This is the maneater’s skull.
This is the maneater’s skull.
These brows were the Arc de Triomphe
To the gullet.
The deaf adder of appetite
Coiled under. It spied through these nacelles
Ignorant of death.
And the whole assemblage flowed hungering through the long ways.
Its cry
Quieted the valleys.
It was looking for me.
I was looking for you.
You were looking for me.
*
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
Nuptials among prehistoric insects
The tremulous convulsion
The inching hydra strength
Among frilled lizards
Dropping twigs, and acorns, and leaves.
The oak is in bliss
Its roots
Lift arms that are a supplication
Crippled with stigmata
Like the sea-carved cliffs earth lifts
Loaded with dumb, uttering effigies
The oak seems to die and to be dead
In its love-act.
As I lie under it
In a brown leaf nostalgia
An acorn stupor.
*
A primrose petal’s edge
A primrose petal’s edge
Cuts the vision like laser.
And the eye of a hare
Strips the interrogator naked
Of all but some skin of terror –
A starry frost.
Who is this?
She reveals herself, and is veiled.
Somebody
Something grips by the nape
And bangs the brow, as against a wall
Against the untouchable veils
Of the hole which is bottomless
Till blood drips from the mouth.
*
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed
It happened
You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase.
It was the third time. And it smashed.
I turned
I bowed
In the morgue I kissed
Your temple’s refrigerated glazed
As rained-on graveyard marble, my
Lips queasy, heart non-existent
And straightened
Into sun-darkness
Like a pillar over Athens
Defunct
In the blinding metropolis of cameras.
*
The swallow – rebuilding –
The swallow – rebuilding –
Collects the lot
From the sow’s wallow.
But what I did only shifted the dust about.
And what crossed my mind
Crossed into outer space.
And for all rumours of me read obituary
What there truly remains of me
Is that very thing – my absence.
So how will you gather me?
I saw my keeper
Sitting in the sun –
If you can catch that, you are the falcon of falcons.
*
The grass-blade is not without
The grass-blade is not without
The loyalty that never was beheld.
And the blackbird
Sleeking from common anything and worm-dirt
Balances a precarious banner
Gold on black, terror and exultation.
The grim badger with armorial mask
Biting spade-steel, teeth and jaw-strake shattered,
Draws that final shuddering battle cry
Out of its backbone.
Me too,
Let me be one of your warriors.
Let your home
Be my home. Your people
My people.
*
I know well
I know well
You are not infallible
I know how your huge your unmanageable
Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist
As thin as a silk scarf, on your skull,
And how your pony’s eye darkened larger
Holding too lucidly the deep glimpse
After the humane killer
And I had to lift your hand for you
While your chin sank to your chest
With the sheer weariness
Of taking away from everybody
Your envied beauty, your much-desired beauty
Your hardly-used beauty
Of lifting away yourself
From yourself
And weeping with the ache of the effort
*
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Like the flushed gossip
With the tale that kills
Sometimes it strengthens very slowly
What is already here –
A tree darkening the house.
The saviour
From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache
Like the sun
Which is itself cloudless and leafless
Was always here, is always as she was.
*
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Stumble through all the hedges in the country
Hither thither crying day and night
Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.
After some days, a stupor sadness
Collects them again in their field.
They will never stray any more.
From now on, they only want each other.
So much for calves.
As for the tiger
He lies still
Like left luggage.
He is roaming the earth light, unseen.
He is safe.
Heaven and hell have both adopted him.
*
A bang – a burning –
A bang – a burning –
I opened my eyes
In a vale crumbling with echoes.
A solitary dove
Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.
From this centre
It wearies the compass.
Am I killed?
Or am I searching?
Is this the rainbow silking my body?
Which wings are these?
*
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.
Or ‘Terrible as an army with banners’.
If I wait, I am a castle
Built with blocks of pain.
If I set out
A kayak stitched with pain
*
Your tree – your oak
Your tree – your oak
A glare
Of black upward lightning, a wriggling grab
Momentary
Under the crumbling of stars.
A guard, a dancer
At the pure well of leaf.
Agony in the garden. Annunciation
Of clay, water and the sunlight.
They thunder under its roof.
Its agony is its temple.
Waist-deep, the black oak is dancing
And my eyes pause
On the centuries of its instant
As gnats
Try to winter in its wrinkles.
The seas are thirsting
Towards the oak.
The oak is flying
Astride the earth.
from
REMAINS OF ELMET
Football at Slack
Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill
Men in bunting colours
Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.
The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men
Spouted like water to head it.
The ball blew away downwind –
The rubbery men bounced after it.
The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind
Over a gulf of treetops.
Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.
Winds from fiery holes in heaven
Piled the hills darkening around them
To awe them. The glare light
Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.
Then the rain lowered a steel press.
Hair plastered, they all just trod water
To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up
Coming fine and thin, washed and happy
While the humped world sank foundering
And the valleys blued unthinkable
Under depth of Atlantic depression –
But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air
And the goalie flew horizontal
And once again a golden holocaust
Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.
Stanbury Moor
These grasses of light
Which think they are alone in the world
These stones of darkness
Which have a world to themselves
This water of light and darkness
Which hardly savours Creation
And this wind
Which has enough just to exist
Are not
A poor family huddled at a poor gleam
Or words in any phrase
Or wolf-beings in a hungry waiting
Or neighbours in a constellation
They are
The armour of bric-à-brac
To which your soul’s caddis
Clings with all its courage.
Leaf Mould
In Hardcastle Crags, that echoey museum,
Where she dug leaf mould for her handfuls of garden
And taught you to walk, others are making poems,
Between
finger
and
thumb
roll
a
pine-needle.
Feel
the
chamfer,
feel
how
they
threaded
The
sewing
machines.
And
Billy
Holt
invented
a
new
shuttle
As
like
an
ant’s
egg,
with
its
folded
worker,
As
every
other.
You
might
see
an
ant
carrying
one.
And
The
cordite
conscripts
tramped
away.
But
the
cenotaphs
Of
all
the
shells
that
got
their
heads
blown
off
And
their
insides
blown
out
Are
these
beech-bole
stalwarts.
And oak, birch,
Holly, sycamore, pine.
The lightest air-stir
Released their love-whispers when she walked
The needles weeping, singing, dedicating
Your spectre-double, still in her womb,
To this temple of her
Missa
Solemnis.
White-faced, brain-washed by her nostalgias,
You were her step-up transformer.
She grieved for her girlhood and the fallen.
You mourned for Paradise and its fable.
Giving you the kiss of life
She hung round your neck her whole valley
Like David’s harp.
Now, whenever you touch it, God listens
Only for her voice.
Leaf mould. Blood-warm. Fibres crumbled alive
Between thumb and finger.
Feel
again
The
clogs
twanging
your
footsoles,
on
the
street’s
steepness,
As
you
escaped.