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They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot
fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.
Seríamos dois faunos sobre a praia,
Batidos pelo vento e pelo sal,
Tendo por manto apenas a cambraia
Da espuma
E, por fronteira,
O areal.
Gémeos de corpo e alma,
Ver um era ver outro:
A mesma voz
A mesma transparência,
A mesma calma
De búzio, intacto, em cada um de nós!
Felicidade?
Não.
Inconsciência!
E as nossas mãos brincavam com o lume
À beira da impaciência
E do ciúme...
Have you tried
rose hydrosol? Smoky quartz
in a steel bottle
of glacial water? Tincture
drawn from the stamens
of daylilies grown
on the western sides
of two-story homes?
Pancreas of toad?
Deodorant paste?
Have you removed
all your metal fillings? Made peace
with your mother? With all
the mothers you can?
Or tried car exhaust? Holding your face
to the steaming kettle?
Primal screamed into
a down-alternative pillow
in a wood while tree bathing?
Have you finally stopped
shoulding all over yourself?
Has your co-pay increased?
Right hip stiffened? Has the shore
risen as you closed up the shop?
And have you put your weight
behind its glass door to keep
the ocean out? All of it?
Rang the singing bowl
next to the sloping toilet? Mainlined
lithium? Colored in another
mandala? Have you looked
at yourself in the mirror
and found the blessed halo
of a ring light in each iris?
Have you been content enough
being this content? Whose
shop was it?
Nada me prende a nada.
Quero cinquenta coisas ao mesmo tempo.
Anseio com uma angústia de fome de carne
O que não sei que seja —
Definidamente pelo indefinido...
Durmo irrequieto, e vivo num sonhar irrequieto
De quem dorme irrequieto, metade a sonhar.
Fecharam-me todas as portas abstractas e necessárias.
Correram cortinas de todas as hipóteses que eu poderia ver na rua.
Não há na travessa achada número de porta que me deram.
Acordei para a mesma vida para que tinha adormecido.
Até os meus exércitos sonhados sofreram derrota.
Até os meus sonhos se sentiram falsos ao serem sonhados.
Até a vida só desejada me farta — até essa vida...
Compreendo a intervalos desconexos;
Escrevo por lapsos de cansaço;
E um tédio que é até do tédio arroja-me à praia.
Não sei que destino ou futuro compete à minha angústia sem leme;
Não sei que ilhas do Sul impossível aguardam-me náufrago;
Ou que palmares de literatura me darão ao menos um verso.
Não, não sei isto, nem outra coisa, nem coisa nenhuma...
E, no fundo do meu espírito, onde sonho o que sonhei,
Nos campos últimos da alma onde memoro sem causa
(E o passado é uma névoa natural de lágrimas falsas),
Nas estradas e atalhos das florestas longínquas
Onde supus o meu ser,
Fogem desmantelados, últimos restos
Da ilusão final,
Os meus exércitos sonhados, derrotados sem ter sido,
As minhas coortes por existir, esfaceladas em Deus.
Outra vez te revejo,
Cidade da minha infância pavorosamente perdida...
Cidade triste e alegre, outra vez sonho aqui...
Eu? Mas sou eu o mesmo que aqui vivi, e aqui voltei,
E aqui tornei a voltar, e a voltar,
E aqui de novo tornei a voltar?
Ou somos todos os Eu que estive aqui ou estiveram,
Uma série de contas-entes ligadas por um fio-memória,
Uma série de sonhos de mim de alguém de fora de mim?
Outra vez te revejo,
Com o coração mais longínquo, a alma menos minha.
Outra vez te revejo — Lisboa e Tejo e tudo —,
Transeunte inútil de ti e de mim,
Estrangeiro aqui como em toda a parte,
Casual na vida como na alma,
Fantasma a errar em salas de recordações,
Ao ruído dos ratos e das tábuas que rangem
No castelo maldito de ter que viver...
Outra vez te revejo,
Sombra que passa através de sombras, e brilha
Um momento a uma luz fúnebre desconhecida,
E entra na noite como um rastro de barco se perde
Na água que deixa de se ouvir...
Outra vez te revejo,
Mas, ai, a mim não me revejo!
Partiu-se o espelho mágico em que me revia idêntico,
E em cada fragmento fatídico vejo só um bocado de mim —
Um bocado de ti e de mim!...
I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.
Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds—
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.
As formerly, I wheel
I hover and I twist,
But only want the feel,
In my possessive thought,
Of catcher and of caught
Upon your wrist.
You but half civilize,
Taming me in this way.
Through having only eyes
For you I fear to lose,
I lose to keep, and choose
Tamer as prey.
I can’t tell you
Why I loved him or
What it meant. When you
Are a child, you know only
The kind of love your little
Life lacked, so every
Blooming flower is a field. What I know
Is that there were two skies
And under one, I was a shadow. His
Sky was as blue as his eyes. Some
Of that is my doing and the rest of it
Is time. These days, he traces the shape of
The curds above him and I lay out under
A separate sun. Both of us are fine
With this. We picked our place
Under the lid of god and we shut
Our eyes to it every night. That’s what it means
To have loved goodly—to meet
Fate in a lavender hall and walk
Right past it, the white train quivering,
Nostalgia in your wake.
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
And there this night I walk in the white giant’s thigh
Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,
Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,
And alone in the night’s eternal, curving act
They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
Hill. Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
In the courters’ lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay
Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,
Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.
Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun’s bush
Rough as cows’ tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,
Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.
Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime
And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round—
(But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose’s ground
They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)—
Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.
The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
And cut the birds’ boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed
Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
Love for ever meridian through the courters’ trees
And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.