AIRMAIL

HYMN (from the Danish)

Now the sun rises on the eastern side,

Opens the child-king’s golden tomb world-wide –

Now be a steeple bell, my soul, high-swinging!

Lift up your house of dust,

Scatter bright thanks and trust,

Through the sky ringing!

Mercy is measureless – count the grains of sand

And the sea’s fingers piano-ing the land,

But mercy never. At each day’s rose-budding

It overflows the bowl

Of my star-crowded soul

With its down-flooding!

Last night the angels in a fire of frost

Devoured my house. Now nothing can be lost,

And in the morning I have woken, scrambled,

Half-way along the path

That leads away from death

And my soul’s shambles.

Let the good land lift up her fruit and wheat,

Let Truth stride on till she and Justice meet –

Give me my share, as much as any other.

Till at the end, death-sick,

I drop my walking stick

And join the weather.

ORCHESTRA

I saw my heart go flying in

A little flock of instruments.

My lungs belonging to the sky,

Pushed by foot-pedal closed and open,

And strings and pipes, and crimson bags,

A one-man-band cum flying machine,

Flapping and fluttering and clanking.

I was the music it was playing.

HOOK

There is a hook that drags me by a line

Up to the deep. Days I can push upstream

Or delve awhile into the murk again,

As the line loosens, but the iron remains,

Snaps straight the loops of my long wanderings,

Trains my pond sight on the down-gazing grey

Wavering eye. Trues to the stream my lines,

And lifts my chin. My mouth is twisted then

Into a half-laugh. Nothing I can try,

Having no counter-argument that weighs

More than what makes me light. So, trimmed and tamed,

As the sealed waters open vulva-wise

Around my seal head, catch or friction none

Between my skin and what I’m in, slipped from

The lake I would have loved if there was time,

I rise into the deep

BLACK

Catch a fistful of the black

that shines from the earth’s cracks.

Black of the portraits

When you switch off the gallery lights

Subject of shut books, black

That seeps from the feet of the oaks

Creeps round behind their backs,

Shrinks to the innermost point

Then seeps out of the front.

Follow it, follow it

Parody and clown of light,

Down the black brick road

Into the shadowless

PATIENCE

Patience, unquarrelsome goddess, inward-turned,

Standing on your stopped escalator, waiting

For your own sweet erosion, long postponed

By your chin’s ironstone, lifted anciently

Into the never-changing strain – lead me

To a slow stream where I can sit

And watch my float compete for which

Will move me first – starvation or a fish.

 DEATHSONG

Death walked in through the wall, but I was ready

With history books and books of poetry

To prove he was a costumed character,

And the mere skeleton of metre,

So with a hurricane he wrecked Kew gardens,

But I was in a ferry on the sea,

Watching the wave-trees crash and grow again –

Also I was in love – Then I will make you

Want women other than your love and learn

I can kill love with love! Well that did happen,

Kind of, but love still keeps re-growing.

Death roars, obliterating millions,

And then, one day, walks through the wall again,

But armed, this time, with my own thigh-bones,

And rips my ribs out one by one

And batters me to dust with them.

So Death, you win the earth, big victory.

So Death, I yield the field of death to thee.

FISH AND SPIRITS

Even now, down there,

Think of them, various as the birds,

Think of the gurnard’s flickering fins.

Just as invisible,

Swimming through your own rigging,

Dogbishop, queenraven.

Various as the birds, debating

The next great act

Of your grand disintegration

FULL MOON, MONDAY OF HOLY WEEK.

Very dim and small,

The moon too big and too bright,

An owl experiments its call,

As in an empty lecture hall

A child might.

And if it was a stone dropped in a lake

The screech would make

Increasing circles, but this moon

Swallows it soon.

And all the little cries of time and space

Sink without trace

Into its hush, and out-pour

This bright inaudible roar.

Daisies may close

But this moon grows

Star-high invisible plants.

Stillness conducts their dance.

Up on the roof,

Soundless, its silver hoof

Pounds on the slates.

Unfolding their fates

With thick dream-fingers, folk

Open their mouths to joke,

But this moon swallows it all,

Silver and gold beach ball

Bursting but still unbroken

By the half-spoken

That it keeps on blissfully drinking,

Bright babe unblinking,

And that keeps on shining out

In this odd corpse-mouth shout

That makes you stir and stir

Searching for him or her,

Face to the blank and then

Face to the blank again,

Shuffling your pack

Of selves – King, Queen, Jack,

Till at last a fat old priest

Turns in his sleep to the east

Which breaks

And the world wakes.

 GOOD FRIDAY

This is the bloody point

Where flesh and spirit meet

And spirit bangs iron nails

Through flesh’s hands and feet

Having first ripped the skin

Till it looks like a street

Where there has been a riot –

Hangs it up in the heat

Like dead meat that can speak.

An entire empire flesh

Has put in place, complete

With limbs of law, and police

Eyes, and blood of belief.

Spirit says no, and sets

Into the hands of flesh

Hammer and hazel stake

For its own undead heart.

Tears of the mother glint,

Watching the fading light

Of the whole bloody point.

CRUCIFIED

Dead, dead and dead. Now heavy in its webbing,

The carrier bag of guts. Self-lifting system

Now all downpooled; shut down, the purifiers.

Sleep disappearing from comparison

Like a man swimming in a fishsuit, nothinged

When the big fish goes by, in the black ocean.

Bone-frame irrelevant to flesh now cleaving

Only from habit, following tradition’s

Forgotten meaning. Insomnia’s bluegreen,

Depression’s eyeshadow of dawnless mornings,

Utterly outdone. Irises unwidened

By changes in the day, spine free of gravity’s

Increase at evening. Plankwood and iron pins

Now brotherly and full of fellow-feeling.

Yet what’s this flicker at the deep of reason,

A Loch Ness Monster on the sonar, circling,

As your eye slides along the chin-spar, noting

Cuneiform at the mouth’s edge, that is pushing

Into your childed mind, its deathless impression?

SO DIE

So die but do it gracefully

And spend a lifetime doing it,

And fate that follows faithfully

Won’t notice you pursuing it.

It knows you by a growing sign,

The slow decay of your disguise,

And recognises by decline

What you decline to recognise:

The figure that it has in view,

Whose breaths its searching looks condemn,

That cannot possibly be you,

Since you are watching both of them.

Until it climbs into your eyes

This thing can never get behind you:

Bring no disgrace on the disguise

That makes it take a life to find you.

GOD TRIES TO SEE THINGS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF AN ATHEIST.

I speak to the door

And the door does not answer me.

I try all the tables and chairs,

The floorboards,

The entire fabric of the house.

Nothing will make any reply.

I go out, I listen to the wind,

Birds and animals

Run towards me and away from me.

Everything moves in circles of its own.

There is the sea,

Tearing at the rocks

With soft fingers.

I calm myself

But the sea carries on foaming.

I lie down to sleep.

In all the universes

I am the only substance

That can cease to exist.

Time slides away from me

Like shale down a mountain

When a goat slips over the skyline.

WHO IS THE GOD OF THIS AEON?

None of the old pantheon.

Where are his shrines?

Do not say

The telephone Exchange

The petrol Station

The Beauty Spot,

Accident Spot with flowers,

Sculpture Park,

Dry Ski Slope,

Airport –

Point to the empty places

Where his shrines should be, all over the place.

Not even a blasted hole in the ground,

This god is worshipped by not being worshipped,

His obeisance neglect,

His observance procrastinate.

This god asks no other service

Than helplessness,

His Church is vast,

All the peoples of the earth are in it,

His prayers are sleeptalk,

His sacrifice the human race.

HERE COMES THE PREACHER

Here comes the preacher

In his black hat.

He says there’s no death –

How we hate him for that!

We know it’s not true

Cos we’re all going blind –

But he says that’s the death

Of death, we’ll find.

He takes the small baby

And wets its head –

But the dead he buries,

They do look dead.

Here comes the preacher

In his black hat.

He says there’s no death –

How we hate him for that!

AFTER DROUGHT.

The river returns.

At last –

A reply to the light.

FIRE SERMON.

Day starts, a blast of oxygen.

In the green smoke of the wood,

The low Dog's Mercury burning.

Keep on, keep walking.

Flickers of song entwine

With your brain's flickering.

Open the door, sit down

With the saints who are sitting

In the white of the fire

As if it was their living room.

THROUGH BLUEBELL PERISCOPES

Through bluebell periscopes

The dead are watching.

What do they see,

After their fire-bath, fire-clean?

What do they hear

Down the daffodil speaking-tubes?

Bend in close,

The scent of their laughter

Climbs your airstreams.

 UNDER THE CHURCHYARD WORDS

Each night she tends her stone,

Rubbing out dates and name,

Softly encouraging the moss.

Each dawn the facts are less defined.

Mineral detail is best.

All night the church-tower, stern,

Envigilates the exam

Of forgetting. No pencils or pens,

Only the hourglass sound

Of the souls erasing their lives.

Under the churchyard words

Souls are passing their exams.

LADY

Lady, when I stood by your grave,

They had not yet settled down

All your strawberry summers,

Breaths of the sea, of the compost

And rose areas of gardens,

Of the road, a gasp of hills

Between terraces

And your glimpses,

Butterflies on blackening bananas,

Had not yet dispersed to pollinate

Who knows what plants?

CAT

 I’m walking through the rooms of my dead body.

Light is escaping through the windows, rising

like coloured steam; by long accumulation

compressed into thick boards, but now by seconds

returning to the sun, untwisting from

the fibres of itself, accelerating

as it ascends, like leafsmoke when it climbs

into the wind, suddenly young again.

Patches of brickwork spreading show the pace

of the unbuilding – now whole summers flaking

from the high ceilings fall but falling, lighten,

and fly out of the windows. On a landing

two old officials sit, among the scuttling

of the disintegrating decorations,

and the oil paintings whose green leaves are falling.

They stare at chess, and have not heard, it seems,

and I can’t make them hear. The statue room

is almost empty. The last figures redden

and step down. Documents will be supplied,

and maps, and they will slip away disguised

over the border. Look – that sleepy-spry

cat curled up in the corner of your eye.

SEA.

As I was walking to the sea,

Through the tall bracken, still bright green,

And filling me above the eyes

With memories of glens, I blinked,

As from the corner of my eye

A moth got up, or so it seemed,

And flew away in front of me,

Like a child ducking through a cloud,

Or a cork bobbing on the sea,

Wings like two white hands powdering

The face of air in a great hurry.

But when I looked more carefully

And felt my face, I saw for certain

That it was not a moth but my

Right eyelids fluttering away.

And then – it was astonishing -

The other pair unclipped, disengaged,

Peeled off and took flight (I felt no pain)

To join the first ones flickering

In freedom to the sun. I saw them

Black in the bright disk. Now the sea

Was sniffing at my feet, far down,

And I was standing at the end,

Where no plank, no path, no rope, no pier

Crosses the air. And then my skin

Slipped off and floated to the sand,

And the waves washed it out and in,

And it turned over in the foam

And spread out, white, to the horizon.

Breathe – I breathed out, and in the air

My lungs stood tendrilled like a cloud.

And then a v of geese, my bones,

And they crashed straight into the sea,

And my eyes followed – no more need

To dream what happens in the sea.

Lastly my heart sank down the sky

And slid, bright red, into the sea.

DEAD MAN DOING UP HIS SHOELACES.

A dead man is doing up his shoelaces.

Far, far away from his fingers,

Further than from the earth its furthest sliding satellite

Are his fingers, fiddling vaguely with the laces.

In between

Drift the vast histories,

Like clouds that slowly tear in the middle

Or shuffle themselves in restless layers.

The laces are worming into impossible tangles,

It will take centuries to unravel them

Enough to begin the tying,

Which will itself take centuries.

The dead man sighs, a sigh that

Blasts all the skin off his skull,

And off the rest of his bones,

And he gets up and walks away

Barefoot over the air

HISTORY LESSON

I was coaching serenely

Through the eighteenth century

When a motorbike punched round the corner and

Splat me

Spat me

Shat me

Straight through the present moment

Into eternity

A SPIRIT WATCHES ITS BODY BEING DEVOURED BY LIONS.

I cling to the air

Peering for a better view.

I now have no weight,

Diver without leads

Forever leaking upwards

With my own bubbles,

I have to catch myself,

Holiday helium baloon,

Haul myself down hand over hand,

A ship rigged with sails lighter than air,

Impossible to handle in even the slightest breeze.

I am more metaphor than anything,

I can bring myself down to the ground

By thinking of rocks, disappointments,

Shipwrecks, jokes badly told, and betrayal.

I have to imagine the smell of them,

Even the most recent memories are now fables,

That is why I have to watch them,

Just to make sure.

Yes. I am utterly done. Do not send

For paramedics with hunting guns,

One of them is prancing off

With my head in its fangs.

The head of one of them

Is stuffed right into my stomach.

Now the air is loose with dark birds,

And the shadows of the jackals

Shoot out from between the thorn trees.

I am satisfied. I leave

The red fog of slaughter beneath me.

All night the full fed,

Fighting off sleep, will do battle

With the scuttling desperate,

Who dash to outflank them,

While the earth, from beneath, picks me apart

With its mandibles.

Whilst, in new rooms, I am encountering,

Briefly, the saddest possible music.

And that is it - that is all my mourning

For myself and those stranded behind.

I have the capacity for grief of an infant,

As I descend into the guts of the Infinite -

Rampant, heraldic

Or invisible stalker of spirits

Through the grass of the commonplace.

 SYLPHS.

Note – hard to take the idea of Sylphs seriously in English. These are elemental beings who, according to Rudolf Steiner, have responsibility for the germination of plants.

SYLPHS:

Nowhere is air

fairer than here,

where we are,

where we are.

For – in sere air

how can the bud flower?

And in dead wind

where can the seed wander?

Therefore here we are,

we are an April air

fairer than the fairest law,

we are the law of the air.

Law that allows, being fair,

openings everywhere,

which cold and dark outlawed,

keeping all colours closed

to bee, to breeze,

when harshness holds,

claims, clasps, keeps all worlds,

proclaiming victory,

final, of night over day,

not a word more to say.

There is a space between,

called Dawn – and that is our way.

We walk its widening

and in its light we fly.

It is an opening eye,

a bud itself indeed –

Dawn is the flower of flowers.

That law that breaks the law

is gentle showers

of light, of wakening colours,

a bridge, a way of air

from there to here and here to there

in a glimpse, a glance,

quick-dance.

Then seeds, in their trance,

float, bright, out of sight,

as on a spider strand

over the glad land.

You think perhaps this requires

none such as us, only laws

and the free trade of the airs,

where a thing falls, there it lies.

Well true, but for things to rise

requires the light of our eyes.

We speak soft, we speak low,

we know as only we know,

the Dawn of every closed thing,

shut bud or folded wing.

There is just one little word

that first must be heard,

one little touch,

not much –

there is just one, just one time

for a thing to begin to climb.

And this is us, we are this,

touch of truth’s mother-kiss

that falls out of the air

but would go nowhere

if we did not carry it

into the flower’s heart –

it would not know where to start,

poor plant, if we did not

carry down out of the light,

ah from the highest Cherubim, right

down to the soil-held bulb and quorm,

its first and final form.

So love’s invisible light

passes through us into

the flowers and into you.

And how we adore the birds!

The music of their feathers

in the world-wandering weathers –

we hear it, and we repeat

to them the sound, ah so sweet,

which they sing back to us

in many a dawn chorus!

So you can hear what we hear,

and bend to heaven your ear.

Nowhere is air

fairer than here,

where we are,

where we are  

 OLD MAN AND CABBAGE WHITES.

An old man is walking up the garden. So far the cabbage whites have not seen him. Above, and to the sides, clouds watch, hiding their smiles. Someone calls to the old man, ‘Good morning!’ He turns, but can’t see who’s called him – one of the crowded apple trees? The cabbage whites spin, they make wheels in the air, wheels made out of wheels. The clouds, their slow parents, smile and would clap if it would not spoil the scene. The cabbage whites spin around the towers of the shot lettuces and the towers of sprouts, the cabbages are spinning them, the laying of the eggs has been done, and the cabbages rejoice in their own coming destruction, like wombs, and spin the cabbage whites, girls dancing hand in hand in rings that have done with the ground, or kites possessed by devils or caught in really intricate turbulence. Still the old man presses on, through the fading echo of the greeting. But now one of the cabbage whites has seen him, it flashes by his glasses, then crashes into one of the lenses, smothering it in pretend panic, and now another comes, and now the clouds are really paying attention, the butterflies are tumbling all over his hands, he has dropped his stick, his eyes are assailed by tiny mad serviettes again and again, now one of them is struggling on his tongue, now seven of them have flown in through his nose, down the pipes, into his lungs, three into one, four into the other, and they are battering about making the lungs ring like glass jars. Others are floating down his veins, into the old pumping station, they are interfering with its rhythms, causing a flutter, now a hundred of them are flying off with his cap and a thousand of them are carrying off his stick and a million of them have picked him right up, they are lifting him over the apples and the clouds have reached down white hands, they have taken him –

PECULIAR

Peculiar for you to get back home without yourselves,

Flying clear of your still-burning Pick-up,

The two dead dogs running with you,

Sniffing for themselves at the door.

Peculiar for you, mother, to see as I saw

The book by your pillow, with its bookmark,

Turning your mind to different scripts already,

As you said to me,

‘I have to learn the language of the dead,’

Tongueless tongue, not for expressing

Any of the crockery or ornaments

You now surveyed, just as you left them,

Everything the same, the clock saying

RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW,

An entire house and its contents and address books

Fatally colliding on the A9 with a house in Holland.

Curious for you, and for me too –

Paintings waiting to be scattered by the impact,

Bubble-wrapped into boxes, the copper beech

Cut down. How curious for you flying here,

You mother first and you father after her,

Curious and new for you, the flames, the flying.

VENUS

Beyond Nig, and scottermost edges,

where the north sea whets its blades on the legs of the rigs

on to where the Kursk is a husk,

across the nuclear wastes,

the empty villages,

a billion identical trees,

the slavestreets, carcases of factories,

flayed and crucified and garrotted machinery,

the army towns, whatever,

abandoning maps, and even geography,

on, on, past iciest vagueness,

where never fact travelled,

to the very pinnacle

or the edge, if there is an edge,

and you are there, then,

only a gap, a jump, a drop of space between

your burnt-black self and

her majesty of the morning and evening

 BABY I DON’T WANNA BURN.

‘Baby I don’t wanna burn.’

By this stage there were angels moving around,

taking people’s names -

we were so far gone,

it was a formality,

the actual dying,

like choosing pink or white ice cream:

the fire, jumping stairs two at a time,

or the drop, the drop –

oh I looked at my fingers

and said to the little ones

it will not be like falling it will be like climbing

a tower of hands,

a tower of clapping hands,

a tree made out of wedding rings,

take my hand baby take my hand

PARADISO 33

Marine Interrogator

Virgin Mary

Saint Bernard

Dante

A TORTURE CHAMBER. DANTE IS CHAINED TO A CHAIR, BLINDFOLDED. BERNARD IS STANDING, IN PRISONER’S UNIFORM, CUFFED.

MARINE: Speak! Make him speak!

BERNARD: It is not right!

MARINE: Don’talk to me about right, Saint fucking Bernard! Preacher! Did you ever visit Jerusalem to see how it looked? Knee-deep in blood, alleyways blocked by stiffs, mums and dads and kids all tangled up. They couldn’t move in the streets, your Warriors of the Cross, till they’d forced the survivors to drag them a passage. That was heaven that did that, that was God! Jews and Muslims and  Christians, anyone, they just killed whoever they met, your men of iron, your men of Christ – they straightened out Jerusalem! No you never went, you just preached the sacred rampage, with the Pope’s stamp, you raised hell with your hymns and prayers, sanctified Satan and set him on Jerusalem! Nobody loves you, Bernard, nobody thanks you now! So do what I say because we can do what we like with you –

BERNARD: Believe me, I want you and the world to see what he has seen – so does he! It’s just that – to speak of it is utterly impossible –

MARINE: Ok. Good. You’re dead then. And him.

BERNARD: No! I will try! I will try!

MARINE: Try!

BERNARD: God, help me.

Oh Virgin Mother, daughter of thy son,

Lower  and higher than all other creatures,

Unending end of the eternal teaching,

Thou art the one in whom the human form

Was made so perfect that the one who made it

Was happy to be made by it! Thy womb

Was the hothouse in which the flower bloomed

That is our peace forever. You are here

For us the cloudless noon of love. Down there

You are a spring of hope for mortals. Lady,

To seek for grace without your help is like

Trying to fly without wings. You are mercy,

Pity and plenty – all the good is gathered

In you, that can be found in any creature.

This man, who from the bottom of the pit

To this high point, has travelled viewing all

The spirits one by one, now turns to thee

For strength to follow his own eyes towards

Salvation’s final height. Wipe clean the sky

Of his mortality, with your strong prayers

Clear all the clouds, so that the total joy

Can be revealed to him. I also pray,

Queen, that you bring him from wide-opened sight

Back to his right mind – let him still be human!
See Beatrice, and many of the blessed,

Praying with me for this!

MARY LOOKS AT BERNARD AND DANTE AND LOOKS UP TOWARDS THE LIGHT. THE MARINE REMOVES  DANTE’S BLINDFOLD AND SHINES A LIGHT INTO HIS FACE.

MARINE: Speak! What can you see? Speak!

DANTE: I – I – I – I –

HE REACHES OUT HIS HANDS.

MARINE: What do you want?

DANTE: Nothing – nothing –

BERNARD: He is beyond desire.

DANTE: So the tracks vanish from the snow

When the sun rises –

So the wood’s library of leaves

With all the Sibyl’s prophecies,

When the wind blows –

Leave me a gleam of speech – light –

Infinite goodness – o abounding grace –

I looked so long that all my sight was spent –

I saw that it contained, all folded tight,

All that is scattered through the universe –

All substance, chance, connection, accident,

Intensified into a point of light.

I think I saw the form of it, the face

Of everything –because to speak of it

Makes me so vast! And in a single blink

It sinks into the swirling past as deep

As Jason and the Argo, ship that shocked

Neptune, when it swept over him, the first

Keel he had ever felt! But then, I kept

Staring and staring! What could drag my sight

Away from that? It is the origin

Of wishing.

No – no – nonsense! Babytalk! Increasingly fraudulent and insufficient!

Not that it changed, it never changed, the light!
But it changed me, it magnified my sight,

So that it seemed to change, but it was me

Changing, my way of seeing it, not it

Changing at all! In the clear depth of it

I saw three different coloured circles shining

In one another as a rainbow does

In a rainbow – the third was fire breathed out

Equally by the others.

No! Nonsense! Nonsense! Drunken gibberish! Nothing like that!

Words are nothing, nothing!

O everlasting light, you know yourself,

Dwell in yourself alone, and love yourself,

Smiling into the mirror of yourself!

That which was circling, like reflected light,

Light born from light, when my eyes understood,

Inside itself assembled from its colour

A human figure – then my widened sight

Poured into it – like the geometrician

Who stares and stares to try to square the circle,

But cannot twist his mind into a theorem,

So did I stare at first, and try to judge

The way the figure fitted – and I lacked

The soaring thoughts to do it, but a flash

Suddenly struck me and I had my wish.

Then my imagination simply snapped.

But now I wanted only what there was.

I was a smoothly turning wheel, revolved

By the same love that moves the sun and stars.

SILENCE.

MARINE: Is that it? Is that all the information he’s giving us?

BERNARD: I’m afraid so, sir.

MARINE: You better change your mind, man, we want more than that! And we can get it! Because you’re in the losing team, you backed the wrong God, that’s why you’re here in this chair, and he ain’t gonna help you because he ain’t real! He let you down!

DANTE: He will come in his own time.

BERNARD: There is no escaping him.