Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

WAS THERE A TIME

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles

In children’s circuses could stay their troubles?

There was a time they could cry over books,

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.

What’s never known is safest in this life.

Under the skysigns they who have no arms

Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost

Alone’s unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

NOW

Now

Say nay,

Man dry man,

Dry lover mine

The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,

Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,

Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

Now

Say nay,

Sir no say,

Death to the yes,

The yes to death, the yesman and the answer,

Should he who split his children with a cure

Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

Now

Say nay,

No say sir

Yea the dead stir,

And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,

He lying low with ruin in his ear,

The cockerel’s tide upcasting from the fire.

Now

Say nay,

So star fall,

So the ball fail,

So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,

The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,

The come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

Now

Say nay

A fig for

The seal of fire,

Death hairy-heeled, and the tapped ghost in wood,

We make me mystic as the arm of air,

The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

WHY EAST WIND CHILLS

Why east wind chills and south wind cools

Shall not be known till windwell dries

And west’s no longer drowned

In winds that bring the fruit and rind

Of many a hundred falls;

Why silk is soft and the stone wounds

The child shall question all his days,

Why night-time rain and the breast’s blood

Both quench his thirst he’ll have a black reply.

When cometh Jack Frost? the children ask.

Shall they clasp a comet in their fists?

Not till, from high and low, their dust

Sprinkles in children’s eyes a long-last sleep

And dusk is crowded with the children’s ghosts,

Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops.

All things are known: the stars’ advice

Calls some content to travel with the winds,

Though what the stars ask as they round

Time upon time the towers of the skies

Is heard but little till the stars go out.

I hear content, and ‘Be content’

Ring like a handbell through the corridors,

And ‘Know no answer,’ and I know

No answer to the children’s cry

Of echo’s answer and the man of frost

And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

A GRIEF AGO

A grief ago,

She who was who I hold, the fats and flower,

Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,

Hell wind and sea,

A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,

Rose maid and male,

Or, malted venus, through the paddler’s bowl

Sailed up the sun;

Who is my grief,

A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,

Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud

Shot through the leaf,

Was who was folded on the rod the aaron

Rose cast to plague,

The horn and ball of water on the frog

Housed in the side.

And she who lies,

Like exodus a chapter from the garden,

Brand of the lily’s anger on her ring,

Tugged through the days

Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,

On field and sand

The twelve triangles of the cherub wind

Engraving going.

Who then is she,

She holding me? The people’s sea drives on her,

Drives out the father from the caesared camp;

The dens of shape

Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,

That she I have,

The country-handed grave boxed into love,

Rise before dark.

The night is near,

A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;

I tell her this: before the suncock cast

Her bone to fire,

Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid

Draw in their seas,

So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,

And close her fist.

HOW SOON THE SERVANT SUN

How soon the servant sun

(Sir morrow mark)

Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone

(Fog has a bone

He’ll trumpet into meat)

Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown

And the naked egg stand straight,

Sir morrow at his sponge,

(The wound records)

The nurse of giants by the cut sea basin,

(Fog by his spring

Soaks up the sewing tides)

Tells you and you, my masters, as his strange

Man morrow blows through food.

All nerves to serve the sun,

The rite of light,

A claw I question from the mouse’s bone,

The long-tailed stone

Trap I with coil and sheet,

Let the soil squeal I am the biting man

And the velvet dead inch out.

How soon my level, lord,

(Sir morrow stamps

Two heels of water on the floor of seed)

Shall raise a lamp

Or spirit up a cloud,

Erect a walking centre in the shroud,

Invisible on the stump

A leg as long as trees,

This inward sir,

Mister and master, darkness for his eyes,

The womb-eyed, cries,

And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour’s ear,

Blasts back the trumpet voice.

EARS IN THE TURRETS HEAR

Ears in the turrets hear

Hands grumble on the door,

Eyes in the gables see

The fingers at the locks.

Shall I unbolt or stay

Alone till the day I die

Unseen by stranger-eyes

In this white house?

Hands, hold you poison or grapes?

Beyond this island bound

By a thin sea of flesh

And a bone coast,

The land lies out of sound

And the hills out of mind.

No bird or flying fish

Disturbs this island’s rest.

Ears in this island hear

The wind pass like a fire,

Eyes in this island see

Ships anchor off the bay.

Shall I run to the ships

With the wind in my hair,

Or stay till the day I die

And welcome no sailor?

Ships, hold you poison or grapes?

Hands grumble on the door,

Ships anchor off the bay,

Rain beats the sand and slates.

Shall I let in the stranger,

Shall I welcome the sailor,

Or stay till the day I die?

Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,

Hold you poison or grapes?

FOSTER THE LIGHT

Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,

Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,

But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;

Master the night nor serve the snowman’s brain

That shapes each bushy item of the air

Into a polestar pointed on an icicle.

Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel’s eggs,

Nor hammer back a season in the figs,

But graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;

Farmer in time of frost the burning leagues,

By red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,

In your young years the vegetable century.

And father all nor fail the fly-lord’s acre,

Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,

But rail with your wizard’s ribs the heart-shaped planet;

Of mortal voices to the ninnies’ choir,

High lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,

And pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.

Roll unmanly over this turning tuft,

O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift

From all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;

Nor when my love lies in the cross-boned drift

Naked among the bow-and-arrow birds

Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.

Who gave these seas their colour in a shape

Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven’s ark

In time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;

O who is glory in the shapeless maps,

Now make the world of me as I have made

A merry manshape of your walking circle.

THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country,

These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose’s quill has put an end to murder

That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor stroke the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

SHOULD LANTERNS SHINE

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Would wither up, and any boy of love

Look twice before he fell from grace.

The features in their private dark

Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come

And from her lips the faded pigments fall,

The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

I have been told to reason by the heart,

But heart, like head, leads helplessly;

I have been told to reason by the pulse,

And, when it quickens, alter the actions’ pace

Till field and roof lie level and the same

So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman

Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

I have heard many years of telling,

And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

I HAVE LONGED TO MOVE AWAY

I have longed to move away

From the hissing of the spent lie

And the old terrors’ continual cry

Growing more terrible as the day

Goes over the hill into the deep sea;

I have longed to move away

From the repetition of salutes,

For there are ghosts in the air

And ghostly echoes on paper,

And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;

Some life, yet unspent, might explode

Out of the old lie burning on the ground,

And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.

Neither by night’s ancient fear,

The parting of hat from hair,

Pursed lips at the receiver,

Shall I fall to death’s feather.

By these I would not care to die,

Half convention and half lie.

FIND MEAT ON BONES

‘Find meat on bones that soon have none,

And drink in the two milked crags,

The merriest marrow and the dregs

Before the ladies’ breasts are hags

And the limbs are torn.

Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,

But when the ladies are cold as stone

Then hang a ram rose over the rags.

‘Rebel against the binding moon

And the parliament of sky,

The kingcrafts of the wicked sea,

Autocracy of night and day,

Dictatorship of sun.

Rebel against the flesh and bone,

The word of the blood, the wily skin,

And the maggot no man can slay.’

‘The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,

And my heart is cracked across;

My face is haggard in the glass,

My lips are withered with a kiss,

My breasts are thin.

A merry girl took me for man,

I laid her down and told her sin,

And put beside her a ram rose.

‘The maggot that no man can kill

And the man no rope can hang

Rebel against my father’s dream

That out of a bower of red swine

Howls the foul fiend to heel.

I cannot murder, like a fool,

Season and sunshine, grace and girl,

Nor can I smother the sweet waking.’

Black night still ministers the moon,

And the sky lays down her laws,

The sea speaks in a kingly voice,

Light and dark are no enemies

But one companion.

‘War on the spider and the wren!

War on the destiny of man!

Doom on the sun!’

Before death takes you, O take back this.

GRIEF THIEF OF TIME

Grief thief of time crawls off,

The moon-drawn grave, with the seafaring years,

The knave of pain steals off

The sea-halved faith that blew time to his knees,

The old forget the cries,

Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,

Call back the castaways

Riding the sea light on a sunken path,

The old forget the grief,

Hack of the cough, the hanging albatross,

Cast back the bone of youth

And salt-eyed stumble bedward where she lies

Who tossed the high tide in a time of stories

And timelessly lies loving with the thief.

Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook,

Death flashing from his sleeve,

With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack

Sneak down the stallion grave,

Bull’s-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack

And free the twin-boxed grief,

No silver whistles chase him down the weeks’

Dayed peaks to day to death,

These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes

And the undead eye-teeth,

No third eye probe into a rainbow’s sex

That bridged the human halves,

All shall remain and on the graveward gulf

Shape with my fathers’ thieves.

AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead men naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan’t crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

THEN WAS MY NEOPHYTE

Then was my neophyte,

Child in white blood bent on its knees

Under the bell of rocks,

Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas

The winder of the water-clocks

Calls a green day and night.

My sea hermaphrodite,

Snail of man in His ship of fires

That burn the bitten decks,

Knew all His horrible desires

The climber of the water sex

Calls the green rock of light.

Who in these labyrinths,

This tidethread and the lane of scales,

Twine in a moon-blown shell,

Escapes to the flat cities’ sails

Furled on the fishes’ house and hell,

Nor falls to His green myths?

Stretch the salt photographs,

The landscape grief, love in His oils

Mirror from man to whale

That the green child see like a grail

Through veil and fin and fire and coil

Time on the canvas paths.

He films my vanity.

Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,

Over the water come

Children from homes and children’s parks

Who speak on a finger and thumb,

And the masked, headless boy.

His reels and mystery

The winder of the clockwise scene

Wound like a ball of lakes

Then threw on that tide-hoisted screen

Love’s image till my heartbone breaks

By a dramatic sea.

Who kills my history?

The year-hedged row is lame with flint,

Blunt scythe and water blade.

‘Who could snap off the shapeless print

From your tomorrow-treading shade

With oracle for eye?’

Time kills me terribly.

‘Time shall not murder you,’ He said,

‘Nor the green nought be hurt;

Who could hack out your unsucked heart,

O green and unborn and undead?’

I saw time murder me.

ALTARWISE BY OWL-LIGHT

I

Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway-house

The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;

Abaddon in the hang-nail cracked from Adam,

And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,

The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,

Bit out the mandrake with tomorrow’s scream.

Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,

Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,

With bones unbuttoned to the halfway winds,

Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,

Scraped at my cradle in a walking word

That night of time under the Christward shelter:

I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,

And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

II

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;

The child that sucketh long is shooting up,

The planet-ducted pelican of circles

Weans on an artery the gender’s strip;

Child of the short spark in a shapeless country

Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;

The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,

You by the cavern over the black stairs,

Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,

And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars;

Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,

Are but the roots of nettles and of feathers

Over these groundworks thrusting through a pavement

And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

III

First there was the lamb on knocking knees

And three dead seasons on a climbing grave

That Adam’s wether in the flock of horns,

Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,

Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes

On thunderous pavements in the garden time;

Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle

Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,

And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,

Dipped me breast-deep in the descended bone;

The black ram, shuffling off the year, old winter,

Alone alive among his mutton fold,

We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,

Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

IV

What is the metre of the dictionary?

The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?

Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?

(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper.)

Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?

(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow.)

What of a bamboo man among your acres?

Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?

Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,

My camel’s eyes will needle through the shroud.

Love’s reflection of the mushroom features,

Stills snapped by night in the bread-sided field,

Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,

Ark-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

V

And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,

From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,

The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;

Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,

Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle,

Rose my Byzantine Adam in the night.

For loss of blood I fell on Ishmael’s plain,

Under the milky mushrooms slew my hunger,

A climbing sea from Asia had me down

And Jonah’s Moby snatched me by the hair,

Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel

Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa

By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil

And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw.

VI

Cartoon of slashes on the tide-traced crater,

By lava’s light split through the oyster vowels

And burned sea silence on a wick of words.

Pluck, cock, my sea eye, said medusa’s scripture,

Lop, love, my fork tongue, said the pin-hilled nettle;

And love plucked out the stinging siren’s eye,

Old cock from nowheres lopped the minstrel tongue

Till tallow I blew from the wax’s tower

The fats of midnight when the salt was singing;

Adam, time’s joker, on a witch of cardboard

Spelt out the seven seas, an evil index,

The bagpipe-breasted ladies in the deadweed

Blew out the blood gauze through the wound of manwax.

VII

Now stamp the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice,

A Bible-leaved of all the written woods

Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,

Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,

And one light’s language in the book of trees;

Doom on deniers at the wind-turned statement.

Time’s tune my ladies with the teats of music,

The scaled sea-sawers, fix in a naked sponge

Who sucks the bell-voiced Adam out of magic,

Time, milk, and magic, from the world beginning.

Time is the tune my ladies lend their heartbreak,

From bald pavilions and the house of bread

Time tracks the sound of shape on man and cloud,

On rose and icicle the ringing handprint.

VIII

This was the crucifixion on the mountain,

Time’s nerve in vinegar, the gallow grave

As tarred with blood as the bright thorns I wept;

The world’s my wound, God’s Mary in her grief,

Bent like three trees and bird-papped through her shift,

With pins for teardrops is the long wound’s woman.

This was the sky, Jack Christ, each minstrel angle

Drove in the heaven-driven of the nails

Till the three-coloured rainbow from my nipples

From pole to pole leapt round the snail-waked world.

I by the tree of thieves, all glory’s sawbones,

Unsex the skeleton this mountain minute,

And by this blowclock witness of the sun

Suffer the heaven’s children through my heartbeat.

IX

From the oracular archives and the parchment,

Prophets and fibre kings in oil and letter,

The lamped calligrapher, the queen in splints,

Buckle to lint and cloth their natron footsteps,

Draw on the glove of prints, dead Cairo’s henna

Pour like a halo on the caps and serpents.

This was the resurrection in the desert,

Death from a bandage, rants the mask of scholars

Gold on such features, and the linen spirit

Weds my long gentleman to dusts and furies;

With priest and pharaoh bed my gentle wound,

World in the sand, on the triangle landscape,

With stones of odyssey for ash and garland

And rivers of the dead around my neck.

X

Let the tale’s sailor from a Christian voyage

Atlaswise hold halfway off the dummy bay

Time’s ship-racked gospel on the globe I balance:

So shall winged harbours through the rockbirds’ eyes

Spot the blown word, and on the seas I image

December’s thorn screwed in a brow of holly.

Let the first Peter from a rainbow’s quayrail

Ask the tall fish swept from the bible east,

What rhubarb man peeled in her foam-blue channel

Has sown a flying garden round that sea-ghost?

Green as beginning, let the garden diving

Soar, with its two bark towers, to that Day

When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom

My nest of mercies in the rude, red tree.

BECAUSE THE PLEASURE-BIRD WHISTLES

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,

Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?

Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer

The supper and knives of a mood.

In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year

That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,

An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,

Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,

Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair

In a wind that plucked a goose,

Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,

Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.

Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,

That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea

Secretly in statuary,

Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,

Not spin to stare at an old year

Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries

Like the mauled pictures of boys?

The salt person and blasted place

I furnish with the meat of a fable;

If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble

An upright man in the antipodes

Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:

Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

I MAKE THIS IN A WARRING ABSENCE

I make this in a warring absence when

Each ancient, stone-necked minute of love’s season

Harbours my anchored tongue, slips the quaystone,

When, praise is blessed, her pride in mast and fountain

Sailed and set dazzling by the handshaped ocean,

In that proud sailing tree with branches driven

Through the last vault and vegetable groyne,

And this weak house to marrow-columned heaven,

Is corner-cast, breath’s rag, scrawled weed, a vain

And opium head, crow stalk, puffed, cut, and blown,

Or like the tide-looped breastknot reefed again

Or rent ancestrally the roped sea-hymen,

And, pride is last, is like a child alone

By magnet winds to her blind mother drawn,

Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.

She makes for me a nettle’s innocence

And a silk pigeon’s guilt in her proud absence,

In the molested rocks the shell of virgins,

The frank, closed pearl, the sea-girls’ lineaments

Glint in the staved and siren-printed caverns,

Is maiden in the shameful oak, omens

Whalebed and bulldance, the gold bush of lions,

Proud as a sucked stone and huge as sandgrains.

These are her contraries: the beast who follows

With priest’s grave foot and hand of five assassins

Her molten flight up cinder-nesting columns,

Calls the starved fire herd, is cast in ice,

Lost in a limp-treed and uncaring silence,

Who scales a hailing hill in her cold flintsteps

Falls on a ring of summers and locked noons.

I make a weapon of an ass’s skeleton

And walk the warring sands by the dead town,

Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown,

Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins

Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten.

Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jawbone,

And, for that murder’s sake, dark with contagion

Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.

Ruin, the room of errors, one rood dropped

Down the stacked sea and water-pillared shade,

Weighed in rock shroud, is my proud pyramid;

Where, wound in emerald linen and sharp wind,

The hero’s head lies scraped of every legend,

Comes love’s anatomist with sun-gloved hand

Who picks the live heart on a diamond.

‘His mother’s womb had a tongue that lapped up mud,’

Cried the topless, inchtaped lips from hank and hood

In that bright anchorground where I lay linened,

‘A lizard darting with black venom’s thread

Doubled, to fork him back, through the lockjaw bed

And the breath-white, curtained mouth of seed.’

‘See,’ drummed the taut masks, ‘how the dead ascend:

In the groin’s endless coil a man is tangled.’

These once-blind eyes have breathed a wind of visions,

The cauldron’s root through this once-rindless hand

Fumed like a tree, and tossed a burning bird;

With loud, torn tooth and tail and cobweb drum

The crumpled packs fled past this ghost in bloom,

And, mild as pardon from a cloud of pride,

The terrible world my brother bares his skin.

Now in the cloud’s big breast lie quiet countries,

Delivered seas my love from her proud place

Walks with no wound, nor lightning in her face,

A calm wind blows that raised the trees like hair

Once where the soft snow’s blood was turned to ice.

And though my love pulls the pale, nippled air,

Prides of tomorrow suckling in her eyes,

Yet this I make in a forgiving presence.

WHEN ALL MY FIVE AND COUNTRY SENSES SEE

When all my five and country senses see,

The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark

How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,

Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,

Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,

The whispering ears will watch love drummed away

Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,

And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry

That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.

My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.

My one and noble heart has witnesses

In all love’s countries, that will grope awake;

And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,

The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

WE LYING BY SEASAND

We lying by seasand, watching yellow

And the grave sea, mock who deride

Who follow the red rivers, hollow

Alcove of words out of cicada shade,

For in this yellow grave of sand and sea

A calling for colour calls with the wind

That’s grave and gay as grave and sea

Sleeping on either hand.

The lunar silences, the silent tide

Lapping the still canals, the dry tide-master

Ribbed between desert and water storm,

Should cure our ills of the water

With a one-coloured calm;

The heavenly music over the sand

Sounds with the grains as they hurry

Hiding the golden mountains and mansions

Of the grave, gay, seaside land.

Bound by a sovereign strip, we lie,

Watch yellow, wish for wind to blow away

The strata of the shore and drown red rock;

But wishes breed not, neither

Can we fend off rock arrival,

Lie watching yellow until the golden weather

Breaks, O my heart’s blood, like a heart and hill.

IT IS THE SINNERS’ DUST-TONGUED BELL

It is the sinners’ dust-tongued bell claps me to churches

When, with his torch and hourglass, like a sulphur priest,

His beast heel cleft in a sandal,

Time marks a black aisle kindle from the brand of ashes,

Grief with dishevelled hands tear out the altar ghost

And a firewind kill the candle.

Over the choir minute I hear the hour chant:

Time’s coral saint and the salt grief drown a foul sepulchre

And a whirlpool drives the prayerwheel;

Moonfall and sailing emperor, pale as their tideprint,

Hear by death’s accident the clocked and dashed-down spire

Strike the sea hour through bellmetal.

There is loud and dark directly under the dumb flame,

Storm, snow, and fountain in the weather of fireworks,

Cathedral calm in the pulled house;

Grief with drenched book and candle christens the cherub time

From the emerald, still bell; and from the pacing weather cock

The voice of bird on coral prays.

Forever it is a white child in the dark-skinned summer

Out of the font of bone and plants at that stone tocsin

Scales the blue wall of spirits;

From blank and leaking winter sails the child in colour,

Shakes, in crabbed burial shawl, by sorcerer’s insect woken,

Ding dong from the mute turrets.

I mean by time the cast and curfew rascal of our marriage,

At nightbreak born in the fat side, from an animal bed

In a holy room in a wave;

And all love’s sinners in sweet cloth kneel to a hyleg image,

Nutmeg, civet, and sea-parsley serve the plagued groom and bride

Who have brought forth the urchin grief.

O MAKE MEA MASK

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies

Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws

Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,

Gag of a dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies

The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,

The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,

Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce

To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,

And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes

To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive

Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses

By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

THE SPIRE CRANES

The spire cranes. Its statue is an aviary.

From the stone nest it does not let the feathery

Carved birds blunt their striking throats on the salt gravel,

Pierce the spilt sky with diving wing in weed and heel

An inch in froth. Chimes cheat the prison spire, pelter

In time like outlaw rains on that priest, water,

Time for the swimmers’ hands, music for silver lock

And mouth. Both note and plume plunge from the spire’s hook.

Those craning birds are choice for you, songs that jump back

To the built voice, or fly with winter to the bells,

But do not travel down dumb wind like prodigals.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

(In memory of Ann Jones)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,

Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap

Tap happily of one peg in the thick

Grave’s foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,

The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,

Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,

Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat

In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,

That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout,

After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles

In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,

I stand, for this memorial’s sake, alone

In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann

Whose hooded, fountain heart once fell in puddles

Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun

(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly

Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;

She would not have me sinking in the holy

Flood of her heart’s fame; she would lie dumb and deep

And need no druid of her broken body).

But I, Ann’s bard on a raised hearth, call all

The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue

Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,

Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods

That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,

Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.

Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue

With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull

Is carved from her in a room with a wet window

In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.

I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands

Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare

Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,

Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;

And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.

These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental

Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,

Storm me forever over her grave until

The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love

And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

ONCE IT WAS THE COLOUR OF SAYING

Once it was the colour of saying

Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill

With a capsized field where a school sat still

And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;

The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo

That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.

When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park

Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo

Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,

The shade of their trees was a word of many shades

And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;

Now my saying shall be my undoing,

And every stone I wind off like a reel.

NOT FROM THIS ANGER

Not from this anger, anticlimax after

Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower

Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods

In a land strapped by hunger

Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds

And bear those tendril hands I touch across

The agonized, two seas.

Behind my head a square of sky sags over

The circular smile tossed from lover to lover

And the golden ball spins out of the skies;

Not from this anger after

Refusal struck like a bell under water

Shall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,

That burns along my eyes.

HOW SHALL MY ANIMAL

How shall my animal

Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,

Vessel of abscesses and exultation’s shell,

Endure burial under the spelling wall,

The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,

Who should be furious,

Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,

Roaring, crawling, quarrel

With the outside weathers,

The natural circle of the discovered skies

Draw down to its weird eyes?

How shall it magnetize,

Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze

That melts the lionhead’s heel and horseshoe of the heart,

A brute land in the cool top of the country days

To trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,

Love and labour and kill

In quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout out,

The black, burst sea rejoice, The bowels turn turtle,

Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle

The parched and raging voice?

Fishermen of mermen

Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin

With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,

Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound

Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,

Trace out a tentacle,

Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weed

To clasp my fury on ground

And clap its great blood down;

Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas

Or poise the day on a horn.

Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,

Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost

Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops

With carved bird, saint, and sun, the wrackspiked maiden mouth

Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,

Clips short the gesture of breath.

Die in red feathers when the flying heaven’s cut,

And roll with the knocked earth:

Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.

You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,

And dug your grave in my breast.

THE TOMBSTONE TOLD WHEN SHE DIED

The tombstone told when she died.

Her two surnames stopped me still.

A virgin married at rest.

She married in this pouring place,

That I struck one day by luck,

Before I heard in my mother’s side

Or saw in the looking-glass shell

The rain through her cold heart speak

And the sun killed in her face.

More the thick stone cannot tell.

Before she lay on a stranger’s bed

With a hand plunged through her hair,

Or that rainy tongue beat back

Through the devilish years and innocent deaths

To the room of a secret child,

Among men later I heard it said

She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare

And her red lips were kissed black,

She wept in her pain and made mouths,

Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.

I who saw in a hurried film

Death and this mad heroine

Meet once on a mortal wall

Heard her speak through the chipped beak

Of the stone bird guarding her:

I died before bedtime came

But my womb was bellowing

And I felt with my bare fall

A blazing red harsh head tear up

And the dear floods of his hair.

ON NO WORK OF WORDS

On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody

Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body

I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given

Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,

The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death

That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath

And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.

Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas

If I take to burn or return this world which is each man’s work.

A SAINT ABOUT TO FALL

A saint about to fall,

The stained flats of heaven hit and razed

To the kissed kite hems of his shawl,

On the last street wave praised

The unwinding, song by rock,

Of the woven wall

Of his father’s house in the sands,

The vanishing of the musical ship-work and the chucked bells,

The wound-down cough of the blood-counting clock

Behind a face of hands,

On the angelic etna of the last whirring featherlands,

Wind-heeled foot in the hole of a fireball,

Hymned his shrivelling flock,

On the last rick’s tip by spilled wine-wells

Sang heaven hungry and the quick

Cut Christbread spitting vinegar and all

The mazes of his praise and envious tongue were worked in flames and shells.

Glory cracked like a flea.

The sun-leaved holy candlewoods

Drivelled down to one singeing tree

With a stub of black buds,

The sweet, fish-gilled boats bringing blood

Lurched through a scuttled sea

With a hold of leeches and straws,

Heaven fell with his fall and one crocked bell beat the left air.

O wake in me in my house in the mud

Of the crotch of the squawking shores,

Flicked from the carbolic city puzzle in a bed of sores

The scudding base of the familiar sky,

The lofty roots of the clouds.

From an odd room in a split house stare,

Milk in your mouth, at the sour floods

That bury the sweet street slowly, see

The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair.

Strike in the time-bomb town,

Raise the live rafters of the eardrum,

Throw your fear a parcel of stone

Through the dark asylum,

Lapped among herods wail

As their blade marches in

That the eyes are already murdered,

The stocked heart is forced, and agony has another mouth to feed.

O wake to see, after a noble fall,

The old mud hatch again, the horrid

Woe drip from the dishrag hands and the pressed sponge of the forehead,

The breath draw back like a bolt through white oil

And a stranger enter like iron.

Cry joy that this witchlike midwife second

Bullies into rough seas you so gentle

And makes with a flick of the thumb and sun

A thundering bullring of your silent and girl-circled island.

‘IF MY HEAD HURT A HAIR’S FOOT’

‘If my head hurt a hair’s foot

Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my breath

Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.

Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat

Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.

‘All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:

I’ll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,

Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time

Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,

Strike light, and bloody a loud room.

‘If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel

Rage me back to the making house.