Gaudete (16 page)

In a world where all is temporary

And must pass for its opposite 

The trousseau of the apple

Came by violence into my possession.

I neglected to come to degree of nature

In the patience of things.

I forestalled God –

I assailed his daughter.

Now I lie at the road’s edge.

People come and go.

Dogs watch me.

Collision with the earth has finally come –

How far can I fall?

A kelp, adrift

In my feeding substance

A mountain

Rooted in stone of heaven

A sea

Full of moon-ghost, with mangling waters

Dust on my head

Helpless to fit the pieces of water

A needle of many Norths

Ark of blood

Which is the magic baggage old men open

And find useless, at the great moment of need

Error on error

Perfumed

With a ribbon of fury

Trying to be a leaf

In your kingdom

For a moment I am a leaf

And your fulness comes

And I reel back

Into my face and hands

Like the electrocuted man

Banged from his burst straps

I heard the screech, sudden –

Its steel was right inside my skull

It scraped all round, inside it

Like the abortionist’s knife.

My blood lashed and writhed on its knot –

Its skin is so thin, and so blind,

And earth is so huge, so hard, wild

And so nearly nothing

And so final with its gravity stone –

My legs, though, were already galloping to help

The woman who wore a split lopsided mask – 

That was how the comedy began.

Before I got to her – it was ended

And the curtain came down.

But now, suddenly,

Again the curtain goes up.

This is no longer the play.

The mask is off.

Once I said lightly

Even if the worst happens

We can’t fall off the earth. 

And again I said

No matter what fire cooks us

We shall be still in the pan together.

And words twice as stupid.

Truly hell heard me.

She fell into the earth

And I was devoured.

Music, that eats people

That transfixes them

On its thorns, like a shrike

To cut up at leisure

Or licks them all over carefully gently

Like a tiger

Before leaving nothing but the hair of the head

And the soles of the feet

Is the maneater

On your leash.

But all it finds of me, when it picks me up

Is what you have

Already

Emptied and rejected.

The rain comes again

A tightening, a prickling in

On the soft-rotten gatepost.

But the stars

Are sunbathing

On the shores

Of the sea whose waves

Pile in from your approach

An unearthly woman wading shorewards

With me in your arms

The grey in my hair.

This is the maneater’s skull.

These brows were the Arc de Triomphe

To the gullet.

The deaf adder of appetite

Coiled under. It spied through these nacelles

Ignorant of death.

And the whole assemblage flowed hungering through the

                                                                     long ways.

Its cry

Quieted the valleys.

It was looking for me.

I was looking for you.

You were looking for me.

I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.

Nuptials among prehistoric insects

The tremulous convulsion

The inching hydra strength

Among frilled lizards

Dropping twigs, and acorns, and leaves.

The oak is in bliss

Its roots

Lift arms that are a supplication

Crippled with stigmata

Like the sea-carved cliffs earth lifts

Loaded with dumb, uttering effigies

The oak seems to die and to be dead

In its love-act.

As I lie under it

In a brown leaf nostalgia

An acorn stupor

A perilously frail safety.