My hand unravel

When you sew the deep door. The bed is a cross place.

Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make

A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.’

‘No. Not for Christ’s dazzling bed

Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms

My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.

Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,

Nor when all ponderous heaven’s host of waters breaks.

‘Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave

To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,

O my lost love bounced from a good home;

The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave

Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.

‘Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,

At the breast stored with seas. No return

Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton’s thin ways.

The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,

And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.’

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.

(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)

In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor

Sewing a shroud for a journey

By the light of the meat-eating sun.

Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,

With my red veins full of money,

In the final direction of the elementary town

I advance for as long as forever is.

THE CONVERSATION OF PRAYERS

The conversation of prayers about to be said

By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs

Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,

The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move

And the other full of tears that she will be dead,

Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise

Into the answering skies from the green ground,

From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.

The sound about to be said in the two prayers

For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies

Will be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?

Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?

The conversation of prayers about to be said

Turns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stairs

Tonight shall find no dying but alive and warm

In the fire of his care his love in the high room.

And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer

Shall drown in a grief as deep as his true grave,

And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,

Dragging him up the stairs to one who Mes dead.

A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF A CHILD IN LONDON

Never until the mankind making

Bird beast and flower

Fathering and all humbling darkness

Tells with silence the last light breaking

And the still hour

Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round

Zion of the water bead

And the synagogue of the ear of corn

Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound

Or sow my salt seed

In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.

I shall not murder

The mankind of her going with a grave truth

Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath

With any further Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other.

POEM IN OCTOBER

It was my thirtieth year to heaven

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood

And the mussel pooled and the heron

Priested shore

The morning beckon

With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot

That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road

Over the border

And the gates

Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling

Blackbirds and the sun of October

Summery

On the hill’s shoulder,

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened

To the rain wringing

Wind blow cold

In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist and the castle

Brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

There could I marvel

My birthday

Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country

And down the other air and the blue altered sky

Streamed again a wonder of summer

With apples

Pears and red currants

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother

Through the parables

Of sun light

And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in

mine.

These were the woods the river and sea

Where a boy

In the listening

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.

And the mystery

Sang alive

Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

It was my thirtieth

Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon

Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.

O may my heart’s truth

Still be sung

On this high hill in a year’s turning.

THIS SIDE OF THE TRUTH

(for Llewelyn)

This side of the truth,

You may not see, my son,

King of your blue eyes

In the blinding country of youth,

That all is undone,

Under the unminding skies,

Of innocence and guilt

Before you move to make

One gesture of the heart or head,

Is gathered and spilt

Into the winding dark

Like the dust of the dead.

Good and bad, two ways

Of moving about your death

By the grinding sea,

King of your heart in the blind days,

Blow away like breath,

Go crying through you and me

And the souls of all men

Into the innocent

Dark, and the guilty dark, and good

Death, and bad death, and then

In the last element

Fly like the stars’ blood,

Like the sun’s tears,

Like the moon’s seed, rubbish

And fire, the flying rant

Of the sky, king of your six years.

And the wicked wish,

Down the beginning of plants

And animals and birds,

Water and light, the earth and sky,

Is cast before you move,

And all your deeds and words,

Each truth, each lie,

Die in unjudging love.

TO OTHERS THAN YOU

Friend by enemy I call you out.

You with a bad coin in your socket,

You my friend there with a winning air

Who palmed the lie on me when you looked

Brassily at my shyest secret,

Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye

Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,

Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,

Whom now I conjure to stand as thief

In the memory worked by mirrors,

With unforgettably smiling act,

Quickness of hand in the velvet glove

And my whole heart under your hammer,

Were once such a creature, so gay and frank

A desireless familiar

I never thought to utter or think

While you displaced a truth in the air,

That though I loved them for their faults

As much as for their good,

My friends were enemies on stilts

With their heads in a cunning cloud.

LOVE IN THE ASYLUM

A stranger has come

To share my room in the house not right in the head,

A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.

Strait in the mazed bed

She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,

At large as the dead,

Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed

Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,

Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust

Yet raves at her will

On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last

I may without fail

Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

UNLUCKILY FOR A DEATH

Unluckily for a death

Waiting with phoenix under

The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days,

And for the woman in shades

Saint carved and sensual among the scudding

Dead and gone, dedicate forever to my self

Though the brawl of the kiss has not occurred,

On the clay cold mouth, on the fire

Branded forehead, that could bind

Her constant, nor the winds of love broken wide

To the wind the choir and cloister

Of the wintry nunnery of the order of lust

Beneath my life, that sighs for the seducer’s coming

In the sun strokes of summer,

Loving on this sea banged guilt My holy lucky body

Under the cloud against love is caught and held and kissed

In the mill of the midst

Of the descending day, the dark our folly,

Cut to the still star in the order of the quick

But blessed by such heroic hosts in your every

Inch and glance that the wound

Is certain god, and the ceremony of souls

Is celebrated there, and communion between suns.

Never shall my self chant

About the saint in shades while the endless breviary

Turns of your prayed flesh, nor shall I shoo the bird below me:

The death biding two lie lonely.

I see the tigron in tears In the androgynous dark,

His striped and noon maned tribe striding to holocaust,

The she mules bear their minotaurs,

The duck-billed platypus broody in a milk of birds.

I see the wanting nun saint carved in a garb

Of shades, symbol of desire beyond my hours

And guilts, great crotch and giant

Continence. I see the unfired phoenix, herald

And heaven crier, arrow now of aspiring

And the renouncing of islands.

All love but for the full assemblage in flower

Of the living flesh is monstrous or immortal,

And the grave its daughters.

Love, my fate got luckily,

Teaches with no telling

That the phoenix’ bid for heaven and the desire after

Death in the carved nunnery

Both shall fail if I bow not to your blessing

Nor walk in the cool of your mortal garden

With immortality at my side like Christ the sky.

This I know from the native

Tongue of your translating eyes. The young stars told me,

Hurling into beginning like Christ the child.

Lucklessly she must lie patient

And the vaulting bird be still. O my true love, hold me.

In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,

And the living earth your sons.

THE HUNCHBACK IN THE PARK

The hunchback in the park

A solitary mister

Propped between trees and water

From the opening of the garden lock

That lets the trees and water enter

Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper

Drinking water from the chained cup

That the children filled with gravel

In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship

Slept at night in a dog kennel

But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early

Like the water he sat down

And Mister they called Hey mister

The truant boys from the town

Running when he had heard them clearly

On out of sound

Past lake and rockery

Laughing when he shook his paper

Hunchbacked in mockery

Through the loud zoo of the willow groves

Dodging the park keeper

With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper

Alone between nurses and swans

While the boys among willows

Made the tigers jump out of their eyes

To roar on the rockery stones

And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time

A woman figure without fault

Straight as a young elm

Straight and tall from his crooked bones

That she might stand in the night

After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park

After the railings and shrubberies

The birds the grass the trees the lake

And the wild boys innocent as strawberries

Had followed the hunchback

To his kennel in the dark.

INTO HER LYING DOWN HEAD

I

Into her lying down head

His enemies entered bed,

Under the encumbered eyelid,

Through the rippled drum of the hair-buried ear;

And Noah’s rekindled now unkind dove

Flew man-bearing there.

Last night in a raping wave

Whales unrefined from the green grave

In fountains of origin gave up their love,

Along her innocence glided

Juan aflame and savagely young King Lear,

Queen Catherine howling bare

And Samson drowned in his hair,

The colossal intimacies of silent

Once seen strangers or shades on a stair;

There the dark blade and wanton sighing her down

To a haycock couch and the scythes of his arms

Rode and whistled a hundred times

Before the crowing morning climbed;

Man was the burning England she was sleep-walking,

and the enamouring island

Made her limbs blind by luminous charms,

Sleep to a newborn sleep in a swaddling loin-leaf

stroked and sang

And his runaway beloved childlike laid in

the acorned sand.

II

There where a numberless tongue

Wound their room with a male moan,

His faith around her flew undone

And darkness hung the walls with baskets of snakes,

A furnace-nostrilled column-membered

Super-or-near man

Resembling to her dulled sense

The thief of adolescence,

Early imaginary half remembered

Oceanic lover alone

Jealousy cannot forget for all her sakes,

Made his bad bed in her good

Night, and enjoyed as he would.

Crying, white gowned, from the middle moonlit stages

Out to the tiered and hearing tide,

Close and far she announced the theft of the heart

In the taken body at many ages,

Trespasser and broken bride

Celebrating at her side

All blood-signed assailings and vanished marriages in

which he had no lovely part

Nor could share, for his pride, to the least

Mutter and foul wingbeat of the solemnizing nightpriest

Her holy unholy hours with the always anonymous beast.

III

Two sand grains together in bed,

Head to heaven-circling head,

Singly lie with the whole wide shore,

The covering sea their nightfall with no names;

And out of every domed and soil-based shell

One voice in chains declaims

The female, deadly, and male

Libidinous betrayal,

Golden dissolving under the water veil.

A she bird sleeping brittle by

Her lover’s wings that fold tomorrow’s flight,

Within the nested treefork

Sings to the treading hawk

Carrion, paradise, chirrup my bright yolk.

A blade of grass longs with the meadow,

A stone lies lost and locked in the lark-high hill.

Open as to the air to the naked shadow

O she lies alone and still,

Innocent between two wars,

With the incestuous secret brother in the seconds

to perpetuate the stars,

A man torn up mourns in the sole night.

And the second comers, the severers, the enemies

from the deep

Forgotten dark, rest their pulse and bury their

dead in her faithless sleep.

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

DEATHS AND ENTRANCES

On almost the incendiary eve

Of several near deaths,

When one at the great least of your best loved

And always known must leave

Lions and fires of his flying breath,

Of your immortal friends

Who’d raise the organs of the counted dust

To shoot and sing your praise,

One who called deepest down shall hold his peace

That cannot sink or cease

Endlessly to his wound

In many married London’s estranging grief.

On almost the incendiary eve

When at your lips and keys,

Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,

One who is most unknown,

Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,

Will dive up to his tears.

He’ll bathe his raining blood in the male sea

Who strode for your own dead

And wind his globe out of your water thread

And load the throats of shells

With every cry since light

Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.

On almost the incendiary eve

Of deaths and entrances,

When near and strange wounded on London’s waves

Have sought your single grave,

One enemy, of many, who knows well

Your heart is luminous

In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,

Will pull the thunderbolts

To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys

And sear just riders back,

Until that one loved least

Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.

A WINTER’S TALE

It is a winter’s tale

That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes

And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,

Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,

The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,

And the stars falling cold,

And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl

Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold

Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl

In the river wended vales where the tale was told.

Once when the world turned old

On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,

As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled

The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,

Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold

Of fields. And burning then

In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow

And the dung hills white as wool and the hen

Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow

Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men

Stumble out with their spades,

The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,

The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milk maids

Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,

And all the woken farm at its white trades,

He knelt, he wept, he prayed,

By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light

And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,

In the muffled house, in the quick of night,

At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.

He knelt on the cold stones,

He wept from the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky

May his hunger go howling on bare white bones

Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties

And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone

Into the home of prayers

And fires where he should prowl down the cloud

Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.

His naked need struck him howling and bowed

Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air

But only the wind strung

Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed

In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.

And his nameless need bound him burning and lost

When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among

The rivers mouthed in night,

And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught

In the always desiring centre of the white

Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought

By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.

Deliver him, he cried,

By losing him all in love, and cast his need

Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,

Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed

Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.

Listen. The minstrels sing

In the departed villages. The nightingale,

Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings

And spells on the winds of the dead his winter’s tale.

The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring

Is telling. The wizened

Stream with bells and baying water bounds. The dew rings

On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening

Parish of snow. The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.

Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop. Listen.

It was a hand or sound

In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide

And there outside on the bread of the ground

A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.

A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.

Look. And the dancers move

On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light

As a dust of pigeons. Exulting, the grave hooved

Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white

Paddocks in the farms of birds. The dead oak walks for love.

The carved limbs in the rock

Leap, as to trumpets. Calligraphy of the old Leaves is dancing.

Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.

And the harp shaped voice of the water’s dust plucks in a fold

Of fields. For love, the long ago she bird rises. Look.

And the wild wings were raised

Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice

Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised

And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced

That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,

In the mantle and calm,

By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.

And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed

Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight

Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.

In the poles of the year

When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row

And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,

Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow

And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,

Rags and prayers down the knee-

Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,

All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-

Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.

Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,

The sky, the bird, the bride,

The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond

The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,

The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.

In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,

And the bird descended.

On a bread white hill over the cupped farm

And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended

Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm

And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.

The dancing perishes

On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,

The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes

That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread

And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes

Flying. The rite is shorn

Of nightingale and centaur dead horse. The springs wither

Back. Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.

Exultation lies down. Time buries the spring weather

That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.

For the bird lay bedded

In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,

And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,

And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,

The woman breasted and the heaven headed

Bird, he was brought low,

Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-

Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds

Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.

And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

ON A WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

The sky is torn across

This ragged anniversary of two

Who moved for three years in tune

Down the long walks of their vows.

Now their love lies a loss

And Love and his patients roar on a chain;

From every true or crater

Carrying cloud, Death strikes their house.

Too late in the wrong rain

They come together whom their love parted:

The windows pour into their heart

And the doors burn in their brain.

THERE WAS A SAVIOUR

There was a saviour

Rarer than radium,

Commoner than water, crueller than truth;

Children kept from the sun

Assembled at his tongue

To hear the golden note turn in a groove,

Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes

In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.

The voice of children says

From a lost wilderness

There was calm to be done in his safe unrest,

When hindering man hurt

Man, animal, or bird

We hid our fears in that murdering breath,

Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,

In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

There was glory to hear

In the churches of his tears,

Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,

O you who could not cry

On to the ground when a man died

Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood

And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:

Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.

Two proud, blacked brothers cry,

Winter-locked side by side,

To this inhospitable hollow year,

O we who could not stir

One lean sigh when we heard

Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour

But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall

Now break a giant tear for the little known fall,

For the drooping of homes

That did not nurse our bones,

Brave deaths of only ones but never found,

Now see, alone in us,

Our own true strangers’ dust

Ride through the doors of our unentered house.

Exiled in us we arouse the soft,

Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

ON THE MARRIAGE OF A VIRGIN

Waking alone in a multitude of loves when morning’s light

Surprised in the opening of her nightlong eyes

His golden yesterday asleep upon the iris

And this day’s sun leapt up the sky out of her thighs

Was miraculous virginity old as loaves and fishes,

Though the moment of a miracle is unending lightning

And the shipyards of Galilee’s footprints hide a navy of doves.

No longer will the vibrations of the sun desire on

Her deepsea pillow where once she married alone,

Her heart all ears and eyes, lips catching the avalanche

Of the golden ghost who ringed with his streams her mercury bone,

Who under the lids of her windows hoisted his golden luggage,

For a man sleeps where fire leapt down and she learns through his arm

That other sun, the jealous coursing of the unrivalled blood.

IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

CEREMONY AFTER A FIRE RAID

I

Myselves

The grievers

Grieve

Among the street burned to tireless death

A child of a few hours

With its kneading mouth

Charred on the black breast of the grave

The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.

Begin

With singing

Sing

Darkness kindled back into beginning

When the caught tongue nodded blind,

A star was broken

Into the centuries of the child

Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.

Forgive

Us forgive

Give

Us your death that myselves the believers

May hold it in a great flood

Till the blood shall spurt,

And the dust shall sing like a bird

As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.

Crying

Your dying

Cry,

Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed

Street we chant the flying sea

In the body bereft.

Love is the last light spoken. Oh

Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.

II

I know not whether

Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock

Or the white ewe lamb

Or the chosen virgin

Laid in her snow

On the altar of London,

Was the first to die

In the cinder of the little skull,

O bride and bride groom

O Adam and Eve together

Lying in the lull

Under the sad breast of the head stone

White as the skeleton

Of the garden of Eden.

I know the legend

Of Adam and Eve is never for a second

Silent in my service

Over the dead infants Over the one

Child who was priest and servants,

Word, singers, and tongue

In the cinder of the little skull,

Who was the serpent’s

Night fall and the fruit like a sun,

Man and woman undone,

Beginning crumbled back to darkness

Bare as the nurseries

Of the garden of wilderness.

III

Into the organpipes and steeples

Of the luminous cathedrals,

Into the weathercocks’ molten mouths

Rippling in twelve-winded circles,

Into the dead clock burning the hour

Over the urn of Sabbaths

Over the whirling ditch of daybreak

Over the sun’s hovel and the slum of fire

And the golden pavements laid in requiems,

Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames,

Into the wine burning like brandy,

The masses of the sea

The masses of the sea under

The masses of the infant-bearing sea

Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever

Glory glory glory

The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis’ thunder.

ONCE BELOW A TIME

I

Once below a time,

When my pinned-around-the-spirit

Cut-to-measure flesh bit,

Suit for a serial sum

On the first of each hardship,

My paid-for slaved-for own too late

In love torn breeches and blistered jacket

On the snapping rims of the ashpit,

In grottoes I worked with birds,

Spiked with a mastiff collar,

Tasselled in cellar and snipping shop

Or decked on a cloud swallower,

Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats

And out-of-perspective sailors,

In common clay clothes disguised as scales,

As a he-god’s paddling water skirts,

I astounded the sitting tailors,

I set back the clock faced tailors,

Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,

Hopping hot leaved and feathered

From the kangaroo foot of the earth,

From the chill, silent centre

Trailing the frost bitten cloth,

Up through the lubber crust of Wales

I rocketed to astonish

The flashing needle rock of squatters,

The criers of Shabby and Shorten,

The famous stitch droppers.

II

My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,

Around some coffin carrying

Birdman or told ghost I hung.

And the owl hood, the heel hider,

Claw fold and hole for the rotten

Head, deceived, I believed, my maker,

The cloud perched tailors’ master with nerves for cotton.

On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,

Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,

I was pierced by the idol tailor’s eyes,

Glared through shark mask and navigating head,

Cold Nansen’s beak on a boat full of gongs,

To the boy of common thread,

The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy

With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.

It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water

With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed

Summoning a child’s voice from a webfoot stone,

Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore

On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.

Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,

Lie down, lie down and live

As quiet as a bone.

WHEN I WOKE

When I woke, the town spoke.

Birds and clocks and cross bells

Dinned aside the coiling crowd,

The reptile profligates in a flame,

Spoilers and pokers of sleep,

The next-door sea dispelled

Frogs and satans and woman-luck,

While a man outside with a billhook,

Up to his head in his blood,

Cutting the morning off,

The warm-veined double of Time

And his scarving beard from a book,

Slashed down the last snake as though

It were a wand or subtle bough,

Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf.

Every morning I make,

God in bed, good and bad,

After a water-face walk,

The death-stagged scatter-breath

Mammoth and sparrowfall

Everybody’s earth.

Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks

I heard, this morning, waking,

Crossly out of the town noises

A voice in the erected air,

No prophet-progeny of mine,

Cry my sea town was breaking.

No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,

I drew the white sheet over the islands

And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

AMONG THOSE KILLED IN THE DAWN RAID WAS A MAN AGED A HUNDRED

When the morning was waking over the war

He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,

The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,

He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone

And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.

Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun

And the craters of his eyes grew springshoots and fire

When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.

Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.

The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound

Assembling waits for the spade’s ring on the cage.

O keep his bones away from that common cart,

The morning is flying on the wings of his age

And a hundred storks perch on the sun’s right hand.

LIE STILL, SLEEP BECALMED

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound

In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat

On the silent sea we have heard the sound

That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening

To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound

And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing

The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,

Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat

For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,

We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.

Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,

Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

VISION AND PRAYER

I

Who
Are you
Who is born
In the next room
So loud to my own
That I can hear the womb
Opening and the dark run
Over the ghost and the dropped son
Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?
In the birth bloody room unknown
To the burn and turn of time
And the heart print of man
Bows no baptism
But dark alone
Blessing on
The wild
Child.

I
Must lie
Still as stone
By the wren bone
Wall hearing the moan
Of the mother hidden
And the shadowed head of pain
Casting tomorrow like a thorn
And the midwives of miracle sing
Until the turbulent new born
Burns me his name and his flame
And the winged wall is torn
By his torrid crown
And the dark thrown
From his loin
To bright
Light.

When
The wren
Bone writhes down
And the first dawn
Furied by his stream
Swarms on the kingdom come
Of the dazzler of heaven
And the splashed mothering maiden
Who bore him with a bonfire in
His mouth and rocked him like a storm
I shall run lost in sudden
Terror and shining from
The once hooded room
Crying in vain
In the cauldron
Of his
Kiss

I n
The spin
Of the sun
In the spuming
Cyclone of his wing For
I was lost who am
Crying at the man drenched throne
In the first fury of his stream
And the lightnings of adoration
Back to black silence melt and mourn
For I was lost who have come
To dumbfounding haven
And the finding one
And the high noon
Of his wound
Blinds my
Cry.

There
Crouched bare
In the shrine
Of his blazing
Breast I shall waken
To the judge blown bedlam
Of the uncaged sea bottom
The cloud climb of the exhaling tomb
And the bidden dust upsailing
With his flame in every grain.
O spiral of ascension
From the vultured urn
Of the morning
Of man when
The land
And

The
Born sea
Praised the sun
The finding one
And upright Adam
Sang upon origin!
O the wings of the children!
The woundward flight of the ancient
Young from the canyons of oblivion!
The sky stride of the always slain
In battle! the happening
Of saints to their vision!
The world winding home!
And the whole pain
Flows open
And I
Die.

II

In the name of the lost who glory in
The swinish plains of carrion
Under the burial song
Of the birds of burden
Heavy with the drowned
And the green dust
And bearing
The ghost
From
The ground
Like pollen
On the black plume
And the beak of slime
I pray though I belong
Not wholly to that lamenting
Brethren for joy has moved within
The inmost marrow of my heart bone

That he who learns now the sun and moon
Of his mother’s milk may return
Before the lips blaze and bloom
To the birth bloody room
Behind the wall’s wren
Bone and be dumb
And the womb
That bore
For
All men
The adored
Infant light or
The dazzling prison
Yawn to his upcoming.
In the name of the wanton
Lost on the unchristened mountain
In the centre of dark I pray him

That he let the dead lie though they moan
For his briared hands to hoist them
To the shrine of his world’s wound
And the blood drop’s garden
Endure the stone
Blind host to sleep
In the dark
And deep
Rock
Awake
No heart bone
But let it break
On the mountain crown
Unbidden by the sun
And the beating dust be blown
Down to the river rooting plain
Under the night forever falling.

Forever falling night is a known
Star and country to the legion
Of sleepers whose tongue I toll
To mourn his deluging
Light through sea and soil
And we have come
To know all
Places
Ways
Mazes
Passages
Quarters and graves
Of the endless fall.
Now common lazarus
Of the charting sleepers prays
Never to awake and arise
For the country of death is the heart’s size

And the star of the lost the shape of the eyes.
In the name of the fatherless
In the name of the unborn
And the undesirers
Of midwiving morning’s
Hands or instruments
O in the name
Of no one
Now or
No
One to
Be I pray
May the crimson
Sun spin a grave grey
And the colour of clay
Stream upon his martyrdom
In the interpreted evening
And the known dark of the earth amen.

I turn the corner of prayer and burn
In a blessing of the sudden
Sun. In the name of the damned
I would turn back and run
To the hidden land
But the loud sun
Christens down
The sky.
I
Am found.
O let him
Scald me and drown
Me in his world’s wound.
His lightning answers my
Cry. My voice burns in his hand.
Now I am lost in the blinding
One.