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
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.