The simplified orderings of sky-lorded perspectives

Above the Oxbow

Here in this valley of discreet academies
We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks

To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,

Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.

Still, they're our best mustering of height: by

Comparison with the sunken silver-grizzled

Back of the Connecticut, the river-level

Flats of Hadley farms, they're lofty enough

Elevations to be called something more than hills.

Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine

Against our sky: they are what we look southward to

Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes

Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,

They mound a summer coolness in our view.

To people who live in the bottom of valleys

A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks

To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic

In going up for the coming down if the post

We start at's the same post we finish by,

But it's the clear conversion at the top can hold

Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful

Wish for even ground, and it's the last cliff

Ledge will dislodge our cramped concept of space, unwall

Horizons beyond vision, spill vision

After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye

To full capacity. We climb in hopes

Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,

Blinded by green, under a green-grained sky

Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places

Where nothing higher's to be looked to. Downward looks

Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track

Of the air eddies' loop and arc through air's at rest

To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high

Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled

Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle

Four-way veranda, view-keeping above

The fallen timbers of its once remarkable

Funicular railway, witness to gone

Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-

Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes

Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.

A ruddy skylight paints the gray oxbow

And paints the river's pale circumfluent stillness

As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux

Of the desultory currents -- all that unique

Stipple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost

In the simplified orderings of sky-

Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled

By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all

Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave

Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll

Straightforwardly across the springing green.

All's peace and discipline down there. Till lately we

Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops

And never saw how coolly we might move. For once

A high hush quietens the crickets' cry.

-- Sylvia Plath

Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker

They called the place Lookout Farm.

                                                            Back then, the sun

Didn't go down in such a hurry. How it

Lit things, that lamp of the Possible!

                                                           Wet yet

Lay over the leaves like a clear cellophane,

A pane of dragonfly wing, when they left me

With a hundred bushel baskets on the edge

Of the spinach patch.

                                    Bunch after bunch of green

Upstanding spinach-tips wedged in a circle --

Layer on layer, and you had a basket

Irreproachable as any lettuce head,

Pure leafage. A hundred baskets by day's end.

Sun and sky mirrored the green of the spinach.

In the tin paul shaded by yellow paper

Well-water kept cool at the start of the rows.

The water had an iron taste, and the air,

Even, a tang of metal.

                                    Day in, day out,

I bent over the plants in my leather-kneed

Dungarees, proud as a lady in a sea

Of prize roses, culling the fullest florets;

My world pyramided with laden baskets.

I'd only set one foot in wilderness --

A whole sea of spinach-heads leaned to my hand.

-- Sylvia Plath

Poems, Potatoes

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line

Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous

In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,

Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,

Given an inch. Not that they're gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter

To delicacy, to poise) but that they

Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.

Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato

Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly

Superior page; the blunt stone also.

-- Sylvia Plath

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

A Sestina for the Douanier

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you

Came to be lying on this baroque couch

Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye

Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,

Set in an intricate wilderness of green

Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies,

It seems the consistent critics wanted you

To choose between your world of jungle green

And the fashionable monde of the red couch

With its prim bric-a-brac, without a moon

To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye

And body whiter than its frill of lilies:

They'd have had yellow silk screening the moon,

Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you

Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch

Stood stubborn in its jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,

The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.

So Roussau, to explain why the red couch

Persisted in the picture with the lilies,

Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,

And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon

On a red velvet couch within your green-

Tessellated boudoir. Hearing flutes, you

Dreamed yourself away in the moon's eye

To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies

Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch

Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon

And the snakecharmer's song and the gigantic lilies,

Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.

But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye

So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch

To feed his eye with red: such red! under the moon,

In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!

-- Sylvia Plath

Here is Rousseau's painting, The Dream. 

How best beauty's born of hardihood

Mayflower

Throughout black winter the red haws withstood
Assault of snow-flawed winds from the dour skies

And, bright as blood-drops, proved no brave branch dies

If root's firm-fixed and resolution good.

Now, as green sap ascends the steepled wood,

Each hedge with such white bloom astounds our eyes

As sprang from Joseph's rod, and testifies

How best beauty's born of hardihood.

So when staunch island stock chose forfeiture

Of the homeland hearth to plough their pilgrim way

Across Atlantic furrows, dark, unsure --

Remembering the white, triumphant spray

On hawthorn boughs, with goodwill to endure

They named their ship after the flower of May.

-- Sylvia Plath

Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident

To set the sight on fire

In my eye, nor seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,

Occasionally, some backtalk

From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:

A certain minor light may still

Leap incandescent

Out of a kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,

One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

Wary (for it could happen

Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,

Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare

Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine

As to seize my senses, haul

My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality. With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

Of fatigue, I shall

Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,

The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.

-- Sylvia Plath

Prospect

Among orange-tile rooftops

    and chimney pots

the fen fog slips,

    gray as rats,

while on spotted branch

    of the sycamore

two black rooks hunch

    and darkly glare,

watching for night

    with absinthe eye

cocked on the lone, late,

    passer-by.

-- Sylvia Plath

Southern Sunrise

Color of lemon, mango, peach,

These storybook villas

Still dream behind

Shutters, their balconies

Fine as hand-

Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen sketch.

Tilting with the winds,

On arrowy stems,

Pineapple-barked,

A green crescent of palms

Sends up its forked

Firework of fronds.

A quartz-clear dawn

Inch by bright inch

Gilds all our Avenue,

And out of the blue drench

Of Angels' Bay

Rises the round red watermelon sun.

-- Sylvia Plath

Fiesta Melons

In Benidorm there are melons,
Whole donkey-carts full

Of innumerable melons,

Ovals and balls,

Bright green and thumpable

Laced over with stripes

Of turtle-dark green.

Choose an egg-shape, a world-shape,

Bowl one homeward to taste

In the whitehot noon:

Cream-smooth honeydews,

Pink-pulped whoppers,

Bump-rinded cantaloupes

With orange cores.

Each wedge wears a studding

Of blanched seeds or black seeds

To strew like confetti

Under the feet of

This market of melon-eating

Fiesta-goers.

-- Sylvia Plath

Teach the free man how to praise

In Memory of W. B. Yeats
    (d. Jan 1939)

    1

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

O all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness

The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,

the peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;

By mourning tongues

The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,

An afternoon of nurses and rumours;

The province of his body revolted ,

The squares of his mind were empty,

Silence invaded the suburbs,

The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities

And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections;

To find his happiness in another kind of wood

And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.

The words of a dead man

Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the 

                                                                            Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly 

                                                                        accustomed,

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his

                                                                         freedom;

A few thousand will think of this day

As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly

                                                                          unusal.

O all the instruments agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

    2

You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its saying where executives

Would never want to tamper; it flows south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

    3

Earth, receive an honoured guest;

William Yeats is laid to rest:

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

Time that is intolerant

Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week

To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives

Everyone by whom it lives;

Pardons cowardice, conceit,

Lays its honous at their feer.

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well.

In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace

Stares from every human face,

And the seas of pity lie

Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse

Make a vineyard of the curse,

Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.

-- W. H. Auden

Atlantis

Being set of the idea

    Of getting to Atlantis,

You have discovered of course

    Only the Ship of Fools is

Making the voyage this year,

As gales of abnormal force

    Are predicted, and that you

    Must therefore be ready to

Behave absurdly enough

    To pass for one of The Boys,

At least appearing to love

    Hard liquor, horseplay and noise.

Should storms, as may well happen,

    Drive you to anchor a week

In some old harbour-city

    Of Ionia, then speak

With her witty scholars, men

Who have proved there cannot be

    Such a place as Atlantis:

    Learn their logic, but notice

How their subtlety betrays

    A simple enormous grief;

Thus they shall teach you the ways

    To doubt that you may believe.

If, later, you run aground

    Among the headlands of Thrace

Where with torches all night long

    A naked barbaric race

Leaps frenzied to the sound

Of conch and dissonant gong;

    On that stony savage shore

    Strip off your clothes and dance, for

Unless you are capable

    Of forgetting completely

About Atlantis, you will

    Never finish your journey.

Again, should you come to gay

    Carthage or Corinth, take part

In their endless gaiety;

    And if in some bar a tart,

As she strokes your hair, should say

'This is Atlantis, dearie,'

    Listen with attentiveness

    To her life-story: unless

You become acquainted now

    With each refuge that tries to

Counterfeit Atlantis, how

    Will you recognize the true?

Assuming you beach at last

    Near Atlantis, and begin

The terrible trek inland

    Through squalid woods and frozen

Tundras where all are soon lost;

If, forsaken then, you stand,

    Dismissal everywhere,

    Stone and snow, silence and air,

Remember the noble dead

    And honour the fate you are,

Travelling and tormented,

    Dialectic and bizzare.

Stagger onward rejoicing;

    And even then if, perhaps

Having actually got

    To the last col, you collapse

With all Atlantis gleaming

Below you yet you cannot

    Descend, you should still be proud

    Even to have been allowed

Just to peep at Atlantis

    In a poetic vision:

Give thanks and lie down in peace,

    Having seen your salvation.

All the little household gods

    Have started crying, but say

Good-bye now, and put to sea.

    Farewell, dear friend, farewell: may

Hermes, master of the roads

And the four dwarf Kabiri,

    Protect and serve you always;

    And may the Ancient of Days

Provide for all you must do

    His invisble guidance,

Lifting up, friend, upon you

    The light of His countenance.

-- W.H. Auden

The Aliens

    (for William Gray)

Wide though the interrupt be that divides us, runers and

                                                                            counters,

from the Old World of the Plants, all lapped in a tolerant

                                                                                silence,

where, by the grace of chlorophyll, few of them ever have

                                                                                    taken

life and not one put a sceptical question, we nod them as

                                                                        neighbours

who, to conclude from their friendly response to a gardener's

                                                                            handling,

like to be given the chance to get more than a self-education.

As for the hot-blooded Beasts, we didn't need Darwin to tell

                                                                                        us

horses and rabbits and mice are our cognates, the double- 

                                                           voiced song-birds

cousins, however removed: unique as we seem, we, too, are

shovelled out into the cold, poodle-naked, as male or as

                                                                                female,

grab at and gobble up proteins, drop dung, perform the 

                                                                        ungainly

brute-with-two-backs until, dared and doddered by age, we

                                                                    surrender,

lapse into stagnant stuff, while they by retaining a constant

visible shape through a lifetime, accord with our human idea

                                                                                         of

having a Self. They also, we cannot but fancy, are peering

at a horizon as we do, aware of, however obscurely,

more than they must be concerned with, and vaguely elated

                                                                             at being

someone who's up and about: yes, even their humblest have,

                                                                                  surely,

nosed a few steps on the hazardous foreright to courage,

utterance, joy and collateral love. That is why, in our folk-

                                                                                   tales,

toads and squirrels can talk, in our epics the great be

                                                                        compared to

lions or foxes or eagles.

                                        But between us and the Insects,

namely nine-tenths of the living, there grins a prohibitive

                                                                                fracture

empathy cannot transgress: (What Saint made a friend of a 

                                                                            roach or

preached to an ant-hill?) Unrosed by a shame, unednorsed 

                                                                        by a sorrow,

blank to a fear of failure, they daunt alike the believer's 

faith in a fatherly providence and the atheist's dogma of

                                                                                purely

random evetns. To begin as a crawling insatiable eater,

then to be buried and mortify, then to emerge from the cere-

                                                                                 cloth

winged and mateable, brilliantly coloured, a sipper of juices,

yet a compulsive hunter and hoarder, must do havoc to any

unitive sense. To insert them, excuse those unamiable towns

                                                                                where

sex is reserved for the Few and the many animate tool-kits

perish from overwear, one is tempted to cook up a Gnostic

myth of an earlier Fall, preceding by aeons the Reptiles:

Adam, a crab-like creature who'd just wriggled out of a 

                                                                                steamy

ocean where he had failed at making a living and now lay

moribund, choked, on a shore without song. Unto whom the

                                                                            Seducer,

not our romantic Satan but a clever cartesian Archon,

coaxingly thus: Not doing very well, are you, poor deathling,

no, and unlikely to do any better, thanks to the schemes of

We-Know-Whom. (He's a Precious but logic was never His

                                                                                    forte.)

Freedom may manage in Heaven with Incorporeals, but for

ghosted extended matter the consequence is to be doomed to

err where an error is mortal. But trust me and live, for I do

                                                                                    know

clearly what needs to be done. If I programme your ganglia for

                                                                                        you,

you shall inherit the earth.

                                          Such a myth, we all know, is no

                                                                               answqer.

What they mean to themselves or to God is meaningless

                                                                        question:

they to us are quite simply what we must never become.

-- W.H. Auden

I stepped from plank to plank

I stepped from plank to plank

    So slow and cautiously;

The stars about my head I felt,

    About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next

    Would be my final inch, -

This gave me that precarious gait

    Some call experience.

- Emily Dickinson

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse

a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo

non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,

senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

    Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats 

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?'

Let us go then and make our visit.

    In the room  the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

    The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

    And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

    In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

    And indeed there will be time

To wonder, 'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair --

(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin --

(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

    For I have known them all already, known them all --

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

    So how should I presume?

    And I have known the eyes already, known them all --

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

    And how should I presume?

    And I have known the arms already, known them all --

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or weap about a shawl.

    And should I then presume?

    And how should I begin?

            .        .        .        .        .

    Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

    I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floor of silent seas.

            .        .        .        .        .

    And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep . . . tired . . .  or it mallingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)

    brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet -- and here's no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and

    snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

    And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while, 

To have bitted off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overhwhelming question,

To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all' --

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

    Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.

    That is not it, at all.;

    And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled

    streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that

    trail along the floor --

And this, and so much more? --

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a 

    screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

    'That is not it at all,

    That is not what I meant at all.'

            .        .        .        .        .

    No! I am not Prince Hamlet, not was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene of two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous --

Almost, at times, the Fool.

    I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

    Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

-- T.S. Eliot

Lightenings-Settings-Crossings-Squarings

Lightenings

i

Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light

In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep

A beggar shivering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set:

Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into --

Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

And after the commanded journey, what?

Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.

A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,

Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.

Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

ii

Roof it again. Batten down. Dig in.

Drink out of tin. Know the scullery cold,

A latch, a door-bar, forged tongs and a grate.

Touch the crossbeam, drive iron in a wall,

Hang a line to verify the plumb

From lintel, coping-stone and chimney-breast.

Relocate the bedrock in the threshold.

Take squarings from the recessed gable pane.

Make your study the unregarded floor.

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure

The bastion of sensation. Do not waver

Into language. Do not waver in it.

iii

Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings

Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints

You were allowed before you'd shoot, all those

Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb,

Test-outs and pull-backs, re-envisagings,

All the ways your arms kept hoping towards

Blind certainties that were going to prevail

Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.

A million million accuracies passed

Between your muscles' outreach and that space

Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.

You squinted out from a skylight of the world.

iv

Beneath the ocean of itself, the crowd

In Roman theatres could hear another

Stronger groundswell coming through.

It was like the steady message in a shell

Held to the ear in earshot of the sea:

Words being spoken on the scene arrived

Resonating up through the walls of urns.

the cordoned air rolled back, wave upon wave

Of classic mouthfuls amplified and faded.

How airy and how earthed it felt up there.

Bare to the world, light-headed, volatile

And carried like the rests in tides or music.

v

Three marble holes thumbed in the concrete road

Before the concrete hardened still remained

Three decades after the marble-player vanished

Into Australia. Three stops to play

The music of the arbitrary on.

Blow on them now and hear an undersong

Your levelled breath made once going over

The empty bottle. Improvise. Make free

Like old hay in its flimsy afterlife

High on a windblown hedge. Ocearina earth.

Three listening posts up on some hard-baked tier

Above the resonating amphorae.

vi

Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep,

Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead

And lay down flat among their dainty shins.

In that sniffed-at, bleated-into, grassy space

He experimented with infinity.

His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting

For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch

Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused

In the fleece-hustle was the original

Of a ripple that would travel eighty years

Outward from there, to be the same ripple

Inside him at its last circumference.

vii

(I misremembered. He went down on all fours,

Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-leaze.

Hardy sought the creatures face to face,

Their witless eyes and liability

To panic made him feel less alone,

Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment

Over him, perfectly known and sure.

And then the flock's dismay went swimming on

Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections

He'd know at parties in renowned old age

When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost

And circulated with that new perspective.)

viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill.

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said,  'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

ix

A boat that did not rock or wobble once

Sat in long grass one Sunday afternoon

In nineteen forty-one or two. The heat

Out on Lough Neagh and in where cattle stood

Jostling and skittering near the hedge

Grew redolent of the tweed skirt and tweed sleeve

I nursed on. I remember little treble

timber-notes their smart heels struck from planks,

Me creadled in an elbow like a secret

Open now as the eye of heaven was then

Above three sisters talking, talking steady

In a boat the ground still falls and falls from under.

x

Overhang of grass and seedling birch

On the quarry face. Rock-hob where you watched

All that cargoed brightness travelling

Above and beyond and sumptuously across

The water in its clear deep dangerous holes

On the quarry floor. Ultimate

Fathomableness, ultimate

Stony up-againstness: could you reconcile

What was diaphanous there with what was massive?

Were you equal to or were you opposite

To build-ups so promiscuous and weightless?

Shield your eyes, look up and face the music.

xi

To put a glass roof on the handball alley

Where a hopped ball cut merciless angles

In and out of play, or levelled true

For the unanswerable dead-root . . .

He alone, our walking weathercock,

Our peeled eye at the easel, had the right

To make a studio of that free maze,

To turn light outside in and curb the space

Where accident got tricked to accuracy

And rain was rainier for being blown

Across the grid and texture of the concrete.

He scales the world at arm's length, gives thumbs up.

xii

And lightening? One meaning of that

Beyond the usual sense of alleviation,

Illumination, and so on, is this:

A phenomenal instant when the spirit flares

With pure exhilaration before death --

The good thief in us harking to the promise!

So paint him on Christ's right hand, on a promonotory

Scanning empty space, so body-racked he seems

Untranslatable into the bliss

Ached for the moon-rim of his forehead,

By nail-craters on the dark side of his brain:

This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.

Settings

xiii

Hazel stealth. A trickle in the culvert.

Athletic sealight on the doorstep slab,

On the sea itself, on silent roofs and gables.

Whitewashed suntraps. Hedges hot as chimneys.

Chairs on all fours. A plate-rack braced and laden.

The fossil poetry of hob and slate.

Desire within its moat, dozing at ease --

Like a gorged cormorant on the rock at noon,

Exiled and in tune with the big glitter.

Re-enter this as the adult of solitude,

the silence-forder and the defintie

Presence you sensed withdrawing first time round.

xiv

One afternoon I was seraph on gold leaf.

I stood on the railway sleepers hearing larks,

Grasshoppers, cuckoos, dog-barks, trainer planes

Cutting and modulating and drawing off.

Heat wavered on the immaculate line

And shine of the cogged rails. On either side,

Dog daisies stood like vestals, the hot stones

Were clover-meshed and streaked with engine oil.

Air spanned, passage waited, the balance rode,

Nothing prevailed, whatever was in store

Witnessed itself already taking place

In a time marked by assent and by hiatus.

xv

And strike this scene in gold too, in relief,

So that a greedy eye cannot exhaust it:

Stable straw, Rembrandt-gleam and burnish

Where my father bends to a tea-chest packed with salt,

The hurricane lamp held up at eye-level

In his bunched left fist, his right hand foraging

For the unbleeding, vivid-flesh bacon,

Home-cured hocks pulled up into the light

For pondering a while and putting back.

That night I owned the piled grain of Egypt.

I watched the sentry's torchlight on the hoard.

I stood in the door, unseen and blazed upon.

xvi

Rat-poison the colour of blood pudding

Went phosphorescent when it was being spread:

Its sparky rancid shine under the blade

Brought everything to life -- like news of murder

Or the sight of a parked car occupied by lovers

On a side road, or stories of bull victims.

If a muse had sung the anger of Achilles

It owuld not have heightened the world-danger more

It was all there in the fresh rat-poison

Corposant on mouldy, dried-up crusts.

On winter evenings I loved its reek and risk.

And windfall freezing on the outhouse roof.

xvii

What were the virtues of an eel skin? What 

Was the eel itself? A rib of water drawn

Out of the water, an ell yielded up

From glooms and whorls and slatings,

Rediscovered once it had been skinned.

When a wrist was bound with eelskin, energy

Redounded in that arm, a waterwheel

Turned in the shoulder, mill-races poured

And made your elbow giddy.

Your hand felt unconstrained and spirited

As heads and tails that wriggled in the mud

Aristotle supposed all eels were sprung from.

xviii

Like a foul-mouthed god of hemp come down to rut,

The rope-man stumped about and praised new rope

With talk of how thick it was, or how long and strong,

And how you could take it into your own hand

And feel it. His perfect, tight-bound wares

Made a circle round him: the making of reins

And belly-bands and halters. And of slippage --

For even then, knee-high among the farmers,

I knew the rope-man menaced them with freedoms

They were going to turn their backs on; and knew too

His powerlessness once the fair-hill emptied

And he had to break the circle and start loading.

xix

Memory as a building or a city,

Well lighted, well laid out, appointed with

Tableaux vivants and constumed effigies --

Statues in purple cloaks, or painted red,

Ones wearing crowns, ones smeared with mud or blood:

So that the mind's eye could haunt itself

With fixed associations and learn to read

Its own contents in meaningful order,

Ancient textbooks recommended that

Familiar places be linked deliberately

With a code of images. You knew the portent

In each setting, you blinked and concentrated.

xx

On Red Square, the brick wall of kremlin

Looked unthreatening in scale, just right for people

To behave well under, inside or outside.

The big cleared space in front was dizzying.

I looked across a heave and sweep of cobbles

Like the ones that beamed up in my dream of flying

Above the old cart road, with all the air

Fanning off beneath my neck and breastbone.

(The cloud-roamer, was it, Stalin called Pasternak?)

Terrible history and protected joys!

Plosive horse-dung on nineteen forties' roads.

The newsreel bomb-hits, as harmless as dust-puffs.

xxi

Once and only once I fired a gun -

A point two two. At a sqaure of handkerchief

Pinned on a tree about sixty yards away.

It exhilarated me -- the bullet's song

So effortlessly at my fingertip,

The target's single shocking little jerk,

A whole new quickened sense of what rifle meant.

And then again as it was in the beginning

I saw the soul like a white cloth snatched away

Across dark galaxies and felt that shot

For the sin it was against eternal life --

Another phrase dilating in new light.

xxii

Where does spirit live? Inside or outside

Things remembered, made things, things unmade?

What came first, the seabird's cry or the soul

Imagined in the dawn cold when it cried?

Where does it roost at last? On dungy sticks

In a jackdaw's nest up in the old stone tower

Or a marble bust commanding the parterre?

How habitable is perfected form?

And how inhabited the windy light?

What's the use of a held note or a held line

That cannot be assailed for reassurance?

(Set questions for the ghost of W.B.)

xxiii

On the bus-trip into saga country

Ivan Malinowski wrote a poem

About the nucelar submarines offshore

From an abandones whaling station.

I remember it as a frisson, but cannot

Remember any words. What I wanted then

Was a poem of utter evening:

The thirteenth century, weird midnight sun

Setting at eye-level with Snorri Sturluson

Who has come out to bathe in a hot spring

And sit through the stillness after milking time,

Laved and ensconced in the throne-room of his mind.

xxiv

Deserted harbour stillness. Every stone

Clarified and dormant under water,

The harbour wall a masonry of silence.

Fullness. Shimmer. Laden high Atlantic

The moorings barely stirred in, very slight

Clucking of the swell against boat boards.

Perfected vision: cockle minarets

Consigned down there with green-clicked bottle glass,

Shell-debris and a reddened bud of sandstone.

Air and ocean known as antecedents

Of each other. In apposition with

omnipresence, equilibrium, brim.

Crossings

xxv

Travelling south at dawn, going full out

Through high-up stone-wall country, the rocks still cold,

Rainwater gleaming here and there ahead,

I took a turn and met the fox stock-still.

Face-to-face in the middle of the road.

Wildness tore through me as he dipped and wheeled

In a level-running tawny breakaway.

O neat head, fabled brush and astonished eye

My blue Volkswagen flared into with morning!

Let rebirth come through water, through desire,

Through crawling backwards across clinic floors:

I have to cross back through that startled iris.

xxvi

Only to come up, year after year, behind

Those open-ended, canvas-covered trucks

Full of soldiers sitting cramped and staunch,

Their hands round gun-barrels, their gaze abroad

In dreams out of the body-heated metal

Silent, time-proofed, keeping an even distance

Beyond the windscreen glass, carried ahead

On the phantasmal flow-back of the road,

They still mean business in the here and now.

So draw no attention, steer and concentrate

On the space that flees between like a speeded-up

Meltdown of souls from the straw-flecked ice of hell.

xxvii

Everything flows. Even a solid man,

A pillar to himself and to his trade,

All yellow boots and stick and soft felt hat,

Can sprout wings at the ankle and grow fleet

As the god of fair days, stone posts, roads and crossroads,

Guardian of travellers and pyschopomp.

'Look for a man with an ashplant on the boat,'

My father told his sister setting out

For London, 'and stay near him all night

And you'll be safe.' Flow on, flow on

The journey of the soul with its soul guide

And the mysteries of the dealing-men with sticks!

xxviii

The ice was like a bottle. We lined up

Eager to re-enter the long slide

We were bringing to perfection, time after time

Running and readying and letting go

Into a sheerness that was its own reward:

A farewell to surefootedness, a pitch

Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.

And what went on kept going, from grip to give,

The narrow milky way in the black ice,

The race-up, the free passage and return --

It followed on itself like a ring of light

We knew we'd come through and kept sailing towards.

xxix

Scissor-and-slap abruptness of a latch.

Its coldness to the thumb. Its see-saw lift

And drop and innocent harshness.

Which is a music of binding and of loosing

Unheard in this generation, but there to be

Called up or called down at a touch renewed.

Once the latch pronounces, roof

Is original again, threshold fatal,

The sanction powerful as the foreboding.

Your footstep is already known, so bow

Just a little, raise your right hand,

Make impulse one with wilfulness, and enter.

xxx

On St Brigid's Day the new life could be enetred

By going through her girdle of straw rope:

The proper way for men was right leg first,

Then right arm and right shoulder, head, then left

Shoulder, arm and leg. Women drew it down

Over the body and stepped out of it.

The open they came into by these moves

Stood opener, hoops came off the world,

They could feel the February air

Still soft above their heads and imagine

The limp rope fray and flare like wind-borne gleanings

Or an unhindered goldfinch over ploughland.

xxxi

Not an avenue and not a bower.

For a quarter-mile or so, where the country road

Is running straight across North Antrim bog,

Tall old fir trees line it on both sides.

Scotch firs, that is. Calligraphic shocks

Bushed and tufted in prevailing winds.

You drive into a meaning made of trees.

Or not exactly trees. It is a sense

Of running through and under without let,

Of glimpse and dapple. A life all trace and skim

The car has vanished out of. A fanned nape

Sensitive to the millionth of a flicker.

xxxii

Running water never disappointed.

Crossing water always furthered something.

Stepping stones were stations of the soul.

A kesh could mean the track of some called a causey

Raised above the wetness of the bog,

Or the causey where it bridged old drains and streams.

It steadies me to tell these things. Also

I cannot mention keshes or the ford

Without my father's shade appearing to me

On a path towards sunset, eyeing spades and clothes

That turf-cutters stowed perhaps or souls cast off

Before they crossed the log that spans the burn.

xxxiii

Be literal a moment. Recollect

Walking out on what had been emptied out

After he died, turning your back and leaving.

That morning tiles were harder, windows colder,

The raindrops on the pane more scourged, the grass

Barer to the sky, more wind-harrowed,

Or so it seemed. The house that he had planned

'Plain, big, straight, ordinary, you know',

A paradigm of rigour and correction,

Rebuke to fanciness and shrine to limit,

Stood firmer than ever for its own idea

Like a printed X-ray for the X-rayed body.

xxxiv

Yeats said, To those who see spirits, human skin

For a long time afterwards appears most coarse.

The face I see that all falls short of since

Passes down an aisle: I share the bus

From San Francisco Airport into Berkeley

With one other passenger, who's dropped

At the Treasure Island military base

Half-way across Bay Bridge. Vietnam-bound,

He could have been one of the newly dead come back,

Unsurprisable but still disappointed,

Having to bear his farm-boy self again,

His shaving cuts, his otherworldly brow.

xxxv

Shaving cuts. The pallor of bad habits.

Sunday afternoons, when summer idled

And couples walked the road along the Foyle,

We brought a shaving mirror to ourwindow

In the top storey of the boarders' dorms:

Lovers in the happy valley, cars

Eager-backed and silent, the absolute river

Between us and it all. We tilted the glass up

Into the sun and found the range and shone

A flitting light on what we could not have.

Brightness played over them in chancy sweeps

Like flashes from a god's shield or a dance-floor.

xxxvi

And yes, my friend, we too walked through a valley

Once. In darkness. With all the streetlamps off.

As danger gathered and the march dispersed.

Scene from Dante, made more memorable

By one of his head-clearing similes --

Fireflies, say, since the policemen's torches

Clustered and flicked and tempted us to trust

Their unpredictable, attractive light.

We were like herded shades who had to cross

And did cross, in a panic, to the car

Parked as we'd left it, that gave when we got in

Like Charon's boat under the faring poets.

Squarings

xxxvii

In famous poems by the sage Han Shan,

Cold Mountain is a place that can also mean

A state of mind. Or different states of mind

At different times, for the poems seem

One-off, impulsive, the kind of thing that starts

I have sat here facing the Cold Mountain

For twenty-nine years, or There is no path

That goes all the way -- enviable stuff,

Unfussy and believable.

Talking about it isn't good enough

But quoting from it at least demonstrates

The virtue of an art that knows its mind.

xxxviii

We climbed the Capitol by moonlight, felt

The transports of temptation on the heights:

We were privileged and belated and we knew it.

Then something in me moved to prophesy

Aganist the beloved stand-offishness of marble

And all emulation of stone-cut verses.

'Down with form triumphant, long live' (said I)

'From mendicant to convalescent. We attend

The come-back of pure water and the prayer-wheel.'

To which a voice replied, 'Of course we do.

But the others are in the Forun Cafe waiting,

Wondering where we are. What'll you have?'

xxxix

When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne

Of 'the wishing chair' at Giant's Causeway,

The small of your back made very solid sense.

Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple tree,

You gathered force out of the world-tree's hardness.

If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,

The rocks and wonder of the world were only

Lava crystallized, salts of the earth

The wishing chair gave a savour to, its kelp

And ozone freshening your outlook

Beyond the range you thought you'd settled for.

xl

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe

Encountering the ancients dampish feel

Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats

In a rank puddle-place, splash -darkened mould

Around the terracottta water-crock.

Ground of being. Body's deep obedience

To all its shifting tenses. A half-door

Opening dircetly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited

A stack of singular, cold memory-weights

To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

xli

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before

I knew river shallows or river pleasures

I knew the ore of longing in those words.

The places I go back to have not failed

But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley,

I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling

The very currents memory is composed of,

Everything accumulated ever

As I took squarings from the tops of bridges

Or the banks of self at evening.

Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.

Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

xlii

Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear

Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,

The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed

Where gaunt ones in their shirtsleeves stooped and dug

Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks --

Apparitions now, yet active still

And territorial, still sure of their ground,

Still interested, not knowing how far

The country of the shades has been pushed back,

How long the lark has stopped outside these fields

And only seems unstoppable to them

Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.

xliii

Choose one set of tracks and track a hare

Until the prints stop, just like that, in snow.

End of the line. Smooth drifts. Where did she go?

Back on her tracks, of course, then took a spring

Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.

She landed in her form and ate the snow.

Consider too the ancient hieroglyph

Of 'hare and zig-zag', which meant 'to exist',

To be on the qui vive, weaving and dodging

Like our friend who sprang (goodbye) beyond our ken

And missed a round at last (but of course he'd stood it):

The shake-the-heart the dew-hammer, the far-eyed.

xliv

All gone into the world of light? Perhaps

As we read the line sheer forms do crowd

The starry vestibule. Otherwise

They do not. What luceny survives

Is blanched as worms on nightlines I would lift,

Ungratified if always well prepared

For the nothing there -- which was only what had been there.

Although in fact it is more like a caught line snapping,

That moment of admission of All gone,

When the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools

And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence

Swifter (it seems) than the water's passage.

xlv

For certain ones what was written may come true:

They shall live on in the distance

At the mouths of rivers.

For our ones, no. They will re-enter

Dryness that was heaven on earth to them,

Happy to eat the scones baked out of clay.

For some, perhaps, the delta's reed-beds

And cold bright-footed seabirds always wheeling.

For our ones, snuff

And hob-soot and the heat off ashes.

And a judge who comes between them and the sun

In a pillar of radiant house-dust.

xlvi

Mountain air from the mountain up behind;

Out front, the end-of-summer, stone-walled fields;

And in a slated house the fiddle going

Like a flat stone skimmed at sunset

Or the irrevocable slipstream of flat earth

Still fleeing behind space.

Was music once a proof of God's existence?

As long as it admits things beyond measure,

That supposition stands.

So let the ear attend like a farmhouse window

In placid light, where the extravagant

Passed once under full sail into the longed-for.

xlvii

The visible sea at a distance from the shore

Or beyond the anchoring grounds

Was called the offing.

The emptier it stood, the more compelled

The eye that scanned it.

But once you turned your back on it, your back

Was suddenly all eyes like Argus's.

Then, when you'd look again, the offing felt

Untresspassed still, and yet somehow vacated

As if a lambent troop that exercised

On the borders of your vision had withdrawn

Behind the skyline to manoeuvre and regroup.

xlviii

Strange how things in the offing, once they're sensed,

Convert to things foreknown;

And how what's come upon is manifest

Only in light of what has been gone through.

Seventh heaven may be

The whole truth of a sixth sense come to pass.

At any rate, when light breaks over me

The way it did on the road beyond Coleraine

Where wind got saltier, the sky more hurried

And silve lame shivered on the Bann

Out in mid-channel between the painted poles,

That day I'll be in step with what escaped me.

-- Seamus Heaney