When you have nothing more to say, just drive
But pass through, though always skirting landfall.
The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,
And drive back home, still with nothing to say
I sense the pads
if I lie with my ear
long enough, thigh-bone
I expect to pick up
and must not be surprised
to find myself snared, swinging
Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary.
The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or
split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.
I can feel the tug
It blows her nipples
I can see her drowned
Under which at first
her shaved head
to store
you were flaxen-haired,
I almost love you
of your brain's exposed
I who have stood dumb
who would connive The Peninsula
For a day all round the peninsula.
The sky is tall as over a runway,
The land without marks, so you will not arrive
At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,
The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable
And you're in the dark again. Now recall
That rock where breakers shredded into rags,
The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,
Islands riding themselves out into the fog,
Except that now you will uncode all landscapes
By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,
Water and ground in their extremity. Land (III)
unfurling under grass and clover:
in this loop of silence
and shoulder against the phantom ground,
a small drumming
in bursting air
an ear-ring of sharp wire. Cloistered
I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill.
Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and in between, the
gated town. Here, an obedient clerk kissing a bishop's ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous
illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.
In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe's in winter. The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into
his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my
foothold in a main vern in Livy. From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke
the ice on an enamelled water-jig with exhilarated self-regard. Punishment
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
