'After great pain, a formal feeling comes'

After great pain, a formal feeling comes -

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs -

The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,

And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round -

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought -

A Wooden way

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone -

This is the Hour of Lead -

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -

First - Chill - then Stupor - Then the letting go -

The Flea

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,

    Yet this enjoys before it woo,

    And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

    And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.   

This flea is you and I, and this

Our mariage bed, and marriage temple is;   

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,   

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

    Though use make you apt to kill me,

    Let not to that, self-murder added be,

    And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?   

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?   

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou   

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

    ’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

    Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

    Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped forever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door growing strong —
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’

Tara

She stood by the door

of her Virginia farm

pulling a sweater on

the branches

of the dogwood

she had tended

were bowed

blossoms loosened

tossed in sudden snow

the deer stood

in mute wonder

by her garden’s edge

she slipped the phone

in her pocket

her daughter

unharmed

among

petals gone

she snapped

a branch

a tempest stalled

she felt the boy

she felt the dead

she felt the families

she felt the wind

the deer don’t do that

she said
the deer don’t do that

18 Rugby Street

So there in Number Eighteen Rugby Street's

Victorian torpor and squalor I waited for you.

I think of that house as a stage-set -

Four floors exposed to the auditoriums.

On all four floors, in, out, the love-struggle

In all its acts and scenes, a snakes and ladders

Of intertangling and of disentangling

Limbs and loves and lives. Nobody was old.

An unmysterious laboratory of amours.

Perpetual performance - names of the actors altered.

But never the parts. They told me: 'You

Should write a book about this house. It's possessed!

Whoever comes into it never gets properly out!

Whoever enters it enters a labyrinth -

A Knossos of coincidence. And now you're in it.'

The legends were amazing. I listened, amazed.

I lived there alone. Sat alone

At the hacked, archaic, joiner's bench

That did for desk and table,

And waited for you and Lucas.

Whatever I was thinking I was not thinking

Of that Belgian girl in the ground-floor flat,

Plump as a mushroom, hair black as boot polish:

The caged bird and extra-marital cuddle

Of the second-hand-car dealer who kept

The catacomb basement heaped with exhaust mufflers,

Assorted jagged shafts of cars, shin-rippers

On the way to the unlit and unlovely

Lavatory beneath the street's pavement.

That girl had nothing to do with the rest of the house

But play her part in the drama. Her house-jailor

Who kept her in solitary was a demon

High-explosive, black, insane Alsatian

That challenged through the chained crack of the door

Every entrance and exit. He guarded her,

For the car dealer, from all, too well finally.

Not, seven years in the future, from her gas-oven.

She was nothing to do with me. Nor was Susan

Who still had to be caught in the labyrinth,

And who would meet the Minotaur there,

And would be holding me from my telephone

Those nights you would most need me. On this evening

Nothing could make me think I would ever be needed

By anybody. Ten years had to darken,

Three of them in your grave, before Susan

Could pace that floor above night after night

(Where you and I, the new rings on our fingers,

Had warmed our wedding night in the single bed)

Crying alone and dying of leukaemia.

Lucas was bringing you. You were pausing

A night in London on your escape to Paris.

April 13th, your father's birthday. A Friday.

I guessed you were off to whirl through some euphoric

American Europe. Years after your death

I learned through desperation of that search

Through those following days, scattering your tears

Around the cobbles of Paris. I deferred for a night

Your panics, your fevers, your worst fear -

The toad-stone in the head of your desolation.

The dream you hunted for, the life you begged

To be given again, you would never recover, ever.

Your journal told me the story of your torture.

I guess how you visited each of your sacred shrines

In raging faith you'd catch him there, somehow,

By clairvoyance, by coincidence -

Normally child's play to a serious passion.

This was not the last time it would fail you.

Meanwhile there was me, for a few hours -

A few pence on the fare, for insurance.

Happy to be martyred for folly

I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you.

Were you conjuring me? I had no idea

How I was becoming necessary.

Or what emergency Fate would make

Of my casual self-service. I can hear you

Climbing the bare stairs, alive and close,

Babbling to be overheard, breathless.

That was your artillery, to confuse me:

Before coming over the top in your panoply

You wanted me to hear you panting. Then -

Blank. How did you enter? What came next?

How did Lucas delete himself, for instance?

Did we even sit? A great bird, you

Surged in the plumage of your excitement,

Raving exhilaration. A blueish voltage -

Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura

That I later learned was yours uniquely.

And your eyes' peculiar brightness, their oddness,

Two little brown people, hooded, Prussian,

But elvish, and girlish, and sparkling

With the pressure of your effervescence.

Were they family heirlooms, as in your son?

For me yours were the novel originals.

And now at last I got a good look at you.

Your roundy face, that your friends, being objective,

Called 'rubbery' and you, crueller, 'boneless':

A device for elastic extremes,

A spirit mask transfigured every moment

It its own séance, its own ether.

And I became aware of the mystery

Of your lips, like nothing before in my life,

Their aboriginal thickness. And of your nose,

Broad and Apache, nearly a boxer's nose,

Scorpio's obverse to the Semitic eagle

That made every camera your enemy,

The jailor of your vanity, the traitor

In your Sexual Dreams Incorporated,

Nose from Attila's horde: a prototype face

That could have looked up at me through the smoke

Of a Navajo campfire. And your small temples

Into which your hair-roots crowded, upstaged

By that glamorous, fashionable bang.

And your little chin, your Pisces chin.

It was never a face in itself. Never the same.

It was like the sea's face - a stage

For weathers and currents, the sun's play and the moon's.

Never a face until that final morning

When it became the face of a child - its scar

Like a maker's flaw. But now you declaimed

A long poem about a black panther

While I held you and kissed you and tried to keep you

From flying me about the room. For all that,

You would not stay.

We walked south across London to Fetter Lane

And your hotel. Opposite the entrance

On a bombsite becoming a building site

We clutched each other giddily

For safety and went in a barrel together

Over some Niagara. Falling

In the roar of your soul your scar told me -

Like its secret name or its password -

How you had tried to kill yourself. And I heard

Without ceasing for a moment to kiss you

As if a sober star had whispered it

Above the revolving, rumbling city: stay clear.

A poltroon of a star. I cannot remember

How I smuggled myself, wrapped in you,

Into the hotel. There we were.

You were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish.

You were a new world. My new world.

So this is America, I marvelled.
Beautiful, beautiful America!