Then Hardy, for many a major
poet, is for me just an old-stager,
shuffling about a bogus heath
cobwebbed with his Victorian breath.
And coming to my own century
with its critics’ compulsive hurry
to place a poet, I must smile
at the congestion at the turnstile
of fame, the faceless, formless amoeba
with the secretion of its vers libre.
Rough
God looked at the eagle that looked at
the wolf that watched the jack-rabbit
cropping the grass, green and curling
as God’s beard. He stepped back;
it was perfect, a self-regulating machine
of blood and faeces. One thing was missing:
he skimmed off a faint reflection of himself
in sea-water; breathed air into it,
and set the red corpuscles whirling. It was not long
before the creature had the eagle, the wolf and
the jack-rabbit squealing for mercy. Only the grass
resisted. It used it to warm its imagination
by. God took a handful of small germs,
sowing them in the smooth flesh. It was curious,
the harvest: the limbs modelled an obscene
question, the head swelled, out of the eyes came
tears of pus. There was the sound
of thunder, the loud, uncontrollable laughter of
God, and in his side like an incurred stitch, Jesus.
The Gap
The one thing they were not troubled
by was perfection; it was theirs
already. Their hand moved in the dark
like a priest’s, giving its blessing
to the bare wall. Drawings appeared
there like a violation of the privacy
of the creatures. They withdrew with their work
finished, leaving the interrogation of it
to ourselves, who inherit everything
but their genius.
This was before
the fall. Somewhere between them and us
the mind climbed up into the tree
of knowledge, and saw the forbidden subjects
of art, the emptiness of the interiors
of the mirror that life holds up
to itself, and began venting its frustration
in spurious metals, in the cold acts of the machine.
The Annunciation by Veneziano
The messenger is winged
and the girl
haloed a distance
between them
and between them and us
down the long path the door
through which he has not
come
on his lips what all women
desire to hear
in his hand the flowers that
he has taken from her.
Ivan Karamazov
Yes, I know what he is like:
a kind of impossible robot
you insert your prayers into
like tickets, that after a while
are returned to you with the words
‘Not granted’ written upon them.
I repudiate such a god.
But if, as you say, he exists,
and what I do is an offence
to him, let him punish me:
I shall not squeal; to be proved
right is worth a lifetime’s
chastisement. And to have God
avenging himself is to have
the advantage, till the earth opens
to receive one into a dark
cleft, where, safer than Elijah,
one will know him trumpeting
in the wind and the fire
and the roar of the earthquake, but not
in the still, small voice of the
worms that deliver one for ever
out of the tyranny of his self-love.
Hill Christmas
They came over the snow to the bread’s
purer snow, fumbled it in their huge
hands, put their lips to it
like beasts, stared into the dark chalice
where the wine shone, felt it sharp
on their tongue, shivered as at a sin
remembered, and heard love cry
momentarily in their hearts’ manger.
They rose and went back to their poor
holdings, naked in the bleak light
of December. Their horizon contracted
to the one small, stone-riddled field
with its tree, where the weather was nailing
the appalled body that had asked to be born.
The Combat
You have no name.
We have wrestled with you all
day, and now night approaches,
the darkness from which we emerged
seeking; and anonymous
you withdraw, leaving us nursing
our bruises, our dislocations.
For the failure of language
there is no redress. The physicists
tell us your size, the chemists
the ingredients of your
thinking. But who you are
does not appear, nor why
on the innocent marches
of vocabulary you should choose
to engage us, belabouring us
with your silence. We die, we die
with the knowledge that your resistance
is endless at the frontier of the great poem.
Ffynon Fair
(St Mary’s Well)
They did not divine it, but
they bequeathed it to us:
clear water, brackish at times,
complicated by the white frosts
of the sea, but thawing quickly.
Ignoring my image, I peer down
to the quiet roots of it, where
the coins lie, the tarnished offerings
of the people to the pure spirit
that lives there, that has lived there
always, giving itself up
to the thirsty, withholding
itself from the superstition
of others, who ask for more.
Somewhere
Something to bring back to show
you have been there: a lock of God’s
hair, stolen from him while he was
asleep; a photograph of the garden
of the spirit. As has been said,
the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up
into the honey the mind feeds on.
What are our lives but harbours
we are continually setting out
from, airports at which we touch
down and remain in too briefly
to recognise what it is they remind
us of? And always in one
another we seek the proof
of experiences it would be worth dying for.
Surely there is a shirt of fire
this one wore, that is hung up now
like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?
Surely these husbands and wives
have dipped their marriages in a fast
spring? Surely there exists somewhere,
as the justification for our looking for it,
the one light that can cast such shadows?
Marged
Was she planned?
Or is this one of life’s
throw-offs? Small, taken from school
young; put to minister
to a widowed mother, who keeps
her simple, she feeds the hens,
speaks their language, is one
of them, quick, easily
frightened, with sharp
eyes, ears. When I have
been there, she keeps her perch
on my min
d. I would
stroke her feathers, quieten
her, say: ‘Life is
like this.’ But have I
the right, who have seen plainer
women with love
in abundance, with
freedom, with money to
hand? If there is one thing
she has, it is a bird’s
nature, volatile
as a bird. But even
as those among whom she
lives and moves, who look at her
with their expectant
glances, song is denied her.
Thus
Whatever you imagine
has happened. No words
are unspoken, no actions
undone: wine poisoned
in the chalice, the corpses
raped. While Isaiah’s
angel hither and thither
flies with his hot coal.
Alive
It is alive. It is you,
God. Looking out I can see
no death. The earth moves, the
sea moves, the wind goes
on its exuberant
journeys. Many creatures
reflect you, the flowers
your colour, the tides the precision
of your calculations. There
is nothing too ample
for you to overflow, nothing
so small that your workmanship
is not revealed. I listen
and it is you speaking.
I find the place where you lay
warm. At night, if I waken,
there are the sleepless conurbations
of the stars. The darkness
is the deepening shadow
of your presence; the silence a
process in the metabolism
of the being of love.
Which
And in the book I read:
God is love. But lifting
my head, I do not find it
so. Shall I return
to my book and, between
print, wander an air
heavy with the scent
of this one word? Or not trust
language, only the blows that
life gives me, wearing them
like those red tokens with which
an agreement is sealed?
Gone
There was a flower blowing
and a hand plucked it.
There was a stream flowing
and a body smirched it.
There was a pure mirror
of water and a face came
and looked in it. There were words
and wars and treaties, and feet trampled
the earth and the wheels
seared it; and an explosion
followed. There was dust
and silence; and out of the dust
a plant grew, and the dew formed
upon it; and a stream seeped
from the dew to construct
a mirror, and the mirror was empty.
Pardon
What pardon for this, Lord?
There was a man ate bread
from your hand and did not snap
at it; but when on his knees
listened to the snivelling sound
of laughter from somewhere inside
himself. He had been taught
that to laugh was an echo
of the divine joy; but this
was the lifting of a dog’s leg
in a temple. There is no defence
against laughter issuing
at the wrong time, but is there ever
forgiveness?
He went from his prayers
into a world holding
its sides, but the return
to them was the return
to vomit, thanking where
he did not believe for something
he did not want but could not
refuse.
There is no pardon
for this, only the expedient
of blaming the laughter on someone else.
Marriage
I look up; you pass.
I have to reconcile your
existence and the meaning of it
with what I read: kings and queens
and their battles
for power. You have your battle,
too. I ask myself: Have
I been on your side? Lovelier
a dead queen than a live
wife? History worships
the fact but cannot remain
neutral. Because there are no kings
worthy of you; because poets
better than I are not here
to describe you; because time
is always too short, you must go by
now without mention, as unknown
to the future as to
the past, with one man’s
eyes resting on you
in the interval of his concern.
Montrose
It is said that he went gaily to that scaffold,
dressed magnificently as a bridegroom,
his lace lying on him like white frost
in the windless morning of his courage.
His red blood was the water of life,
changed to wine at the wedding banquet;
the bride Scotland, the spirit dependent on
such for the consummation of her marriage.
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Men, who in their day
went down acknowledging
defeat, what would they say
now, where no superlatives
have meaning? What was failure
to them, our abandonment
of an ideal has turned
into high art. Could
they with foreknowledge have
been happy? Can we,
because there are levels
not yet descended to,
take comfort? Is it
sufficient for us
that we, like that minority
of our fellows in the hurrying
centuries, turning aside
re-enter the garden? What
is the serenity of art
worth without the angels
at the hot gates, whose sword
is time and our uneasy conscience?
Llananno
I often call there.
There are no poems in it
for me. But as a gesture
of independence of the speeding
traffic I am a part
of, I stop the car,
turn down the narrow path
to the river, and enter
the church with its clear reflection
beside it.
There are few services
now; the screen has nothing
to hide. Face to face
with no intermediary
between me and God, and only the water’s
quiet insistence on a time
older than man, I keep my eyes
open and am not dazzled,
so delicately does the light enter
my soul from the serene presence
that waits for me till I come next.
The Interrogation
But the financiers will ask
in that day: Is it not better
to leave broken bank balances
behind us than broken heads?
And Christ recognising the
new warriors will feel breaching
his healed side their terrible
pencil and the haemorrhage of its figures.
Sea-watching
Grey waters, vast
as an area of prayer
that one enters. Daily
over a period of years
I have let the eye rest on them.
Was I waiting for something?
Nothing
but that continuous waving
that is without meaning
occurred.
Ah, but a rare bird is
rare. It is when one is not looking,
at times one is not there
that it comes.
You must wear your eyes out,
as others their knees.
I became the hermit
of the rocks, habited with the wind
and the mist. There were days,
so beautiful the emptiness
it might have filled,
its absence
was as its presence; not to be told
any more, so single my mind
after its long fast,
my watching from praying.
Good
The old man comes out on the hill
and looks down to recall earlier days
in the valley. He sees the stream shine,
the church stand, hears the litter of
children’s voices. A chill in the flesh
tells him that death is not far off
now: it is the shadow under the great boughs
of life. His garden has herbs growing.
The kestrel goes by with fresh prey
in its claws. The wind scatters the scent
of wild beans. The tractor operates
on the earth’s body. His grandson is there
ploughing; his young wife fetches him
cakes and tea and a dark smile. It is well.
Travellers
I think of the continent
of the mind. At some stage
in the crossing of it a traveller
rejoiced. This is the truth,
he cried; I have won
my salvation !
What was it like
to be alive then? Was it a time
when two sparrows were sold