Even Now

Bitter tastes

Bitter tastes the herb of memory.

Artillery, chunks of phosphorus,

Chalky stubble turnips surround the house and who

Is not watching there, unchaste sentinels waiting for the sign

Of the burning bush, of the horn,

Of the helmeted weathercock of hate?

One step and monkeys start swinging, slithering,

Sliding in on fingers,

Forcing entry into my resting blood. Living there swiftly,

Living there slowly. Until it burns in the hay of all words,

Until it burns in the bygone field, the drowned days and

Their fermenting corn.

The Singer

The singer is not free

But fast and scornful and skimming the peaks like a pond.

He is not free because his transfixed cascade

And worm-eaten wood resound in his throat, tongue and mouth.

Let loose in his skin, this house,

The singer greets neither cuckoo nor bird catcher

Nor the furtive watchers in the low country.

The singer is his song.

The Mother

There is no me, no me but in your earth.

When you cried out your skin shivered

And my bones caught fire.

(My mother, imprisoned in her skin,

Changes by the measure of the years.

Her eyes are pale, escaped from the urging

Of the years by looking at me and calling me

Her joyful son.

She was no bed of stone, no feverish beast,

Her joints were a litter of kittens,

But my skin stays unforgivable to her,

The crickets in my voice unmoving.

“You have outgrown me,” she says slowly,

Washing my father’s feet, then falling silent

Like a woman without a mouth.)

When your skin cried out my bones caught fire.

You laid me down, I can never bear this image again,

I was the welcome but murderous guest.

And now, in manhood, I am a stranger to you.

You see me approaching and you think, “He is

The summer, he shapes my flesh and keeps

The dogs in me alert.”

While you die on your feet every day, not with me,

Apart, there is no me, no me but in your earth.

Turning inside of me, your life is lost, you won’t

Come back to me, I cannot recover from you.

A Father

Dancing or defeated,

Imprisoned in human warmth, we are already slowing

In the thickets of disinclination, in the contaminated fields,

Following on the heels of the mutilated, who whisper.

Their lips dry in the sun, the late sun.

We hear the dusk, we hear

The daily rattle from the scaffold,

We hear the flayed cub, we hear

The Jew burning in the bush and the crippled nun,

The judge’s sisters, god-fearing and voluptuous,

The heathens in the park, the raven shooters and the crusaders.

We hear them all.

A beak eats out of our mouths.

A tropic encircles our blood.

And under the linden, dewy in its shade,

The father lies for days, days on end, unswayable,

Watching his worn-down children.

A Virgin

Between clouds and royal ferns

The mares will ride tonight in the white field

Growing whiter.

Between thorns and rhododendrons the farmers beat

The children who came too soon.

And where the black iron maiden

Subdues me

The tower shudders, the holy signs tremble.

Listen:

“I am the fatal mother, desire me,

implore me, awaken in my sun — I

Will be with you till your breath fails.”

Listen: “You will not heal but live

On the edge of my life.

In sand, you will acknowledge me.”

In a harbour

That breathes like a woman,

Not restlessly but endlessly,

Her body flutters,

And where she swells all buttons snap,

All skins peel.

Where she swells I surrender, foundering in her bucking

Boats, her rising triumph,

Her sinking, slackening, sailing inland sea.

A Woman

1

Hair roaring with laughter,

Seagull eyes, a pouch on her belly,

A mother or another traitor,

Who knows this scorching woman?

Her nails come close to my wood,

Her tainted claws awaken my skin,

She blares in my hair like a hunting horn.

She approaches in pleats and bolts,

In heat, in resin, in splashing,

While I, in a state of desire,

Extended like a rifle and

Ready to engage and kill,

Enclose, plough and fell,

Bending, kneeling, the heady animal

Between her leather-soft knees.

She splits my skittle

In the familiar warmth.

5

The husky night and the cart

Of time that drives into the night,

Rattling.

Your hair, the seagull nest.

The meerschaum hills in which,

Toothed, the fruit that splits.

The lizards, the stone woodpeckers

Swaying in the leaves,

In the furious leaves.

Hear the hooves of the horse Desire

Fleeing down the road.

Hear in the fields the moorcock, the hare,

The chattering teeth of love.

12

Her mouth: the tiger, the leap, the spinning top

Round and round to seven months of summer.

Her body: liana waiting to ignite.

A shell of wheat.

Flat is my white,

As white as a fish of stone.

I have been razed to the skin.

My population purged.

She has become someone else. Strange to my eye,

The one who lived in the scruff of my neck.

The Catchword: House

3

One leap

And I dived

Blind

Into the arms of a wind so bitter

The land let go its hold and I

Was impregnated by winter

And winter was the fury

Of my coagulating skin.

Darkness

Visited me

The blood

Of women asked and swiftly climbed and leapt

Into my backbone. And I became flesh and claw

And branch. Brittle

With desire I grew, a

Rider of the night-time

Strangers

Who I,

The animal,

Could no longer escape. In this season

Strangers

Are my life. Turning, they collapse,

As hot as women in the snow.

8

The night blows and beats its mutilated wings.

Rising from the uncertain earth the broken branch

Pierces my body.

Winter ends again and

No-one is mine.

From the avaricious woods,

The avaricious rats come riding through the grass.

12

Loneliness is a home.

(A home closes — warm

Lives a season in lodgings and

Becomes a face — soft

Is loneliness and ripens thought-

Fully from child to man and corpse.)

Don’t be like a home.

Love is a cramp and

(A murder) reaching for the

Moment: a dying executioner, a splitting conch.

Mirrors ripen. Don’t be like a mirror.