Part 33 (1/2)
Cities of gra.s.s. Fort walls. The dumbstruck palace.
I'd come to with the night wind on my face, Agog, alert again, but far, far less Focused on victory than I should have been Still isolated in my old disdain Of claques who always needed to be seen And heard as the true Argives. Mouth athletes, Quoting the oracle and quoting dates, Pet.i.tioning, accusing, taking votes.
No element that should have carried weight Out of the grievous distance would translate.
Our war stalled in the pre-articulate.
The little violets' heads bowed on their sterns, The pre-dawn gossamers, all dew and scrim And star-lace, it was more through them I felt the beating of the huge time-wound We lived inside. My soul wept in my hand When I would touch them, my whole being rained Down on myself, I saw cities of gra.s.s, Valleys of longing, tombs, a windswept brightness, And far off, in a hilly, ominous place, Small crowds of people watching as a man Jumped a fresh earth-wall and another ran Amorously, it seemed, to strike him down.
4 THE NIGHTS.
They both needed to talk,
pretending what they needed was my advice. Behind backs each one of them confided it was s.e.xual overload every time they did it and indeed from the beginning (a child could have hardly missed it) their real life was the bed.
The king should have been told, but who was there to tell him if not myself? I willed them to cease and break the hold of my cross-purposed silence but still kept on, all smiles to Aegisthus every morning, much favoured and self-loathing.
The roof was like an eardrum.
The ox's tons of dumb inertia stood, head-down and motionless as a herm.
Atlas, watchmen's patron, would come into my mind, the only other one up at all hours, ox-bowed under his yoke of cloud out there at the world's end.
The loft-floor where the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses took lovers and made out endlessly successfully, those thuds and moans through the cloud cover were wholly on his shoulders.
Sometimes I thought of us apotheosized to boulders called Aphrodite's Pillars.
High and low in those days. .h.i.t their stride together.
When the captains in the horse felt Helen's hand caress its wooden boards and belly they nearly rode each other.
But in the end Troy's mothers bore their brunt in alley, bloodied cot and bed.
The war put all men mad, horned, horsed or roof-posted, the boasting and the bested.
My own mind was a bull-pen where horned King Agamemnon had stamped his weight in gold.
But when hills broke into flame and the queen wailed on and came, it was the king I sold.
I moved beyond bad faith: for his bullion bars, his bonus was a rope-net and a bloodbath.
And the peace had come upon us.
5 HIS REVERIE OF WATER.
At Troy, at Athens, what I most clearly
see and nearly smell is the fresh water.
A filled bath, still unentered and unstained, waiting behind housewalls that the far cries of the butchered on the plain keep dying into, until the hero comes surging in incomprehensibly to be attended to and be alone, stripped to the skin, blood-plastered, moaning and rocking, splas.h.i.+ng, dozing off, accommodated as if he were a stranger.
And the well at Athens too.
Or rather that old lifeline leading up and down from the Acropolis to the well itself, a set of timber steps slatted in between the sheer cliff face and a free-standing, covering spur of rock, secret staircase the defenders knew and the invaders found, where what was to be Greek met Greek, the ladder of the future and the past, besieger and besieged, the treadmill of a.s.sault turned waterwheel, the rungs of stealth and habit all the one bare foot extended, searching.
And then this ladder of our own that ran deep into a well-shaft being sunk in broad daylight, men puddling at the source through tawny mud, then coming back up deeper in themselves for having been there, like discharged soldiers testing the safe ground, finders, keepers, seers of fresh water in the bountiful round mouths of iron pumps and gus.h.i.+ng taps.
The Gravel Walks
River gravel. In the beginning, that.
High summer, and the angler's motorbike Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight Whose ghost we'd lately questioned: 'Any luck?'
As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts Dangled and cl.u.s.tered closer to the whirlpool.
The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played An eternity that ended once a tractor Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed And cement mixers began to come to life And men in dungarees, like captive shades, Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if The Pharaoh's brickyards burned inside their heads.
h.o.a.rd and praise the verity of gravel.