Transfigurations, Exequies, Urban Landscapes, Autobiographies, Mythologies

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XVI)

CHRISTMAS ‘77

Today the fabulous boy is born, ‘Neath the criss-cross hedge he lies, Blood-drops on the wild hawthorn Hang between him and the skies: Jewelled, a milk-white unicorn Pieces the baby as he cries.

Today the fabulous boy forlorn, In the Temple circumcised, Blood bedewed, the cruciform Infant on the altar lies: Rubies round its golden horn Sparkle in the creature’s eyes.

Today the fabulous boy is torn, Stretched out, open to the skies, Blood runs down his milk-white form, Slowly, painfully, he dies: The fabulous dead unicorn Shall be with Him in Paradise.

EXEQUIES (XXVIII)

THE FEBRUARY POOL

Beneath the glassy sheet of ice his body lies floating. His head is perfect still, close-cropped, unmoving. The winter has ended his abstract running. Dead eyes stare through frozen water, mirror the sky. He is safe. February winds will pass over The frozen pool, unruffled. Sleeping, he watches The distorted landscape of our suffering Like the child he will always be now; sees Only the unregarded winter moment of the death He ran towards eagerly, when familiar things became Strange and comforting, a choice forever beyond his choosing. Through the sudden ice he hears the distant words of angels; Sees, in the unexpected wonder of a blue ice sky, Their passing images reflected; soars above the ice; Joins them in their unrecorded flight; acknowledges, Reluctantly, his ultimate season with the dead.

EXEQUIES (XXIX) FROM THEANGLO-SAXON CEMETERY NEAR DOVER

I GRAVE OF AWARRIOR

Sunk in death, the lineaments of hard soldier flesh are traced now by the bone’s fragility his skeleton, safe from the ultimate democracy of death, marked out at crucial points by the fragments of a transitory fame, oxidised buckle and sword-blade, wristlet and shield-boss and fastening-pin, sterile stars of his puissant summer, emblematic constellations immutable now in the zodiac of rust and earth.

II GRAVE OF A RICH FEMALE

Rich, respected Anglo-Saxon matriarch, sure of your rank and position, now you must dwell in the egalitarian grave only the amethyst and gold brooch at your throat remains, fastening nothing; while the useless fragment of flaking iron key still keeps safe your last secrets, dust with the box which contained them, its rusted lock fast shut against eternity.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XVII)

Christ, March is here. Christ, Christ, the world renews itself. Spring is a metaphor. Christ is a metaphor. Death is a metaphor. Only the world is real. We live a little time. Die into eternity. Christ died in the springtime of the year. A metaphor. Christ, the March is here. Christ, Christ, the spring is here.

EXEQUIES (XXX)

EUROPEAFTER THE RAIN

The clouds are scattered The sky is blue again What shall become of Europe

After the Rain

Where shall we find refuge In this arid plain Insentience creeps over

The human brain

Mankind is dying These obelisks remain This stratified detritus

We have our inheritance The landscape in this frame Useless now assessing Life-like and strange

The loss or gain

The flood has subsided The world is new and changed What shall we do with Europe After the Rain

EXEQUIES (XXXI)

MAY DAY

A maid came forth one May morning The sky was starry blue The frozen moon was waning She sought the morning dew

She sought the morning dew, she sought The beauty of the May That dew-bright moonlight beauty caught Before the break of day

She wandered over moonlit paths The world was lost in sleep Bending she touched the dewy grass Secret where waters meet

She saw the universe embossed On every drop of dew She saw old age, her beauty lost And all the years would do

She saw her pale face trembling there In the pale moonlight Caught in each dew-drop, prisoner Of that starry night

They found her next day, cold as snow Under a copper sun Still bathing her stoney beauty though The last dew was gone.

EXEQUIES (XXXII) - ARTISTS (iv)

METAMORPHOSES

It seems I can still see him Longing for Rome Dying an exile among barbarians Prisoner of a lost world Existing only in his unattended moments

Thus did he catch a gleam Beyond the hawthorn barrier Of white gravestones between The dark red-berry clusters And the leaves dusty green

Nothing could console him Neither the simple kindness Of the peasants nor the memory Of the marvellous changes wrought In all but the dumb instinct self

Thus did he tread a path Among the decaying tombs The same impacted earth Mute with ancient bones Whispering secret death

Now I can understand The utter desolation Of his thrice exiled spirit Lost to himself his country And the gods of his imagination

Thus did he stop to see Within an open grave The unthought of banality Ovid poet of change Without gods or poetry

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XVIII)

OVIDAMONG THE SCYTHIANS

Nothing will ever change. The light of the last sunset touches the highest point of the hill. Wisps of mist

line the valley with blue shadows. Dead grey waters mirror his flat despair. He sinks onto the ground.

His last metamorphoses, this grand desolation complete, night, forever about to fall, darkens

the mental landscape, mutes the colours of an evening which can never be accomplished.

The great black mare, a shadow among shadows, home-bound or halted, waits: Will share

always these last sharp comforting moments, share the mild eternal exile of paint.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XIX)

Overloaded the Laxton tree has dropped its fruit like a dowager at a ball whose broken string of pearls lies scattered around her on the ground.

URBAN LANDSCAPES (VIII)

THE FACTORY

The factory stands in a desert of commerce on the derelict banks of the Grand Union Canal.

Come with me, past the respectable red brick facade, past the panelled wood

of the Managing Director’s comfortable office, past the quiet decorum of the typist and the clerk:

Come with me to the factory floor; the soft underbelly of our equality.

Here corridors of coloured trays are filled amid clouds of fine white powder.

Here the preponderant immigrant workers wither at their benches over moulded plastic:

The Indian girls’ gold applique, flashing gorgeously under their dustcoats;

the newly arrived young blacks, still half-expecting to make ‘a fresh start’.

Come with me, past the tedium of the metal-room’s interminable brass screws,

past the clatter of the wheelabrator, where earmuffed and insulated

the operators emerge like creatures from another world,

past the packing docks and loading bays, where plastic parts are cleaned and boxed,

where endless rows of labouring faces pass the stages of their youth and age:

The old men, near retirement, expecting nothing beyond ‘the next break’;

the young men, impatient still, tasting existence in rough-house and jibe -

humour their only identity, horseplay their ultimate bid

to retain something of childhood, something of themselves more lasting than

the futile tattooed forearms, the “Love from Eddie, Mum and Dad”.

Come with me, past the foul vapours that issue from the moulding shop,

past the sacks of plastic powder waiting to pass through the factory’s intestines,

past the canteen’s sudden hour of bustling transitory life.

Come with me, along the deserted towpath, where only the fourfold petals

of the hot-drink cup blossoms, to the banks of the almost derelict Grand Union Canal.

Here in silence the grass has grown since the last great horse lent his power to the barges.

Here on the dead green waterway, detritus of another age,

the lighters lie at their moorings, still buoyant on the ebbing tide.

Their names, the “Liss”, the “Mary Brent”, the “White Wings”, echo the past.

All are shrouded in their covers save one loading metal girders.

The loading, slow and leisurely, is like the breathing of an old man;

each unhurried exhalation a long expected certainty.

A lighterman, shirtless in the sun, sits between loads on the bulkhead;

like Seurat’s melancholy bather he gazes before him, while distant

factory chimneys belch black smoke into the sunny August sky.

His reflection, inverted with the white, red and blue

reflection of his barge, shimmers on the water, already unreal.

Only the seagulls, skimming low over the canal, attaining the height required

with a few swift beats of their white and grey wings, sleek as they glide,

their grace the grace of necessity, purposeful as the shape of their beaks, only the seagulls are free.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XX)

POPE JOHN PAUL I

white prisoner visiting our night

pale moon reflecting other light

John Paul your time may be

the Sun’s noon-tied eternity

EXEQUIES (XXXIII)

FOR PAW-PAW

when we heard that you were dead all the clocks in the world stopped at once

seeing you that last time your top coat wrapped around you in the dark the cold wind making your eyes water smiling and waving in the early morning street

accustomed as we were to the separation of geography we were not prepared for this eternities

the clocks have started up again now at least most of them have

in the last note you wrote to us you said Darlings - the only thing I’m living for now is the thought of seeing you all again that’s the one dream I have left _____

EXEQUIES (XXXIV) - ARTISTS (v)

TRIPTYCH

(i) ROBERT LOWELL READING

(Mermaid Theater, Sunday 29th November, 1970)

His voice is dry and light as Liebfraumilch Like an architect revealing the dark difficult corners of some long finished work, detached, ironic, almost diffident, he pauses to explain a word, a line; the symbol of the moon-struck mother skunk. Awake now, scanning metric certainties, history is a dream he can control. A random, banal question, suddenly he is no longer with us. “Nothing can justify a suicide.” His answers, desultory now above our sea of heads, rise with the riding bubble of a past that he cannot forgive or bear to break.

(ii)

ROBESPIERREAND MARY McCARTHY

(An Imitation : after Robert Lowell)

She is still flying in the face of time. He mind as sharp as la guillotine, on the block the heads that stood against her will kiss in the basket. Everyone knows the drama enacted on the T.V. screen is not the one her all-clear eyes have witnessed over Vietnam - Brünnhilde riding out, not for warriors but as a witness, telling Wotan his world is all awry. Like a man, unhysterical, precise; like Robespierre you justify la terreur that must come. Has come. Mary, my friend, Your clarity hammers my heart into the grave. Together our souls beat time as they decay.

(III)

ROBERT LOWELL

(1917 - 1977)

A winter sun, low on the horizon, molten through the long bare black line of skeleton trees, is strong and of the day. In the west, the shadowy pale ghost of a moon fades to the colour of sky, of blue immensity. Along the earth, fixed to the pavement in negative, my shadow marches, moon-struck, towards midday.

URBAN LANDSCAPES (IX) THE NEW FACTORY

Vacant, unfinished, bare, smelling of raw cement, of concrete and paint, the new factory has an air of interrupted life, an atmosphere, almost a pulse, as of recent arrival or departure. An abandoned ladder, angled against a wall, bisects the emptiness. Eight red doors open onto a sunlit courtyard. Five are tight shut. Three stand ajar, the green paint of their inner surfaces half or wholly revealed in bright primary colour. Half or wholly revealed also; the dark, hollow door-mouths, empty, silent. Overhead, a jet plane, like a pale, silvery spider, draws its fine web of vapour-trail behind it. The distant engine roar fades against the depthless blue of the winter sky.

My sharp footfalls, cracking the silence like china, leave an intenser silence, a vague disturbance of the air, echo with the steps of a future workforce, almost make manifest their noon-day ghosts.

URBAN LANDSCAPES (X)

THE NEW FACTORY - FAREWELL

No doubt the factory would have looked romantic in the early evening, a pale moon overhead, the last light still in the sky. No doubt it would have seemed like the ruin of some once to be completed temple of progress, with its eight closed doors and abandoned ladder the mysterious remains of a lost people; an impossible enigma never to be solved in the uncertain moonlight. No doubt. I, however, had a train to catch, friends to say goodbye to, a little life, a little door to shut forever; so I departed, scarcely glancing over my shoulder at the low moon, before hurrying on towards the bright lighted railway station separating itself from the surrounding darkness.

EXEQUIES (XXXV) THE SONG OF THE COAT

Jaunty, twenty, a civil engineer in the making, Chris is the future. His grandfather’s Indian Army jacket fits him like a glove. Forty-seven years old, pips, braids, insignia all gone, dusty from unloading the container, it still cuts a dash as slim and upright he marches over the bridge. His grandfather served in India half-a-century ago a slim, youthful Lieutenant Colonel Chris only knows from a fading photograph only remembers in the veterans’ home of his last few years still able to walk four miles every day after lunch.

“When he died, Nobody wanted the coat .....” Across the bridge, a history too near, Chrish shrinks to a khaki blur against the snow.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XX) AT HOME

I

In the red room red light is shed by the solitary eye of the strip-heater on the wall - the meter8 is full nothing at all exists outside this room no one opens or closes the door - shows us that glimpse of the inessential world no word from the elemental darkness in the hall the clock ticks softly on the wall

II

Bacon, diced with a little celery, sizzles in the wrought-iron skillet; its aroma perfumes the morning air. We are at home: Cooking ..... reading ..... listening ..... all the domestic ingredients of middle-class bliss. Outside snow is in the air; our radiators do not quite obliterate its penetrating chill.

EXEQUIES (XXXVI) - ARTISTS (vi)

DER SELBSTSEHER

At first only the hurt eyes are naked, regarding us from behind the respectable hat and tie of his earliest self-portrait.

Later, masturbating before a mirror, the balls are clutched between long bony fingers.

But now Edith Harms is dying; watches impassively the unflinching Selbstseher as he sketches out this last precious bastion against mortality;

manifestes, in the sunken, empty, pillow-bound features, a draughtsmanship strong enough, a resignation deep enough, a reality intense enough to make the death mere incident when seen against the conscious strength of his lines.

Three days later, when he followed her, there remained only the camera’s indifferent eye to record an unshaven, emaciated face, exhausted with suffering, staring out from the stained, emancipated pillow.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXI)

INSCAPE

In weird luminous deserts

grey shapes of fear

cast their surreal shadows

on the crucified silence

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXI) FOR ROSARIO .....

Spawned in dark primordial earth, Leda, our mother washed us in the sea my father hid behind a cloud; your father bound you fast to Italy. Darkened under different foreign suns, destiny still played with us you naked on a mud roof in Turkey, while I became drunken with the confused sunlight of Panama City. Travelling in my mind, as you moved through long dusty days in India, soft Mexican nights and the gold of California, we, meeting at last in London, recognised each other. Unique before I knew you, now you speak the language of my soul, my own soul’s brother, my friend, my other self, my brother Castor. Poor mortal Dioscuri, offering each other only our mortality had I the faith I would share your death, my eternity .....

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXII)

At nine o’clock, the sun, enormous and golden, emerged from clouds on the horizon, hung for a few moments like a great molten golden ball, then sunk out of sight behind the false horizon of steely grey cloud banks.

Something remained.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXIII)

There is a flower that blossoms only in darkness, only in caves or the darkest recesses of disused mines. No man has ever seen it. In the full light of day it withers, as it withers in the artificial light of torches or of miners’ lamps. Some say the merest glint of an eye destroys it utterly. Many have sensed it though; have felt its unseen presence in the darkness, in the deepest shafts of unseen labyrinths, stronger than life or death, its fat leaves and lush petals seeming to mock the light by which their unreal beauty can never be seen.

30 - June

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXII)

DOGDAYS

Once more July has taken its toll. On motorway verges the dry grasses turn yellow. Trees, a week ago in their summer prime, grow tired and sparse.

In Kensington Cemetery, half-glimpsed between thinning branches, the coloured slabs of flowers, still masking the new graves, wither and fade overnight.

As July ends all things seem to mount towards some great, romantic climax; each hour promises to bear witness to its own, unique,

never before permitted revelation. Then, in the stale twilight, we stagger from the pub, watch our piss froth like beer down ivied walls,

having drunk our farewell drink to the summer of promise which has ended, like all the others, enmeshed in forking branches and dead leaves.

Always the ribs show nearer the skin. In bed at night emaciated finger-tips play, ever closer, to the white ivories. Almost as if

one summer more could jerk away forever the whole, mad, complex machinery of flesh and blood emancipate, crustacean-like, the hidden bone.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXIII)

Ten past three and time, the old somnambulist, Nibbles another second from our life. The worm is in the bud, will not be still, Eating away the hours. Youth never was.

Death is the message carried in the sperm, Dangles in balls, spurts up the rigid prick, Swims through the scarlet sea of secret blood. Death is the double-helix. Fucking death.

Death is the God in whom we all believe, Death is the faith that can not let us down, Death is the absent guest who will not leave, Death is the summit that we all can climb, Death is the sleep with death its only dream, Death is the one success we all achieve.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXIV)

DEPARTURES

The ducks are leaving.

I heard them last night, honking outside my window in the darkness, answering a call of the blood.

Today I saw them, emblematic shadows in formation, moving formally across an emptied sky into an unanswerable sun.

It is September. The leaves are falling. The air is bright and chill. In branch and stem the living sap sinks slowly into winter; responds to the call of its vegetable roots.

When shall I answer the Call? South! South! No argument. No equivocation. To infuse myself fully: Into life. Into primal barbarity. Into the house of the sun.

Three young Australians invade the early morning tube to Ealing Broadway, gauche, noisy, with their yet-to-be sophisticated blood.

While the prim secretary sitting opposite, defined by her reading matter as a Latin tag defines a nursery flower, is by a postal district classified.

But in the dark eyes and coded features of the young South American who reads ‘El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba’,

Lineaments of an ancestral Spain project through the burning-glass of time a broken image of the future.

Eastbound, an inter-city thunders by. I stand my ground. My trousers whip against my thighs. My coat billows out behind. At my shoulders transient wings unfurled will dry and stiffen in the sun preparatory to flight.

Travelling west, picking up speed, leaving London’s postal codes behind us, the endless rows of terraces give way to parkland and cemetery.

There is only one departure: Between the bone-white marble slabs a fresh, raw grave gapes in the wounded earth.

Nobody stops at Hanwell.

We journey on. The twin ribbons of railway line unwind, merge always far in the deceiving distance, seem stronger than the strands of a spider’s web, silvery with promise in the sun.

EXEQUIES (XXXVII)

GIOVANNI’S SEARCH

Donna Anna is one thing: her prim, sterile virginity colder than her marble vulva and breasts.

Donna Elvira is quite another: her outrage magnificent, were it built upon a rock more worthy of honour.

Zerlina, however, is all woman: teasing, tender, her live hand in the Don’s eclipses a stonier grasp.

MYTHOLOGIES (XV)

That silence amid the pools of green shadow .....

That green silence ..... Those pools of green shadow .....

Surely the redbreast bled upon a thorn, his heart, pierced by such silence, had to sing .....

In pools of silence ..... In pools of green shadow .....

And the stones bled in the pools of green silence .....

The green moss clung to the dark earth, emerald green, feathery on the dark earth .....

Only the stones were singing in the green silence .....

And the redbreast, his heart pierced by the green silence, bled upon a stone .....

And the redbreast sung of the green silence, sung of his heart pierced by a thorn, sung of the stones in the pools of shadow, sung of the feathery moss on the dark earth .....

And the stones sang in the pools of green shadow, sang as the redbreast bled in the mossy silence, his heart pierced by the thorns of the dark earth .....

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXV)

Against the sun-washed red brick wall The shadow of a dove in flight Appears like an autumn sentinel

(Fugacious harbinger of night) Beyond the curtained window, Then disappeared into the night.

Closing my eyes it does not go, But on the now abandoned stage Within my head a vagrant shadow

Beats black wings across the page, Tracing the hieroglyphics that, If once deciphered, might assuage

The strangeness their appearance wrought. My pen, unwilling to translate Such unimaginable thought,

Must either falsify, or wait Upon a truth it can discern, Then verbalise and punctuate.

If truth were shadow I the sun would pin truth like a butterfly Against the page so everyone .....

But truths change even as they fly, Are lost in the encroaching night, Will lie as only snapshots lie

The moment lost is lost outright

The sun itself can never nail The shadow of the dove in flight Against the sun-washed red brick wall.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXVI)

L’IMPRÉVU

Death would surprise us by its unexpectedness had not each little death like a paralysis granted immunity.

So we must all share the unique and commonplace process of living where custom has squandered our last serendipity.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXVII)

Ending the breathless ride Reaching the riverside Scanning the waters wide Knowing the map has lied

Crossing without a guide Moving against the tide Feeling the saddle slide Sensing the horse has died

Breasting the current we Glimpse the dark symmetry Of this strange destiny

Head for the open sea Sniff our mortality Concede a victory

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXVIII) TRIPTYCH

I Those nymphs of S. Mallarmé, Did he dream them or did they, Flickering over the lawn Create their own sleeping faun, Who dreams a poet at work Dicing them out of the dark. II

Love bade me learn a poet’s trade, Educate an apprenticed heart, Yet would I play the soldier’s part, Lay bloody siege and ambuscade. Truth was the first to be betrayed, (Pity and tenderness apart) Storming that bastion of art With musket-ball and sabre blade.

Breaching the citadel at last My Muse had wet herself with fright, Was crouched in a corner, legs apart, Wanting only a fuck.

I obliged. Afterwards she cried. Told me how She never could love me. I tried To comfort her.

“Again. Now!” “Fuck me,” she cried,

III

Rilke was going steady The Muses stood appalled When they were good and ready His angelic voices called

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXIV)

THE DEATH OF OSCAR ROMERO

Stones the bread we take out of the ovens Doing this in memory of him Lead the iron entering our souls Parched now in the sunlight of unknowing

Spent beyond the bullet’s punctuation Doing this in memory of him Naked under the harsh stars at noon Parched now in the sunlight of unknowing

Could the cracked adobe of our hearts Doing this in memory of him Drink such dangerous unconsidered blood

Except his body cold as broken stones Parched now in the sunlight of unknowing Blaspheme the grammar of the injured earth

URBAN LANDSCAPES (XI)

ASILHOUETTE IN PARLIAMENT SQUARE ASHADOW IN WARDOUR STREET

A gardening lad hip slung to one side stripped to the waist at rest on a rake bronze in the evening sun his silhouette one with the statesmen and kings which history brings to stand with him there in Parliament Square.

A young working man striding along two planks of timber angled over one shoulder his shadow foreshortened on the noonday pavement like the Carpenter’s seems carrying those cross-beams to some Calvary meet in Wardour Street.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXV)

Brown hair the colours of soft fur and brothers we were together on the bus

If each hair is counted then no hair need ever be said to be finally lost inasmuch as the sparrow can never in falling make good its escape from His heavenly care And your hair clings so soft to the nape of a neck which is mine O my son as I sit here behind you aware

That my hair almost grey is the hair that was yours soft brown O my son as we were on that bus

The tawny soft locks light as air in the sun

While behind the cropped head and ruffled grey feathers that fall to the ground will be counted by One who suffers my son though only one hair on your head if it fell and failed to be counted should ever be lost

Brown hair the colours of soft fur and brothers we were together on the bus

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXIX)

INNERLICHKEIT

And there is a kitten inside me wandering through the empty house of my body vainly seeking its lost mother mouth stained with milk

And there is an eagle inside me stripping the meat from my flayed breastbone eyelids heavy with self-love blood on its beak

And there is a graveworm inside me lost in the windings of my testicles blind as their dark labyrinthine coils swallowing seminal progeny

And there is an angel inside me beautiful as the heavy petals of roses void in the space between ribs and stars that will not let me die

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXX)

Early the grey August light stirs us half-awake.

We lie delighted, not with the prospect of another day

but happy to be only half-awake and granted

these moments spent in each other’s company.

We are the lucky ones; the world outside a dangerous place

peopled by monsters out of our first faerie-book.

But, light filtering through these yellow curtains,

we are safe as children who have stumbled on a certain magic.

The alarm allows no safety in numbers.

Sensible we move about a house peopled by its outraged silence.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXVI)

THE BRACELET

Not even any rotting vegetation. Detritus only. Unrecognisable. The broken toys of a civilisation. Perhaps that was a car. That length of cable may have carried immense power at its core. Now, like so much around us, unusable. The city is dead. We squat like natives, score the dry earth half-heartedly with broken sticks. But there is no water. Scattered on the floor

of an abandoned shelter, in a district set apart, we find some odd pieces of bone, black, jagged. A skull. Through the interstices of the rib-cage, lying like a bleached hair-comb half-buried in the dust, something glittering among the debris. A chain. A silver chain, bright, delicate, still uselessly circling a bony wrist. I slip it in my pocket. On the cracked, dry bed of the river, walking a little behind the others, the bracelet burns my leg like a hot coal. I do not know why. Later, dropping my pants, where the bracelet has rubbed against my thigh, the grey skin is now red and raw. I do not know why. Do not care. I squat to shit. Nothing comes. A sudden row of black and white piano keys flash and flare in my mind. At twelve, after my first full day’s practice, sitting on the piano-stool where, my hands twined together, inchoate fingers throbbed one against the other like small heart-beats, alive as they had not been alive before.

Strange the tricks memory plays. The patch now beats on my thigh in the same way. Without fires, we huddle together close on the hard ground. The throbbing stars flame in the windless darkness. My heart beats and beats. The earth beats under me. My thigh burns. I thrust my hands in my pockets. The bracelet is there. Letting its filigree move gently between my fingers like lost beads, I lie awake. Alone, in silence, softly fondling the treasure, my chill fingers burn and beat, as they did first that day years ago at the piano-stool. My eyes fill with tears. Just before dawn, a stone sinking in a pond, I fall asleep. Soft and slow the dream appears out of the blackness. I am standing alone on a hill outside the city. It is night. The city, not this city but my childhood’s, stretches out below me and throbs with its life.

The motorways cross and recross like dew-drops on a vast glittering web. Bright beads of light emerge and lose themselves again. Everywhere man-marks glow and twinkle distantly. Buildings, bridges, palaces, monuments, thoroughfares, each illuminated in a warm golden light. Light. In every window light. Rectangles, squares, row upon row, cut into the darkness. A giant beehive humming with its promise. Waking, I am weak and sick. The others stand in clusters, awkward, at a distance, consult like doctors, nod their heads. They know the symptoms And leave me alone at last with my bracelet.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXI)

alone in

the dark -ness at the end

of the world (hearing the branches shake

in the night wind outside) towards early morning

looking down (into the cold void) at the street-lamp still burning

(having frittered away our inherited strength without parsimony)

living on in an empty crumbling red-brick terrace (circa eighteen eighty-eight)

on the top floor of a decayed house in Chelsea (all the other floors vacated in the nearly

two-and-a-half years since we moved in) why do I feel history at last catching up with us (or is it us

catching up at last with history) the Victoria and Albert Museum is floodlit at night against a black sky

clearly visible from the now curtainless back window of the living room in which we sit (by the fire) around the meal table

(returned from theatre or concert or opera) tired (having mounted the eighty-seven steps) but grateful to be home and dry (eating dinner)

and happy now as angels on the head of a pin

we (the four of us still together) linger on and discuss the evening (in a desultory kind of way) the big house (silent) surrounding us

its Victorian and Edwardian ghosts listening outside in the dark passageways (passing back and forth as our conversation

falls and rises) then disappearing in the night (wherein every human voice must be lost) the long night of history

and I am haunted by a vision deeper than this night (the V. and A. having just switched off) a vision of

our own brief historicity the four of us (on the top floor now) with nowhere to go but out

into the night sky into darkness and death (into this eternity of angels)

where we shall relive (a blinding flash) nothing save this dance along the edge

of (ah my dears) our dance along the (what) edge of the abyss

know (forever alone at the end) only this

last refuge (our last sanc -tuary)

and (more so than ever

be -fore) be

URBAN LANDSCAPES (XII)

THE CHESTNUT SELLERS

1

The chestnut sellers, early this year, stand guard on every corner; muffled in overcoats, braziers aglow, springing up overnight, fully armed, from the pavement.

2

Chestnut seller! Tell me your name. Your breath stains the sunny air of late October. Are you merely winter’s harbinger, or do you fulfil a darker, more sinister purpose?

3

“Why question me? I look at you and have the eyes of Rembrandt’s eighty-three year old woman. You do not ask her painted surface why. In the quiet of the gallery you accept what I am.”

4

Chestnut seller! Shuffling by your brazier; awaiting the next customer with hungry eyes. Your chestnuts emit only the ghost of their winter fragrance.

5

“Look closely! Look! The embers glow like hellfire. The chestnuts blacken and split. In each fissure, floury, sweet, see Shelley’s brain exposed upon that memorable beach.”

6

Chestnut seller! Bodies burn and crack, skulls contain, perhaps, only the kernels of dead thoughts. Yet cannibals devour the brain, hoping to gain the dead man’s qualities.

7

“Look again! Look! Ask yourself: can any fugitive thought leap heavenward from the chestnut’s dead white flesh? The hammer-blows demolishing its frail, protective shell, did any of Joe Orton remain?”

8

Chestnut seller! Must the skull crack either from God’s heat or Love’s hammer? Must we squander dead cells to oblivion, offer the spirit Incarnate for a transient, empty glory?

9

“Enough! Know even of hell there is no certainty. The chestnuts are ready. Let the flavour of their warm flesh, like Christ’s Body in your mouth, be part of you forever. Come! Buy! Eat!”

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXII)

the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick of the clock is close to madness

the deep breathing of the dead closer still

the darkness

of God is very close to the darkness of mere oblivion

and I am close to death to madness

to the dead breathing in the darkness of mere oblivion

to God

‘s

ticking clock

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXIII)

LEAVING

The doves, returning tonight, have come to say goodbye: wings delicate grey, collared in pure white, they fly to the branch of their familiar tree, perch side by side, so much at ease in each other’s company that I must stand by (for the last time perhaps) and watch in the windless dusk how, still as china ornaments, they fade, become one with the unanimous twilight.

Pluck the live hairs from the protesting chin, still the dark beard grows white, (to match every black hair a grey): nothing can keep at bay the encroaching night.

EXEQUIES (XXXVIII) - ARTISTS (vii)

KEATS DYING

Admittedly dying cannot be very pleasant -

still a sudden shock with eyes wide in surprise

preferable to these interminable Rome days -

no comfort save my comforting of Severn.

If I could believe in Heaven but no,

it is better so, coughing these red roses on the pillow.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXIV)

COCKTAIL HOUR

The smoke-grey glass cocktail-shaker is shattered now past repair.

Fifteen years in secure tea-chest darkness it rested

safe among spiders. Used once almost daily, redolent of gin

and vermouth; but that was in another country, before the long

dark hiatus. Six months in our cosy new home -

translated carefully, put on a shelf out of harm’s way -

twice more to be brought out, to stand frosted with ice

at the festal dinner-table twice more to mark off

the passing of the years. Now splintered jagged sides

curve up into nothingness, trace the unbroken shape:

a crumbling perimeter of roofless half-demolished walls

that still defines a ruined building once containing life.

Civilisations rise and fall. Love is fragile. We are all glass.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXV) WHOLENESS

This is how it is: a fine powdery sugar sifting down upon the ground almond meal, the plump yellow yolks plopped from one half-shell into the other, bound together with love, become one homogenous marzipan miracle, while the light sifts down, as in some Flemish painting, upon your bare arms, and your head, inclined in an intensity of concentration.

3 - January - 1982

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXVI)

8 - MAY - 1982

1

Sandra, now we know The worst that life can hold, The world and all its show Can never, as of old Dazzle us, although A thousand lies are told To suffering mankind: Seeing a glimpse of blue We know the good and true; Can never more be blind.

2 Sandra, in our heart The sun can never set: That which has no start Can have no finish - Yet Ducks upon the stream We sing our last song twice, Knowing all we have seen Prefigures loaded dice, Knowing what we have been Predicts a Paradise.

3 Sandra, we have seen What no one else can see; Sandra, we have been, You and Breck and me, Living in an age Of miracles on earth, And now no more should rage And weeping pray for death Than in his golden cage The singing bird should curse.

4 Sandra, we step out Into the sky at night, Sensing all about Things that will catch the light When morning comes to pace Across the London miles, Where sunlit wing-tips trace Their hieroglyphic smiles, And golden martyrs grace The steeple of St. Giles.

EXEQUIES (XXXIX)

CANCER PATIENT

The television documentary film will be here long after he is gone.

He is scarcely more than a boy

yet haggard, unshaven,

(his face contorted with a pain that will cease only when he ceases)

does not mind this record of suffering being his sole posterity;

does not mind the watchers at home

(even in some unimaginable future where he is not)

seeing the tears spring to his eyes as his tumorous legs are probed and tested;

does not even mind the impassive lens, depthless as the Eye of God:

minds though to cup both hands over his crotch,

clasping the sheets,

holding this last vestigial scrap of modesty

(the insignificant exposure of a common manhood)

to be of an importance with his life.

While at home we smile, involuntarily perhaps, of a sudden glimpsing only what is ours;

even as we glimpse

(in his eyes sudden depthlessness)

the ultimate exposure which will be ours yet.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXVII)

Happy as we were, Death, the uninvited Guest, was always present;

Now has come and done Only his worst to us, And at last departed.

What was once a fear Become a certain hope: That at least is something.

Death cannot win: Can take a trick or two; The whole Game never.

We hold the winning Card Once, twice, perhaps; Misunderstand the signals.

God has all the Trumps, Plays them as He wills, His Hand always hidden.

But progress is slow: Hard as the acceptance Of our own offences.

I could not love you more Unless my soul had been Of a finer substance:

Could not recognise The things I sought alone Which were in you always.

We were one my love, Of one being and substance, Till, by God divided,

Searching in my self, Finding only dust, The Breath of Life departed,

I knew the Soul as yours: Pray that it rising teach My dust-blind spirit love.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXVII)

Always awake, Ever at rest, Sleep, my love, In Jesus Christ.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXVIII)

“Only in this can the darkness be averted ------”

Half a lifetime. Spent! In love with. The Idea. Of Art? Of being an artist. Extracting the gold from the baser metal. Futile attempts. Frantic inopportune efforts. To stop the clock. Freeze the fluid moment. Lend ‘significance’. Spurious. In the end. The only true significance. Not earned. Only ever shown. Always freely given.

Having played too long. In the labyrinth. Of creation? Pursuing the ‘Ideal’. Forgetting. At length. That the Game. Even if cornered. Or won. Still fatally flawed. Half-beast. Fool’s gold! Always.

All sight lost. Through long habit. Of mind? Fake quality. Of the whole process. Always. Fine fragments of irritant. Deliberately introduced. Chastely meticulous stimulation. Layer upon layer. Coating. Covering. Building. The small pearls of culture. Produced! Smooth. Comfortable. At regular intervals. Immortal diamond ‘immortalised’. Become carbon dust. And the horror of forgetting. That the immortality always sought for. Was never to be found there. But only. Ever. Elsewhere.

Confronted now. At last! Mutability of all flesh. True grit. At last! Working its way into. The so secure shell. Sharp. Embedded deep. Flesh forced to react. At last! Truthfully. Secrete. The real thing. The true pearl. Alone able to make the pain. Bearable? For a lifetime. Not any mere crafted artifice expelled from the body ascetic. However worthy. But forced to admit. At last! Only. Always. Everything. The whole of a lifetime. Given! Nothing less. Ever. Even vaguely consonant with. This precious pain. That perfect love.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXVIII)

THEAPOTHEOSIS OF POLYPHEMUS

The great Sicilian giant thunders still. The empty crater of his liquid eye Flashed fire once; stones that would terrify Lie scattered, pumice-like, too light to kill.

That he loves her, she Acis, the gods will: The hot hard lust no flesh could satisfy Erupting streams of lava, streams that dry And crust upon the belly of the hill.

She loves her Polyphemus now, and loves His ready roughness, blindly, as he loved; In Acis’ blood his wounded brow she laves.

Poseidon lounges on his bed of pearls, The Tritons blast, their lips to nacreous shells, And nymphs and nereids leap amid the waves.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XXXIX)

LAULTIMACÉNA

I remember hardly at all. I remember, of course, the Bread and Wine, the transubstantiation: He made sure we remembered that. But of the meal itself, oddly enough, I can remember almost nothing. There was fish, most probably, meat, no doubt. But these I do not recall. After the meal, though, in the garden, just before we slept, one thing sticks in my mind which no one else saw fit to record: The cheese and bread He asked us to share with Him, before the long ordeal, an offer I quite harshly declined, having, as I then thought, other more important things to hand. John, of course, joined Him; could refuse Our Lord nothing. AS did the others. I alone stood aloof, thinking food no fit subject for a time like this, with great events imminent. I can still recall His look, His acceptance of my refusal, knowing now my pettiness and spite part of His preparation, making smooth a path for the greater betrayal to come.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXIX)

FOR GUY

To rack and ruin his dreams all come the state and crown with him have done

his bowels unwound his vitals gone his manhood’s emblem taken down

the people warned the traitor hung a straw-stuffed clown at once become

a ragged icon of the Son to his Father’s home safe returned

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XL)

ASHAND SNOW

The children’s voices fade away behind me. Silence confirms this. My footsteps echo on the path. My feet follow each other like slightly disobedient children.

My soul is disobedient too, blooms unexpectedly between rocks, puts forth green tendrils. Honeysuckle soon will send its sickly odour out into the world.

Strange this world. Another rather perhaps. But in another we would find the snow. We had another here not long ago; A world of snow where footsteps crossed, recrossed,

followed each other disobediently. We do not need a cross of ash to tell us that we are dust. Children confirm this. Snow confirms it. My echoing footsteps too.

EXEQUIES (XL)

A flurry on the grass and he is gone. A moment earlier, later, and the green would have seemed undisturbed. No tragic action disturbs it now. Even the birds return,

after a moment's strange silence, to feed where the event occurred, accepting it all nonchalantly, their pointed beaks jabbing, searching along the grassy sward for worms.

Why can I not accept? This sunny peace a stage for tragic action, seems all wrong. I on my way to the supermarket to buy the meat to eat to keep alive.

My blackest fears confirmed I travel on, cultivating still a stupid hope, while he a glimpse of predatory beak, brown feathers, soars squawking above terrified shrill cries.

AUTOBIOGRAPHIES (XLI) CHANGINGAT SCHOOL

The little chap was quite erect under his shirt-tails; a bully, with his sharp eye, did not neglect to rag him unmercifully: “Hey, look at Stewart’s, everyone! Have you ever seen one like his!” The other boys, easily egged on to obscenity, jeered at this. He felt his face grow scarlet, hot, felt his balls become tight and scared. He tried to hide himself, could not; they plucked at his shirt-tails and stared. His clothes were snatched, a shoe, a sock, his pants were flourished, hoisted high: Reaching up, exposing his cock, the boys gave a whoop and a cry. Between the ink-stained desks his shorts he scampered after, but in vain: A boy called Prince, a prince at sports, caught them, laughing, and passed them on. The more he chased, the more it swung and bounced, from his shirt protruded; sexual shame and pride in one left his very soul denuded. “Quick! Sir’s coming!” When Sir came in all was quiet; his pants returned and quickly pulled on, covered him, although his bulging prick still burned. And all this was in forty-nine, when he was ten, or little more; and yet the thing sticks in the mind of an old chap of fifty-four.

EXEQUIES (XLI)

BLACKPOOL PIETÁ

His body was found on the beach in the early morning.

Gulls were crying. There was only the sound of the sea.

He was naked. Badly beaten. Eight of his ribs were broken.

There were bite-marks on the body. And severe head injuries.

He was twenty-four years old. The cause of death had been drowning.

His bloodstained jeans and boxer shorts were discovered nearby.

There was no shirt. He was a single man who lived alone.

Mary took his body into her arms like her Son’s.

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXX)

BETWEENASCENSION DAYAND PENTECOST

WAITING: FOR JACKIE

Absence here Is presence elsewhere Presence here Is absence there

Presence there Is absence nowhere Absence nowhere Presence here

Presence lost Is absence given Presence in An upper room

Absence presence Presence in the Absence of An empty tomb

TRANSFIGURATIONS (XXXI)

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

(“Report from Wenceslas Square” by Jiri Myš)

I am. Therefore I think. I do not think long or deeply. The effort is too great. And I have other things on my mind. I have to have all my wits about me just to survive. But I do survive. Therefore I am. I think.

I have been here long. I do not know how long. Time seems to have got away from me. I lose count of the days. And the years. When I was young my elders and betters would say to me: “Just you wait, Jiri, until you are our age. Then you will know that life is a serious business. Then you will think like we do.” But I have waited. And I am their age. And they are all dead. And my contemporaries have all grown old around me. And they all tell me that life is a serious business. But I do not know. And I do not know if I think like they do, or did. Because I do not know how they think.

Nothing ever changes. Everything changes around me but nothing changes really. Only the surface of things. All my friends and companions, my contemporaries as I have called them, say to me: “If you were married, Jiri, like we are, with children to bring up, you would realise that life is a serious business, you would understand the changes that are going on around us. You would know what a terrible world we are living in.” But I do not know. All I do know is that change is the only constant in life. Therefore nothing changes. And the world has always been terrible.

Once I had to avoid tanks. Now I have to avoid the high heels of the ladies of the night. Pardon my reticence. My contemporaries all call them prostitutes or whores. But I do not like such terms. As they are ladies and they come out at night, I can think of them in no other way. But I do not think about them long or deeply. The effort is too great. And to me their heels are as lethal as the tracks of the tanks or the boots of the soldiers.

I own nothing. Only a silver coin I found one night on the cobbles near the centre of the square. I do not know why I kept it. Why I dragged it back laboriously to my home. It means nothing to me. I do not understand the hieroglyphs engraved on either side. I do not understand the eleven planed edges. But it pleases me. My contemporaries all say: “Jiri, why keep it. It is useless. Only takes up room.” But I hold my peace. I hold my piece. Because I found it near the spot where he died.

And because it sparkles in the fire like his eyes.

I said I found it near the spot where he died. This is not quite accurate. He died three days later in the hospital. But I try not to think too long or deeply about that. I like to think he dropped it as he ran flaming through the night. The night his day had become. Perhaps that is why I keep it. I do not know. There are so many imponderables. My contemporaries no doubt would all tell me: “Jiri, he could not possibly have dropped it. Years have passed since he died. This is a new world. Time has got away from you. You have lost count of the days. And the years.” This may well be so. But still I like to think that he dropped it. As I watch it sparkling safe in my lair. Because how can his dark flame of suffering ever be of the past. How can his blistering body ever not be now.

But for now I have to have all my wits about me just to survive. A morsel of food waits near the heel of an old man two ladies of the night are arguing over. They will soon tire. And then my time will have come. I will scamper out, eyes alight, and bring it back here to my nest. Then I shall feast. I shall eat the flesh of my burning boy. And I shall live.

EXEQUIES (XLII)

I crouch beside your body clutching your cold hand, letting stiffened fingers impart to my supple ones the comfort death brings. Yet supine you still lie

in the warm summer twilight as you lay once under snow. Why do you thaw by your long hibernation this winter of mine? At your side I can feel

how very easy it is, my Belgian brother, to sleep under the stars feeling nothing but a hand which presses your own. Do you perhaps wonder

why a poor mortal creature seeks to comfort you, who are beyond comfort? Why he seeks comfort himself? O my dead soldier, my verviétoise friend,

Bouzou sleeps in his music as you sleep in bronze, far from all battlefields, and by a sleep reminds us that it is not very hard just being dead.

- Returning in high summer to revisit the war memorial at Verviers after hearing Lekeu’s violin sonata the previous evening. -