Selected Poems Read online

  own flower on his lips

  can keep that tone as light as breath

  beneath his fingertips.

  Though its reflection starts to swim

  before your failing sight:

  know the image.

  Only in the double realm

  is the voice both infinite

  and assuaged.

  Horseman

  Look at the sky: is there no constellation

  called The Horseman? Because this is our song –

  a beast’s will, and some higher distillation

  steering and braking as it’s borne along.

  Isn’t this just our sinewy existence,

  spurring ourselves on, reining ourselves back in?

  Track and turning; then one touch – a new distance

  opens up, and the two are one again.

  But is that true? Don’t they just signify

  the road they take together? As it is,

  they’re sundered by the table and the trough.

  Even their starry union is a lie.

  For now, we can do nothing but insist

  we read it there. And maybe that’s enough.

  Taste

  Gooseberry, banana, pear

  and apple, all the ripenesses …

  Read it in the child’s face:

  the life-and-death the tongue hears

  as she eats … This comes from far away.

  What is happening to your mouth?

  Where there were words, discovery

  flows, all shocked out of the pith –

  What we call apple … Do you dare

  give it a name? This sweet-sharp fire

  rising in the taste, to grow

  clarified, awake, twin-sensed,

  of the sun and earth, the here and the now –

  the sensual joy, the whole Immense!

  The Dead

  Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom.

  Though they speak with more than just the season’s tongue –

  the colours that they blaze from the dark loam

  all have something of the jealous tang

  of the dead about them. What do we know of their part

  in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,

  invigorators of the soil – oiling the dirt

  so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?

  But here’s the question: are the flower and fruit

  held out to us in love, or merely thrust

  up at us, their masters, like a fist?

  Or are they the lords, asleep amongst the roots,

  granting to us in their great largesse

  this hybrid thing – part brute force, part mute kiss?

  Dog

  My dumb friend … You are so alone

  because of us, each word and sign

  we use to make this world our own –

  the fraction that we should decline.

  But can we point towards a scent?

  You know the powers that threaten us.

  You bark out when the dead are present;

  you shrink back from the spell and curse.

  These broken views we must pretend

  form the whole and not the part.

  Helping you will be difficult

  and never plant me in your heart –

  I’d grow too fast. But I’d guide his hand,

  saying: Here. This is Esau in his pelt.

  Horse

  What shall I offer you, lord, what homage,

  who gave the creatures their ear?

  I remember one Spring, in Russia …

  It was evening, and at the first star

  a white horse

  crossed the village square, one fetlock hobbled

  for a night alone in the field …

  And how his ticking mane exactly followed

  his great heart, its high-swung

  drumbeat – cantering as if that crude shackle

  did not exist … How the fountains of his blood

  leapt! That horse knew the distances – how he sang,

  and listened! Your myth-cycle

  was closed in him. I’ll dedicate his image.

  The Race

  Man is the driver.

  But time and speed

  in the weave of forever

  are twists in a thread:

  what races or flies

  is already over.

  We’re already baptised

  in the endless river.

  So boys, don’t waste

  your courage on time-

  trials, or test-flights –

  all these are at rest:

  darkness and light;

  the book and the bloom.

  Breath

  Breath, you invisible poem –

  pure exchange, sister to silence,

  being and its counterbalance,

  rhythm wherein I become,

  ocean I accumulate

  by stealth, by the same slow wave;

  thriftiest of seas … Thief

  of the whole cosmos! What estates,

  what vast spaces have already poured

  through my lungs? The four winds

  are like daughters to me.

  So do you know me, air, that once sailed through me?

  You, that were once the leaf and rind

  of my every word?

  Anemone

  In the meadow the anemone

  is creaking open to the dawn.

  By noon, the sky’s polyphony

  will flood her white lap till she drowns.

  The tiny muscle in her star

  is tensed to open to the All,

  yet the daylight’s blast so deafens her

  she barely heeds the sunset’s call

  or finds the willpower to refurl

  her petal-edges – her, the power

  and will of how many other worlds!

  In our violence, we outlive her.

  But which new life will see us flower

  and face the skies, as true receivers?

  The Ball

  What happened to that little brotherhood,

  lords of the scattered gardens of the city?

  We were all so shy, I never understood

  how we hooked up in the first place; like the lamb

  with the scroll that spoke, we too spoke in silence.

  It seemed when we were happy it was no one’s;

  whose ball was it? In all the anxiety

  of that last summer, it melted in the scrum:

  the street leaned like a stage-set, the traffic

  rolled around us, like huge toys; nobody

  knew us. What was real in that All?

  Nothing. Just the ball. Its glorious arc.

  Not even the kids … But sometimes one, already

  fading, stepped below it as it fell.

  The Passing

  Be ahead of all departure; learn to act

  as if, like the last winter, it was all over.

  For among the winters, one is so exact

  that wintering it, your heart will last for ever.

  Die, die through Eurydice – that you might pass

  into the pure accord, praising the more, singing

  the more; amongst the waning, be the glass

  that shatters in the sound of its own ringing.

  Be; and at the same time know the state

  of non-being, the boundless inner sky,

  that this time you might fully honour it.

  Take all of nature, its one vast aggregate –

  jubilantly multiply it by

  the nothing of yourself, and clear the slate.

  The Flowers

  Consider the flowers: true only to the earth

  yet we lend them a fate, from the borders of fate,

  and supervise their fadings, their little deaths.

  How right that we should author their regret:

  everything rises – and yet we trudge along,


  laying our heavy selves upon the world.

  What wearisome teachers we are for things!

  While the Earth dreams on in its eternal childhood.

  But if someone took them into infinite sleep,

  lay down with them … how lightly he would waken

  to the different day, out of the common deep –

  or perhaps he’d stay: stay until they weakened

  and took him in as one of their own kind,

  a meadow-brother, a breath inside the wind.

  The Drinking Fountain

  O tireless giver, holy cataract,

  conductor of the inexhaustible One –

  your clear tongue, lifting through the mask of stone

  you hold before your face … Behind you, aqueducts

  vanish into the distance. From the Apennine

  foothills, through the wheat fields and the graveyards,

  they bear the sacred utterance, the words

  that arrive for ever, blackening your chin

  to fall into the basin that lies rapt

  to your constant murmur, like a sleeping ear.

  Marmoreal circumstance. Listening rock.

  An ear of Earth’s, so she only really talks

  to herself. So when we’re filling up our pitcher,

  it feels to her that someone interrupts.

  The Cry

  The call of one lone bird can make us cry –

  whatever sounds just once, then dies away.

  But listen: beyond the mere sound of their play,

  those yelling kids beneath the open sky –

  they cry the chance! They hammer every scream

  like a wedge into the black interstices

  of the world – those cracks where only the bird-cries

  can pass clean through, the way men do in dreams.

  O, where are we now? Freer and freer,

  like kites torn from their lines, we loop and race

  in the middle air … Our tattered hems snicker

  like lunatics … O lord, make one great choir

  of all the criers, so they wake as one voice,

  one current, carrying both the head and lyre!

  Time

  Is there really such thing as time-the-destroyer?

  When will it shatter the tower on the rock?

  When will that low demiurge overpower

  this heart, that runs only to heaven’s clock?

  Are we really so fragile, so easily broken

  as fate wants to prove us, or have us believe?

  Is the infinite life that our childhood awakened

  torn up by the roots, and then thrown in the grave?

  Look how the ghosts of impermanence slide

  straight through the mind of the open receiver

  again and again, like smoke through a tree.

  Among the Eternal – wherein we reside

  as that which we truly are, the urgent, the strivers –

  we still count; as their means, as their Earth-agency.

  Being

  Silent comrade of the distances,

  Know that space dilates with your own breath;

  ring out, as a bell into the Earth

  from the dark rafters of its own high place –

  then watch what feeds on you grow strong again.

  Learn the transformations through and through:

  what in your life has most tormented you?

  If the water’s sour, turn it into wine.

  Our senses cannot fathom this night, so

  be the meaning of their strange encounter;

  at their crossing, be the radiant centre.

  And should the world itself forget your name

  say this to the still earth: I flow.

  Say this to the quick stream: I am.

  from

  RAIN

  Two Trees

  One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed

  with one idea rooted in his head:

  to graft his orange to his lemon tree.

  It took him the whole day to work them free,

  lay open their sides, and lash them tight.

  For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright

  they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared

  two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years

  the limbs would get themselves so tangled up

  each bough looked like it gave a double crop,

  and not one kid in the village didn’t know

  the magic tree in Miguel’s patio.

  The man who bought the house had had no dream

  so who can say what dark malicious whim

  led him to take his axe and split the bole

  along its fused seam, then dig two holes.

  And no, they did not die from solitude;

  nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;

  nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring

  for those four yards that lost them everything,

  as each strained on its shackled root to face

  the other’s empty, intricate embrace.

  They were trees, and trees don’t weep or ache or shout.

  And trees are all this poem is about.

  The Error

  As the bird is to the air

  and the whale is to the sea

  so man is to his dream.

  His world is just the glare

  of the world’s utility

  returned by his eye-beam.

  Each self-reflecting mind

  is in this manner destined

  to forget its element,

  and this is why we find

  however deep we listen

  that the skies are silent.

  The Swing

  The swing was picked up for the boys,

  for the here-and-here-to-stay

  and only she knew why it was

  I dug so solemnly

  I spread the feet two yards apart

  and hammered down the pegs

  filled up the holes and stamped the dirt

  around its skinny legs

  I hung the rope up in the air

  and fixed the yellow seat

  then stood back that I might admire

  my handiwork complete

  and saw within its frail trapeze

  the child that would not come

  of what we knew had two more days

  before we sent it home

  I know that there is nothing here

  no venue and no host

  but the honest fulcrum of the hour

  that engineers our ghost

  the bright sweep of its radar-arc

  is all the human dream

  handing us from dark to dark

  like a rope over a stream

  But for all the coldness of my creed

  for all those I denied

  for all the others she had freed

  like arrows from her side

  for all the child was barely here

  and for all that we were over

  I could not weigh the ghosts we are

  against those we deliver

  I gave the empty seat a push

  and nothing made a sound

  and swung between two skies to brush

  her feet upon the ground

  Why Do You Stay Up So Late?

  for Russ

  I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:

  remember that day you lost two years ago

  at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweller

  with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?

  Most of them went dark and nothing more,

  but sometimes one would blink the secret colour

  it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.

  This is how you knew the ones to keep.

  So I collect the dull things of the day

  in which I see some possibility

  but which are dead and which have the surprise

  I don’t kno
w, and I’ve no pool to help me tell –

  so I look at them and look at them until

  one thing makes a mirror in my eyes

  then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.

  This is why I sit up through the night.

  The Circle

  for Jamie

  My boy is painting outer space,

  and steadies his brush-tip to trace

  the comets, planets, moon and sun

  and all the circuitry they run

  in one great heavenly design.

  But when he tries to close the line

  he draws around his upturned cup,

  his hand shakes, and he screws it up.

  The shake’s as old as he is, all

  (thank god) his body can recall

  of that hour when, one inch from home,

  we couldn’t get the air to him;

  and though today he’s all the earth

  and sky for breathing-space and breath

  the whole damn troposphere can’t cure

  the flutter in his signature.