Tableaux I-XX

The Antinomian

Hell is not any crowd you happen to be in,
    Alone, yet not so, feeling a fervour
Attack your marrow, still, in isolation
    Bordering on the profound
Lonesomeness of a damaged animal.
    The fervour of the crowd infects,
It hangs on the hedge of nervous defences
    Heavy impediments like the huge
Static models they make of bacteria.
    But then, for once, you notice
The interstices, holes, crevices, gaps
    In the stems and baubles, hiatus
Happening everywhere; hiatus, the secret
    Long bending corridor of a breath.
It is the crack through which your close-packed
    Fellows have slipped, time after time,
Benign or bestial. Taking their chances,
    Out they stole, to come back in again:
The benign, a breath of fresh air,
    The bestial, out for blood.

This curiously clouded August afternoon
    I mean to celebrate only the generous -
And come to the gap, work skeletal, old hat,
    No closure to it, no comprehensive
Statement such as might make people say
    You have to be smart to say a thing
Like that. But comprehension with closure
    Can be prorogued for now. The grace
Of the hiatus is the fine thing I go after -
    Not escape, not the cop-out,
Simply the gift that can free a body,
    Transmitter of spirit, from all contortion.

Help! The gift, hurting, has to run the gauntlet
    Between packed graves, the solitary givens,
Even between words when, making phrases,
    They are composed as if comprehending
That an antinomian anthropoid, in the hiatus
    Of mouth becoming at last connected,
Found I, without Thou, had no power to speak.


Tableau in the Restaurant

Hairclip a semicircle of imitation tortoiseshell
    To aureole her really uninteresting hair,
She gazed through schoolmarm glasses at a script
    And laughed to see the way her father wrote it.
The matron opposite, more lustre in her soup-spoon
    Than in her ponytail, said little, sat enveloped
In a brown sweater; unlike her pink, spare profile,
    Her thighs, inside a floral dress, and looming
Over the chair's edge, had gone so soon to fat.
    But as the girl laughed, her father tilted
Such delicately modelled features in the halflight:
    At each glance I stole the bony forehead broadened,
Nostrils bronzed by the candle became a tiny double flute:
    Behind deep eye-sockets, in the barbered skull,
The reptile snored, algebra did a dance.
    Florentine his whole allure, yet, utterly forlorn,
He found no way to step back into his picture.
    Somehow, her soda water long forgot, scattered
The ashes of a love she supped on tonight.
    Of that forlorn father she will resolve to tell.


A Lingering Enchantment

Back, what might be found, found intelligible,
    Back, beneath the crusts, beneath
The layering phosphors of antiquity?
    Cropping their hair with flint -
And the toenail, how about that? - the tribal
    Institutions writ in bone marrow,
People it would be no pleasure to live with?
    What compliments might we reciprocate?
We are not mad, these habits, normal, as they come,
    And our unstopped awe amid animals,
Our agility in water, shelter in the stockade,
    Those painted tunnels running tubes
Through Mother, for her own glory and good,
    Not to mention the elaborate
Inventions of our cave speech deliver
    Dreadful truth: the idiot, thou it is:
And all answer of thine speaks brittlish
    Bones: alone thy daintiness
Consigns thy neural node to death.

    Then take a leap, to Mithras,
Occupy for a while the hole through incense
    Dug, and horror, here the blood
Gushes from that bull they wrestle, hoofs
    Clattering on the pinewood planks, -
The red stench of this torrent suffocates,
    But born anew, with a huge
Gasp you spring out, into the embrace
    Of white-robed, Greek-speaking,
Tremulous friends: the goddess,
    See now her shimmer, hear it
Pulse in the notes of the double flute
    And re-organise the shattered sea wave
As it was in the beginning and ever shall be.
    Some such folk held the fort
At Montségur. In secret cells others waited
    To smell the clear rose of daylight.
Still others chose to haunt, puffing
    Cigarettes, telling the old tales,
A bridge of stone at Visegrad...
                                  What then,
    What, then, of the circus while Vandals roared
With weaponry sharp, besieging Carthage?
    For in the theatre, wanton as it was,
The applause of spectators mingled, it is said,
    With groans of the dying and amid
The Carthaginian giggle battle cries went ignored.

While of the angel of history it was supposed
    He might like to waken the dead,
To repair what had been broken, still his wings
    Cannot be closed: tempest from paradise,
Caught in his wings, blows only him backwards
    And at his feet ruins amass to the sky,
You open his eyes, your mouth is his, agape,
    You only turn to this teacup, study the leaves.


Washington Fragment

Sunlight ploughshare peeling away from earth,
    Over and over, topsoil darkness, please
Brighten the buzzards at the breakfast table
    When they squat and chuckle: Let us prey.


A Species of Limbo

What might they have done with their long lives,
    These old Turks who sit on the terrace,
Now summer has come and inside the rustic
    Ramshackle tea house it is no cooler?
What might they say that they have not said
    A hundred times over, in the noon
Or when twilight hushes the day nightingale
    And the owl calls from her niche?
What work they ever did, unless their wives
    Did all of it, in the fields,
Hoeing and harvesting okra, aubergine, apricot
    Or far up north the leaves of tea,
Has now gone into the withering of their skin,
    Their crablike hands fondling the worrybeads.
But should a stranger come, they question him:
    Family? Occupation? Memleket?
And the stranger has turned away: Their horizon,
    How high? Their carnal compass
How close to the bone? So they sit, hungry for
    Music, exchanging an amiable nod
With a neighbour, who calculates the extent
    To which the other has washed his nose,
Inside his domicile, or Friday at the mosque.
    A swotted fly lands in a tulip,
And the tulip is shaken out, with dregs
    Of tea, the tea-glass being the tulip.
The gentlemen josh one another, now and then.
    The gentlemen live for this farniente.
And some are so old they soldiered in Korea,
    Some too numb to sense any sway,
Back and forth, of a lifetime's needle.
    In dark bag trousers, caps of wool,
The gentlemen inhabit a species of limbo.
    They call it the world, dünya, just as if
Yesterday it was, the world. Not a single knife
    To be seen in a boot. No visible stir,
If over the potholes a truckload of prisoners
    Hurtles by.
               Spare for them a thought
Now juvenile swaggering imperialists draw
    Down on themselves again enemy fire,
Now the whole shebang of vain transcendence
    Could go up in smoke (any rapture being
Rancid superstition, atavistic imposture).
    So much for the stone dances of old.
So much for aspiration, taunting the wise...


Not the Last of Aesthetics

Improvident people, where will they be taken?
    Shots ring out. Into the truck they climb
Over the tailgate. Toby is there, Herb who forgot
    To check his mailbox. Was there a message?
Had they rejected his contribution again?
    In a gust of wind, holding her skirt down,
Megan's ashamed. Someone might see,
    Bitten by Toby, the backs of her legs.
This is the last we see of them alive.
    Seldom under the hammer, Donatello,
Whoever they were, might you have heard
    More true the marble ring.


Prospecting in Sicily, April 1787

I

Disconcerting: such a sorry monk.
    Yet he put the pipe organ through its paces.
Of a reed, the littlest whisper.
    Of trumpet calls, the solidest confabulation;
We never saw who pumped, working the bellows,
    And the swell quite carried me aloft.
Phenomenally intricate couplings wished away
    Fact's grapeshot, blue goodbyes,
The blue goodbye, which does molest our flesh.


II

A blessing that my hat was not blown off today
    Into the crater when I walked around it.
Zeolites picked from cavities in lava,
    Hornstone, basalt, motta
(A significant rock) in my satchel I amass,
    Shells, mosses, and a red, red sedum -
Of Neptune evidence? We'll see about that,
    Sift agates from gravel in a brook; the globe,
Up it goes with the Sicilian lark.


III

Had the roof been blown away? What otherwise
    Woke me? Overhead I saw the best
And brightest star. Of flowers, thick on the road,
    A whiff remembered? Grit needling a shank?
Daybreak: the roof intact, I descried a hole in it;
    And scooping Chance into some not indescribable
Design, that starlight, me in total dark, I reckoned,
    Had passed through my meridian, a rotary design
Which, come the day, with pen and ink, I'll plot.


IV

Gazing on the cast statues at the French Academy
    Megalio thought that form `included everything'.
`I'm modelling in clay a human foot,' his quill
    Scratched, and now I leave the earth
Of Rome, the moon at full illumines also me.
    So to the light above, atmospheric form, unwarped
The plant aspires. Angelika's garden,
    There I will set a pine-sprout, but in the North
Ego-agonised recall gravity dragging its Wurzel down.


The Torture Foreshadowed

      `Hast du wirklich diesen Freund in Petersburg?'
                                                         Kafka, `Das Urteil'

A door, again a door, and waiting for the door
    To open, through a mica window Aliosha
Discerns the sentinels, motionless, in silhouette
    Against an emerald sky. Poor Tsarevitch!
Enveloped in the odour again of cooking cabbage pie...

And Count Andrei, thinking, while the father hugs
    His Aliosha: So the hawk will kiss
The chicken till the last fluff has gone.

Then to Varlaam, not his familiar priest, Aliosha
    Tells his transgressions, every detail
The same as he has told papa, but meekly
    Adding a couple more. Varlaam (was it real
Or fancy?) did seem a trifle agitated; a tremor
    Passes between them, `fugitive, mysterious...'


Tableau X

It might drive anyone to distraction, this hearsay
    That certain souls are formed only for delight,
And music was composed in measures, once,
    Compatible with the plan of Solomon's Temple.
The souls formed for delight, only delight,
    They are unfractured by intent:
The music, to their confusion it was heard
    By citizens in the Cathedral of the Flower.
These rumours only circulate, so the hearsay goes,
    Because a wish wings every thought,
Or else with vanity they are entertained, to reverse,
    At its onset, an inscrutable passion.
So they also circulate when a nation
    Adopts the idea of building itself up,
Only to persist while the pools of blood
    And body parts take back the street.


A Secret-Keeper

Eye on a tennis ball, Henry the Fifth,
    Having raced after who knows what,
Magnifies that kitten, paw sinister lifted
    Haptic on a hollyhock pod, passant,
Topaz kitten, tail point foremost
    Flush with haunch, looping a collarbone,
Tenses, now altogether immobile -

    Yet this incandescence of a day's end
Fluffs his breast, captive there, it is
    Gloaming you see, eyeballs, both
In a flash reflect it, so intact this cat
    Who knows what his play was discovering -
A me in the Many, the Singular?
    A kingdom, why not, in the wind.


Narcissus in the Styx

Arms lifting, palm inward, as if a pope or king
    Expected kisses, but no, shoo, shoo!
He says and starts to sweep away, with arms
    Frenetically waving, stories from far afield
Which do not tally right with his conceit,
    Which aim a pin at the skin of his bubble:
Talk other than his, he has divined, is nuts
    And monkeys his interlocutors. French,
His latest claim is that he can speak French:
    Souson, he says, Souson - even French people
Really do not know what that word means.
    And met with some suspicion he proceeds
To stretch his bones out, on the sofa, trilling:
    If you but knew how I have loved you.

As life in expendable organs desires life,
    Steadily to measure self-love circulates;
Step up the volume to a torrent, torrent exudes
    A choking fume, power being self-abused.
Spawn of democracy in its dotage, such bogus
    Petty despots work their mouths, enthroned,
Each, in a globule of this gas of tin prestige.
    This one, song his talent, and when he sings
The hole in his face displays the dentadura
    Of a jack rabbit - Made in Disneyland.
Room for his bubble. Shocked a moment
    Back to life, stiff in her coffin, yoicks!
It is the mouth of Pushkin's Queen of Spades.


The Signal Officer's Story

Now when I tell you this, what might you be thinking?
    And down to the ships we went, bending
Over my oar I could not see our beaked prow,
    But surely it turned due east. And
Subsequently on that island they threw at us
    Every craft still capable of flight,
The Zeros, not only the Zeros, but crates
    Ill-serviced, every one with a bomb
Strapped underneath, plummeting vertical down.
    The ack-ack shot them up, in mid-air,
You saw the stuff explode, suspended,
    Then shattering, all in a moment.
Pilots, if they jumped in time, them too
    The machine-guns shattered, so bad,
With body parts all dispersed, the parachute
    Deprived of any weight, lost uplift,
Withered, shrank, dropped empty to the ground.
    I tell you, it was something. The cheers
Rose from our pits, savage, for every Jap foe
    Who fell was one step closer to home.
And this perhaps you were thinking, this,
    From his chant, the stodgy old poet,
Composing, prone on his couch, long ago
    Not far, perhaps, from a Mediterranean island?
Anyone with an ego rushes to have or be had;
    Love, to the contrary, is a figure
Relating persons, one free formation bonding
    Erratic particles, timing the growth
A person desires, especially limiting it.
    And I too, it happens, think of that.


The Cubicle

Roll a dice till the side with four dots
    Comes face to face with you,
Then watch. That side like a door opens
    A crack and out slips a dazed
Manikin. Picture him as he grows
    In quite a remarkably short time
To a natural size. Soon a can of beer
    Has unbefuddled him. He speaks:

I must say it's a relief to be back again,
    And none the wiser, so far.
Here the complication is more than enough;
    There I tumbled at high speed
To a tune so old that the latterday
    Pagan Jovius hummed it,
Choosing and changing allegiances
    Compatibly with Sovereign Chance.

Another beer - he flips the little catch
    And sips, and says: I chose
At random, more or less, four images.
    And the four walls on which
I projected them held them in place.
    What was floor, what was roof
Had no part at all in the experiment.
    Did the images blur? I think not.
No, each distinct, each in turn I saw,
    But the velocity of their succession
And my tumbling made attention difficult.

Then he described (in words, words) the images
    So long the object of his meditation:
All from the welter of things that had been;
    Which one might strike the nerve of history?

Sophie Streatfield, famous for prettily weeping.

Sergeant Bourgogne, veteran of the Grande Armée,
    Through curtains of thick snow he stumbles -
Smolensk, where are you? - hearing behind him
    The elemental moan of organ music.

Bauto the Frank was number three, his Christian
    Faith attested by no more than a singular
Participle in the Latin of Saint Ambrose.

Number four: Dying Hester Thrale, her finger
    Traces an oblong coffin in the air;
So Hester saves the doctor half his trouble.

Had this experiment no upshot whatever?
    What if the images had been
Not images at all, but the real thing?
    The real, raw, unextracted horror?

The man has walked away. His cubicle
    Flies after him, with six doors open.


Spoon, Covered Wagon

The barkeep spoke, fingering a coffee spoon
    (Hush in the bar that night, for some reason):
See the stem, at this end it tapers, but
    Not to a point quite; at the other end,
Lower, only a little lower, here is the scoop.
    Remind you of anything?

                              Not much,
We with our red wine said, and he continued:
    The latest thing in design, this; and yet
Almost it is identical with a silver spoon
    Dug from the earth at Roman Cirencester:
No coffee then, but eggs, supposedly.
    Yet where the stem tapered, at that time,
A pretty sharp point stood at the end of it.
    Another difference: the Roman scoop
Was supported by a little silver bridge;
    Soldered it was, soldered on,
Said the barkeep, beneath the narrow throat
    Connecting scoop and stem. But this, this
Absence of a point at the tapering end
    Has been explained by an archaeologist.
The point existed to pierce the shell of an egg.

Such perforation guaranteed that evil demons
    Inhabiting the egg would all disperse.
Dissipated in the atmosphere they could inflict
    Harm no more, no evil on anyone.
Our spoon is not so made as to exert
    A similar effect. An egg spoon
It is not. Are we at a disadvantage?
    That wine, raw, and in our heads afloat
A sombre Jacobean, no, what he said
    They said of him: Deep in a dump
John Ford was alone got, with folded arms
    And melancholy hat, now could not
But remind someone of the brisk tap to top
    Or bottom, aforetimes, of an egg:
One dent in the shell, if it did not disperse
    Foul demons, at least it let the egg
Ventilate. One tap could stop the yellow yolk
    From spreading round itself a blue
Circumference, a demon habitat.

                                       Barkeep,
    Event had interrupted here your argument.
Errand took you off. So it began again,
    The patching we do to the spandrils
Which spit grit and creak under the bridge
    Called uneasily culture. Here we are,
America, who take astray your covered wagon,
    Stop the opening lips, then into bluster
Turn treasured objects of people not to be subdued.
    They saw not far, either, but their eyebrows,
Look, how they rise, gracious, how they swoop,
    Look, like bridges, stems of silver spoons.


Theological Fragment

Fearing the invisible
    Might want to make away with you,
Best deny its having any want at all.
    Then backtrack, with your want improvise
An Invisible to have a relation with,
    A relation in the deep, and personal.
Must a God not intervene to frighten off
    Throngs of undependable intermediaries?

Mingling with odium a phobic worm
    Twists ultra-subtle fibres in the skull;
And on the worm enormous robust rhetorics,
    Civilisation, fabrics of holy rite
Are mounted.

                  When she felt the tremor
    Coming, your girl, so she reported,
Saw vivid animals, safe rooms: the jaguar,
    Giraffe, peacock, strolling;
Rooms luminous, never once too large,
    Yet opening, opening; her animals,
Those depended on her breath to stay alive.

Perhaps the marvel is that, as it foams up,
    The phobia forms crystals of a magnitude
Not to be spoken of. Greed, lusting with hazard,
    Shatters them; odium makes such
Cultures malignant, pulls down on them
    Their curtain. Your girl, unerringly
Over every spike in the crystal, every dome,
    She spans her pirouette.


De Mortuis

The note pad and over it the candle glass
    Spills a shadow. Redder now the candle
Housed in its glass. No red suffusing shadow.

Suddenly there's such a crowd, I can't see
    Over their heads, let alone into them.
I am struck by their muteness, their misty
    Dissolution as they drop, one by one,
Trudging step by step through a wilderness.
    What visions might have made them so
Strangely here at home?

                             This mother
    Cadaverous, with pinched lips, atrophied
Yet waiting for her moment still. Her Hubert
    Who tore his colon apparatus out and told
A doctor he had come in to the ward to die.
    Johannes, peritonitis picked him off;
Your brother, headache, on a couch, at thirty-one;
    Now John of Brecht, wondering if the cancer
Had it coming to him when he quit two houses,
    Each a rat's nest of old papers, dangerous
Chairs, and the understanding of Anne. These
    First faces blend into Manfred's, comatose,
With drowned Brady's, in sickbay at school he heard
    The owl hoot, me saying one of us must die.

To tell me death dwells in my deep underground
    With speech and all resting on a negative,
Soon to the fore others will surge, soonest
    This one, perhaps. No, put him back
As long as there is time, a little. Otherwise
    He'll gulp your wine, hobnob with you.
Dear dead, who is this not speaking you alive
    And, failing that, fears he stole
Honour off you? Who flightily spoke no word,
    Not one, that speaks to his death
The speaker? All he cared was once to touch,
    Scenting no danger, these blank pages,
Though alone he might die, discovered
    Hosting many maggots, hardest work undone.


Avdagina

Prey they do, each upon another,
    Agglomerated, from beachcomber
To barkeep, full circle.
                             She remembers
    How a heaventree of stars touched her;
When with a tingle in them she leaned
    Her breasts against a wooden window strut,
Vast distance took it back again,
    Rich, limitless, and the wheat,
You could have heard it ripen, so still below,
    And strung along the river, the white town.
How long, this procession of the refugees,
    Huggermugger, white dust on their clothes,
Pots and pans now in saddlebags, the tiny
    Dazed children peering out of baskets.
Singular, in their migration, beaten masses
    Sealed in trucks, then scattered
By howling bombs they still jam the road.

                       Here, have another spoon
    Of porridge... And in the tea, bromide.

Aaman! Imdat. Chiquito no tiene cuna.


Datura

At the onset of twilight, Zulf says, you see
    That white datura lily open on the patio;
Against the undivided green of oaks, how white,
    A flourished trumpet, star-gazing.
It does not yearn for anything. It can't resist
    Its time, time to open, for a single night.
You should see the bees come out and visit,
    Bees and moths, working for their lives,
For then it is what they were waiting for.
    No fuss, they flock to the datura,
Taking turns. Space for every one of them,
    Sufficient. Those active insects
Perceive in it a lustrous cavern storing liquor,
    Says Zulf, and if you looked at him
Instead, you saw his dark throat active
    As down it slid, invisible, the wine.


Nobody's Ukelele

Still policed by the poor and hungry,
    Sold for a fair price
Into soup for the politician,
    The sea-turtle, black
Or loggerhead, or green, became
    A species endangered.
Their predators are being told
    Nowadays to desist,
And sure enough, if many can elude
    Monofilament nets
With no sensible discrimination
    Winched aboard factory ships,
The turtles might be coming back.
    Beaches in Japan
To which they travel, beaches
    Californian, Turkish,
Also Greek, where these ancient
    Animals lay eggs,
Have their defenders nowadays.
    Across wet sand
Here comes a young turtle,
    You see her paddles
Indent her heavy body's path,
    Cold glitter, no,
Lustrous her shell, headfirst,
    Imaginably as once
Before time spelled out the human,
    Dash into the foam.


Standing Figure

How long has he stood there, and only now
    He is aware of a warmth, a weight
Encumbering his feet. A small street dog
    Had fallen asleep there. This
Must be the fork in the road, the scene familiar:
    Cosy the strip houses, garden plots,
Unbroken paving stones, this one, that one.
    Yet the figure who waved, the old neighbour
Woman has gone. She had wanted him
    To follow her far up into the hills.
Now not a sight of her. Should he turn back?

    Does he know the way back? The way on
Had its landmarks, as predicted, the ruinous
    Cottage, only weeks ago its brickwork
Intact; the house with the big picture window,
    And in the window those people sat,
Faces uplifted when he had passed, -
    Will they still be there? Will they shout,
Will they ask him to lunch? Not likely,
    For twilight comes and far, far ahead,
The neighbour, had she drawn breath again?
    The air is spreading a terrible hush.

Then he remembers the short cut: a rocky
    Trail that led once, once to the ridge
Where she, the neighbour, must have, by now,
    Almost arrived. A risk, to take it
And stumble, slither into a crevasse, or else
    Limp over the promontory where whitecaps crash
And self evaporates into the cries of birds,
    Might not be the plan. Time,
Besides, has not hesitated. The street dog
    Has trotted away. The little boy
Whose forehead he had mysteriously caressed,
    Only to the boy's disbelief, must have skipped
Back among those thin travellers who stood in the café.

    What could he learn by looking back?
He would go home if he knew, as he turns
    From the crossroads, now, and sees
The way he came, knew where home has gone.
    That bend in the road goes on for ever,
And trees, identifiable once, melt into nebulae
    Disgorging dust, not stars.



Notes

`A Lingering Enchantment'
Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Fourth Century of the Western Empire (1898).
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina (1945; English translation, 1957).
Walter Benjamin, `Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen'.

`A Species of Limbo'
Memleket = native country. Dünya = world. Dün = yesterday.

`Prospecting in Sicily, April 1787'
Various details from Geothe, Italienische Reise. Megalio was the name bestowed on Goethe at his induction into the Arcadian Society in Rome.

`The Torture Foreshadowed'
Details from Dmitri Merejkowski, Peter and Alexis (English translation, 1905).

`A Secret-Keeper'
Henry the Fifth: cf. Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 1, Sc. 2.

`Spoon, Covered Wagon'
John Ford: quotation from Peter Quennell, The Singular Preference (originally Cyril Tourneur?).
Eyebrows: notable in daguerreotypes and ambrotypes.

`The Signal Officer's Story'
World War II (Pacific Theatre) details communicated by Donald L. Weismann.

`De Mortuis'
`... resting on a negative': cf. Hegel, Phenomenology, cap. 1, and commentary by Giorgio Agamben, in Le langage et la mort (1982, French translation, 1991).
`... speaks to his death...': cf. W.S. Graham, `The Nightfishing,' part 3 (1955).

`Avdagina'
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina.
Last line: Aman. Imdat = Ah! Help! (Turkish). Chiquito no tiene cuna: from an old Spanish copla (`the little one has no cradle').

`Nobody's Ukelele'
Marks scuffled in wet sand by the turtle resemble the alternating flush and indented lines of Roman elegiacs (photograph by H.H. Huey, National Wildlife, August-September, 2003).