since life is long, and art merely a toy.’
Well – okay – supposing life is short,
and the sea never touches your little boat –
just wait, and watch, and wait, for art is long;
whatever. To be quite honest with you,
none of this is terribly important.
Chords
Perhaps, when we’re half-asleep,
the same hand that sows the stars
trails across that galactic lyre …
the dying wave reaching our lips
as two or three true words
Dream
I woke. Was it her breath or my own
that misted up the window of my dream?
My heart’s all out of time …
The black flame of the cypress in the orchard,
the lemon-blossom in the meadow …
then a tear in the clouds,
the land brightening in its lantern
of sun and rain, the sudden rainbow;
then all of it, inverted, minuscule, in each speck
of rain in her black hair!
And I let it slip away again
like a soap-bubble in the wind …
The Eyes
When his beloved died
he decided to grow old
and shut himself inside
the empty house, alone
with his memories of her
and the big sunny mirror
where she’d fixed her hair.
This great block of gold
he hoarded like a miser,
thinking here, at least,
he’d lock away the past,
keep one thing intact.
But around the first anniversary,
he began to wonder, to his horror,
about her eyes: Were they brown or black,
or grey? Green? Christ! I can’t say …
One Spring morning, something gave in him;
shouldering his twin grief like a cross,
he shut the front door, turned into the street
and had walked just ten yards, when, from a dark close,
he caught a flash of eyes. He lowered his hat-brim
and walked on … yes, they were like that; like that …
Profession of Faith
God is not the sea, but of its nature:
He scatters like the moonlight on the water
or appears on the horizon like a sail.
The sea is where He wakes, or sinks to dreams.
He made the sea, and like the clouds and storms
is born of it, over and over. Thus the Creator
finds himself revived by his own creature:
he thrives on the same spirit he exhales.
I’ll make you, Lord, as you made me, restore
the soul you gifted me; in time, uncover
your name in my own. Let that pure source
that pours its empty heart out to us pour
through my heart too; and let the turbid river
of every heartless faith dry up for ever.
Meditation
Is my heart asleep?
Has the dream-hive
fallen still,
the wheel that drives
the mind’s red mill
slowed and slowed
to a stop, each scoop
full of only shadow?
No, my heart’s awake,
perfectly awake;
it watches the horizon
for the white sail, listens
along the shoreline
of the ancient silence
Nothing
So is this magic place to die with us?
I mean that world where memory still holds
the breath of your early life:
the white shadow of first love,
that voice that rose and fell
with your own heart, the hand
you’d dream of closing in your own …
all those beloved burning things
that dawned on us,
lit up the inner sky?
Is this whole world to vanish when we die,
this life that we made new in our own fashion?
Have the crucibles and anvils of the soul
been working for the dust and for the wind?
from One Day’s Poem
So here he is,
your man, the Modern Languages Teacher
(late occupant of the ghost-chair,
ahem, of gaya ciencia,
the nightingale’s apprentice)
in a dark sprawl somewhere between
Andalusia and La Mancha.
Winter. A fire lit.
swithers between mist and sleet.
Imagining myself a farmer,
I think of the good Lord astride
the tilled fields, tapping the side
of his great riddle, keeping up
the steady murmur
over the parched crops,
over the olive-groves and vineyards.
They’ve prayed hard
and now they can sing their hosannas:
those with new-sown wheat,
those who’ll pick
the fattened olives,
those, who in their whole lives
aspire to no more luck
than enough to eat;
those who now, as ever,
put all their little silver
on one turn of the wheel,
the terrible wheel of the seasons.
In my room, brilliant
with the pearl-light
of winter, strained
through cloud and glass and rain,
I dream and meditate.
The clock
glitters on the wall,
its ticktock
drifting in and out
of my head. Ticktock, ticktock,
there; now I hear it.
Ticktock, ticktock, the dead click
of its mechanical heart …
In these towns, one fights –
oh for a second’s respite! –
with those bleak hiccups
from the clock’s blank face
that count out time as emptiness,
like a tailor taking his measuring-tape
to yard on yard of space.
But your hour, is it the hour?
Your time, friend, is it ours?
(ticktock, ticktock) On a day
(ticktock) you would say had passed
death took away
the thing that I held dearest.
Bells in the distance.
The rain drums harder
on the windowpanes.
A farmer again,
I go back to my fields of grain …
… It’s getting darker:
I watch the filament
redden and glow;
I’d get more light from a match
or the moonshine.
God knows where my glasses went –
(if one had to define
the pointless search!)
amongst these reviews, old papers …
who’d find anything?
… Aha. Here we go.
New books.
I open one by Unamuno –
the pride and joy
of our Spanish revival –
no, renaissance, to hell
with it … This country dominie
has always carried the torch for you,
Rector of Salamanca.
This philosophy of yours
you call dilettantish,
just a balancing act –
Don Miguel, it’s mine too.
It’s water from the true source,
a downpour, then a burn, a cataract,
always alive, always fugitive … it’s poetry,
a real thing of the heart.
But can we really build on it?
There’s no foundation
in the spirit or the
wind –
no anchorage, no anchor;
only the work –
our rowing or sailing
towards the shoreless ocean …
Henri Bergson: The Immediate
Data of Consciousness. Looks
like another of these French tricks …
This Bergson is a rogue,
Master Unamuno, true?
I’d sooner take that boy
from Königsberg
and his – how’d you put it –
salto inmortal …
that devilish jew
worked out free will
within his own four walls.
It’s okay, I guess – every scholar
with his headache, every lunatic
wrestling with his …
I suppose it matters
in this short, troublesome affair
whether we’re slaves or free;
but, if we’re all bound for the sea,
it’s all the same in the end.
God, these country backwaters!
All our idle notes and glosses
soon show up for what they are:
the yawns of Solomon …
no, more like Ecclesiastes:
a solitude of solitudes,
vanity of vanities …
… The rain’s slacking off.
Umbrella, hat, gaberdine, galoshes …
Right. I’m out of here.
Paradoxes
(i)
Just as the lover’s sky is bluest
the poet’s muse is his alone;
the dead verse and its readership
have lives and muses of their own.
The poem we think we have made up
may still turn out to be our truest.
(ii)
Only in our sorrows do we live
within the heart of consciousness, the lie.
Meeting his master crying in the road,
a student took Solon to task: ‘But why,
your son long in the ground, do you still grieve
if, as you say, man’s tears avail him nothing?’
‘Young friend,’ said Solon, lifting his old head,
‘I weep because my tears avail me nothing.’
Poem
I want neither glory
nor that, in the memory
of men, my songs survive;
but still … those subtle worlds,
those weightless mother-of-pearl
soap-bubbles of mine … I just love
the way they set off, all tarted up
in sunburst and scarlet, hover
low in the blue sky, quiver,
then suddenly pop
Poetry
In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet’s early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,
it’s not love’s later heat that poetry holds,
but the atom of the love that drew it forth
from the silence: so if the bright coal of his love
begins to smoulder, the poet hears his voice
suddenly forced, like a bar-room singer’s – boastful
with his own huge feeling, or drowned by violins;
but if it yields a steadier light, he knows
the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound
like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.
Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.
Promethean
The traveller is the aggregate of the road.
In a walled garden beside the ocean’s ear
he carries his whole journey on his coat –
the hoarfrost and the coffee-smell, the dry heat
of the hay, the dog-rose, the bitter woodsmoke.
The long day’s veteran, he puts a brake
on all sentiment, and waits for the slow word
to surface in his mind, as if for air.
This was my dream – and then I dreamt that time,
that quiet assassin drawing us through the days
towards our end, was just another dream …
And at that, I saw the gentle traveller lift
his palm to the low sun, and make a gift
of it: the Name, the Word, the ashless blaze.
Road
Traveller, your footprints are
the only path, the only track:
wayfarer, there is no way,
there is no map or Northern star,
just a blank page and a starless dark;
and should you turn round to admire
the distance that you’ve made today
the road will billow into dust.
No way on and no way back,
there is no way, my comrade: trust
your own quick step, the end’s delay,
the vanished trail of your own wake,
wayfarer, sea-walker, Christ.
Siesta
Now that, halfway home, the fire-fish swims
between the cypress and that highest blue
into which the blind boy lately flew
in his white stone, and with the ivory poem
of the cicada ringing hollow in the elm,
let us praise the Lord –
the black print of his good hand! – who has declared
this silence in the pandemonium.
To the God of absence and of aftermath,
of the anchor in the sea, the brimming sea …
whose truant omnipresence sets us free
from this world, and firmly on the one true path,
with our cup of shadows overflowing, with
our hearts uplifted, heavy and half-starved,
let us honour Him who made the Void, and carved
these few words from the thin air of our faith.
Sigh
Again
my heart
creaks
on its hinge
and with a long
sigh
opens on
the arcade
of my short
history
where
the orange
and acacia
are flowering
in the courtyard
and the fountain
sings
then speaks
its love-song
to no one
from
LANDING LIGHT
Luing
When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,
I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.
Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever – sharing her breath,
watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?
Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,
aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.
St Brides: Sea-Mail
Now they have gone
we are sunk, believe me.
Their scentless oil, so volatile
it only took one stray breath on its ski
n
to set it up – it was our sole
export, our currency
and catholicon.
There was a gland
below each wing, a duct
four inches or so down the throat;
though it was tiresome milking them by hand
given the rumour of their infinite
supply, and the blunt fact
of our demand.
After the cull
we’d save the carcasses,
bind the feet and fan the wings,
sew their lips up, empty out their skulls
and carry them away to hang
in one of the drying-houses,
twelve to a pole.
By Michaelmas
they’d be so light and stiff
you could lift one up by its ankle
or snap the feathers from its back like glass.
Where their eyes had been were inkwells.
We took them to the cliffs
and made our choice.
Launching them,
the trick was to ‘make
a little angel’: ring- and fore-
fingers tucked away, pinkie and thumb
spread wide for balance, your
middle finger hooked
under the sternum.
Our sporting myths:
the windless, perfect day
McNicol threw beyond the stac;
how, ten years on, MacFarlane met his death
to a loopback. Whatever our luck,
by sunset, they’d fill the bay
like burnt moths.
The last morning
we shuffled out for parliament
their rock was empty, and the sky clear
of every wren and fulmar and whitewing.
The wind has been so weak all year
I post this more in testament
than hope or warning.
Sliding on Loch Ogil