Selected Poems

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach: The Ogre cannot master speech. About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.

We have no destiny assigned us: Nothing is certain but the body; we plan To better ourselves; the hospitals alone remind us Of the equality of man.

But round your image there is no fog, and the Earth can still astonish.

Time will say nothing but I told you so. Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know. If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so. There are no fortunes to be told, although Because I love you more than I can say, If I could tell you I would let you know. The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, There must be reasons why the leaves decay; Time will say nothing but I told you so. Perhaps the roses really want to grow, The vision seriously intends to stay; If I could tell you I would let you know. Suppose the lions all get up and go, And all the brooks and soldiers run away; Will Time say nothing but I told you so? If I could tell you I would let you know.

Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases, turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country it scours, approaching the tidal mark where it puts off majesty, disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta, punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country, wearies to its final act of surrender, effacement, atonement in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled attractive child ever dreams of, non-country, image of death as a spherical dew-drop of life. Unlovely monsters, our tales believe, can be translated too, even as water, the selfless mother of all especials.

From gallery-grave and the hunt of a wren-king to Low Mass and trailer camp is hardly a tick by the carbon clock, but I don't count that way nor do you: already it is millions of heartbeats ago back to the Bicycle Age, before which is no After for me to measure, j ust a still prehistoric Once where anything could happen. To you, to me, Stonehenge and Chartres Cathedral, the Acropolis, Blenheim, the Albert Memorial are works by the same Old Man under different names : we know what He did, what, even, He thought He thought, but we don't see why.

Here, where the possessive note is utterly silent and all events are tautological repetitions and no decision will ever alter the secular stagnation, at long last you are, as you have asked to be, the only subject. Who, When, Why, the poor tired little historic questions fall wilting into a hush of utter failure. Your tears splash down upon clinkers which will never be persuaded to recognise a neighbour and there is really and truly no one to appear with tea and help. You have indeed come all the way to the end of your bachelor's journey where Liberty stands with her hands behind her back, not caring, not minding anything. Confronted by a straight and snubbing stare to which mythology is bosh, surrounded by an infinite passivity and purely arithmetrical disorder which is only open to perception, and with nowhere to go on to, your existence is indeed free at last to choose its own meaning, that is, to plunge headlong into despair and fall through silence fathomless and dry, all fact your single drop, all value your pure alas.

Is it possible that, not content with inveigling Caliban into Ariel's kingdom, you have also let loose Ariel in Caliban's? We note with alarm that when the other members of the final tableau were dismissed. He was not returned to His arboreal confinement as He should have been. Where is He now? For if the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded the poetic. that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. We want no Ariel here, breaking down our picket fences in the name of fraternity, seducing our wives in the name of romance. and robbing us of our sacred pecuniary deposits in the name of justice. Where is Ariel? What have you done with Him? For we won't, we daren't leave until you give us a satisfactory answer.

Now our partnership is dissolved, I feel so peculiar: As if I had been on a drunk since I was born And suddenly now, and for the first time, am cold sober, With all my unanswered wishes and unwashed days Stacked up all around my life ; as if through the ages I had dreamed About some tremendous journey I was taking, Sketching imaginary landscapes, chasms and cities, Cold walls, hot spaces, wild mouths, defeated backs, Jotting down fictional notes on secrets overheard In theatres and privies, banks and mountain inns, And now, in my oId age, I wake, and this journey really exists, And I have actually to take it, inch by inch, Alone and on foot, without a cent in my pocket, Through a universe where time is not foreshortened, No animals talk, and there is neither floating nor flying.

Now, more than ever, we distinctly hear The dreadful shuffle of a murderous year And all our senses roaring as the Black Dog leaps upon the individual back.

Beyond him his young cousins in the city Pursued their rapid and unnatural course, Believed in nothing but were easy-going, And treated strangers like a favourite horse.

Will you wheel death anywhere In his invalid chair, With no affectionate instant But his his attendant? For to be held for friend By an underdeveloped mind To be joke for children is Death's happiness: Whose anecdotes betray His favourite colour as blue Colour of distant bells And boys' overalls.

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full strength of Collective Man.

Is first baby, warm in mother, Before born and is still mother, Time passes and now is other, Is knowledge in him now of other

From Archaeology one moral, at least, may be drawn, to wit, that all our school text-books lie. What they call History is nothing to vaunt of,' being made, as it is, by the criminal in us: goodness is timeless.

where to all species except the talkative have been allotted the niche and diet that become them. This, whatever micro- biology may think, is the world we really live in and that saves our sanity, who know all too well how the most erudite mind behaves in the dark without a surround it is called on to interpret, how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor, it sinks into a driveling monologue, too literal to see a joke or distinguish a penis from a pencil.

for the subject of the verb to-hunger is never a name : dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms, but the neotene who marches upright and can subtract reveals a belly like the serpent's with the same vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy, he must get his calories before he can consider her profile or his own, attack you or play chess, and take what there is however hard to get down : then surely those in whose creed God is edible may call a fine omelette a Christian deed.

joining the crowd is the only thing all men can do.

Expect no help from others, for who Talk sense to princes or refer to The scorpion in official speeches As they unveil some granite Progress Leading a child and holding a bunch Of lilies?

Still his loud iniquity is still what only the Greatest of saints become-someone who dqes not lie : He because he cannot Stop the vivid present to think, they by having got Past reflection into A passionate obedience in time. We have our BoyMeets-Girl era of mirrors and muddle to work through, Without rest, without j oy. Therefore we love him because his judgements are so Frankly subjective that his abuse carries no Personal sting.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

the hospitals alone remind us Of the equality of man.

They carry terror with them like a purse, And flinch from the horizon like a gun; And all the rivers and the railways run Away from Neighbourhood as from a curse.

Behind each sociable home-loving eye The private massacres are taking place ; All Women, Jews, the Rich, the Human Race.

And over the talkative city like any other Weep the non-attached angels

A friend is the old tale of Narcissus Not to be born is the best for man An active partner in something disgraceful Change your partner, dance while you can.

It is time for the destruction of error.