Verse Chronicle

"I want to paint Me and Allen Ginsberg, . . .

Every car crash on all the motorways of England, . . .

I want to make pink flowers brighter like you

Henri Rousseau." Tonight at noon, too.

Why not, bespectacled eyes of the Liverpool Scene?

Why not leap over schoolgirls' lips, the lean

Hard dawn, and the hills of poetic breasts you've kissed?

Why not squirt Poésie with Body Mist?

But if there be "only one right way to say

Precisely what you mean," your jazz today

Is not so "new-wave" as it was last night.

Of course we worry. Everything may not be all right.

None of us here, at war and alienated

From half our ideals and the best black men by hatred,

Can agree with you. The Bank of America's broke.

You can't put it back together with a joke.

This Molly Holden knows, whom illness caught

And lashed to a chair. Pity in time has taught

Mankind to love itself. Though one beget

An animal, "it will be human yet."

Her substance withered as her head grew strong

Against old age and the dimming view. Along

The highway "came a car that hooted," and it slew

The crippled motives men urge for keeping true.

"The pieces of unprofitable land

Are what I like, best seen in winter,

Triangular tail of cottage garden

Tall with dead willowherb, and tangled splinter. . . .

"Attained by sight alone, because so small,

Private, or thorny, stuffed with the years' seeds,

Their failure's proof of reclamation,

Their vigour justifies all wastes and weeds."

The English countryside is her mind's house

Where fox and rabbit chase through the rooms, and the mouse

and the hare each spring overcome hunger and poor sight,

"Fill with huge heroics, . . . stand up and fight."

She had, she says, "once a pleasing face."

Now she has, we read, a grief-filled grace

That keeps the Wiltshire sunsets of delight

Bright on these pages while she rests at night.

But the country of the mind has other laws.

A thought expressed expresses psychic flaws.

"The point between mind and feeling" is not a bird,

"Has yet to be found. One must go beyond the word."

"Before throwing you over," my son John Horder,

His father asked, as of any unpaid boarder,

"Shall I break your legs?" Then carried him home on his back,

So the boy forgot the cliff and empty sack.

The ghosts of evil haunted his childhood years,

Astounding him that life could endure such fears.

For eighteen winters and summers the cries of the boy

"Had hardly been heard. Now he's overwhelmed by the noise."

"The measure of our guilt is very great."

The poet's measure is the poet's fate,

"Cut off from everyone," knowing no man,

"And that was when my sense of self began."

What can we do? "It remains for the soul to slip

From this earth by itself." It takes its final trip

Alone, making its way to Christ like a star.

"We have to be brought back to what we are."

Henri and Horder offered poems to friends,

And both to Lucie-Smith, whose poetry tends

Towards Silence, though his is the voice of Adam

Naming the things of this world in "garrulous Eden."

Iseult and Tristan's ardor, unleashed by the brute,

Pre-emptive heart, ran loose in the Garden of Love

Breeding and slaughtering; King Mark was mute;

And no one could land the lost, the ever-circling dove.

"Motion, you say. The cells that divide and breed

Here in the dusty sea" spawn the creed

That moves a nation to war. Dead men are jelly.

"The ships weigh anchor, the sea washes their bellies."

"A Game of French and English" is an art

In which the actors take each other's parts

"Suspended a moment over their trembling doubles"

On the fields of Crécy, the clay bloody and trampled,

" "All dead,' I think, 'we are all dead men.' "

One wakes; then he does, too, who learns again

Through pain and wounds "we wake victorious."

We know we have made history, and history, us.

Valor is "'a whole expedition of bones"

Rising from hot, white Aegean stones

In a hopeless cause. "Burn, phoenix. Who now

Will believe you can do it?" Ten "Borrowed Emblems" bow

In Huguenot piety before our arms race.

"The moon shines. The dog howls. Through deep space

Tonight the sound goes probing." Whose deaf eye

Is "unperturbed on the pivot of that cry?"

"What is a man but his own dream?" I read

The question backwards before I went to bed:

Man-ah-is what? A grave, half-sunken island.

Hear his "noisy machine . . . moving towards silence."

MacSweeney watching a "glass of electric violets"

Thinks: "Your wet thigh." "I am a minter

Of coins. Let's not forget that." Swirling toward doom

"Water on the steps in the dining room"

Of "the burned-down Salvation Army Palace"

Cleans nothing from his mind. He swims like Alice

Through a pool of tears. His "women stem their blood

Flow for love." His mother sweeps the crud

From her life, "a stooping figure shovelling coal,"

Who "worries, not like a hound worrying a rat,

But like a star worries the ocean." That

"Fears no reflection." Then, who tends the goal?

"Walking to post the other letter its form

Exact in my pocket & the sun behind

Chimneys & round the corner it splashes on

The trunk of a single oak, trickles through fences

Dappled in tiny ivy diamonds." Shout:

"There is a particular and definite glory about

The simple things we do." Lie with me here

"Naked under musical sheets," my dear.

The black man's losses at the Cape of Good Hope

Are hard to set to verse. Ruth Miller's rope

Stays a loyal god "in the correct phrases"

While rats swarm up the hawsers to their mazes.

White men, "who are you grinding into the gutter?"

Who is the "strong white youth with a coloured stutter?"

She knows: "Only a lad whose skin is black."

She says: "Weep for his darkness, he'll not come back."

You see, the Virgin's love was a "full-term Death."

Our hearts purple, our groins salty, our breath

Reeking of lies like garlic, we pretend

We, also, are immortal because we're men.

Our death is birth. That's when we get to God

And ask Him on His porcelain throne to nod

In our direction. But no, 'tis sad: He looks

Away, lured by the pictures in imported books.

Six books, six spaces in the alphabet

From H to M: 2 pop, 3 safe, 1 set

Professional-what's in a name? Some guys

Write from the guts; some wish; some advertize.

But all, all are caught (like you and me)

In the shadows between the words where they can't see

Their shivering selves. Lines don't make a poem,

Nor would a turtle call his shell his home

Though he hides there. Art is something magic,

The calculated gesture that looks tragic

And convinces us of tragedy in ourselves.

Meanwhile, they're right who write their verses well.