Joseph Gordon Macleod

Now as the farmer sits at his accounts Reviewing fleeces neath deciduous beeches And notes in red contented ink Net profits of his quite impossible serenity; As graded apples marketably beautiful Into the bushel-baskets sink And trussed hay to the tin roof reaches, And where red tiles through darkening trees are reared A whole year's work is sold in sacks of meal; Now suddenly running Drops like a sprig Of oak in a gale on the neck The little wriggler, Vindictive-legged cunning, Drops like a fleck Of blood on a finger ring Crooking in his sting. It wriggles and stops, Wriggles and turns Through copper ferns Through stubble of crops Into the garden of his most impossible serenity. Chrysanthemums Wilt in alarm As dangerous comes Its arching arm A probable harm Nearer to his impossible serenity. Brambles turn sour Berries crinkle All fruits, Every flower, All roots wrinkle: The trees' atour Lapses, and the power Of his impossible serenity Collapses. The scorpion poison grips, its patterns spread Like wine that trickling on a dusty floor Hence and thence makes pellets and canals. Asphodel, improbable, beside the river bed Is found rank ramsons with a garlic smell. And cider in a dirty cask, lovelike, turns vinegar. Where had been pears and pippins, is a row of rotten balls, Globes of mundungus, faced with foul fungus, And locusts swarm to make the end complete. The last bee disembowelled waves its dislocated feet. Diseased the last elm falls, and with it falls The indistinct last glint of Dionysus Lysius. Earth is with scorpions like spiders hung. From every tile and brick they flick Like leaping twisting mixing flies on dung. A pretty virgin makes a pretty shrew, As those lo longer virgins also do, Because they are no longer so, or else because they are. The fracasado, self-considering as from far, By force of self-perverted scales Pities himself for impotence, and rails Oftener therefore: more he pities, more he fails. The scolding wife drives man to keep a scolding whore: If either dies, he grieves because she scolds no more, And scorns the other still because she scolds. The man whose one wife makes him ten cuckolds Wishes the girl were plain: she finds no joys In playing with her multiplicated boys, Wishes herself plain too, to find her joy in one. Whose wife Is dutiful and bashful all her life Thinks he would be happier if she were loved by other men. Surely some wit usurps the throne of Cypris, when Woman so seems what never woman was, For man to caper to as man should not. The golden mean is not. The man of business bonded to his trade Postpones his culture till his fortune has been made. The cultured man to realize his will Can find no means, nor wherewithal to touch His learning, since his culture costs too much. Reformers, visionaries, poets, other such, Because their vision real is, too sane their wit, The multitude they seek to benefit Lunatic calls them: and although they spurn Others' opinions, lunatic for lack of heed they turn, Parodying their visions of perfection. The land, too stupid to desire a change, Too lazy for that mental insurrection, Yet knowing their salvation lies In broader education Like cats enough uneasy to surmise They have the mange, Further enlightenment refuses And its chief men accuses Of unenlightenment, With consequent Stagnation. Over its losses Autumn its mosses Draws: the dormice go to sleep. In the shorter afternoons Determined to forget, the caterpillars crawl Into the weak oblivion of cocoons. To easier life the coward birds have all Flown from the towns and woods and pools: But some remain at large, poor ignorant fools. The bats are wiser, who hang upside down, Less crazily inverted than the town: Snails in cement immure their sleepy souls: Less mad, though timid, are the celibate Ferns that abide the next arriving spring To unroll fronds again, when warblers sing, Meantime intelligently hibernate, And delicately, Up to date. But we as leaves evacuate a lime Cannot deceive ourselves nor bide our time: Forced to retire by buds that seize our place, Self-superannuated, in disgrace, Know but too well that what we most deride In others is the poison on our side, Stung by the poison we ourselves put up Ourselves the poisoned cup We give our intellectual pride To sup. A scorpion drops from a unicorn's nape Into the virgin's lap. A scorpion drops from blood Xanthippê's tongue And Socratês though he have wrung A whole night's liquor from a score kulixes And sadly his wine mixes, Drinking all below the table, Wanders, constitutionally unable To drink himself unwise. Yes, even him approaching now to weigh these things The scorpion stings. This belt of fretted stars that so promiscuously plays Upon our eyes, we learn to name them all, Picking our favourites out like horses in a race. But now their steady passages recall How, geared to the years, They tick our lives out: and we cease to see Much hope in false futurity: Instead we falsify stars that have been With promise that we alter since those stars, Raising reality Not in what we see, Nor in what meteors there yet may be, But in fixed stars we would we once had seen.

Supervises over the teatable our voluble hostess The passing round of titterings and toasties. Her glass-eyed friends, confidence's make-and-breaks, Give each in series gobbets of another's cakes. Dough drips into their tight triangular shoes. Their mouths give vent to evil-smelling news Keep their minds pure, make mental products crisper, With speaking eyeball rolls and the not too improper whisper. Fawn-eyed, the daughter, a gossip apprentice, Festoons gilt malice on her unmalicious twenties. Holiday smarmed the manureminded ephebus Sees in every skirt lubricity's rebus. Sex is their unknown god, with neither purity nor pox, To whom they genuflect whenever they enjoy their shocks. A little of everything, is the note they strike, The only limitation, what they think they do not like. Always they suffer inexpressible injustices, Making their own beds, these amateur Procrusteses, But expect their maids to lie in them. The middle classes Must have some defence against the vulgar masses. They have no use for idle gossips that scarify: But in their own leisure get together to verify Rumours of rationalists, use of contraceptives, Probable bastards, hope of their proving defectives (Details being perquisites of good detectives). This of course for the parish's sake. These long nose weevils Seek knowledge of others', as expression of their own, evils: And naught escapes being twisted and messed, Their own souls included, on matters of interest. Ignorant, superficial, malignant, self-deceived, Ashamed to bear, but proud to be bereaved, Devoted to truth's medals, but dismayed to see its flesh— Babies are born to them in prams and crêches. Lip-honouring peace, by their indignant whispers Others they desecrate, their own insure, in their smug vespers. At mattins for their own sins pray to be forgiven, Revelling in others while walking home from heaven. Martrylike suffer for transgressions of the parish, Or say they do, particularly the most garish. But humbly at their bedside never hope that Jesus has destroyed Others' misfortunes wholly, lest themselves be unemployed. Such and so balsting are their faded Joys Which Time, nor Sickness, never quite destroys. Balder and balder every haircut Cutting a caper as lewd as he dare cut, Quasiphilosophically Capricorn carouses Ill at ease in such respectable houses, The disinherited soul of an atrabilious Semi self-deprecating paterfamilias. With many eyeglitters at women's legs in stockings And at the schoolboys' furtive corybantic eyecockings, His Bacchanalian belly he wobbles like a sack with metaphysical justification as Dionysiac, And ungenteel jokes undoubtedly due to his strabismus Distorting even the quaint festivities of Christmas. Remembering in the artificial afternoon Old days when Pan his saxophonic tune Under the ilex played, and how the figwood image Nimbly swayed in the nights of lustful scrimmage, And how in pleased surprise he uttered several Eurekas At finding the gross fungus Ithyphallus Impudicus. With him his father's hair his father's scalp reveals Commensurate, with scratching too much during silent meals, With virgin's blood the holly on the wall Drips. As from Druid branches fail to fall Light, intense pearl juices from alabaster fitting, The proper tight-drawn hostess cuts unwitting Symbols of fertility from Christmas cake. All jollity Is fastened down. Only innocent frivolity Saturnalia is allowed in houses of good quality. Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. The door bursts open wide The Sunday china stands up horrified. Tiddledywog. Meh, meh. All he has ever remembered Bulges out like a plaster panel badly distempered. Tiddledywog. Meh, membrum caprinum erexit: Culpabat, alia aliam, quia ipsa conspexit. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. First he puts under the mat Persian cat and Pekinese dog. Then the tables' and chairbacks' torselling Smashes, and piles on potsherds of Worcester porcelain. Tiddledywog. Tiddledywog. Forefeet dangling like clappers Dancing about he grips the frightened flapper's Flaxen coils, throws to the ground and violates her. Which done she becomes he: he hates her, And turning on the boy, knocks his eyes out, Strips him, and using sinewy tail as a knout Flogs the boy till he eddies and faints. And the mother faints, Whom Capricorn props up upon the chintz And bathing her forehead with cold milk and tea Reverses coldness that used to be. But when she recovers, recovers himself and batters The woman to death. This seems to mend matters. Next pausing somewhat incommoded by his toils, The carpets, cushions, colour schemes he soils. Last in fierce memory of dislocate desire The house itself he dislocates with fire. Scatters the redhot imitation coals Over this mortuary of human souls. The imitation furniture goes up in smoke And well fired china serves as admirable coke. Like wood distilled that dribbles clammily Oozes the ectoplasm of his burning family. Various vermicular disseminations

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations Mad and stark naked Sidles The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis Sidles All three across heaven with a rocking motion. The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.' But the calms are rare The winds baffling but not light And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon All in the pallescent Sargasso weed And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance For What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon? (Truth like starlight crookedly) What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'? And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we. But there is no snow here, nor lilies. The night is glutinous In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps Smoulder: distant fireback of copse Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond The constellations which have stopped working (?) Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps. On edge of lawn a glowworm Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn And in the centre the rugate trees Though seeming as if they go up in smoke Are held like cardboard where they are. Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move. Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation (prandial).' But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother. Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for Praxinoê' But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's eyelashes. Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the value of its beauty.' Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.' But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse. Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.' Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool." Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy? Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college, Iphogenês saw God and died, And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian, With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and tripthongs, Choctaw with three different clicks Each letter is somebody But the Crab is nobody Nobody Nobody A ganglion of neurotic imitations Composed of each letter in turn Jointed by conflicts he does not want A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand. Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude Haunted by phantoms of his female self Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus: Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen This he desires, but despises: Bhah! Always sideways, crabs walk. Either he is not fit for this world Or this world not fit for him. But which? After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward? They lured him with promises, Now it has all slipped sideways What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot If fated to melt again after getting out of it? The answers are: He is not out of it Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth For chance is not blind but unimpedable And we call it blind because Since we frustrate it only by chance We prefer to shut our own eyes. The crab however crawls on. He must therefore be a crab subnormal. One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men, Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer And the process is reversed. In mass production one hand never knows The evil the other is inspiring it to do This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe So worthless, awkward, unintelligible, The crab crawls on. He has sufferd because he was ugly Let him be cruel now that he is attractive Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self. We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods: We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer We don't. We drink and drivel. My poor Catullus, do stop being such a fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is gone. O, once the days shone very bright for you, when where that girl you loved so (as no other will be) called, you came and came. And then and there were odd things done and many which you wanted and she didn't not want. Yes indeed the days shone very bright for you. But now she doesn't want it. Don't you either, booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened. Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened, doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked. Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted? Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to? Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble? —Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened. How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid? O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind Wind humming like distant rooks Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization Civilization being relative our to Greek Greek to Persian Persian to Chinese Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction Satisfaction a matter of capacity Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram Epigrams—poems with a strabismus Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the Zodiac And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways