Part 11 (2/2)

For what? For the ear? For the people?

For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders, Its low conducive voices Mutter about let-downs and erosions And yet each drop recalls The diamond absolutes.

I am neither internee nor informer; An inner emigre, grown long-haired And thoughtful; a wood-kerne Escaped from the ma.s.sacre, Taking protective colouring From bole and bark, feeling Every wind that blows; Who, blowing up these sparks For their meagre heat, have missed The once-in-a-lifetime portent, The comet's pulsing rose.

from FIELD WORK (1979)

Oysters

Our sh.e.l.ls clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ocean.

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast Through flowers and limestone And there we were, toasting friends.h.i.+p, Laying down a perfect memory In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: I saw damp panniers disgorge The frond-lipped, brine-stung Glut of privilege And was angry that my trust could not repose In the clear light, like poetry or freedom Leaning in from sea. I ate the day Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

Triptych

I AFTER A KILLING.

There they were, as if our memory hatched them,

As if the unquiet founders walked again: Two young men with rifles on the hill, Profane and bracing as their instruments.

Who's sorry for our trouble?

Who dreamt that we might dwell among ourselves In rain and scoured light and wind-dried stones?

Basalt, blood, water, headstones, leeches.

In that neuter original loneliness From Brandon to Dunseverick I think of small-eyed survivor flowers, The pined-for, unmolested orchid.

I see a stone house by a pier.

Elbow room. Broad window light.

The heart lifts. You walk twenty yards To the boats and buy mackerel.

And today a girl walks in home to us Carrying a basket full of new potatoes, Three tight green cabbages, and carrots With the tops and mould still fresh on them.

II SIBYL.

My tongue moved, a swung relaxing hinge.

I said to her, 'What will become of us?'

And as forgotten water in a well might shake At an explosion under morning Or a crack run up a gable, She began to speak.

'I think our very form is bound to change.

Dogs in a siege. Saurian relapses. Pismires.

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