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 pured 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, breathe'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 uneating 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 jaw-bone, 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 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 through my love pulls the pale, nippled air, Prides of to-morrow 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, through five eyes break.
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. We lying by seasand
It is the sinner's 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 alter 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 tide-print, 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 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 marraige, 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. It is the sinner's dust-tongued bell
O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies Of the sharp, enamelld 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, To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners, And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes To veil belladona and let the dry eyes percieve Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve. O make me a mask
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 not 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. The spire cranes
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 judgement 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 hymning head, 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 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.
After the Funeral
Once it was the coulour 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.
Once it was the Colour of Saying
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 recieve 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.
Not from this Anger