My time was in streams, meadow and in
stones,
and the common seeming of earth,
the oil of bones
appareled in the swaddle of
birth,
an undreamed of glory that makes the
face flush,
as mine hath been of yore. Like the dawn
break,
I turn in the wherefore;
days sling nightsore;
things that now are seen have been flushed from the opaque.
I come gone with rainbow
and
roses freak’d in the glow,
delightly doff a moon
down the bare-shouldered heavens
looking
night-starred on the waters of
June.
Fairly goes beauty cooking
the birthing sun into bright
shine
everywhere in the impure air,
yet there is something hoary deep in the soul-mine.
A stickcrow creaking; dolorosa joints
of pure lamb stuck on spits,
the greasy-fingered sits
alone where a thought or three comes
to rack,
projected like utterances on his
back,
displayed in all its points.
The brokewing’d cataract of soot and
lampblack,
old bird who never sung but wronged a
season
echos in the shaft of my inbone
reason;
some instinct that springs alive on
the dark track,
descending the night breezes
on rungs of phosphor.
The old bone hunter shall come
to prosper
through his own diseases.
The clear light, the exegesis,
when
understood
and practiced as an art may sustain the world for good.
Creatures hear each other call and
make
as if in blessed jubilee
soft calls of laughing. Heaven-by-the-sea,
a town to slink through for the
sake
of the festivals where tides of life
break
through the human pitch: the drone, the heave, the ache,
the sullen thing― evil of days,
beckons in the mirror―
waste and error,
the children in the maze,
fruitful nights,
the valley of a thousand
plights,
flowers the wilting sun has
warmed,
children leaping from their mothers
half-formed.
Is joy audible everywhere?
the sounds that underneath a
tree
of bliss I made as one too young to
see
that the nature of things is that
they’ll cease to be?
Feet pause by the pansies,
take them for mere fancies
when a parsec’s field of vision shall
have fled
from the place we live when we’re no
longer dead,
where a forgetting makes us as if
new,
long before star rise or a soul
congeals
and sets us in some blank
pew
that
the screen of god reveals,
so you half remember what you
get
and you’re naked or not naked
yet;
and the clouds trail upstairs through
the choir,
through the stained glass,
the lead wire,
up and out into the blithe infancy,
until the closing of the fontanelle
in your childlike
spiritskull
which tempers the bright light
and damps the bell
and joy itself goes dull,
with drifting dailier east to the
edges
of some potter’s heath of windy
pledges.
Slender was the vision,
low and damp the prison;
and a person wonders am I real?
is heaven full of grasses and
bonemeal?
No, Earth is! and her lapful of
pleasure.
She yearns for the good man with
fearless child
intact, fierce motherkind’s hard
weather, wild
excess without theory―
no doubt she does make do what
can
foster the indwelling son of outcast
man
to dread of her glories beyond
measure,
into
which he falls deadweary.
Look at him playing in the roots of
the elm;
his mother is chasing invisible fire
inside the house. But his hands
desire
to put out his stones along byways, his
realm
required being hidden from the sire―
plan for the feet to chart the holy
see
if only in fragments as a life defies
its artless shaping, striations
damnèd be.
Attending family celebration
with rhizomes in the ancient
nation,
a frame, a vantage easy―
his father’s sentimental air,
the child piping sure
beside him no lament, but otherwise
to be soon enough there,
before joy is thrown aside
in the seam of the divide
between the newly dead and the merely
lazy,
filling up the spaces between boyhood
friends
with silver humours poached in
sleep’s draught-ends,
electrolyzed deaftalk as the
dreamed-one wends
east of recall, west
of the map of the rest.
Believe the deeps and cavernous yawns
that bowl
themselves through racing
holes
within you if you’d speculate and
read
a heritage into the bright white pang
of mind haunted by a silent seed,
compressed eternal ‘til each cosmic
bang
repeat a thing called Brahman,
‘til infinite is common.
Perceive all space abysmal boomerang
inside you as it is in heavenly
fields.
Immortal be believed, but mortal roll
the days to which even the witness
yields,
knowing in the end he must become the
mole
to reach the fields
in the fastfading light of wants and
waves
before the one world caves
and mole-like he must travel blind
and sole
into that midnight of clay. One might
brave
a dwelling there ad infinitum and,
save
that it bring neither joy, nor warmth,
nor hope,
enjoy an unimaginable scope,
without delay. It’s not the child’s
grace
who has seen eternity in sand to
doubt
his sense, nor the man’s to be
quenched in the drought
his star commands or the ravage of
his face
We live within joy’s embers
after the bright flames die,
where Tuesdays and
Septembers
blink by with cindered eye.
This state of affairs harrows
benediction,
annotates a perpetual fiction.
All things otherwise worthy to be
blest―
freedom in time and the fancy of
childhood,
their fledgling hearts gently embracing
sweetest
concord, glad expectation, become
distressed;
until the wretched heart
lay cowering down athwart
her bed in secret doom. I sing
what I know of nothing,
falling on the vanished, trusting
to that instinct or trick of the
genes
to even mould the immortal notion,
who could not make ends in guilt but
witless means,
to set trembling the girth of the
ocean,
the crust of mountain rock.
The simple art, the lock,
the key, construes the
subject
to the floor and substitutes an
object
in a circle before the door, calling
it the icon, Cherish, the cupholder
of an inspiration. Soma falling
on the crown, the temples and the
shoulder,
to be renewed
at a thousand odd points between the
broad
nodes of the present,
remote where it times out at the
descent
into shadow, without the wit to
recant
what must become eternal round,
so fretful of the blank
ends of endless gulfstream or greasy
tank
which no waves pound
but swells imperceptibly bound;
and the sporting boy by that edge of
sea―
all I can recall, all I wish to be.
Then I chant in a low tone, to keep
wick trim
and flame round as a tabor.
Steady and slow my labor,
drawing out the mute chord with
plectrum
and flesh of finger pad.
The flag of light, nomad
of dawn, but are you mad
that this radiance is all you wish to
know?
this fleet star that’s nothing less
than childglow?
Already it’s past six o’clock.
Already it’s the time when all the starlings flock.
The light becomes post image,
expansive as a blear mirage.
O it’s the mind that
projects
this density, that interjects
the doctrine of the monad.
And you read it in the sad
glass reflecting back of you,
a spinning sexless globe in startling
plumage
before a pristine high cold mountain
col.
Is this the angel’s house you cry,
but all
comes blizzard when the messenger
descends
to tell you you have reached these
means, these ends.
How do I know this? Well, I couldn’t
say,
I’m improvising a yellow trail
through the snow
as everyone must do or be turned away.
Now the sharp moving dayclouds roil
and say,
“let gilt light flow
over the forms you hold before your
eye.”
This pure moment in an ecstasy of
atmosphere. Endless rock, the sky
above
water, speak that long within which lie
all pandaemonium of spacious presence―
my wife alive and mute by my side!
in the black cloudbank, the
evanescence,
the awful vault in which we take our
pride.
