I.
Given to sweet motion
the wilderness believes
one fair one of flowers
to be a moral blossom.
We go so far. Walks now,
only legend remaining.
"I came afterwards to the window when you was writing."
But in their documents
her judges had written
"Insolent."
In its branches
spirit shelters
air with wailing.
The air thunders
unavailingly there.
"Fear is a snare. Why should I be afraid."
In three directions
are two storms.
I instruct the edges
of my hands to become
irises, to shatter
in that way,
in three directions.
There's nothing behind me.
Viols
claw beneath our fences
at the elevation
of sound to pure
unsanctity, the moment
of simultaneity:
airplanes seeming to collide and not colliding, the crow alighting
in the manner of a seabird, the carbomb a more than momentary poppy.
It doesn’ t matter
A damn what’ s playing —
In the dead of winter
You go, days of 1978 —
79, and we went
Because the soldiers were beautiful
And doomed as Asian jungles
Kept afire Christ-like
In the hopeless war
I did not go to in the end
Because it ended.
Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.
A man’ s imagining
Suddenly may inherit
The handclapping centuries
Of his one minute on earth.
And hear the virgin juries
Talk with his own breath
To the corner boys of his street.
And hear the Black Maria
Searching the town at night.
And hear the playropes caa
The sister Mary in.
And hear Willie and Davie
Among bracken of Narnain
Sing in a mist heavy
With myrtle and listeners.
And hear the higher town
Weep a petition of fears
1
Gently disintegrate me
Said nothing at all.
Is there still time to say
Said I myself lying
In a bower of bramble
Into which I have fallen.
Look through my eyes up
At blue with not anything
We could have ever arranged
Slowly taking place.
Above the spires of the fox
Gloves and above the bracken
Tops with their young heads
Recognising the wind,
The armies of the empty
Blue press me further
Into Zennor Hill.
Unmet at Euston in a dream
Of London under Turner’ s steam
Misting the iron gantries, I
Found myself running away
From Scotland into the golden city.
I ran down Gray’ s Inn Road and ran
Till I was under a black bridge.
This was me at nineteen
Late at night arriving between
The buildings of the City of London.
And the I (O I have fallen down)
Fell in my dream beside the Bank
Of England’ s wall to be, me
With my money belt of Northern ice.
I found Eliot and he said yes
Fame is not fastidious about the lips
which spread it. So long as there are mouths
to reiterate the one name it does not
matter whose they are.
The fact that to the seeker after fame
they are indistinguishable from each other
and are all counted as equal shows that this
passion has its origin in the experience
of crowd manipulation. Names collect
their own crowds. They are greedy, live their own
separate lives, hardly at all connected
with the real natures of the men who bear them.
There is no widening distance at the shore —
The sea revolving slowly from the piers —
But the one border of our take-off roar
And we are mounted on the hemispheres.
Above the waning moon whose almanac
We wait to finish continents away,
The Northern stars already call us back,
And silence folds like maps on all we say.
I should be happy with my lot:
A wife and mother – is it not
Enough for me to be content?
What other blessing could be sent?
A quiet house, and homely ways,
That make each day like other days;
I only see Time’ s shadow now
Darken the hair on baby’ s brow!
No world’ s work ever comes to me,
No beggar brings his misery;
I have no power, no healing art
With bruised soul or broken heart.
