In The Poetry

This poem was almost a kind of confession when on one of the occasions I’d gone back to my village and a man who had grown much older – he was kind of going over his life to me – I had come back from England and the essence of what he was saying was a disappointment about his life and what he had been. I called the poem ‘Words of a Jamaican Laas Moment Then’.

Words of a Jamaican Laas Moment Them

When I dead
mek rain fall.
Mek the air wash.
Mek the lan wash good-good.
Mek dry course them run, and run.

As laas breath gone
mek rain burst -
hilltop them work
waterfall, and all
the gully them gargle fresh.

Mek breadfruit limb them drip,
mango limb them drip. Cow, hog, fowl
stan still, in the burst of clouds.
Poinciana bloom them soak off, clean-clean.
Grass go unda water.

Instant I gone
mek all the Island wash – wash away
the mess of my shortcomings -
all the brok-up things I did start.
Mi doings did fall short too much.
Mi ways did hurt mi wife too oftn.

III

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

Eden Rock

They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. Sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

I had not thought that it would be like this.

Somebody asked me the other day where Eden Rock is – I mean, I have no idea, I made it up! ‘Dartmoor,’ I said – that’s always a safe answer.

Her

I had been told about her.
How she would always, always.
How she would never, never.
I’d watched and listened

but I still fell for her,
how she always, always.
How she never, never.

In the small brave night,
her lips, butterfly moments.
I tried to catch her and she laughed
a loud laugh that cracked me in two,
but then I had been told about her,
how she would always, always.
How she would never, never.

We two listened to the wind.
We two galloped a pace.
We two, up and away, away, away.
And now she’s gone,
like she said she would go.
But then I had been told about her -
how she would always, always.

Wittgenstein’s Dream

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,
I get so dreadfully morose at five,
I went in and put Nature on my hatstand
And considering the Sinking of the Eveninglands
And laughed at what translation may contrive
And worked at mathematics and was bored.

There was fire above, the sun in its descent,
There were letters there whose words seemed scarcely cooked,
There was speech and decency and utter terror,
In twice four hundred pages just one error
In everything I ever wrote – I looked
In meaning for whatever wasn’t meant.

Some amateur was killing Schubert dead,
Some of the pains the English force on me,
Somewhere with cow-bells Austria exists,
But then I saw the gods pin up their lists
But was not on them – we live stupidly
But are redeemed by what cannot be said.

Perhaps a language has been made which works,
Perhaps it’s tension in the cinema,
Perhaps ‘perhaps’ is an inventive word,
A sort of self-intending thing, a bird,
A problem for an architect, a star,
A plan to save Vienna from the Turks.

After dinner I read myself to sleep,
After which I dreamt the Eastern Front
After an exchange of howitzers,
The Angel of Death was taking what was hers,
The finger missed me but the guns still grunt
The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.

And then I woke in my own corner bed
And turned away and cried into the wall
And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.
I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,
I heard myself. ‘Tell them’, I said to all,
‘I’ve had a wonderful life. I’m dead.’

Queen Anne’s Lace

Her body is not so white as

anemone petals nor so smooth – nor

so remote a thing. It is a field

of the wild carrot taking

the field by force; the grass

does not raise above it.

Here is no question of whiteness,

white as can be, with a purple mole

at the center of each flower.

Each flower is a hand’s span

of her whiteness. Wherever

her hand has lain there is

a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch

to which the fibres of her being

stem one by one, each to its end,

until the whole field is a

white desire, empty, a single stem,

a cluster, flower by flower,

a pious wish to whiteness gone over –

or nothing.

For John Clare

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and
salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The
feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is
no telling how many there are. They grace everything – bush and tree – to
take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling – so it’s like a smooth switch back.
To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be
seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it
never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that
building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and
the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try
to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and
the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that
window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can,
but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the
future – the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say
there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so
much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.
There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being
immersed in the details of rock and field and slope -letting them come to
you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier – if
they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive
them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside – costumes of
the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street.
You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.
It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely
perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene
is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each
note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things
just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice
it. The pollarded trees scarely bucking the wind – and yet it’s keen, it
makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all
it’s their time too – nothing says they aren’t to make something of it. As for
Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’
to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to -
dumb bird. But the others – and they in some way must know too – it
would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step
of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in
utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So
their comment is:”No Comment.” Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities
is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

This is a poem called ‘Wulf’, which is in fact a loose translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, and the speaker in it is a woman

Wulf

1
They take it from me:
in the manner
of a gift

if danger moves in the earth
is the life given
is it love between us

2
Wulf: on that island
- I on this other

shut into fens, a bone
in the neck of a savage

if danger moves upon water
is the life given
is it love between us

3
In my mind we joined together:

as it rained, as
I was sad in the rain, as
he laid with me in his arms

into his shoulder
a joy given into me like sorrow

4
Wulf, Wulf,
it is not
at all hunger shaking my limbs
but that you do not journey

absent & yet
you fill me

5
They take it from me:
in the manner
of a gift

the spine of a feather, a cloud in the body

ai, it is
easily broken, what

was never at one:

you & I, Wulf, the one
with the other

& singing

Dear Bryan Wynter

1

This is only a note
To say how sorry I am
You died. You will realise
What a position it puts
Me in. I couldn’t really
Have died for you if so
I were inclined. The carn
Foxglove here on the wall
Outside your first house
Leans with me standing
In the Zennor wind.

Anyhow how are things?
Are you still somewhere
With your long legs
And twitching smile under
Your blue hat walking
Across a place? Or am
I greedy to make you up
Again out of memory?
Are you there at all?
I would like to think
You were all right
And not worried about
Monica and the children
And not unhappy or bored

2

Speaking to you and not
Knowing if you are there
Is not too difficult.
My words are used to that.
Do you want anything?
Where shall I send something?
Rice-wine, meanders, paintings
By your contemporaries?
Or shall I send a kind
Of news of no time
Leaning against the wall
Outside your old house.

The house and the whole moor
Is flying in the mist.

3

I am up. I’ve washed
The front of my face
And here I stand looking
Out over the top
Half of my bedroom window.
There almost as far
As I can see I see
St Buryan’s church tower.
An inch to the left, behind
That dark rise of woods,
Is where you used to lurk.

4

This is only a note
To say I am aware
You are not here. I find
It difficult to go
Beside Housman’s star
Lit fences without you.
And nobody will laugh
At my jokes like you.

5

Bryan, I would be obliged
If you would scout things out
For me. Although I am not
Just ready to start out.
I am trying to be better,
Which will make you smile
Under your blue hat.

I know I make a symbol
Of the foxglove on the wall.
It is because it knows you.

Time

Time’s a bird, which leaves its footprints
At the corners of your eyes,
Time’s a jockey, racing horses,
The sun and moon across the skies.
Time’s a thief, stealing your beauty,
Leaving you with tears and sighs,
But you waste time trying to catch him,
Time’s a bird and Time just flies.