FROM
POEMS
(1928)
I was washing at night in the courtyard,
Harsh stars shone in the sky.
Starlight, like salt on an axe-head –
The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.
The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure
Than truth’s clean canvas.
A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
To some, winter is arrack and a blue-eyed punch,
To some, a fragrant wine with cinnamon,
Some get their salty orders from the brutal stars
To carry back to smoke-filled huts.
A little still-warm chicken dung,
Sheep’s muddle-headed warmth:
For life, I would give everything –
For so-much-needed care, for a match to warm me.
Look: in my hand there’s only an earthenware bowl;
A chirping of stars is tickling my thin ear;
Through this pitiful down I have to admire
The yellowness of grass and the warmth of the soil.
Quietly to be carding wool and tedding straw;
To starve like an apple-tree in its winter binding;
Senselessly drawn by tenderness for everything alien;
Fumbling through emptiness, patiently waiting.
Let the conspirators, like sheep, speed over the snow.
Let the brittle snow-crust crack.
Winter – to some – is a lodging of wormwood and acrid smoke,
To some the stern salt of ceremonial wounds.
Oh to raise a lantern on a long stick,
Under the salt of stars to follow a dog,
And, rooster in pot, enter a fortune-teller’s yard.
But white, white snow scalds my eyes till they smart.
Rosy foam of fatigue on his sensual lips,
The bull furiously paws at the green breakers;
A ladies’ man, no oarsman, he snorts,
His spine unused to its laborious burden.
An occasional dolphin leaps in an arc,
A sea-urchin comes into view. Hold in your arms,
Tender Europa, all his worldly possessions:
Where could a bull find a more desirable yoke?
Bitterly she heeds the mighty splashing:
The corpulent and fertile sea is seething.
Aghast at the water’s oily brilliance,
She would like to slide down those hirsute cliffs.
Ah, she would prefer the company of sheep,
The creak of rowlocks or the lap of a spacious deck,
And fish flickering beyond a lofty poop. –
But the oarless oarsman swims with her further and further!
As the leaven swells,
So the housewife’s thrifty soul
Is possessed by the heat of the loaves,
As if Sophias of bread
Raise cupolas of rounded ardour
From a table of cherubim
And to coax a miraculous surplus
With force or caresses, the kingly herd-boy –
Time – seizes the bread, the word.
Even the stale stepson of the centuries
Finds his place – as the cooling makeweight
For loaves already lifted from the oven.
I climbed into the tousled hayloft,
Breathed the hay-dust of the mouldering stars,
The dishevelment of space,
And on the ladder pondered: why
Wake up a swarm of sounds, the miracle of Aeolian order,
Athwart this everlasting squabble?
Once more I want to strike a match,
To shove the night with my shoulder –
To wake it up.
The huge and shaggy load sticks out above the universe,
The hayloft’s ancient chaos
Begins to tickle as the darkness swells.
Mowers bring back
Goldfinches fallen from their nests.
I shall wring loose from these burning lines,
Get back to the order of sound where I belong,
To the blood’s grass-like and ringing connection,
Nerving myself for the dream beyond reason.
My time
My time, my brute, who will be able
To look you in the eyes
And glue together with his blood
The backbones of two centuries?
Blood, the builder, gushes
From the earth’s throat.
Only parasites tremble
On the edge of the future…
To wrench our age out of prison
A flute is needed
To connect the sections
Of disarticulated days…
And buds shall swell again,
Shoots splash out greenly.
But your backbone is broken,
My beautiful, pitiful century.
With an idiot’s harsh and feeble grin
You look behind:
A beast, once supple,
Ponders its paw-marks in the sand.
Whoever finds a horseshoe
We look at a forest and say:
Here is a forest for ships and masts,
Red pines,
Free to their tops of their shaggy burden,
To creak in the storm
In the furious forestless air;
The plumbline fastened to the dancing deck
Will hold out under the wind’s salt heel.
And the sea-wanderer,
In his unbridled thirst for space,
Dragging through damp ruts a geometer’s needle,
Collates the rough surface of the seas
With the attraction of the earth’s lap.
But breathing the smell
Of resinous tears oozing through planks,
Admiring the boards of bulkheads riveted
Not by the peaceful Bethlehem carpenter but by that other –
Father of journeys, friend of seafarers –
We say:
These too stood on the earth,
Awkward as a donkey’s backbone,
Their crests forgetful of their roots,
On a celebrated mountain ridge;
And howled under the sweet cloud-burst,
Fruitlessly offering the sky their precious freight
For a pinch of salt.