Time by the Tail

[timebythetail]

Evening Hawk - Robert Penn Warren From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes. His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light Who knows neither Time nor error, and under Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings Into shadow.

Long now, The last thrush is still, the last bat Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom Is ancient, too, and immense. The star Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear The earth grind on its axis, or history Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

[timebythetail]

October Salmon - Ted Hughes He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety. Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak, Half under a tangle of brambles.

After his two thousand miles, he rests, Breathing in that lap of easy current In his graveyard pool.

About six pounds weight, Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea – But already a veteran, Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it’s over!

So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels! Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s beauty-dress, Her life-robe – Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest, Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –

An autumnal pod of his flower, The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank.

The sea-going Aurora Borealis of his April fury, The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary Ripened to muddy dregs, The river reclaiming his sea-metals –

In the October light He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.

Death has dressed him In her clownish ceremonials, badges and decorations, Mapping the completion of his service, His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body A fungoid anemone of canker –

Can the caress of water ease him? The flow will not let up for a minute.

What a change! From that covenant of Polar light To this shroud in a gutter! What a death-in-life! – to be his own spectre! His living body become death’s puppet, Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes – He haunts his own staring vigil, And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness, And the humiliation of the role!

And that is how it is. That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour. That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,

And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

On the surge-ride of elation, weightless, Body simply the armature of energy In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life, The salt mouthful of actual existence, With strength like light –

Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg. This chamber of horrors is also home. He was probably hatched in this very pool.

And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles And sunk sheets of corrugated iron. People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him. If boys see him they will try to kill him.

All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness, The epic poise That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient In the machinery of heaven.

[timebythetail]

Who Guessed Amiss the Riddle of the Sphinx James Merrill In the night my great swamp-willow fell. I had to run home early, dark by five, To find the young sphinx and the hearth swept bare By the lazy thrashing of her tail. A scraping on my window woke me late. Circling those roots aghast in air I asked of wind, of rottenness the cause, As yet unaware of having forgotten Her yellow gaze unwinking, vertical pupil, Stiff wing, dark nipple, firelit paws --All that the odor of my palm brings back Hiding my face, beside the boughs Whose tall believed exuberance fallen, Bug goes witless, liquors lack, Profusion riddled to its core of dream Dies, whispering names. She only from the dead flames rose, Had licked my fingers but sweet milk disdained. Henceforth, bareness extreme, No more this hand has branchings of a tree.

[timebythetail]

Elegy D.H. Lawrence The sun immense and rosy Must have sunk and become extinct The night you closed your eyes for ever against me. Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings Since then, with fritter of flowers – Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings. Still, you left me the nights, The great dark glittery window, The bubble hemming this empty existence with lights. Still in the vast hollow Like a breath in a bubble spinning Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the bounds like a swallow? I can look through The film of the bubble night, to where you are. Through the film I can almost touch you.

[timebythetail]

I Asked Him to Check the Roof, Then Took the Ladder Away Ella Frears All night I enjoyed the lie: not feeling well, upstairs in bed but sends his love. I could feel his frustration above me, through the ceiling; could feel it so strongly that it was as though my chest were the roof and he was trapped inside me. How will we go on after? I thought, how will I end this? He hadn’t called for help. Maybe he’d worked out a way down but I didn’t think so. The dinner party was wonderful. As the guests left I looked up and realised that there was no moon. Shine, darling. I whispered. And from behind the chimney rose his little head.

[timebythetail]

When the Sun Went Down John Ashbery To have been loved once by someone—surely There is a permanent good in that, Even if we don’t know all the circumstances Or it happened too long ago to make any difference. Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky, Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong? Which of the others on your team could darken the passive Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began? Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems As enormous as a plain, to have to be told That its horizons are comically confining, And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge Of the different forms of love, reducing them To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open To the elements? And some see in this paradigm of how it rises Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour? The refrain is desultory as birdsong, it seeps unrecognizably Into the familiar structures that lead out from here To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions: It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation. There are times when music steals a march on us, Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist; Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed Like jewels down a well; the answer, also, To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten, Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.

[timebythetail]

Summer Farm Norman MacCaig Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass The water in the horse-trough shines. Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines. A hen stares at nothing with one eye, Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky A swallow falls and, flickering through The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue. I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass, Afraid of where a thought might take me – as This grasshopper with plated face Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space. Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

[timebythetail]

The New Intelligence Timothy Donnelly After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery, a room without theme. For the hour that we spend complacent at the window overlooking the garden, we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green, a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent movements some sentence might explain if we had time or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular. That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp- fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way false birch branches arch and interlace from which hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array of primitive bird-shapes. Their pasted feathers shake in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content to leave the way we found it. I love that about you. I love that when I call you on the long drab days practicality keeps one of us away from the other that I am calling a person so beautiful to me that she has seen my awkwardness on the actual sidewalk but she still answers anyway. I say that when I fell you fell beside me and the concrete refused to apologize. That a sparrow sat for a spell on the windowsill today to communicate the new intelligence. That the goal of objectivity depends upon one’s faith in the accuracy of one’s perceptions, which is to say a confidence in the purity of the perceiving instrument. I won’t be dying after all, not now, but will go on living dizzily hereafter in reality, half-deaf to reality, in the room perfumed by the fire that our inextinguishable will begins.

[timebythetail]

The Forge Seamus Heaney All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water. The anvil must be somewhere in the centre, Horned as a unicorn, at one end square, Set there immoveable: an altar Where he expends himself in shape and music. Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose, He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows; Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

[timebythetail]

A Letter to Peter Levi Elizabeth Jennings Reading your poems I am aware of translucencies, of birds hovering over estuaries, of glass being spun for huge domes. I remember a walk when you showed me a tablet to Burton who took his own life. You seem close to fragility yet have a steel-like strength. You help junkies, you understand their language, you show them the stars and soothe them. You take near-suicides and talk to them, you are on the strong side of life, yet also the brittle, I think of blown glass sometimes but reject the simile. Yet about your demeanour there is something frail, the strength is within, won from simple things like swimming and walking. Your pale face is like an ikon, yet any moment, any hour, you break to exuberance, and then it is our world which is fragile: you toss it like a juggler.

[timebythetail]

Blackberrying Sylvia Plath Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes Ebon in the hedges, fat With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides. Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks— Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky. Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting. I do not think the sea will appear at all. The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within. I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies, Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen. The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven. One more hook, and the berries and bushes end. The only thing to come now is the sea. From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me, Slapping its phantom laundry in my face. These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt. I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

[timebythetail]

The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. - Donika Kelly I am taken with the hot animal of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs and have them move as I intend, though my knee, though my shoulder, though something is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead on the harbor beach: one mostly buried, one with skin empty as a shell and hollow feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft, I do not touch them. I imagine they were startled to find themselves in the sun. I imagine the tide simply went out without them. I imagine they cannot feel the black flies charting the raised hills of their eyes. I write my name in the sand: Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky. I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg. To the ditch lily I say I am in love. To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow street I am in love. To the roses, white petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am in love. I shout with the rough calculus of walking. Just let me find my way back, let me move like a tide come in.

[timebythetail]

Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century - Herman Melville        *    *   *    * Found a family, build a state, The pledged event is still the same: Matter in end will never abate His ancient brutal claim.        *    *   *    * Indolence is heaven’s ally here, And energy the child of hell: The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well.

[timebythetail]

Hawk Roosting - Ted Hughes

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees! The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.

[timebythetail]

Wind - Ted Hughes This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as The coal-house door. Once I looked up - Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace, At any second to bang and vanish with a flap; The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note That any second would shatter it. Now deep In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on, Seeing the window tremble to come in, Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

[timebythetail]

Thrushes - Siegfried Sassoon Tossed on the glittering air they soar and skim, Whose voices make the emptiness of light A windy palace. Quavering from the brim Of dawn, and bold with song at edge of night, They clutch their leafy pinnacles and sing Scornful of man, and from his toils aloof Whose heart's a haunted woodland whispering; Whose thoughts return on tempest-baffled wing; Who hears the cry of God in everything, And storms the gate of nothingness for proof.

[timebythetail]

From “Milton” - William Blake THE NEGATION is the Spectre, the Reasoning Power in Man: This is a false Body, an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit, a Selfhood which must be put off and annihilated alway. To cleanse the Face of my Spirit by self-examination, To bathe in the waters of Life, to wash off the Not Human, I come in Self-annihilation and the grandeur of Inspiration; To cast off Rational Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour, To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration, To cast off Bacon, Locke, and Newton from Albion’s covering, To take off his filthy garments and clothe him with Imagination; To cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration, That it no longer shall dare to mock with the aspersion of Madness Cast on the Inspirèd by the tame high finisher of paltry Blots Indefinite or paltry Rhymes, or paltry Harmonies, Who creeps into State Government like a caterpillar to destroy; To cast off the idiot Questioner, who is always questioning, But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave; Who publishes Doubt and calls it Knowledge; whose Science is Despair, Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy, whose whole Science is To destroy the wisdom of ages, to gratify ravenous Envy That rages round him like a Wolf, day and night, without rest. He smiles with condescension; he talks of Benevolence and Virtue, And those who act with Benevolence and Virtue they murder time on time. These are the destroyers of Jerusalem! these are the murderers Of Jesus! who deny the Faith and mock at Eternal Life, Who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination By imitation of Nature’s Images drawn from Remembrance. These are the Sexual Garments, the Abomination of Desolation, Hiding the Human Lineaments, as with an Ark and Curtains Which Jesus rent, and now shall wholly purge away with Fire, Till Generation is swallow’d up in Regeneration.