Stars from five wars, scars,
Words filled with ice and fear,
Nightflares and fogginess,
and a studied regularity.
Gon’ lay down my sword ’ n’ shield —
Down by the river side, down by the river side —
Down by the river side...
1
Is this writing mine
Whose name is this
Did I underline
What I was to miss?
2
An upheaval of leaves
Enlightens the tree
Rooted it receives
Gusts on a spree
3
Beauty makes me sad
Makes me grieve
I see what I must leave
4
Scaffold, gallows
Do whose will
Who hallows wood
To build, kill
O Hesper-Phosphor, far away
Shining, the first, the last white star,
Hear’ st thou the strange, the ghostly cry,
That moan of an ancient agony
From purple forest to golden sky
Shivering over the breathless bay?
It is not the wind that wakes with the day;
For see, the gulls that wheel and call,
Beyond the tumbling white-topped bar,
Had I but lived a hundred years ago
I might have gone, as I have gone this year,
By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know,
And Time have placed his finger on me there:
"You see that man?" — I might have looked, and said,
"O yes: I see him. One that boat has brought
Which dropped down Channel round Saint Alban's Head.
So commonplace a youth calls not my thought."
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’ s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’ s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Haze of wave spume towards Small Point,
Seguin Island Light like a whale's spout —
maybe life washes itself here, cools off.
It never comes clean. See all the sails up
and full in the windy parade of skin
and sand and brine. Soon the rocks will pluck
each wave's feathers. Soon the beach
like the moon, waning, will be 1/8th its size.
Somewhere else — maybe Ireland — the tide
Your death must be loved this much.
You have to know the grief — now.
Standing by the water’ s edge,
looking down at the wave
touching you. You have to lie,
stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth
and see how far the darkness
will take you. I mean it, this, now —
before the ghost the cold leaves
in your breath, rises;
before the toes are put together
inside the shoes. There it is — the goddamn
orange-going-into-rose descending
circle of beauty and time.
You have nothing to be sad about.
When I was
nearly six my
father
opened his magic
doctor bag:
two
tongue depressors fastened by
a rubber
band;
one flick
of his hairy wrist
and lo!
we invented
flight.
At the center of the lit circle, rising
from cotton-candy calf muscles,
the White Clown ushers his
eyebrows skyward. He grates his ukulele,
opens a heart-shaped mouth, inhales —
his serenade begins.
Now's the time. From the shadows,
a blast like a trumpeting elephant:
obscene, ragged. The Auguste capers like a fawn,
darts away, pads around
with his trombone. The gold of the slide
slips into and out of the infinite.
The stems of the sun bent over the eye
The sleeping man
The whole of the earth
And this head heavy with fear
In the night
This complete hole
Vast
And even so streaming with water
The noise
The peals of little bells mingled with the
Clinking of glasses
And bursts of laughter
The head moves
On the carpet the body shifts
