1
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and isolation, heading toward hopelessness.
The boy pulls an animal on a leash.
The house with a red roof rests between two hills.
I can look through its windows to the sea.
His aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?
House is the projection, space around it intermediary, theater.
Celebrated, the moustache,
And near enough ignored
His “beautiful hands”.
Capable on a keyboard, improvised
A polonaise, his own artistic
Compositions “dull and decent”.
He could see, some, but much swam, out there:
Knives and forks, print, street signs.
Then, his mind made up, he laid about,
Sank immense nets into the cultural acid.
When we winched them back in, on fingertips,
They rippled with rainbows — herring and sprat
They gave the city a stroke. Its memories
are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.
Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century
and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget
now squares with another. If the word is Manchester
it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.
To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload
of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.
In the dark we disappear, pure being.
Our mirror images, impure being.
Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and
nothingness (Sartre) — which is purer being?
Being alone is no way to be: thus
loneliness is the test of pure being.
Nights in love I fell too far or not quite
far enough — one pure, one impure being.
Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water,
smoke from fire — a metaphor's pure being.
Stillness and more stillness and the light locked
deep inside — both pure and impure being.
You change a life
as eating an artichoke changes the taste
of whatever is eaten after.
Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat —
not objectively present at all —
and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:
to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.
The piano, that good servant,
has none of you in her at all, she lends herself
to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.
Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot
whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.
In a culvert by the airport
under crumbling slag
wine colored water seeps
to this pool the two does
drink from: each sipping as
the other keeps look out.
The skyline is a blur
of barcode and microchip.
Even at home we hold
the narrowest purchase.
No arcs of tracer fire.
No caravans of fleeing
families. Only this
suspicion ripples
through our circles of lamp glow
(as you sweep the faint sweat
from your forehead and flip
another page in your novel)
habit smacks
its dull skull
like a stuck bull
in a brick stall
and my version
of what I know
is like eye surgery
with a backhoe
on grace
so much beyond
my pitiful gray
sponge of a brain
I'd not believe it exists
except for such
doses of felicity
as this.
Where analgesia may be found to ease the infinite, minute scars of the day;
What final interlude will result, picked bit by bit from the morning's hurry, the lunch-hour boredom, the fevers of the night;
Why this one is cherished by the gods, and that one not;
How to win, and win again, and again, staking wit alone against a sea of time;
Which man to trust and, once found, how far —
Amazing to believe that nothingness
Surrounds us with delight and lets us be,
And that the meekness of nonentity,
Despite the friction of the world of sense,
Despite the leveling of violence,
Is all that matters. All the energy
We force into the matchhead and the city
Explodes inside a loving emptiness.
