Cloudless as minds asleep

  One careless cemetery buzzes on and on

  As if her tombstones were all hives

  Overturned by the impatient dead—

  We imagined they had stored up

  The honey of their immortality

  In the soft commotion the black bees make.

  Below us, far away, the road to Paris.

  You pour some wine upon a tomb.

  The bees drink with us, the dead approve.

  It is weeks ago now and we are back

  In our burnt and dusty Languedoc,

  Yet often in the noon-silences

  I hear the Vaumort bees, taste the young wine,

  Catch a smile hidden in sighs.

  In the long grass you found a ring, remember?

  A child’s toy ring. Yes, I know that whenever

  I want to be perfectly alone

  With the memory of you, of that whole day

  It’s to Vaumort that I’ll be turning.

  1980/1972

  SPRING SONG

  My lovely left-handed lover

  Will be riding down from Geneva

  On the afternoon Catalan bound for Barcelona.

  I’ll catch her all honeygold at Nîmes

  And embrace her on behalf of the city council,

  On behalf of Apollinaire, on behalf of Lou.

  Ah, Lou, Lou, she is somewhat like you.

  My lovely slowcoach, come, I’ll teach you.

  The Geneva train is faster than a river.

  I am no laborious and insipid drone,

  But an Irish poet, and thus perfectible.

  Together we will submit

  To the mesmerism of objects

  Painted or hewn—and without too much cheating.

  And all this nonsense about women’s liberation

  Will fade into the fifty-fifty of kisses shared.

  Let us be enemies of intellectual cosiness.

  Every embrace is an empirical exchange of vitamins.

  Your last postcard from the dark lake read:

  ‘Se réaliser? Oui. Mais comment?

  Darling, I am buying a clockwork mouse

  To show my independence from men.

  Signed: A REAL WOMAN.’

  Perhaps now do you see why?

  1980/1972

  HEY, MISTER, THERE’S A BULGE IN YOUR COMPUTER

  How loud the perfume of common gin

  How morose the pigment that covers a lipid

  How soft the equal gauze of quits

  How purple the pits of amazing berries

  How snuff the cough of the rough shark

  Your sake, my sake, his sake, her sake

  Everyone is entitled to one sake.

  1980/1972

  ON THE SUCHNESS OF THE OLD BOY

  Such was the sagacious Suchness of the Sage

  That all of a sudden in his old age

  He was uplifted bodily by

  A wonderful Umptiousness.

  He became Umptious in the highest degree.

  A heraldic uproariousness of mind possessed him

  And he said: If so things are, why let them be.

  Enough of the doctors of high degree

  Whose rhetoric is the purest road-haulage,

  Damn the deep freeze, bugger the cold storage

  Of minds as cold as a lavatory seat.

  I will just squat here in my umptious extravagance

  Until all the extremes agree to meet.

  It was another way of saying

  That he had discovered the heraldic law

  Namely, that while someone somewhere

  Weeps and tears his hair with his claws

  In some other spot someone is laughing:

  And both from the same damn cause.

  Look not for reason anywhere; but keep

  Revelation for those who least care.

  Be umptious if you can, it’s everywhere.

  Be umptious asleep, awake, dressed or undressed.

  The scrumptiousness of Umptiousness can not be overstressed.

  Is your gaiety fully enigmatic,

  Or are you at odds with some bedwetting ghost?

  A mouse gnawing at a coffin is not static.

  Why do the many never reach the Most?

  To decode even the narrow and finite

  Stuff of life is to tumble upon answers.

  If only space had edges it would bite.

  If time flowed more it would melt into dancers.

  The best philosopher of the cryptic mode

  Is at best a primrose in the carnal mind.

  He only discovers what he set out to find.

  There is no sense in all your deadlock.

  Consider the bees, they are all born out of wedlock.

  Enough of this huge fornication rosary,

  Wearisome are the great commonplaces.

  They have no aptitude for death, agree,

  The million upon million non-Umptious faces.

  In the days of all our Yore

  Folklore was the only Yolklore

  Imprinting was the natural sire

  Of earth air water fire.

  Now to our vapid visual age

  We present our whitewashed cage,

  The present burns in iron symmetry

  With love built in like a geometry.

  If cleanliness is next to Godliness

  Umptiousness is a sort of Sumptuousness,

  Umption the ultimate fruit

  Of holy Gumption.

  It is not a question of being conscious

  Or washing your little white hands like Pontius.

  So spake the Sage, disbursing Suchness

  Like a fine sow, a more than Muchness.

  To have broad canopy with zip and twang

  Is the mark of the sage in his cosmic charabanc.

  Pain may be relieved so often

  By its own intensification.

  How well we know those elephant neuroses

  Lead to the girls who always dish out doses.

  Live the life of a stowaway in this world,

  All places, languages or nations,

  Old couples clinging together like tired gloves

  Images of disaster in a renewal of patience.

  Everywhere revisited is only

  Half of the real story, for death is free.

  The naked runners braked by the soft sea,

  A naked silence going on a spree.

  Spread it like butter over he and she.

  Whole winters long my ape and I

  Winnowed and mused, discussed as best we could,

  The fake images, the true-to-what effect

  To distil the great elixir of the elect,

  Sorting the perfect from the merely good.

  And when at last it died, without presumption,

  I wept, but gave it the extreme Umption.

  This is my choice now, music and tobacco,

  As happy on my hilltop I review

  The vistas of a world it never knew,

  To which my Umption is the only clue.

  Always at midnight when I hear the chimes,

  I tell myself while pouring out a drink,

  Things are less complicated than you think.

  Dreams, therefore crimes, honey,

  Dreams, therefore crimes.

  1973/1972

  THE OPHITE

  For Saph

  First draw the formal circle O

  Of the whole oblong mind, as in the snake

  Where mouth and anus meet to complete it.

  The onus

  The harness

  Of the heartwhole whose cool apples conspire

  Against the serpent like all perverse fruit;

  Which identify with sin but remain innocent.

  The tree of good and oval

  Soft branch of all renewal

  Where the sincere milk of the whole word

  First set the gnostic grimly dreaming

  To furnish an alphabet of
pure dissent,

  Dark night of the Whole

  Convincing to the finite mole.

  Warp and woof like magnets coming together

  In silence thumbless as a pendulum.

  It could be accident. Believe what you prefer.

  No advice worth giving is worth taking.

  1973/1973

  ALPHABETA

  Some withering papers lie,

  The bloody spoor of some great

  Animal anxiety of a poem he wounded

  And followed up in fear, holding his breath.

  The blood was everywhere, the yellowing inks

  Of old manuscripts reproached.

  In stark terror that loaded pen was ready,

  With the safety catch turned off,

  Only the target lacked,

  Crouching somewhere in its own blood.

  Some hideous animal without a name.

  To be called man, but with such a rotten aim!

  1973/1973

  A FAREWELL

  Colours have no memory, friend,

  And can therefore prophesy,

  Turn whiter than tea-roses can

  With whom to exchange addresses

  In far away cities for a good-luck goodbye.

  Time slips her moorings soon, and the

  Surf-gathering boom of candles can retrace

  To the whisper of canvas on the sky

  A tiller’s lug, jerked like some big dog,

  The muscle-softening farewell embrace.

  Survivals and calamities supported

  In thoughts now, no more in words,

  Out there on the flailing waters of everness,

  The flora of tumultuous oceans around me,

  And for company archaic folding birds.

  I will seek out now

  All the arts of silence and of anger

  For many such Aprils have come and gone.

  The lines of your palm are always changing

  As you move from the unknown to the known.

  So often the bountiful hemlock beckoned me,

  I guess it would undeceive,

  Ransacked the secret childhood of the race,

  To pinpoint the groups of fearfulness

  And pardon the terrors it could not reprieve.

  The dangerous years approach, friend.

  You will be lucky to come through whole.

  This speck of lead, a word, fired into the mind

  Will in its queer way change it

  While never seeking to argue or console.

  One thing about death—it isn’t far to fall,

  Its brightness disfigures every silence,

  Its reflections splashed about like in spoons

  Gives a reassurance to the dusty kiss of stars,

  The cold procession of worn-out harvest moons.

  1973/1973

  MANDRAKE ROOT

  Vagina Dentata I love you so,

  You are wide as my dreams are long,

  Like the kipling hiss of the cobra,

  Or the screams of Fay Wray in King Kong.

  Vestal of fire lethargic

  Whose seminal doctrines extract

  The rivets from Caliban’s backbone

  To leave him less fiction than fact.

  Aphrodite Urania we need you

  To lighten the people’s path,

  By the marvellous insights of Crippen

  Or the Brides in the Bath.

  O precious pudendum of seeming,

  We come from the Gullible Isles,

  Where the cannibal complexes frolic

  And the Mona Lisa smiles.

  1973/1973

  APESONG

  Hatch me a gorilla’s egg

  And catch me in the offing,

  Buckle me to a wedding ring

  And make me die of laughing.

  Rock me in the XVI psalm

  And fill my bowels with honey,

  Up in the trees I’ll find a mate,

  If not for love, then money.

  1973/1973

  WANT TO LIVE DON’T YOU?

  Somewhere in all this grace and favour green

  Autumnal in the public gardens,

  Sunk on benches between all ages

  Under the braying foliage mimeographed

  Like the Lord’s Prayer for a computer

  In this fate-forgiven corner of reflection

  The genetic twilight of a race evolves:

  Dreaming in codes, you only think you think.

  Sweet rainwashed cobbles of old towns

  A moving spur on sundials recording.

  The roll of drums buried in the soil,

  Somewhere a pair of fine eyes looking out

  Under a magnificent forehead, but so full

  Of an immense and complicated mistrust

  Of human ways: very reasonable indeed

  I should say, very reasonable indeed.

  Our glances lie unfermented among statues.

  A hunchback pokes a dead swan with a stick

  While children buzz and cannot fathom.

  Then, tied as if to a buoy far out at sea

  An emancipated municipal orchestra makes

  Some shallow confidences to the prams.

  This very spot where the writings of solitaries

  Limp off, take passage for foreign lands,

  Falter to an end, there being nothing left

  With which to compare them,

  Never looking back. Well then, goodbye.

  1973/1973

  THE GREY PENITENTS

  Far away once, in Avignon, the Grey Penitents

  Set up their chapter on a drear canal

  For podgy minds to bleed with happiness

  Upon the waters of a supposed redemption

  Under the orders of twelve concise pigs,

  Revealed their goodness like smooth-feathered men.

  They tried like later you and me

  To find one beauty without sophistry.

  Alas!

  I lit a candle for you once

  But it was slow to the last match;

  The tiny wick, like loving, wouldn’t catch.

  Nature’s lay penitent, I taught thee to fuck;

  But winter came and we were out of luck.

  ‘When the pupil is ready the master always appears,

  But sometimes after 9 lifetimes of a thousand years.’

  Pale students of the Quite Alone

  Whose dreams cut to the very bone

  Add or subtract the kisses of the mind,

  They will not catch, the engine will not fire,

  A vestal love no destiny could bind.

  Now on the far side of Europe

  We suddenly meet far from that faltering candle,

  Not guilty like the penitents of laic misdemeanours,

  Wishing never to have been born, all that stuff.

  And knowing quite well that even without you

  I can easily go on breathing.

  But why you come back I cannot fathom.

  It reminds me of something I once achieved

  To love someone at the speed of thought.

  Walking the loops of the companionable Liffey

  It came to me to think that over these actual

  Waters no shadows lie between there and here,

  Thou and I, you and myself, the far and the near.

  Nor is the remedial therapy of an embrace the answer.

  Dark plaintiff of the courtly love how wisely

  Your reason has subdued the heart’s long pace:

  And tomorrow we’ll be gone to leave no trace.

  Perhaps the primal illness which is loneliness

  Can’t be countered by a stupid candle

  Burning however rosy in the flesh

  Of a writer’s concise and loving wish.

  Would you have supposed, with night

  Coming on over the thorn-curdled hills

  And the snowy dales, that after this long

  Discouragem
ent about you I got kind of severed

  Even from poetry, and for so many years?

  How foolish to make no distinction between the two of you;

  The penitents must have documented so much

  That ordinary lovers spurn, but to their cost.

  A farthing dip is all it costs to formulate

  A wish that burns a dogged lifetime through.

  1973/1973

  DUBLIN

  Sweet sorrow, were you always there?

  I did not recognise

  At first the grave tilt of the head,

  Or the meek dark eyes.

  To share my deepest joy with you

  I sought you—but you seemed to hide

  Far in the mindless canyons of your love

  Which lay for you, like me, near suicide.

  That rainbow over Joyce’s tower

  Was another rare deceit,

  Raising once more those vaulting hopes

  You soon proved counterfeit.

  1973/1973

  SAGES

  The old men said: to wet the soul with wine or urine

  Then stretch it like choice kid over a drumhead,

  Tapping on the cartridge of words one might

  Encapsulate the truth of something latent

  In time, in destiny, in natural lore,

  A caricature of simple intuitions. Giving back.

  The old men said: you might arrive at last

  To pierce behind the mask, for evermore

  Match passion and clarity—that hopeless task.