I brought you to Devon. I brought you into my dreamland.
I sleepwalked you
Into my land of totems. Never-never land:
The orchard in the West.
I wrestled
With the blankets, the caul and the cord,
And you stayed with me
Gallant and desperate and hopeful,
Listening for different gods, stripping off
Your American royalty, garment by garment –
Till you stepped out soul-naked and stricken
Into this cobbled, pictureless corridor
Aimed at a graveyard.
What had happened
To the Italian sun?
Had it escaped our snatch
Like a butterfly off a nettle? The flashing trajectory,
The trans-continental dream-express
Of your adolescence – had it
Slammed to a dead-end, crushing halt, fatal,
In this red-soil tunnel? Was this why
We could not wake – our fingers tearing numbly
At the mesh of nettle-roots.
What wrong fork
Had we taken? In a gloom orchard
Under drumming thatch, we lay listening
To our vicarage rotting like a coffin,
Foundering under its weeds. What did you make of it
When you sat at your elm table alone
Staring at the blank sheet of white paper,
Silent at your typewriter, listening
To the leaking thatch drip, the murmur of rain,
And staring at that sunken church, and the black
Slate roofs in the mist of rain, low tide,
Gleaming awash.
This was Lyonnesse.
Inaccessible clouds, submarine trees.
The labyrinth
Of brambly burrow lanes. Bundled women –
Stump-warts, you called them –
Sniffing at your strangeness in wet shops.
Their eyes followed you everywhere, loamy badgers,
Dug you out of your sleep and pawed at your dreams,
Jabbered hedge-bank judgements, a dark-age dialect,
Peered from every burrow-mouth.
The world
Came to an end at bullocks
Huddled behind gates, knee-deep in quag,
Under the huddled, rainy hills. A bellow
Shaking the soaked oak-woods tested the limits.
And, beside the boots, the throbbing gutter –
A thin squandering of blood-water –
Searched for the river and the sea.
And this was what we had chosen finally.
Remembering it, I see it all in a bubble:
Strange people, in a closed brilliance,
Laughing and crying soundlessly,
Gazing out of the transparency
At a desolation. A rainy wedding picture
On a foreign grave, among lilies –
And just beneath it, unseen, the real bones
Still undergoing everything.