1247 Love poems

But the buried walls and our mouths of fragments, no us but the snow staring at us. . . And you Mr. Ground-of_what, Mr. Text, Mr. Is-Was, can you calculate the ratio between wire and window, between tone and row, copula and carnival and can you reassemble light from the future-past in its parabolic nest or recite an entire winter’s words, its liberties and psuedo-elegies, the shell of a street-car in mid-turn or scattered fires in the great hall I would say not-I here I’d say The Book of Knots I’d say undertows and currents and waterspouts, streaks of phosphorus and rivervine winds Dear Z, I’d say it’s time, it’s nearly time, it’s almost, it’s just about, it’s long past time now time now for the vex- for the vox- for the voices of shadows, time for the prism letters, trinkets and shrouds, for a whirl in gauzy scarves around the wrecked piazza Messieurs-Dames, Meine Herren und Damen, our word-ballon, you will note, is slowly rising over the parched city, its catacombs, hospitals and experimental gardens, its toll-gates, ghettos and ring-roads, narcoleptics and therapists and stray cats Ladies and Gentleen, our menu for this flight, due to temporary shortages, will be an alpha-omega soup, Bactrian hump, and nun’s farts As we enter the seventh sphere, you will discover a thin layer of ice just beginning to form on your limbs Do not be alarmed, this is normal You will experience difficulty breathing, this is normal The breathing you experience is difficulty, this is normal Dear Z, Should I say space constructed of echoes, rifts, mirrors, a strange year for touring the interior Should I say double dance, Horn, axis and wheel Dear A, Scuttled ships are clogging the harbors and their cargoes lie rotting on the piers Prepare executions and transfusions Put on your latest gear

Me—a book in the attic. Maybe some covenant or hymnal. Or a chapter from the Kama Sutra, or a spell for intimate afflictions. But then it seems I am none of these. (If I were, someone would have read me.) Apparently at an assembly of revolutionaries they passed a resolution, and I am a longhand copy of it. It has the police’s stamp on it and was never successfully enforced. It is preserved only for the sake of procedure. And now only some sparrows come, straw in their beaks, and sit on my body and worry about the next generation. (How wonderful to worry about the next generation!) Sparrows have wings on them, but resolutions have no wings (or resolutions have no second generation). Sometimes I think to catch the scent— what lies in my future? Worry makes my binding come off. Whenever I try to smell, just some fumes of bird shit. O my earth, your future! Me—your current state.

“Talking only makes me feel more alone,” you said once in the car outside the clinic. Two years later, you spoke the same sentence word for word one night after friends had gone. Within a month, you’d erased yourself    . . . Erased? “To absent oneself,” I found scribbled on a wrapper a year later    . . . Now sunlight and tree shadow rush over the windshield of  the car: I’m talking with my new wife — then gone,absented. “Sometimes I feel almost too much joy,” you wrote from the balcony of  your cheap hotel in Paris. “What are you thinking?” she asks. Light shutters across us. Wherever you are in me I’m there, though it’s not what you wanted.

You have not conquered me—it is the surge Of love itself that beats against my will; It is the sting of conflict, the old urge That calls me still. It is not you I love—it is the form And shadow of all lovers who have died That gives you all the freshness of a warm And unfamiliar bride. It is your name I breathe, your hands I seek; It will be you when you are gone. And yet the dream, the name I never speak, Is that that lures me on. It is the golden summons, the bright wave Of banners calling me anew; It is all beauty, perilous and grave— It is not you.

Know Celia, since thou art so proud, 'Twas I that gave thee thy renown; Thou hadst, in the forgotten crowd Of common beauties, liv'd unknown, Had not my verse exhal'd thy name, And with it imp'd the wings of fame. That killing power is none of thine, I gave it to thy voice, and eyes; Thy sweets, thy graces, all are mine; Thou art my star, shin'st in my skies; Then dart not from thy borrow'd sphere Lightning on him that fix'd thee there. Tempt me with such affrights no more, Lest what I made, I uncreate; Let fools thy mystic forms adore, I'll know thee in thy mortal state; Wise poets that wrapp'd Truth in tales, Knew her themselves, through all her veils.

' I believe it would go ill with many of us, if we were faced with a strong temptation, and I suspect that with many of us it does go ill.' —Ivy Compton Burnett He set out on the innocent exodus. He went at Easter In a lengthening dawn, and he did not count the days. He was young. With the wooden comb his mother made him He parted his hair in the middle (his beard was slow). He was fair still, he glowed like a source of light. There were so many priests about, there was too much singing; He did not like God the Father who came from Rome With his tattered son and the incomprehensible bird. Easter for him was other kinds of rebirth, But from the trees and streams, the uplands and valleys He knew the native spirits dislodged, crowding the shore To cross over like no longer immortal souls, lined up Awaiting the ferry and the disgruntled boatman. They did not intend to fade out to the sound of bells and choiring; They would find a new woodland or water for haunt, untroubled By candles and books and the tedious, meaningless Latin. Without farewell before daybreak he left home. He pushed past the visible almost crowd on the shore, Divine shapes, scents, their sorrowful voices and silences. He murmured out of respect and they let him pass through. Goodbye he declared to them and to his country. First he crossed the small sea in a leather coracle Pointing the blunt prow at what looked like mainland. The sea was glassy, he paddled with his palms, at landfall Made fire and warmed them, conjuring spirits of a new place. They gathered around to gaze at his lovely body. He abandoned his boat and clambered up the rocks. He climbed a hill, a ridge, and then a mountain. It was a protracted joy, that crossing away From the small sea. Looking back, Ireland got littler. Then it and the smooth water were lost to view And never again did he see what had been home, Hear its lilt, or receive news of his many brothers Who bred, and banked their fields, who fished and hunted, And made a tribe, a village and a nation. The uplands were lush and full of fauna, the grass Deep, humming, and everywhere were gods, Their tears, their wounds and resurrections. Spring Smattered the glades, flecked and mottled with blossom, The wheeling birds shouted their emphatic prayer; And deer: that enormous stag with a broken antler; Wolves and wild cats, too, a bear he saw, red pheasants, And rooting through an oak wood, a tusky boar... He walked in amazement (he did not count the days) Reading the symbols, and cheerful local gods Skipped and tumbled before him, showing the way Across the very backbone of that mainland. It was not England yet. It was wilderness. He wrapped his feet in grass and leaves, in strips of leather; He wore a leathern kilt and a stiff hide waistcoat Fragrant with wear and weather. As he went along He runed, was merry, it was almost like rhyming. He climbed jet black mountains veined with silver falls, Washed face and hands in the frenzied spray of those tarns, Made the noises of a man free now of Christendom, In the uncharted, unmarred wilderness, his sweet voice Gracing the ears of insects, beasts and wild fowl And the ears of the local spirits, Orpheus, Or as Adam's must have done when he told the animals Who they were in the first sunrise of the world, Before Eve had been carved out of his rejoicing To correct and contradict him, and the tall fruit tree Stood safe in his obedience, when at evening God himself, not his bloodied Son, walked out in starlight And kissed his creature, and lay with him in the dark. It was not, he began to know, an innocent exodus. It was the long route to exile, the way that hermits Took to white martyrdom, alone with their God for ever. He was not like them: wild-hearted spirits of place Coaxed his credulous footsteps past the equinox. On the eastern shore of what was becoming England He saw far off kernels of cities, squat towers, spires; Rough roads north and south, wagons groaning with stone, And into meagre harbours boats and barges Hugging the coast bore produce in and away. That world was not for him, with its crosses and crossroads. He saw steep islands dark in a bigger sea, No man mark on them, no smoke, no stone quarry, No furrows or shepherds, in their thin woods no traps. It was summer now (he did not count the days), He sat on the summit of the last hill and looked east Wondering where on that island he would build His round stone dwelling and give his mortal days To local grace, the gods of leaf and stone, With his soul configured to love, like a hearth, his heart On fire but unconsumed because such promiscuous heat Amazes and makes not cinders but rapture and language. His dwelling would be a beacon, a land-star radiant To a lowering ocean unbroken beyond the islands As far as the eye. Shading his eyes, he went on his way. He crossed the bad sands not knowing they were bad Between two tides, two islands, walking ankle deep, knee, Then up to the waist, the paps, until only his upturned face Floated on the water, the mouth crying out joyful spells, Eyes fixed on the sun, the flaxen hair fanned out Like rays of a lesser sphere. He could not swim But there was no need, a sea god hovered ahead, Sandals firm on the wave. Emerging step by step He was new, it was autumn, his homelessness This island, these tilting rocks. He chose for his dwelling A high place with a view of nothing but east, The rows of waves impatient to crash on the boulders, Where the storms might climb and burst over his reflections, And the fowls of the air become familiars. He set to work carting stones, gods gathered nearby Harkening, making crowns of nettle, spears of bone, A cup from a gourd, and a dish. Each day his dwelling Grew higher, like a hive for bees, a dome, a cranium. One day, it was the solstice, a final stone Closed the fontanel. The votary moved in. He gathered the crowns and spears, the cup and dish And laid out the new table for his guests. Would the gods sit down beside at his first supper? He looked for them, he called out praising their names. They had all gone off somewhere. There was nowhere to go! The tide was full and even the deep route hither Had gone under waves, the mainland had vanished in fog. He sat alone at his table. He sat alone. The gods who had brought him were gone. He started counting Day one was the day when things began to go. He watched his shadow every morning, lengthening Over the water, over the sand and stones, And being washed and parched like a piece of laundry Until it was white as a nightshirt spread to dry On a gorse bush, fluttering a little, an empty sleeve, Saying go on, go back, go on, go back The way waves do, the way the tides do, also, Or simply wind blows and the tide says nothing at all. How clean the stones and the sand, the breaking waves, How clean the moonlight, the sunlight, and his lovely throat Young and in love—is it still young and in love?— With the spirits, his voice pure as a bird's, but he's counting, The days are shortening, his voice is growing darker. Surely they listen out and watch their votary There on the verge of the cliff in his careful dance Like a gull whose wings are reliance, like a guillemot. So he chanted, he praised and danced, and it was the end Of autumn. For the first time cold, he telt the bones in his flesh. Above him, north, with terror he saw the Lights And it was a human shadow that towered in them, A man on a cross, a man with a cross inside him Instead of a skeleton; the cross was still and shimmered As if it held its breath so as to observe him. He was trembling, he saw the ghostly limbs Behind the bright-dim curtain, those long wired veins Through which pulse flickered and the wine flowed, The chest breathed with almost no sound at all. This figure had nothing to do with the gods who brought him, Tugged at his heart, took their leave when most he needed. This looked like the son of the god he had sought to elude, Now a giant surveying a world and a singular man Abandoned by everything he'd served, but nonetheless Dancing and shivering above the scrum of waves. Cities had grown on the mainland meanwhile, monks and priors, Grew fat; there were nuns and teachers, the farmsteads prospered. The places he'd passed through had roads now, stone towers and walls, Where he'd chanted to wilderness out of a pagan heart. To the east there is nothing.The sleet blows in. It is so cold now, winter hardening. The days are counted and are counting down. After laud and joy, the radiance fading, Winter is here, and bidding becomes of the body, The rings of light, of fire, the rings of starlight. The votary tries his tongue to find what he means. He tries to speak with what has been refined. He has no words at all. The feet that led, the hands That rested on his head, arrested him, are nowhere. He was grown old and unremarkable, and now He knows desire. He knows desire as he has never Known any passion in his person before, he desires A voice, a touch. From his precipice soon Like a gannet he's to dive, or like a stone. Winter has come indeed, and the stars, he's wasted, wasted. No devil arrives to offer long life and kingdoms, To touch his brow, to kiss him on the lips. No gods return with prayer mats and chains of flowers, With brands and blankets, with warm thick drinks, with lamplight, With meat or fruit, with a breathing loaf or a lamb. (In the coldest night someone does cover him And when he wakes he finds A fire alive in the hearth, his table laid With biscuit, and in the gourd a mouthful of pure water.) He is old, his matted beard dark, filthy. He has Praised presence and absence and set his glow Fading on the island's seaward face. When he starts dying, That night, in the flickering of his chamber, The Vikings steer five ships packed with warriors Around the end of his island, using his glimmer As lighthouse and marker, reaching their intended haven. Had he survived that night, even afar he'd have felt The heat of the conflagration, smelled apocalypse As the pagans returned and the little gods came with them, Clapping their hands and rejoicing, and rushed to the woods To be with their trees and streams and hills and valleys As the church spires collapsed, the monks and priors and priests Fuel for bonfires, and until the Vikings withdrew They were safe, divine again, though the shuddering Lights Disclosed the tall cross and the watcher, smoke in his heart. The island's dark, the darker now for his dying, Unmarked and unremarked. But someone covers his face, Is winding in coarse scented cloth the extinguished body, Having tidied the wild hair, parted it in the centre, And washed at last the limbs that longed to be touched. Someone rolls them to the cliff edge, lets them go east.

I got a letter through the post decreeing my sainthood. Beatified, I sat down, because this was big news for me. Bless the television, bless this chair of four wooden legs. I felt like calling my parents, but thought, in a saintly way, to do so would be immodest, so instead I opened the curtains. Rain was washing everything that seemed in need of washing. A bird landed on a bush and shook water from its wings and I closed my eyes briefly, acknowledging its small, hardworking soul, like a microchip destined for heaven. The cat came in, little devil, and I forgave her, touching under her chin, sweet child. We watched the news together and reflected that this was how the world churns its butter of beginnings and endings in front of the sun. What good, I wondered laterally, might befall an ancient tree today? Perhaps merely nothing much. Perhaps a tree will carry on just as it was. What minerals will develop unseen in the earth, deep beneath a human tragedy? Some minerals. Some salty, bright minerals in the dark. I spent that morning cutting white paper into triangles. I spent that afternoon staring at my bits, enamored. I spent that evening clapping loudly in the garden, and come bedtime I was ready to write my long email to the President of the United States of America.

When I have baked white cakes And grated green almonds to spread upon them; When I have picked the green crowns from the strawberries And piled them, cone-pointed, in a blue and yellow platter; When I have smoothed the seam of the linen I have been working; What then? To-morrow it will be the same: Cakes and strawberries, And needles in and out of cloth. If the sun is beautiful on bricks and pewter, How much more beautiful is the moon, Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree; The moon, Wavering across a bed of tulips; The moon, Still, Upon your face. You shine, Beloved, You and the moon. But which is the reflection? The clock is striking eleven. I think, when we have shut and barred the door, The night will be dark Outside.

Late summer, late afternoon, my work interrupted by bees who claim my tea, even my pen looks flower-good to them. I warn a delivery man that my bees, who all summer have been tame as cows, now grow frantic, aggressive, difficult to shoo from the house. I blame the second blooms come out in hot colors, defiant vibrancy— unexpected from cottage cosmos, nicotianna, and bean vine. But those bees know, I’m told by the interested delivery man, they have only so many days to go. He sighs at sweetness untasted. Still warm in the day, we inspect the bees. This kind stranger knows them in intimate detail. He can name the ones I think of as shopping ladies. Their fur coats ruffed up, yellow packages tucked beneath their wings, so weighted with their finds they ascend in slow circles, sometimes drop, while other bees whirl madly, dance the blossoms, ravish broadly so the whole bed bends and bounces alive. He asks if I have kids, I say not yet. He has five, all boys. He calls the honeybees his girls although he tells me they’re ungendered workers who never produce offspring. Some hour drops, the bees shut off. In the long, cool slant of sun, spent flowers fold into cups. He asks me if I’ve ever seen a Solitary Bee where it sleeps. I say I’ve not. The nearest bud’s a long-throated peach hollyhock. He cradles it in his palm, holds it up so I spy the intimacy of the sleeping bee. Little life safe in a petal, little girl, your few furious buzzings as you stir stay with me all winter, remind me of my work undone.

(' Operation Iraqi Freedom ') It felt odd from the start, this war. At the start, the 'death' of Saddam when Baghdad was bombed, but he's not dead, a bizarre Zapata, and then the Scuds fired at  Kuwait but they weren't Scuds, the 'chemical weapons of mass destruction factory',  with earth banks and barbed wire which wasn't one, however, and the 'column of tanks destroyed leaving Basra' which was three tanks, the endless 'securing' of towns and cities which aren't secure even allowing for the distinction that 'secure' does not mean 'safe', the 'Uprising' in Basra which no one could find there... Once there were poems in inverted commas, this is a war of inverted commas. Once I wrote that 'poems about poems don't seem as abstract as they once did' (although you don't need quotes, quoting yourself) and the Oxford Companion decided this meant I was no longer being abstract,  when in fact I meant that poems about poems (in that case partly a child) are not abstract because the abstract in them works through to a deeper real. Will this war work through to the deeper real at last? Now it seems again, however, that it feels odd, this war. I have paid it careful attention for almost a fortnight and what I would note here is that singular oddness of feeling it evokes: one is always at a tangent to it somehow, albeit with despair's edgy wit. The deaths have black solidity, as if from method, no white napalm suddenness...I thought: is it farce encoring tragedy, but there is too much earnest passion in the evil, and one watches that eros like watching spiders breed: 'It is what they do on this planet,' as a child's science fiction exercise might observe. Spiders feed in street windows broken by children's bones flying, but the US polls say yes: who want this so much. Who know what they do and also that they want those inverted commas, George- Bush-as-by-George-Orwell.            Is the US need for war not 'a way to teach Americans geography' as Bierce is often quoted, but a greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather, not met by food or sex or fashion, by any intimate geography but this? But then the abstract is not the inverted commas, either, and it is those they want: the quotes which in two days will expire, the world left gasping with winded logic, the new skulls on dresses in the marketplace, damp empty dusty shoes. Günter Grass called this a 'wanted war' and perhaps that desire accounts for the oddncss of feeling: the animal impossibility of communication. In a damp concrete corner in the market, one's self-sense crouches close, alert for friendly fire.