Gaudete (19 page)

The sea grieves all night long.

The wall is past groaning.

The field has given up –

It can’t care any more.

Even the tree

Waits like an old man

Who has seen his whole family murdered.

Horrible world

Where I let in again –

As if for the first time –

The untouched joy.

Hearing your moan echo, I chill. I shiver.

I know

You can’t stay with those trees.

I know

The river is only fabled to be orphan.

I know

The flowers also look for you, and die looking.

Just as the sun returns every day

As if owned.

Like me

These are neither your brides, nor your grooms.

Each of us is nothing

But the fleeting warm pressure

Of your footfall

As you pace

Your cage of freedom.

Faces lift out of the earth

Moistly-lidded, and gazing unfocussed

Like babies new born.

And with cries like the half-cry

Of a near-fatally wounded person

Not yet fallen, but already unconscious.

And these are the ones

Who are trying to tell

Your name.

From age to age

Nothing bequeathed

But a gagged yell

A clutchful of sod

And libraries

Of convalescence.

I skin the skin

Take the eye from the eye

Extract the entrails from the entrails

I scrape the flesh from the flesh

Pluck the heart

From the heart

Drain away the blood from the blood

Boil the bones till nothing is left

But the bones

I pour away the sludge of brains

Leaving simply the brains

Soak it all

In the crushed-out oil of the life

Eat

Eat

What steel was it the river poured

Horizontally

Into the sky’s evening throat –

Put out the sun.

The steel man, in his fluttering purples,

Is lifted from the mould’s fragments.

I breathe on him

Terrors race over his skin.

He almost lives

Who dare meet you.

Calves harshly parted from their mamas

Stumble through all the hedges in the country

Hither thither crying day and night

Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.

After some days, a stupor sadness

Collects them again in their field.

They will never stray any more.

From now on, they only want each other.

So much for calves.

As for the tiger

He lies still

Like left luggage.

He is roaming the earth light, unseen.

He is safe.

Heaven and hell have both adopted him.

A bang – a burning –

I opened my eyes

In a vale crumbling with echoes.

A solitary dove

Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.

From this centre

It wearies the compass.

Am I killed?

Or am I searching?

Is this the rainbow silking my body?

Which wings are these?

The dead man lies, marching here and there

In the battle for life, without moving.

He prays he will escape for what comes after.

At least that he’ll escape. So he lies still.

But it arrives

Invisible as a bullet

And the dead man flings up his arms

With a cry

Incomprehensible in every language

And from that moment

He never stops trying to dance, trying to sing

And maybe he dances and sings

Because you kissed him.

If you miss him, he stays dead

Among the inescapable facts.

Every day the world gets simply

Bigger and bigger

And smaller and smaller

Every day the world gets more

And more beautiful

And uglier and uglier.

Your comings get closer.

Your goings get worse.