OUT OF MY THOUSAND VOICES
Out of my thousand voices
I speak with one
To the waves and flying saltfoam,
Flinging the dovetailed words
Of a single voice
At the knife-edged prow
Of the ship unbreakable
That carries her away.
I throw the one remaining voice
Of all my thousand out to sea
And watch it curving
Into the black-paunched water
Like a falling star,
A single word of love
That drops into the grave,
A thousand echoes falling by her ship.
ISLANDS
One great problem poses:
What is that island we’re passing?
Green hills, white houses,
Grey peak, a blue sky,
Ship sailing smooth.
These problems arise
On islands that pass,
White houses lived in
And mountains climbed,
Clouds moving like ships
And ships like clouds.
We on deck open baskets for lunch
To feed the problem of each white island
Of how steep such contours
And shallow those bays,
And who keens that song
In pinewoods by the shore.
‘How beautiful it is’ —
And how remote, waiting for other islands
We shall pass, puzzled that the birds
Can dip their wings at many.
What is that island we’re passing
Heartshaped and hemlocked
Watered by a winding stream?
A monument to us and we a monument to it —
A great problem posed
Till each unanswering island
Left in darkness grows a separate light:
Solutions beyond reach:
Cobalt funereal in the deep sea.
ICARUS
The ocean was timeless, blue
When your unwaxed wings wheeled towards heaven.
Wind was recalled, emptiness new
And smooth as Thermopylae’s lagoon given
To the Heroes’ barge held in repose. Nothing stirred:
The gods watched and held their breath
Forgot to stake each others’ wives, heard
Wings feather the air, dip and climb. Death
Did not come to Daedalus. The sun
Heliographed his escaper, watched his prison cloak
Colouring the sea, shadowing his one
Track channelled to Italy, whose mirror spoke
For his safety. Icarus found entirety
In a gleam from the sun. Was it a lotus-land
He climbed to? A mission of piety
Foretelling a lesser doom written upon sand
For older men? Or pure myth? His wings aileroned
The windless air and carried him in a curve
Measured by a rainbow’s greatness above the honed
Earth: lifted him through a mauve
Loophole of sky. No ships sleeved
The water and filled a farewell in their sails
Or circled the fallen wings, or grieved,
And Daedalus, onward flying, knew no warning fairytales.
CARTHAGE
Scorpions lurk under loose stones
Marked on Leipzig maps, and electric tramways
Ride shallow loops over thrown-up bones;
Eternal dust guides shadowed gangways
To Punic necropolia tombed-out
In timeless tangents, watched by upstart towers
Of a young cathedral, basilicas combed-out
By Time’s long competition and the hours
Of each’s ruin. The shadows of Jesus
And Hamilcar and the later dead
Back up the ancient argument that whims are diced
Out by the timelessness of heaven. The bled
Lips of this crumbling village, with the cry
Of begging children, prove that stone and scorpion lie.
AUTUMN IN MAJORCA
Autumn again: how many more?
The quiet land broods
In the peace of hope taken away,
Like a birth in silence
Or slipping unnoticed towards Death.
In the dusk and softness of earth’s evening
Black figs fall and burst:
Pig food, earth food
Tears from the tree’s broad face.
The familiar wind makes passions tolerable:
A woman does not know for whom she sings;
A prophecy of rain when clouds collect
And the earth in its achievement turns
But will not breathe.
ON A TWIN BROTHER’S RELEASE FROM A SIBERIAN PRISON CAMP
Out of the snow my brother came
Ghost within ghost like a child’s game
Of case into case;
Cloud reflections smashed with wattled feet,
A coniferous stick wielded to meet
Face with face.
Moss-warmed, waist-coated with leaves
His memory survived to shake my hand,
Soil-laden fingers
Reaching from my brother who craves
Impossibly for the enormous land
Where no man lingers.
A surrogate ghost my brother found a road
Across blue ridges, by marks of axe and woad
From Okhotsk shores:
Until frost-bitten both in one grey form
Ghost became brother to an Arctic storm
Beyond all laws.
A price was paid to wilderness and fire:
Flashbacks of his vision beamed
On bleak Siberian snows
Show recollection full of truth and liar:
What one remembers never is what seemed
But what some stranger throws
Up like a ghost before your eyes,
A picture that the ghost of you would see
Had it the power to span
The world from now to then and recognize
What memory discarded and set free
Before you turned and ran.
Each morning my brother asks himself what words
Remain to ply and weave, what dreams, what birds
By twilight to make
Warm nests behind the sockets of his eyes
Opened by gentian-blue barbarian skies
That stayed in his wake.
A youth spent uprooting deciduous nerves
Gave strength to the broad-winding river-curves
Of his soul;
Tenacious eyes sought leaf-mould for breath
Each footstep released what life lived in death
In that great coal-