The knobbly ape that swings along his sex

From damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist

Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,

Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast

Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six

Feet in the rubbing dust.

And what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?

Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?

My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?

The words of death are dryer than his stiff,

My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.

I would be tickled by the rub that is:

Man be my metaphor.

OUR EUNUCH DREAMS

I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,

Of light and love, the tempers of the heart,

Whack their boys’ limbs,

And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,

Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night

Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,

When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,

The bones of men, the broken in their beds,

By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

II

In this our age the gunman and his moll,

Two one-dimensioned ghosts, love on a reel,

Strange to our solid eye,

And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;

When cameras shut they hurry to their hole

Down in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,

Impose their shots, throwing the nights away;

We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill,

Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

III

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which

Shall fall awake when cures and their itch

Raise up this red-eyed earth?

Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,

The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,

Or drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,

Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith

That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

IV

This is the world: the lying likeness of

Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move

Loving and being loth;

The dream that kicks the buried from their sack

And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.

This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,

Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack

The image from the plates;

And we shall be fit fellows for a life,

And who remain shall flower as they love,

Praise to our faring hearts.

ESPECIALLY WHEN THE OCTOBER WIND

Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair,

Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire

And cast a shadow crab upon the land,

By the sea’s side, hearing the noise of birds,

Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,

My busy heart who shudders as she talks

Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark

On the horizon walking like the trees

The wordy shapes of women, and the rows

Of the star-gestured children in the park.

Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,

Some of the oaken voices, from the roots

Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,

Some let me make you of the water’s speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock

Tells me the hour’s word, the neural meaning

Flies on the shafted disc, declaims the morning

And tells the windy weather in the cock.

Some let me make you of the meadow’s signs;

The signal grass that tells me all

I know Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.

Some let me tell you of the raven’s sins.

Especially when the October wind

(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,

The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)

With fist of turnips punishes the land,

Some let me make you of the heartless words.

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

WHEN, LIKE A RUNNING GRAVE

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,

Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,

Love in her gear is slowly through the house,

Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,

Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,

Deliver me who, timid in my tribe,

Of love am barer than Cadaver’s trap

Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape

Of the bone inch,

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,

Heart of Cadaver’s candle waxes thin,

When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time

Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,

From maid and head,

For, Sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,

Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,

I, that time’s jacket or the coat of ice

May fail to fasten with a virgin o

In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver’s country in my force,

My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone

Despair of blood, faith in the maiden’s slime,

Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain

On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.

No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer

Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.

You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar

Tells the stick, ‘fail.’

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,

The cancer’s fusion, or the summer feather

Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,

Nor city tar and subway bored to foster

Man through macadam.

I damp the waxlights in your tower dome.

Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver’s shoot

Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,

Love’s twilit nation and the skull of state,

Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,

(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,

Ball of the foot depending from the sun,

(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,

The actions’ end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind

With whistler’s cough contages, time on track

Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,

Happy Cadaver’s hunger as you take

The kissproof world.

FROM LOVE’S FIRST FEVER TO HER PLAGUE

From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second

And to the hollow minute of the womb,

From the unfolding to the scissored caul,

The time for breast and the green apron age

When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,

All world was one, one windy nothing,

My world was christened in a stream of milk.

And earth and sky were as one airy hill,

The sun and moon shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting

Hand, the breaking of the hair,

And to the miracle of the first rounded word,

From the first secret of the heart, the warning ghost,

And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,

The sun was red, the moon was grey,

The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,

The growing bones, the rumour of manseed

Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,

And the four winds, that had long blown as one,

Shone in my ears the light of sound,

Called in my eyes the sound of light.

And yellow was the multiplying sand,

Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,

Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,

The boy she dropped from darkness at her side

Into the sided lap of light grew strong,

Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh

And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,

Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh

I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts

Into the stony idiom of the brain,

To shade and knit anew the patch of words

Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,

Need no word’s warmth.

The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,

That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;

The code of night tapped on my tongue;

What had been one was many sounding minded.

One womb, one mind, spewed out the matter,

One breast gave suck the fever’s issue;

From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,

The two-framed globe that spun into a score;

A million minds gave suck to such a bud

As forks my eye;

Youth did condense; the tears of spring

Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;

One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning was the three-pointed star,

One smile of light across the empty face;

One bough of bone across the rooting air,

The substance forked that marrowed the first sun;

And, burning ciphers on the round of space,

Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.

In the beginning was the pale signature,

Three-syllabled and starry as the smile;

And after came the imprints on the water,

Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;

The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail

Touched the first cloud and left a sign.

In the beginning was the mounting fire

That set alight the weathers from a spark,

A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower;

Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,

Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock

The secret oils that drive the grass.

In the beginning was the word, the word

That from the solid bases of the light

Abstracted all the letters of the void;

And from the cloudy bases of the breath

The word flowed up, translating to the heart

First characters of birth and death.

In the beginning was the secret brain.

The brain was celled and soldered in the thought

Before the pitch was forking to a sun;

Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,

Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light

The ribbed original of love.

LIGHT BREAKS WHERE NO SUN SHINES

Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin The winter’s robes;

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics die,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

I FELLOWED SLEEP

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,

Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,

Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.

So, ’planing-heeled, I flew along my man

And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,

Reaching a second ground far from the stars;

And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,

My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;

I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

‘My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.’

‘This that we tread was, too, your fathers’ land.’

‘But this we tread bears the angelic gangs,

Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.’

‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,

As, blowing on the angels, I was lost

On that cloud coast to each grave-gabbing shade;

I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed

Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air

Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,

I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,

How light the sleeping on this soily star,

How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,

Each rung a love or losing to the last,

The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.

An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,

My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.

I DREAMED MY GENESIS

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking

Through the rotating shell, strong

As motor muscle on the drill, driving

Through vision and the girdered nerve.

From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled

Off from the creasing flesh, filed

Through all the irons in the grass, metal

Of suns in the man-melting night.

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love’s drop, costly

A creature in my bones I

Rounded my globe of heritage, journey

In bottom gear through night-geared man.

I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel

Rammed in the marching heart, hole

In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled

Death on the mouth that ate the gas.

Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest

Of hemlock and the blades, rust

My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing

My second struggling from the grass.

And power was contagious in my birth, second

Rise of the skeleton and

Rerobing of the naked ghost. Manhood

Spat up from the resuffered pain.

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen

Twice in the feeding sea, grown

Stale of Adam’s brine until, vision

Of new man strength, I seek the sun.

MY WORLD IS PYRAMID

I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles

His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,

Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles

Tomorrow’s diver in her horny milk,

Bisected shadows on the thunder’s bone

Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled

Corrosive spring out of the iceberg’s crop,

The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled

The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,

For half of love was planted in the lost,

And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,

The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,

Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble

Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,

And stake the sleepers in the savage grave

That the vampire laugh.

The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded

The wild pigs’ wood, and slime upon the trees,

Sucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide,

And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs;

Rotating halves are horning as they drill

The arterial angel.

What colour is glory? death’s feather? tremble

The halves that pierce the pin’s point in the air,

And prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.

The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,

The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew

Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.

II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer

Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt

Incising summer.

My Egypt’s armour buckling in its sheet,

I scrape through resin to a starry bone

And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.

I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards

Red in an Austrian volley.

I hear, through dead men’s drums, the riddled lads,

Strewing their bowels from a hill of bones,

Cry Eloi to the guns.

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.

The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,

Drip on my dead house garden.

Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth

The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn

Through the Atlantic corn.

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel

On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,

Bearding the unborn devil,

Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.

The tongues of heaven gossip as I glide

Binding my angel’s hood.

Who blows death’s feather? What glory is colour?

I blow the stammel feather in the vein.

The loin is glory in a working pallor.

My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,

The secret child, I shift about the sea

Dry in the half-tracked thigh.

ALL ALL AND ALL THE DRY WORLDS LEVER

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,

Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,

All from the oil, the pound of lava.

City of spring, the governed flower,

Turns in the earth that turns the ashen

Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,

Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,

Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.

All all and all, the corpse’s lover,

Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,

All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the working world, my mortal,

Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,

Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.

Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,

The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,

Nor the flint in the lover’s mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,

Know now the flesh’s lock and vice,

And the cage for the scythe-eyed raven

Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,

Fear not the screws that turn the voice,

And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,

Ghost with her ghost, contagious man

With the womb of his shapeless people.

All that shapes from the caul and suckle,

Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,

Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people’s fusion,

O light in zenith, the coupled bud,

And the flame in the flesh’s vision.

Out of the sea, the drive of oil,

Socket and grave, the brassy blood,

Flower, flower, all all and all.

I, IN MY INTRICATE IMAGE

I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,

Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator

Laying my ghost in metal,

The scales of this twin world tread on the double,

My half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor,

To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,

Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season

Worked on a world of petals;

She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble

Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain

Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,

Image of images, my metal phantom

Forcing forth through the harebell,

My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, immortal,

I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,

Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,

A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,

No death more natural;

Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,

In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance:

The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel,

No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire

Mount on man’s footfall,

I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,

In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,

Hearing the weather fall.

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,

Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,

Finding the water final,

On the consumptives’ terrace taking their two farewells,

Sail on the level, the departing adventure,

To the sea-blown arrival.

II

They climb the country pinnacle,

Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,

Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;

They see the squirrel stumble,

The haring snail go giddily round the flower,

A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.

As they dive, the dust settles,

The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,

The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel

Turn the long sea arterial

Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy

Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental,

Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,

Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,

The neck of the nostril,

Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody

The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol,

Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,

The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,

A cock-on-a-dunghill

Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,

Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels,

Sweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spindrift

Rings out the Dead Sea scale;

And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,

Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman’s raft,

Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,

The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning

Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,

Let the wax disc babble

Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.

These are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,

Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,

The flight of the carnal skull

And the cell-stepped thimble;

Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel

Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.

Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,

Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly

Star-set at Jacob’s angle,

Smoke hill and hophead’s valley,

And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father’s coral,

Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.

Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,

Be by the ships’ sea broken at the manstring anchored

The stoved bones’ voyage downward

In the shipwreck of muscle;

Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,

Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

And in the pincers of the boiling circle,

The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,

My great blood’s iron single

In the pouring town,

I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle,

No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,

Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,

Time in the hourless houses

Shaking the sea-hatched skull,

And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,

All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.

Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle,

Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,

My ghost in his metal neptune

Forged in man’s mineral.

This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,

And my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.

THIS BREAD I BREAK

This bread I break was once the oat,

This wine upon a foreign tree

Plunged in its fruit;

Man in the day or wind at night

Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood

Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,

Once in this bread

The oat was merry in the wind;

Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let

Make desolation in the vein,

Were oat and grape

Born of the sensual root and sap;

My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

INCARNATE DEVIL

Incarnate devil in a talking snake,

The central plains of Asia in his garden,

In shaping-time the circle stung awake,

In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,

And God walked there who was a fiddling warden

And played down pardon from the heavens’ hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,

A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,

The wisemen tell me that the garden gods

Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;

And when the moon rose windily it was

Black as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian

In sacred waters that no frost could harden,

And in the mighty mornings of the earth;

Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,

All heaven in a midnight of the sun,

A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

TODAY, THIS INSECT

Today, this insect, and the world I breathe,

Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,

Time at the city spectacles, and half

The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,

In trust and tale have I divided sense,

Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double

Of head and tail made witnesses to this

Murder of Eden and green genesis.

The insect certain is the plague of fables.

This story’s monster has a serpent caul,

Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,

Measures his own length on the garden wall

And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;

A crocodile before the chrysalis,

Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,

Winged like a Sabbath ass this children’s piece

Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden.

The insect fable is the certain promise.

Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,

An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,

John’s beast, Job’s patience, and the fibs of vision,

Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:

‘Adam I love, my madmen’s love is endless,

No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,

All legends’ sweethearts on a tree of stories,

My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.’

THE SEED-AT-ZERO

The seed-at-zero shall not storm

That town of ghosts, the trodden womb

With her rampart to his tapping,

No god-in-hero tumble down

Like a tower on the town

Dumbly and divinely stumbling

Over the manwaging line.

The seed-at-zero shall not storm

That town of ghosts, the manwaged womb

With her rampart to his tapping,

No god-in-hero tumble down

Like a tower on the town

Dumbly and divinely leaping

Over the warbearing line.

Through the rampart of the sky

Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,

Manna for the rumbling ground,

Quickening for the riddled sea;

Settled on a virgin stronghold

He shall grapple with the guard

And the keeper of the key.

Through the rampart of the sky

Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,

Manna for the guarded ground,

Quickening for the virgin sea;

Settling on a riddled stronghold

He shall grapple with the guard

And the loser of the key.

May a humble village labour

And a continent deny?

A hemisphere may scold him

And a green inch be his bearer;

Let the hero seed find harbour,

Seaports by a drunken shore

Have their thirsty sailors hide him.

May a humble planet labour

And a continent deny?

A village green may scold him

And a high sphere be his bearer;

Let the hero seed find harbour,

Seaports by a thirsty shore

Have their drunken sailors hide him.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,

From the foreign fields of space,

Shall not thunder on the town

With a star-flanked garrison,

Nor the cannons of his kingdom

Shall the hero-in-tomorrow

Range on the sky-scraping place.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,

From the star-flanked fields of space,

Thunders on the foreign town

With a sand-bagged garrison,

Nor the cannons of his kingdom

Shall the hero-in-tomorrow

Range from the grave-groping place.

SHALL GODS BE SAID TO THUMP THE CLOUDS

Shall gods be said to thump the clouds

When clouds are cursed by thunder,

Be said to weep when weather howls?

Shall rainbows be their tunics’ colour?

When it is rain where are the gods?

Shall it be said they sprinkle water

From garden cans, or free the floods?

Shall it be said that, venuswise,

An old god’s dugs are pressed and pricked,

The wet night scolds me like a nurse?

It shall be said that gods are stone.

Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground,

Flung gravel chime?

Let the stones speak

With tongues that talk all tongues.

HERE IN THIS SPRING

Here in this spring, stars float along the void;

Here in this ornamental winter

Down pelts the naked weather;

This summer buries a spring bird.

Symbols are selected from the years’

Slow rounding of four seasons’ coasts,

In autumn teach three seasons’ fires

And four birds’ notes.

I should tell summer from the trees, the worms

Tell, if at all, the winter’s storms

Or the funeral of the sun;

I should learn spring by the cuckooing,

And the slug should teach me destruction.

A worm tells summer better than the clock,

The slug’s a living calendar of days;

What shall it tell me if a timeless insect

Says the world wears away?

DO YOU NOT FATHER ME

Do you not father me, nor the erected arm

For my tall tower’s sake cast in her stone?

Do you not mother me, nor, as I am,

The lovers’ house, lie suffering my stain?

Do you not sister me, nor the erected crime

For my tall turrets carry as your sin?

Do you not brother me, nor, as you climb,

Adore my windows for their summer scene?

Am I not father, too, and the ascending boy,

The boy of woman and the wanton starer

Marking the flesh and summer in the bay?

Am I not sister, too, who is my saviour?

Am I not all of you by the directed sea

Where bird and shell are babbling in my tower?

Am I not you who front the tidy shore,

Nor roof of sand, nor yet the towering tiler?

You are all these, said she who gave me the long suck,

All these, he said who sacked the children’s town,

Up rose the Abraham-man, mad for my sake,

They said, who hacked and humoured, they were mine.

I am, the tower told, felled by a timeless stroke,

Who razed my wooden folly stands aghast,

For man-begetters in the dry-as-paste,

The ringed-sea ghost, rise grimly from the wrack.

Do you not father me on the destroying sand?

You are your sisters’ sire, said seaweedy,

The salt sucked dam and darlings of the land

Who play the proper gentleman and lady.

Shall I still be love’s house on the widdershin earth,

Woe to the windy masons at my shelter?

Love’s house, they answer, and the tower death

Lie all unknowing of the grave sin-eater.

OUT OF THE SIGHS

Out of the sighs a little comes,

But not of grief, for I have knocked down that

Before the agony; the spirit grows,

Forgets, and cries;

A little comes, is tasted and found good;

All could not disappoint;

There must, be praised, some certainty,

If not of loving well, then not,

And that is true after perpetual defeat.

After such fighting as the weakest know,

There’s more than dying;

Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,

He’ll ache too long

Through no regret of leaving woman waiting

For her soldier stained with spill words

That spill such acrid blood

Were that enough, enough to ease the pain,

Feeling regret when this is wasted

That made me happy in the sun,

How much was happy while it lasted,

Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty,

The hollow words could bear all suffering

And cure me of ills.

Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew,

The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin,

Groping for matter under the dog’s plate,

Man should be cured of distemper.

For all there is to give I offer:

Crumbs, barn, and halter.

HOLD HARD, THESE ANCIENT MINUTES IN THE CUCKOO’S MONTH

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo’s month,

Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan’s hill,

As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;

Time, in a folly’s rider, like a county man

Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,

Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.

Country, your sport is summer, and December’s pools

By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees

Lie this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;

Hold hard, my country children in the world of tales,

The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,

This first and steepled season, to the summer’s game.

And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,

Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,

Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;

Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,

Crack like a spring in a vice, bone breaking April,

Spill the lank folly’s hunter and the hard-held hope.

Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,

Stalking my children’s faces with a tail of blood,

Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;

Hold hard, my county darlings, for a hawk descends,

Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.