246 Spiritual poems

[for Alix Walcott] i Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance, the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty, bois-pain, tree of bread, slave food, the bliss of John Clare, torn, wandering Tom, stoat-stroker in his county of reeds and stalk-crickets, fiddling the dank air, lacing his boots with vines, steering glazed beetles with the tenderest prods, knight of the cockchafer, wrapped in the mists of shires, their snail-horned steeples palms opening to the cupped pool—but his soul safer than ours, though iron streams fetter his ankles. Frost whitening his stubble, he stands in the ford of a brook like the Baptist lifting his branches to bless cathedrals and snails, the breaking of this new day, and the shadows of the beach road near which my mother lies, with the traffic of insects going to work anyway. The lizard on the white wall fixed on the hieroglyph of its stone shadow, the palms’ rustling archery, the souls and sails of circling gulls rhyme with: “In la sua volont    è nostra pace,” In His will is our peace. Peace in white harbours, in marinas whose masts agree, in crescent melons left all night in the fridge, in the Egyptian labours of ants moving boulders of sugar, words in this sentence, shadow and light, who live next door like neighbours, and in sardines with pepper sauce. My mother lies near the white beach stones, John Clare near the sea-almonds, yet the bounty returns each daybreak, to my surprise, to my surprise and betrayal, yes, both at once. I am moved like you, mad Tom, by a line of ants; I behold their industry and they are giants. ii There on the beach, in the desert, lies the dark well where the rose of my life was lowered, near the shaken plants, near a pool of fresh tears, tolled by the golden bell of allamanda, thorns of the bougainvillea, and that is their bounty! They shine with defiance from weed and flower, even those that flourish elsewhere, vetch, ivy, clematis, on whom the sun now rises with all its power, not for the Tourist Board or for Dante Alighieri, but because there is no other path for its wheel to take except to make the ruts of the beach road an allegory of this poem’s career, of yours, that she died for the sake of a crowning wreath of false laurel; so, John Clare, forgive me, for this morning’s sake, forgive me, coffee, and pardon me, milk with two packets of artificial sugar, as I watch these lines grow and the art of poetry harden me into sorrow as measured as this, to draw the veiled figure of Mamma entering the standard elegiac. No, there is grief, there will always be, but it must not madden, like Clare, who wept for a beetle’s loss, for the weight of the world in a bead of dew on clematis or vetch, and the fire in these tinder-dry lines of this poem I hate as much as I love her, poor rain-beaten wretch, redeemer of mice, earl of the doomed protectorate of cavalry under your cloak; come on now, enough! iii Bounty! In the bells of tree-frogs with their steady clamour in the indigo dark before dawn, the fading morse of fireflies and crickets, then light on the beetle’s armour, and the toad’s too-late presages, nettles of remorse that shall spring from her grave from the spade’s heartbreak. And yet not to have loved her enough is to love more, if I confess it, and I confess it. The trickle of underground springs, the babble of swollen gulches under drenched ferns, loosening the grip of their roots, till their hairy clods like unclenching fists swirl wherever the gulch turns them, and the shuddering aftermath bends the rods of wild cane. Bounty in the ant’s waking fury, in the snail’s chapel stirring under wild yams, praise in decay and process, awe in the ordinary in wind that reads the lines of the breadfruit’s palms in the sun contained in a globe of the crystal dew, bounty in the ants’ continuing a line of raw flour, mercy on the mongoose scuttling past my door, in the light’s parallelogram laid on the kitchen floor, for Thine is the Kingdom, the Glory, and the Power, the bells of Saint Clement’s in the marigolds on the altar, in the bougainvillea’s thorns, in the imperial lilac and the feathery palms that nodded at the entry into Jerusalem, the weight of the world on the back of an ass; dismounting, He left His cross there for sentry and sneering centurion; then I believed in His Word, in a widow’s immaculate husband, in pews of brown wood, when the cattle-bell of the chapel summoned our herd into the varnished stalls, in whose rustling hymnals I heard the fresh Jacobean springs, the murmur Clare heard of bounty abiding, the clear language she taught us, “as the hart panteth,” at this, her keen ears pronged while her three fawns nibbled the soul-freshening waters, “as the hart panteth for the water-brooks” that belonged to the language in which I mourn her now, or when I showed her my first elegy, her husband’s, and then her own. iv But can she or can she not read this? Can you read this, Mamma, or hear it? If I took the pulpit, lay-preacher like tender Clare, like poor Tom, so that look, Miss! the ants come to you like children, their beloved teacher Alix, but unlike the silent recitation of the infants, the choir that Clare and Tom heard in their rainy county, we have no solace but utterance, hence this wild cry. Snails move into harbour, the breadfruit plants on the Bounty will be heaved aboard, and the white God is Captain Bligh. Across white feathery grave-grass the shadow of the soul passes, the canvas cracks open on the cross-trees of the Bounty, and the Trades lift the shrouds of the resurrected sail. All move in their passage to the same mother-country, the dirt-clawing weasel, the blank owl or sunning seal. Faith grows mutinous. The ribbed body with its cargo stalls in its doldrums, the God-captain is cast adrift by a mutinous Christian, in the wake of the turning Argo plants bob in the ocean’s furrows, their shoots dip and lift, and the soul’s Australia is like the New Testament after the Old World, the code of an eye for an eye; the horizon spins slowly and Authority’s argument diminishes in power, in the longboat with Captain Bligh. This was one of your earliest lessons, how the Christ-Son questions the Father, to settle on another island, haunted by Him, by the speck of a raging deity on the ruled horizon, diminishing in meaning and distance, growing more dim: all these predictable passages that we first disobey before we become what we challenged; but you never altered your voice, either sighing or sewing, you would pray to your husband aloud, pedalling the hymns we all heard in the varnished pew: “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” “Jerusalem the Golden.” Your melody faltered but never your faith in the bounty which is His Word. v All of these waves crepitate from the culture of Ovid, its sibilants and consonants; a universal metre piles up these signatures like inscriptions of seaweed that dry in the pungent sun, lines ruled by mitre and laurel, or spray swiftly garlanding the forehead of an outcrop (and I hope this settles the matter of presences). No soul was ever invented, yet every presence is transparent; if I met her (in her nightdress ankling barefoot, crooning to the shallows), should I call her shadow that of a pattern invented by Graeco-Roman design, columns of shadows cast by the Forum, Augustan perspectives— poplars, casuarina-colonnades, the in-and-out light of almonds made from original Latin, no leaf but the olive’s? Questions of pitch. Faced with seraphic radiance (don’t interrupt!), mortals rub their skeptical eyes that hell is a beach-fire at night where embers dance, with temporal fireflies like thoughts of Paradise; but there are inexplicable instincts that keep recurring not from hope or fear only, that are real as stones, the faces of the dead we wait for as ants are transferring their cities, though we no longer believe in the shining ones. I half-expect to see you no longer, then more than half, almost never, or never then—there I have said it— but felt something less than final at the edge of your grave, some other something somewhere, equally dreaded, since the fear of the infinite is the same as death, unendurable brightness, the substantial dreading its own substance, dissolving to gases and vapours, like our dread of distance; we need a horizon, a dividing line that turns the stars into neighbours though infinity separates them, we can think of only one sun: all I am saying is that the dread of death is in the faces we love, the dread of our dying, or theirs; therefore we see in the glint of immeasurable spaces not stars or falling embers, not meteors, but tears. vi The mango trees serenely rust when they are in flower, nobody knows the name for that voluble cedar whose bell-flowers fall, the pomme-arac purples its floor. The blue hills in late afternoon always look sadder. The country night waiting to come in outside the door; the firefly keeps striking matches, and the hillside fumes with a bluish signal of charcoal, then the smoke burns into a larger question, one that forms and unforms, then loses itself in a cloud, till the question returns. Buckets clatter under pipes, villages begin at corners. A man and his trotting dog come back from their garden. The sea blazes beyond the rust roofs, dark is on us before we know it. The earth smells of what’s done, small yards brighten, day dies and its mourners begin, the first wreath of gnats; this was when we sat down on bright verandahs watching the hills die. Nothing is trite once the beloved have vanished; empty clothes in a row, but perhaps our sadness tires them who cherished delight; not only are they relieved of our customary sorrow, they are without hunger, without any appetite, but are part of earth’s vegetal fury; their veins grow with the wild mammy-apple, the open-handed breadfruit, their heart in the open pomegranate, in the sliced avocado; ground-doves pick from their palms; ants carry the freight of their sweetness, their absence in all that we eat, their savour that sweetens all of our multiple juices, their faith that we break and chew in a wedge of cassava, and here at first is the astonishment: that earth rejoices in the middle of our agony, earth that will have her for good: wind shines white stones and the shallows’ voices. vii In spring, after the bear’s self-burial, the stuttering crocuses open and choir, glaciers shelve and thaw, frozen ponds crack into maps, green lances spring from the melting fields, flags of rooks rise and tatter the pierced light, the crumbling quiet avalanches of an unsteady sky; the vole uncoils and the otter worries his sleek head through the verge’s branches; crannies, culverts, and creeks roar with wrist-numbing water. Deer vault invisible hurdles and sniff the sharp air, squirrels spring up like questions, berries easily redden, edges delight in their own shapes (whoever their shaper). But here there is one season, our viridian Eden is that of the primal garden that engendered decay, from the seed of a beetle’s shard or a dead hare white and forgotten as winter with spring on its way. There is no change now, no cycles of spring, autumn, winter, nor an island’s perpetual summer; she took time with her; no climate, no calendar except for this bountiful day. As poor Tom fed his last crust to trembling birds, as by reeds and cold pools John Clare blest these thin musicians, let the ants teach me again with the long lines of words, my business and duty, the lesson you taught your sons, to write of the light’s bounty on familiar things that stand on the verge of translating themselves into news: the crab, the frigate that floats on cruciform wings, and that nailed and thorn riddled tree that opens its pews to the blackbird that hasn’t forgotten her because it sings.

Turn it over and look up into the sphere of heaven. The tracery is lucent, light seeping through to write, white-ink your face, upturned. Swing it below and it's a cradle of blue water, the sea, a womb. A mixing bowl for Babylonian gods. Here, they whirl up the cosmos. Pick it up and your hands form a pedestal, and all who drink contain the arcs of body and the universe— and between them, no imaginable tear or distance.

If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same; The vanished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame. They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings; I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings. The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred Seven; But thou, meek lover of the good! Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

She appears to be recognized as herself and not herself, new because endlessly recycled, not what she was but not what she will be—see? Not married and not not married, the processional’s a ritual meant to extend a magical present, until the head of this pin is the size of a rented hall and all of us angels stepping out on the long blank train of her on-going gown. To go in single and come married out is easy enough, what matters is to enlarge the interstitial, to live as long as we can in the not exactly no longer and the not quite not yet also. Where organ music drowns the ill-digested vows and the empty stomach growls. Hesitant. The BND goes down slow as a pill we can’t really swallow, stuck chunk in a stalled gulp between yesterday and tomorrow, at one and the same time belated and punctual. It’s the system itself we’ve come to see (open the plug of that rubber-edged rose window), not me and not you, but we: the marriage of church and state made visible, audible, available. Here Dearly Beloved’s an embarrassing gurgle, and the costly gown so much densely crumpled bathroom tissue backing up one overworked way in and out of the usual world. From the mouth to points South, scrawl that in soap on the vehicle? From “will you?” to “why don’t you ever?” on the march to “irreconcilable.” Hey—whoa! Away with you hand-wringing nay sayers: be here now now now now…. Cheeks are flushed and eyes overflow as we grasp her new handle, here to hear the I do as a couple of hard blows: that flesh-blunted sound of bone on bone dislodging as cough a caught morsel not thoroughly chewed. Back out, back up, quagmire, circle: proposed solutions involve the usual budget expansions, extended tours of duty, and additional troops.

can I do this spiritual drag, collective agony wishful thinking, fearful peek-a-boo actuality about to be read in unapologetic disinterested participation against fantasy without benefit familiarity, remembering distortion, forgetting drudgery necessary to consume anything cement sorrow, surrounded by transfer credit surcharge immortal siege ideology, submissive to appliance bodyisms in doubt in the face of stupidity—oops—knowledge, derivative of skin, bones, eyes and the rest, opposite abrupt aggressive remoteness here to serve another ascendant say-so? I tremble in doubt, divided by multiple entry points and explosive content wrapped in rambling overlays sent to the council on commentary, and without exception the animation either frenetic or dull, shifts to no options left, recognizing useless hope in the face of bomb holes caused by numbering digits.

How to get to it: the heart within the corset made of whalebone and Parisian leaded satin, winter weight. I can barely breathe. Sun filters from high windows into this dark-paneled room where my sister helps me step into the skirt, our grandmother’s grandmother’s sent-for dress, its pinprick satin buttons down my chest. We hook each hook to hold the corset flush, to anchor the bustle, as she did for her quiet February wedding, snow covering the steeple of the Seamen’s Bethel. Melville:This, shipmates, is that other lesson: fasten the locks, hold the heart within its watery chamber. When the seamstress slid the bone into the bodice and pinned each cut piece together, the satin stood upright at the sewing table. She could almost see it breathe. I am swallowed and swallowed whole. It outlasts all our vows.

let through praise while cycling —a hill or shop to match you— the shining bay the foggy gray beneath all names and phrases let through praise while working —a bird or book to watch you— the formal sun the queerer ones lifting their heads to face you let through praise while flirting —a storm or song to patch you— the iced-down bruise the new black shoes and all the things that make you let praise through earthly city —a sibling glad to catch us— the blameless meek the faceless deep please mind your house and graces

Care for thy soul as thing of greatest price, Made to the end to taste of power divine, Devoid of guilt, abhorring sin and vice, Apt by God’s grace to virtue to incline. Care for it so as by thy retchless train It be not brought to taste eternal pain. Care for thy corse, but chiefly for soul’s sake; Cut off excess, sustaining food is best; To vanquish pride but comely clothing take; Seek after skill, deep ignorance detest. Care so, I say, the flesh to feed and clothe That thou harm not thy soul and body both. Care for the world to do thy body right; Rack not thy wit to win thy wicked ways; Seek not to oppress the weak by wrongful might; To pay thy due do banish all delays. Care to dispend according to thy store, And in like sort be mindful of the poor. Care for thy soul, as for thy chiefest stay; Care for thy body for thy soul’s avail; Care for the world for body’s help alway; Care yet but so as virtue may prevail. Care in such sort that thou be sure of this: Care keep thee not from heaven and heavenly bliss.

“Is there no balm in Gilead?” So cries dour Jeremiah in granite tones. “There is a balm in Gilead,” replies a Negro spiritual. The baritone who chants it, leaning forward on the platform, looks up, not knowing his voice is a rainstorm that rinses air to reveal earth’s surprises. Today, the summer gone, four monarch butterflies, their breed’s survivors, sucked a flower’s last blooms, opened their wings, orange-and-black stained glass, and printed on the sky in zigzag lines, watch bright things rise: winter moons, the white undersides of a California condor, once thought doomed, now flapping wide like the first bird from ashes.

A hundred and one butter lamps are offered to my uncle who is no more. Distraction proves fatal in death. A curtain of butter imprints in air. After the burning of bones, ashes are sent on pilgrimage. You are dead, go into life, we pray. My uncle was a man given to giggles in solemn moments. Memory springs like crocuses in bloom. Self conscious and precise. Without blurring the cornea, details are resuscitated. Dried yak meat between teeth. Semblance of what is. Do not be distracted, Uncle who is no more. He does not see his reflection in the river. The arching of speech over “s” as he is becoming. Curvature of spine as it cracked on a misty morning. A shadow evades the wall. You are no more, Uncle who is no more. Every seven days he must relive his moment of expiration. The living pray frequently amid burning juniper. Communication efforts require the right initiative. Somewhere along the line matters of motion and rest are resolved. Crows pick the last offerings. You are someone else, uncle no more.