Hung Wu vase was phoney, like your love!’
How can they do it? Where do they get the gall?
LA MEJICANA
Perfect beneath an eight-rayed sun you lie,
Rejoiced at his caresses. Yours is a land
For pumas, chillis, and men dark of eye;
Yet summon me with no derisive hand
From these remote moon-pastures drenched in dew –
And watch who burns the blacker: I or you.
LAMIA IN LOVE
Need of this man was her ignoble secret:
Desperate for love, yet loathing to deserve it,
She wept pure tears of sorrow when his eyes
Betrayed mistrust in her impeccable lies.
AFTER THE FLOOD
Noah retrieves the dove again,
Which bears him in its bill
A twig of olive to explain
That, if God sends them no more rain,
The world may prosper still.
Shem, Ham and Japheth raise a shout,
But weeks on end must wait
Till Father Noah, venturing out,
Can view the landscape all about
And prophesy their fate.
‘Where have the waters of God’s Flood
Dispersed?’ God only knew.
What Noah saw was miles of mud,
Drowned rogues, and almond trees in bud
With blossom peeping through.
‘Bold lads, in patience here abide!
This mire around the ark
By wind or sun must well be dried