Mortal Intimations

     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.