Selected Poems 1930-1988 (4 page)

Spend the years of learning squandering

Courage for the years of wandering

Through a world politely turning

From the loutishness of learning.

dragging his hunger through the sky

of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must

soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve

till hunger earth and sky be offal

Exeo in a spasm

tired of my darling's red sputum

from the Portobello Private Nursing Home

its secret things

and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge

and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding

round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding

into a black west

throttled with clouds.

Above the mansions the algum-trees

the mountains

my skull sullenly

clot of anger

skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind

bites like a dog against its chastisement.

I trundle along rapidly now on my ruined feet

flush with the livid canal;

at Parnell Bridge a dying barge

carrying a cargo of nails and timber

rocks itself softly in the foaming cloister of the lock;

on the far bank a gang of down and outs would seem to be mending a beam.

Then for miles only wind

and the weals creeping alongside on the water

and the world opening up to the south

across a travesty of champaign to the mountains

and the stillborn evening turning a filthy green

manuring the night fungus

and the mind annulled

wrecked in wind.

I splashed past a little wearish old man,

Democritus,

scuttling along between a crutch and a stick,

his stump caught up horribly, like a claw, under his breech, smoking.

Then because a field on the left went up in a sudden blaze

of shouting and urgent whistling and scarlet and blue ganzies

I stopped and climbed the bank to see the game.

A child fidgeting at the gate called up:

‘Would we be let in Mister?'

‘Certainly' I said ‘you would.'

But, afraid, he set off down the road.

‘Well' I called after him ‘why wouldn't you go on in?'

‘Oh' he said, knowingly,

‘I was in that field before and I got put out.'

So on,

derelict,

as from a bush of gorse on fire in the mountain after dark,

or in Sumatra the jungle hymen,

the still flagrant rafflesia.

Next:

a lamentable family of grey verminous hens,

perishing out in the sunk field,

trembling, half asleep, against the closed door of a shed,

with no means of roosting.

The great mushy toadstool,

green-black,

oozing up after me,

soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence,

in my skull the wind going fetid,

the water …

Next:

on the hill down from the Fox and Geese into Chapelizod

a small malevolent goat, exiled on the road,

remotely pucking the gate of his field;

the Isolde Stores a great perturbation of sweaty heroes,

in their Sunday best,

come hastening down for a pint of nepenthe or moly or half and half

from watching the hurlers above in Kilmainham.

Blotches of doomed yellow in the pit of the Liffey;

the fingers of the ladders hooked over the parapet,

soliciting;

a slush of vigilant gulls in the grey spew of the sewer.

Ah the banner

the banner of meat bleeding

on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers

that do not exist.

world world world world

and the face grave

cloud against the evening

de morituris nihil nisi

and the face crumbling shyly

too late to darken the sky

blushing away into the evening

shuddering away like a gaffe

veronica mundi

veronica munda

gives us a wipe for the love of Jesus

sweating like Judas

tired of dying

tired of policemen

feet in marmalade

perspiring profusely

heart in marmalade

smoke more fruit

the old heart the old heart

breaking outside congress

doch I assure thee

lying on O'Connell Bridge

goggling at the tulips of the evening

the green tulips

shining round the corner like an anthrax

shining on Guinness's barges

the overtone the face

too late to brighten the sky

doch doch I assure thee

before morning you shall be here

and Dante and the Logos and all strata and mysteries

and the branded moon

beyond the white plane of music

that you shall establish here before morning

       grave suave singing silk

       stoop to the black firmament of areca

       rain on the bamboos flower of smoke alley of willows

who though you stoop with fingers of compassion

to endorse the dust

shall not add to your bounty

whose beauty shall be a sheet before me

a statement of itself drawn across the tempest of emblems

so that there is no sun and no unveiling

and no host

only I and then the sheet

and bulk dead

In the magic the Homer dusk

past the red spire of sanctuary

I null she royal hulk

hasten to the violet lamp to the thin K'in music of the bawd.

She stands before me in the bright stall

sustaining the jade splinters

the scarred signaculum of purity quiet

the eyes the eyes black till the plagal east

shall resolve the long night phrase.

Then, as a scroll, folded,

and the glory of her dissolution enlarged

in me, Habbakuk, mard of all sinners.

Schopenhauer is dead, the bawd

puts her lute away.

all the livelong way this day of sweet showers from Portrane on the seashore

Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords

pounding along in three ratios like a sonata

like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum atra cura on the step

Botticelli from the fork down pestling the transmission

tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway

all heaven in the sphincter

the
sphincter

müüüüüüüde now

potwalloping now through the promenaders

this trusty all-steel this super-real

bound for home like a good boy

where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches

ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts

no fingers no spoilt love

belting along in the meantime clutching the bike

the billows of the nubile the cere wrack

pot-valiant caulless waisted in rags hatless

for mamma papa chicken and ham

warm Grave too say the word

happy days snap the stem shed a tear

this day Spy Wedsday seven pentades past

oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork

the glans he took the day off up hill and down dale

with a ponderous fawn from the Liverpool London and Globe

back the shadows lengthen the sycomores are sobbing

to roly-poly oh to me a spanking boy

buckets of fizz childbed is thirsty work

for the midwife he is gory

for the proud parent he washes down a gob of gladness

for footsore Achates also he pants his pleasure

sparkling beestings for me

tired now hair ebbing gums ebbing ebbing home

good as gold now in the prime after a brief prodigality

yea and suave

suave urbane beyond good and evil

biding my time without rancour you may take your oath

distraught half-crooked courting the sneers of these fauns these smart nymphs

clipped like a pederast as to one trouser-end

sucking in my bloated lantern behind a Wild Woodbine

cinched to death in a filthy slicker

flinging the proud Swift forward breasting the swell of Stürmers

I see main verb at last

her whom alone in the accusative

I have dismounted to love

gliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters

dauntless daughter of desires in the old black and flamingo

get along with you now take the six the seven the eight or the little single-decker

take a bus for all I care walk cadge a lift

home to the cob of your web in Holles Street

and let the tiger go on smiling

in our hearts that funds ways home

there was a happy land

the American Bar

in Rue Mouffetard

there were red eggs there

I have a dirty I say henorrhoids

coming from the bath

the steam the delight the sherbet

the chagrin of the old skinnymalinks

slouching happy body

loose in my stinking old suit

sailing slouching up to Puvis the gauntlet of tulips

lash lash me with yaller tulips I will let down

my stinking old trousers

my love she sewed up the pockets alive the live-oh she did she said that was better

spotless then within the brown rags gliding

frescoward free up the fjord of dyed eggs and thongbells

I disappear don't you know into the local

the mackerel are at billiards there they are crying the scores

the Barfrau makes a big impression with her mighty bottom

Dante and blissful Beatrice are there

prior to Vita Nuova

the balls splash no luck comrade

Gracieuse is there Belle-Belle down the drain

booted Percinet with his cobalt jowl

they are necking gobble-gobble

suck is not suck that alters

lo Alighieri has got off au revoir to all that

I break down quite in a titter of despite

hark

upon the saloon a terrible hush

a shiver convulses Madame de la Motte

it courses it peals down her collops

the great bottom foams into stillness

quick quick the cavaletto supplejacks for mumbo-jumbo

vivas puellas mortui incurrrrrsant boves

oh subito subito ere she recover the cang bamboo for bastinado

a bitter moon fessade à la mode

oh Becky spare me I have done thee no wrong spare me damn thee

spare me good Becky

call off thine adders Becky I will compensate thee in full

Lord have mercy upon

Christ have mercy upon us

Lord have mercy upon us

without the grand old British Museum

Thales and the Aretino

on the bosom of the Regent's Park the phlox

crackles under the thunder

scarlet beauty in our world dead fish adrift

all things full of gods

pressed down and bleeding

a weaver-bird is tangerine the harpy is past caring

the condor likewise in his mangy boa

they stare out across monkey-hill the elephants

Ireland

the light creeps down their old home canyon

sucks me aloof to that old reliable

the burning btm of George the drill

ah across the way a adder

broaches her rat

white as snow

in her dazzling oven strom of peristalsis

limae labor

ah father father that art in heaven

I find me taking the Crystal Palace

for the Blessed Isles from Primrose Hill

alas I must be that kind of person

hence in Ken Wood who shall find me

my breath held in the midst of thickets

none but the most quarried lovers

I surprise me moved by the many a funnel hinged

for the obeisance to Tower Bridge

the viper's curtsy to and from the City

till in the dusk a lighter

blind with pride

tosses aside the scarf of the bascules

then in the grey hold of the ambulance

throbbing on the brink ebb of sighs

then I hug me below among the canaille

until a guttersnipe blast his cernèd eyes

demanding 'ave I done with the Mirror

I stump off in a fearful rage under Married Men's Quarters

Bloody Tower

and afar off at all speed screw me up Wren's giant bully

and curse the day caged panting on the platform

under the flaring urn

I was not born Defoe

but in Ken Wood

who shall find me

my brother the fly

the common housefly

sidling out of darkness into light

fastens on his place in the sun

whets his six legs

revels in his planes his poisers

it is the autumn of his life

he could not serve typhoid and mammon