I learn to live without ice and like the Queen;
we didn’t like her buildings when they stood,
but soon Victoria’s manly oak was quartered,
knickknacks dropped like spiders from the whatnot,
grandparents and their unmarried staffs decamped
for our own bobbed couples of the swimming twenties,
too giddy to destroy the homes they fled.
These houses, no two the same, tremble up six stories
to dissimilar Flemish pie-slice peaks,
shaped by constructor’s pipes and scaffolding—
aboriginal like a jungle gym.
Last century’s quantity brick has a sour redness
that time, I fear, does nothing to appease,
condemned by age, rebuilt by desolation.
Tops of the midnight trees move helter skelter
to ruin, if passion can hurt the classical
in the limited window of the easel painter—
love escapes our hands. We open the curtains:
a square of white-faced houses swerving, foaming,
the swagger of the world and chalk of London.
At each turn the houses wall the path of meeting,
and yet we meet, stand taking in the storm.
Even in provincial capitals,
storms will rarely enter a human house,
the crude and homeless wet is windowed out.
We stand and hear the pummelling unpurged,
almost uneducated by the world—
the tops of the moving trees move helter skelter.
3. AMERICA FROM OXFORD, MAY 1970
The cattle have stopped on Godstow Meadow,
the peacock wheels his tail to move the heat,
then pivots changing to a wicker chair,
tiara of thistle on his shitty bobtail.
The feathertouch of May in England, but the heat
is American summer. Two weeks use up two months;
at home the colleges are closed for summer,
the students march, Brassman lances Cambodia—
he has lost his pen, his sword folds in his hand like felt.
Is truth here with us, if I sleep well?—
the ten or twelve years my coeval gives himself
for the new bubble of his divorce … ten or twelve years—
this air so estranged and hot I might be home.…
We have climbed above the wind to breathe.
We frittered on the long meadow of the Thames,
our shoes laminated with yellow flower—
nothing but the soft of the marsh, the moan of cows,
the rooster-peacock. Before we had arrived,
rising stars illuminated Oxford—
the Aztecs knew these stars would fail to rise
if forbidden the putrifaction of our flesh,
the victims’ viscera laid out like tiles
on fishponds changed to yellow flowers,
the goldfinchnest, the phosphorous of the ocean
blowing ambergris and ambergris,
dolphin kissing dolphin with a smirking smile,
not loving one object and thinking of another.
Our senses want to please us, if we please them.
In my dream, my belly was yellow, panels
of mellowing ivory, splendid and still young,
though slightly ragged from defending me.
My tan and green backscales were cool to touch.
For one who has always loved snakes, it is no loss
to change nature. My fall was elsewhere—
how often I made the woman bathe in her waters.
With daylight, I’d turn small, a small snake
on the river path, arrowing up the jags.
Like this, like this, as the great clock clangs round,
I see me—a green hunter who leaps from turn to turn,
a new brass bugle slung on his invisible baldric;
he is groping for trout in the private river,
wherever it opens, wherever it happens to open.
A dog seems to lap water from the pipes,
a wheeze of dogsmell and dogcompanionship—
life-enhancing water brims my bath—
(the bag of waters or the lake of the grave.…?)
from the palms of my feet to my wet neck—
I have no mother to lift me in her arms.
I feel my old infection, it comes once yearly:
lowered good humor, then an ominous
rise of irritable enthusiasm.…
Three dolphins bear our little toilet-stand,
the grin of the eyes rebukes the scowl of the lips,
they are crazy with the thirst. I soak,
examining and then examining
what I really have against myself.
7. DIAGNOSIS: TO CAROLINE IN SCOTLAND
The frowning morning glares by afternoon;
the gay world in purple and orange drag,
Child-Bible pictures, perishables:
oranges and red cabbage sold in carts.
The sun that lights their hearts lights mine?
I see it burn on my right hand, and see
my skin, when bent, is finely wrinkled batwing.
Since you went, our stainless steelware ages,
like the young doctor writing my prescription:
The hospital. My twentieth in twenty years.…
Seatrout run past you in the Hebrides—
the gay are psychic, centuries from now,
not a day older, they’ll flutter garish colors,
salmontrout amok in Redcliffe Square.