Without developing a preference –
Prompt, with a splash, to whatever I offer.
It ruffles in its wallow, or lies sunning,
Digesting old senseless bicycles
And a few shoes. The fish down there
Do not know they have been swallowed
Any more than the girl out there, who over the stern of a rowboat
Tests its depth with her reflection.
Yet how the outlet fears it!
– dragging it out,
Black and yellow, a maniac eel,
Battering it to death with sticks and stones.
Thistles
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey, like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
Ghost Crabs
At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,
To the sea’s edge. To begin with
It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.
Gradually the labouring of the tide
Falls back from its productions,
Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns – a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering spectres
Gliding like shocks through water.
Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.
Their hungers are homing elsewhere.
We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.
Their bubbling mouths, their eyes
In a slow mineral fury
Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,
Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe,
Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions
With a gasp, in a sweat burst, brains jamming blind
Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding
Staring
Thickness of silence
Presses between us. These crabs own this world.
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten on to each other,
They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.
They are the turmoil of history, the convulsion
In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.
All day they recuperate under the sea.
Their singing is like a thin sea-wind flexing in the rocks of a headland,
Where only crabs listen.
They are God’s only toys.
Second Glance at a Jaguar
Skinful of bowls he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine
With the urgency of his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle
Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,
Club-swinging, trying to grind some square
Socket between his hind legs round,
Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers,
And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it
Between his back teeth, he has to wear his skin out,
He swipes a lap at the water-trough as he turns,
Swivelling the ball of his heel on the polished spot,
Showing his belly like a butterfly.
At every stride he has to turn a corner
In himself and correct it. His head
Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar,
His body is just the engine shoving it forward,
Lifting the air up and shoving on under,
The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,
Bottom jaw combing the ground. A gorged look,
Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,
He’s wearing himself to heavy ovals,
Muttering some mantra, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the Cain-brands,
Wearing the spots off from the inside,
Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,
The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,
The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes
The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,
Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.
Song of a Rat
I THE RAT’S DANCE
The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches like torn tin,
An effective gag.
When it stops screeching, it pants
And cannot think
‘This has no face, it must be God’ or
‘No answer is also an answer.’
Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth
Are stealing its backbone
For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,
For supplanting every human brain inside its skull with a
rat-body that knots and unknots,
A rat that goes on screeching,
Trying to uproot itself into each escaping screech,
But its long fangs bar that exit –
The incisors bared to the night spaces, threatening the constellations,
The glitterers in the black, to keep off,
Keep their distance,
While it works this out.
The rat understands suddenly. It bows and is still,
With a little beseeching of blood on its nose-end.
II THE RAT’S VISION
The rat hears the wind saying something in the straw
And the night-fields that have come up to the fence, leaning their silence,
The widowed land
With its trees that know how to cry
The rat sees the farm bulk of beam and stone
Wobbling like reflection on water.
The wind is pushing from the gulf
Through the old barbed wire in through the trenched gateway, past the gates of the ear, deep into the worked design of days,
Breathes onto the solitary snow crystal
The rat screeches
And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly
And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath
And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero
‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.
III THE RAT’S FLIGHT
The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their s
ockets.
And the sleep-souls of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadow –
That was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried
The horned Shadow of the Rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs
While it supplants Hell.
Skylarks
I
The lark begins to go up
Like a warning
As if the globe were uneasy –
Barrel-chested for heights,
Like an Indian of the high Andes,
A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,
But leaden
With muscle
For the struggle
Against
Earth’s centre.
And leaden
For ballast
In the rocketing storms of the breath.
Leaden
Like a bullet
To supplant
Life from its centre.
II
Crueller than owl or eagle
A towered bird, shot through the crested head
With the command, Not die
But climb
Climb
Sing
Obedient as to death a dead thing.
III
I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings
Rip in and out through your voicebox
O lark
And sing inwards as well as outwards
Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle
O lark
O song, incomprehensibly both ways –
Joy! Help! Joy! Help!
O lark
IV
You stop to rest, far up, you teeter
Over the drop
But not stopping singing
Resting only for a second
Dropping just a little
Then up and up and up
Like a mouse with drowning fur
Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall
Lamenting, mounting a little –
But the sun will not take notice
And the earth’s centre smiles.
V
My idleness curdles
Seeing the lark labour near its cloud
Scrambling
In a nightmare difficulty
Up through the nothing
Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,
As if it were too late, too late
Dithering in ether
Its song whirls faster and faster
And the sun whirls
The lark is evaporating
Till my eye’s gossamer snaps
and my hearing floats back widely to earth
After which the sky lies blank open
Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.
Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.
VI
All the dreary Sunday morning
Heaven is a madhouse
With the voices and frenzies of the larks,
Squealing and gibbering and cursing
Heads flung back, as I see them,
Wings almost torn off backwards – far up
Like sacrifices set floating
The cruel earth’s offerings
The mad earth’s missionaries.
VII
Like those flailing flames
The lift from the fling of a bonfire
Claws dangling full of what they feed on
The larks carry their tongues to the last atom
Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –
So it’s a relief, a cool breeze
When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out
And the sun’s sucked them empty
And the earth gives them the O.K.
And they relax, drifting with changed notes
Dip and float, not quite sure if they may
Then they are sure and they stoop
And maybe the whole agony was for this
The plummeting dead drop
With long cutting screams buckling like razors
But just before they plunge into the earth
They flare and glide off low over grass, then up
To land on a wall-top, crest up,
Weightless,
Paid-up,
Alert,
Conscience perfect.
VIII
Manacled with blood,
Cuchulain listened bowed,
Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)
Hearing the far crow
Guiding the near lark nearer
With its blind song
‘That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself
Take thy head
Thine ear
And thy life’s career from thee.’
The Howling of Wolves
Is without world.
What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?
Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,
That they must live
Innocence crept into minerals.
The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.
The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.
It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.
It must feed its fur.
The night snows stars and the earth creaks.
Gnat-Psalm
When the gnats dance at evening
Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,
Shuffling their dumb Cabala,
Under leaf shadow
Leaves only leaves
Between them and the broad swipes of the sun
Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun
From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments
Dancing
Dancing
Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write
Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles
Everybody everybody else’s yoyo
Immense magnets fighting around a centre
Not writing and not fighting but singing
That the cycles of this Universe are no matter
That they are not afraid of the sun
That the one sun is too near
It blasts their song, which is of all the suns
That they are their own sun
Their own brimming over
At large in the nothing
Their wings blurring the blaze
Singing
That they are the nails
In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god
That they hear the wind suffering
Through the grass
And the evening tree suffering
The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries
And the long roads of dust
Dancing in the wind
The wind’s dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain
And the cow dung villages huddling to dust
But not the gnats, their agility
Has outleaped that threshold
And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass
Dancing
Danci
ng
In the glove shadows of the sycamore
A dance never to be altered
A dance giving their bodies to be burned
And their mummy faces will never be used
Their little bearded faces
Weaving and bobbing on the nothing
Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken
And their feet dangling like the feet of victims
O little Hasids
Ridden to death by your own bodies
Riding your bodies to death
You are the angels of the only heaven!
And God is an Almighty Gnat!
You are the greatest of all the galaxies!
My hands fly in the air, they are follies
My tongue hangs up in the leaves
My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing
Your dancing
Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.
Wodwo
What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge
I enter water. What am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I’ve no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there’s all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here’s the water
again very queer but I’ll go on looking
That Moment
When the pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour
Was lifted away
Like a cigarette lifted from an ashtray
And the only face left in the world
Lay broken
Between hands that relaxed, being too late
And the trees closed forever