Observe where you were, Muse of the unique Historical fact, defending with silence Some world of your beholding, a silence
No explosion can conquer but a lover's Yes Has been known to fill. So few of the Big Ever listen: that is why you have a great host Of superfluous screams to care for and
Why, up and down like the Duke of Cumberland,
Or round and round like the Laxey Wheel, The Short, The Bald, The Pious, The Stammerer went, As the children of Artemis go,
Not yours. Lives that obey you move like music,
Becoming now what they only can be once, Making of silence decisive sound: it sounds Easy, but one must find the time. Clio,
Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence
Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder, whose kindness never Is taken in, forgive our noises
And teach us our recollections: to throw away
The tiniest fault of someone we love Is out of the question, says Aphrodite,
Who should know, yet one has known people
Who have done just that. Approachable as you seem,
I dare not ask you if you bless the poets, For you do not look as if you ever read them Nor can I see a reason why you should.
June 1955
First Things First !
Woken, I layin the arms of my own warmth and listened To a storm enjoying its storminess in the winter dark Till my ear, as it can when half-asleep or half-sober, Set to work to unscramble that interjectory uproar, Construing its airy vowels and watery consonants Into a love-speech indicative of a Proper Name.
Scarcely the tongue I should have chosen, yet, as well As harshness and clumsiness would allow, it spoke in
your praise,
Kenning you a god-child of the Moon and the West Wind With power to tame both real and imaginary monsters, Likening your poise of being to an upland county, Here green on purpose, there pure blue for luck.
Loud though it was, alone as it certainly found me,
It reconstructed a day of peculiar silence
When a sneeze could be heard a mile off, and had me walking
On a headland of lava beside you, the occasion as ageless
As the stare of any rose, your presence exactly
So once, so valuable, so very now.
This, moreover, at an hour when only too often A smirking devil annoys me in beautiful English, Predicting a world where every sacred location Is a sand-buried site all cultured Texans do, Misinformed and thoroughly fleeced by their guides, And gentle hearts are extinct like Hegelian Bishops.
Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say How much it believed of what I said the storm had said But quietly drew my attention to what had been done —So many cubic metres the more in my cistern Against a leonine summer—putting first things first: Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
7 1957
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell, But on earth indifference is the least We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot, now I see them, say I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky And feel its total dark sublime, Though this might take me a little time.
? September 1957
Friday's Child
(IN MEMORY OF DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, MARTYRED AT FLOSSENBURG, A PRIL 9TH, 1945)
He told us we were free to choose But, children as we were, we thought— "Paternal Love will only use Force in the last resort
On those too bumptious to repent"— Accustomed to religious dread, It never crossed our minds He meant Exactly what He said.
Perhaps He frowns, perhaps He grieves, But it seems idle to discuss If anger or compassion leaves The bigger bangs to us.
What reverence is rightly paid To a Divinity so odd He lets the Adam whom He made Perform the Acts of God?
It might be jolly if we felt Awe at this Universal Man (When kings were local, people knelt); Some try to, but who can?
The self-observed observing Mind We meet when we observe at all Is not alarming or unkind But utterly banal.
Though instruments at Its command Make wish and counterwish come true, It clearly cannot understand What It can clearly do.
Since the analogies are rot Our senses based belief upon, We have no means of learning what Is really going on,
And must put up with having learned All proofs or disproofs that we tender Of His existence are returned Unopened to the sender
Now, did He really break the seal And rise again? We dare not say; But conscious unbelievers feel Quite sure of Judgement Day.
Meanwhile, a silence on the cross, As dead as we shall ever be, Speaks of some total gain or loss, And you and I are free
To guess from the insulted face Just what Appearances He saves By suffering in a public place A death reserved for slaves.
? 1958
80
Good-bye to the Mezzogiorno
(FOR CARLO lZZ0)
Out of a gothic North, the pallid children
Of a potato, beer-or-whiskey Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere
Of vineyards, baroque, 1a bella figura,
To these feminine townships where men Are males, and siblings untrained in a ruthless Verbal in-fighting as it is taught
In Protestant rectories upon drizzling
Sunday afternoons—no more as unwashed Barbarians out for gold, nor as profiteers, Hot for Old Masters, but for plunder
Nevertheless—some believing amore
Is better down South and much cheaper (Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure To strong sunlight is lethal to germs
(Which is patently false) and others, like me,
In middle-age hoping to twig from What we are not what we might be next, a question The South seems never to raise. Perhaps
A tongue in which Nestor and Apemantus,
Don Ottavio and Don Giovanni make Equally beautiful sounds is unequipped To frame it, or perhaps in this heat
It is nonsense: the Myth of an Open Road
Which runs past the orchard gate and beckons- Three brothers in turn to set out over the hills And far away, is an invention
Of a climate where it is a pleasure to walk
And a landscape less populated Than this one. Even so, to us it looks very odd Never to see an only child engrossed
In a game it has made up, a pair of friends
Making fun in a private lingo, Or a body sauntering by himself who is not Wanting, even as it perplexes
Our ears when cats are called Cat and dogs either
Lupo, Nero or Bobby. Their dining Puts us to shame: we can only envy people So frugal by nature it costs them
No effort not to guzzle and swill. Yet (if I Read their faces rightly after ten years) They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where
Shadows are dagger-edged, the daily ocean blue,
I can see what they meant: his unwinking Outrageous eye laughs to scorn any notion Of change or escape, and a silent
Ex-volcano, without a stream or a bird,
Echoes that laugh. This could be a reason Why they take the silencers off their Vespas, Turn their radios up to full volume,
And a minim saint can expect rockets—noise
As a countermagic, a way of saying Boo to the Three Sisters: "Mortal we may be,
But we are still here!" might cause them to hanker