To Paint a Water Lily

A green level of lily leaves

Roofs the pond's chamber and paves

The flies' furious arena: study

These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air's dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by

Or stands in space to take aim;

Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts

And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise

To see the colours of these flies

Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle

Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse

Is the pond-bed's matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragonned times

Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,

Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour -

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still

As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,

Whatever horror nudge her root.

Snowdrop

Now is the globe shrunk tight

Round the mouse's dulled wintering heart.

Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,

Move through an outer darkness

Not in their right minds,

With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,

Brutal as the stars of this month,

Her pale head heavy as metal.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Logos (Wodwo, 1967)

God gives the blinding pentagram of His power

For the frail mantle of a person

To be moulded onto. So if they come

This unlikely far, and against such odds –

the perfect strength is God's.

And if the family features mount yet another

Opportune, doomed bid

To grapple to everlasting

Their freehold of life –

it is by God's leave.

Creation convulses in nightmare. And awaking

Suddenly tastes the nightmare moving

Still in its mouth

And spits it kicking out, with a swinish cry –

which is God's first cry.

Like that cry within the sea,

A mumbling over and over

Of ancient law, the phrasing falling to pieces

Garbled among shell-shards and gravels,

the truths falling to pieces,

The sea pulling everything to pieces

Except its killers, alert and shapely.

And within seconds the new-born baby is lamenting

That it ever lived -

God is a good fellow, but His mother's against Him.

Existential Song (Uncollected, 1967-70)

Once upon a time

There was a person

Running for his life.

This was his fate.

It was a hard fate.

But Fate is Fate.

He had to keep running.

He began to wonder about Fate

And running for dear life.

Who? Why?

And was he nothing

But some dummy hare on a racetrack?

At last he made up his mind.

He was nobody's fool.

It would take guts

But yes he could do it.

Yes yes he could stop.

Agony! Agony.

Was the wrenching

Of himself from his running.

Vast! And sudden

The stillness

In the empty middle of the desert.

There he stood — stopped.

And since he couldn't see anybody

To North or to West or to East or to South

He raised his fists

Laughing in awful joy

And shook them at the Universe

And his fists fell off

And his arms fell off

He staggered and his legs fell off

It was too late for him to realize

That this was the dogs tearing him to pieces

That he was, in fact, nothing

But a dummy hare on a racetrack

And life was being lived only by the dogs.

ЧАСТКА ДРУГАЯ. Першасны міф

Crow's First Lesson (Few Crows, 1970/ From The Life And Songs Of The Crow, 1970)

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.

Love,' said God. 'Say, Love.'

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

'No, no,' said God. 'Say Love. Now try it. LOVE.'

Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito

Zoomed out and down

To their sundry flesh-pots.

'A final try,' said God. 'Now, LOVE.'

Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and

Man's bodiless prodigious head

Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,

Jabbering protest –

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.

And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.

The two struggled together on the grass.

God struggled to part them, cursed, wept -

Crow flew guiltily off.

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