as thou art
All my delight, so all my smart
George Herbert
Holiness, not wholeness. If I touched
Too fiercely, just a shade so, you would bleed,
So near the skin your innermost of wounds.
*
Autumn on Mount La Verna. A gust of snow
Reminded us: Brother Donkey, the sack-cloth
Showing his ribs, at forty-three, worn through.
*
His body disciplined to stand ajar,
A threadbare sack, two sandals and a cord
Were all he had to guard it from the world.
Think of him as he must have been, the frail
And unregarded body that lay down
Nightly upon a grid in the dark cave:
A withered leaf that curls round its own form –
Though not resisting death, still on the tree,
Still of the world, simply by being there.
*
You who wake to the light of the high peaks,
Here is my darkness in this squalid cave.
But where do you lie down for your snow-dreams?
An angel here, there a tormented beast.
‘The angel I can take; the beast, no.’
No choice: you must take both, or neither.
*
Neither, then. Before long, the wound heals
And leaves in a nest of scars a crescent scar,
Unseen, till again your nakedness be shown.
A Buddha’s sleek tranquillity reflects
In a glazed wood veneer. Nearby is hung
An austere body on a crucifix,
Broken with pain, though sinuously young.
On a small chair the heap of clothes you’ve shed
Is like a crumpled statue. You, set free
From dressed propriety, stretch out on the bed
And draw me gently to your privacy.
No soul distinct from body, love from sex:
In sensuous lines, slight wrinkles, greying hair
I read a ghostly story, and the text
Has flourishes extravagant but spare.
You look at once so strong and vulnerable,
So shaped by fortune to a discipline,
I hardly dare to touch you. Yet I feel
Scar tissue in the smoothness of your skin.
I think of this as of a conversation
That’s run through the nine months we’ve spent apart,
You angry, me despairing; I remember
Stray phrases from your talk, which come to me
Like those quotations out of plays or poems
That bring delight in sorrow or console.
Yours, though, torment: with bitter truth, injustice
And all that beautiful intelligence
I may no longer love. I quote you quoting
From certain of the mystics that you read –
From Meister Eckhart or the Dhammapada
Or visionaries in whom eternal love
Leaves open wounds. Or else I quote from Shakespeare
And you respond: ‘I’ve been re-reading him
And thinking how he dwells, as we have noticed,
On “nothing” – “all for nothing” and all that –
So that his nothing seems the source of all things.’
More often, though: ‘You have betrayed my trust.
You’ve such good qualities: why do you spoil them?
Please keep away. Desire for you has gone.’
But my desire persists, an unhealed lesion
Scoured with your invective, ‘nothing’ then
Making a nothing out of dear remembrance,
Our pool of happiness too soon dried up,
Hope hopeless, and the future without meaning –
Except, perhaps, the kind of meaning found
In Shakespeare or a silent conversation.
‘That fucking whore-madonna…’ and a fart
Of gut contempt, a man his body’s functions.
They drove a spear into Francesco’s heart.
Struck by his comrades. No, the Colonel said,
You could not make a man of him, the priest
No priest of him. So, without leave, he fled.
Bowels clenched, his inner force – from the assault
Contracting – shrank still further in, head split
Like continents adrift along a fault.
The Brothers took the burden on. But then
His inner world’s deranged geography
Stabilised round an organising pain,
Which was the pain of Christ. Therefore not his.
He brooded as he celebrated Mass
And prayed, losing himself not to lose this.
Church hours passed. Pain, sweetened and perfumed,
Swirled through his body. Then a nameless love
Flushed at the portal of each sudden wound.
‘Lop-sided,’ you once told me: more sensitive
On one side than the other, your right brain
More active than the left; but to attain
A self in balance was, you said, to live.
In a photograph your eyes speak, the right one
Of nurture and the force of it; the glaze
In the left, though, brings news of a cold place
It glimpsed once and will one day fix upon.
*
Monuments of the time of the Black Death
Might house two effigies: beauty above
In all its earthly splendour – like a meadow
Embroidered with the thousand flowers of May;
The other effigy, laid out beneath,
Foretells the flayed cadaver. You, my love,
Who walk with death, lie down beside his shadow,
The focused knowledge of your own decay.
He is the Life and the End to which men must come; and He is the Door… We must enter by this Door, by breaking through nature, and by the exercise of virtue and humility…
Johannes Tauler
In the first place, a medieval childhood:
in your father’s hands
the huge key to the manor-house.
A ghost passed on the far side of the wall.
Later on,
hauntings of the spirit and hormones.
Then the retreat: ‘where prayer has been valid’,
who is it thrusts a knife into your sternum?
An angel, you would say. If ghosts, angels:
you have need of them.
You rise from that, as on the afternoon
you drove through a thunderstorm to a sick-bed,
your mother’s, as she waited for the bolt
to strike into her life,
as simultaneously, on a road awash,
it stabbed into your heart.
To live your life was to walk with death.
So when,
your child dead and husband gone,
you lay down on your couch as in your grave,
you fell into another space:
a passage, a garden at the end of it, a door
opening on light, a voice within it
that spoke in concert with an unseen throng,
their scent and music promise and presage.
Hortus conclusus. The locked gates inspire
Trespassers: Casanova with young nuns…
The body vulnerable to its desire
Seeks out another who is vulnerable:
She, sealed in her apartness, broods within
Her body, which has served her as a wall
But, prone to ecstasy, might yet become
The means of access for a teeming world
That, touching her, would leave her chilled and numb.
It was always an illusion, that reserve.
There is no faith or hope that does not know
The odour of carnality, nor love
The neighbourhood of animals: lost sheep,
The ox and ass, the reek of stable straw,
The child at the swollen breast nodding asleep,
Who born in pain will end in pain, his bonds
Unbroken breaking him, his inwardness
Leaking into the world through his five wounds.
The man of sorrows sleeps, his blood congealed:
His hair is clotted with the mud that stops
All orifices, and the tomb is sealed.
It is the day of rest and there is peace.
Despair brings certainty, a sober grief
And understanding. Argument may cease.
Yesterday was the earthquake and the storm,
Crowds, horror, iron hammered into flesh,
The rending of the veil, the foretold doom.
This is the second day. The text is mute.
I am Simon Peter, Thomas Didymus,
I contemplate my guilt, I mourn, I doubt.
Oh you, my love, my fair one, dew in your hair
And roses in your cheeks, you are gone now.
Love dies with you. This is the day of care.
Tomorrow, though, will be the crux of time:
I shall be John or Mary Magdalene
And I shall stand with spices at the tomb.
For some, pagan. The dawn dimly wakes,
Like a new season, raising the dead god,
We mortals sleeping on as the earth turns.
For you, Buddhist. The awakened one,
Pain and its seasons in his opened eyes,
Looks out beyond the torpor of desire.
For me, tragic. While no claggy earth
Clings to his body, there’s the weight and drag
Of the numb sleep he cannot wish to leave.
Or Christian. Death known, the tide of light
Revisits these abandoned earthly shores,
Infusing them, as ghostliness the flesh.
I dreamed we met in Borgo Sansepolcro
A second time, having again endured
The strange frustrations of the usual journey.
Such pleasure just to talk again! We strolled
In tears and laughter toward the city centre,
As if there’d been no breach. Just as before,
We stopped at an ordinary trattoria –
The meal we ate there far from commonplace –
Then on to the Palazzo Comunale
For Piero’s Resurrection. There it stood,
Just as recalled, a layer of tinted plaster
That opened up the surface of a wall
In the long council chamber, giving substance
And bulk to its alert protagonist.
The figures in the foreground were all sleeping
Like us, held there before them in a dream,
But where the last time we’d been struck with silence,
Each sunk within a vision, now we spoke.
First you to me (both looking at the picture):
‘Where have you been these nine months?’ And then I:
‘I have been buried by the weight of darkness,
My wounds all stopped with earth. And what of you?’
‘I slept and underwent the full gestation,
And now I wake, reborn from my own sleep.’
The risen Christ then vanished from the painting;
I woke alone and saw the empty frame,
For he and you had filled the world with absence.
A garden after nightfall rank with the smells
Of musk-rose, honeysuckle and mock-orange
Has eased its way into the front room
Of a terraced house the wrong side of the tracks.
From the kitchen you can hear an urgent sizzle,
Two boys are kicking a ball about in the yard
And a lone mother, wiping her busy hands,
Is taking on my pain. Intensely dark
And almost without highlights, her small eyes
Look into mine, their kindness inspires fear,
And talk of meridians and auric fields
Flutters weakly around their concentration –
Which is a concentration, you are sure,
That knows from the inside, works from the pain
That enters the world at birth. Therefore the hands
Held out above my wound radiate heat
And the room fills with a garden quite unknown
To the boys in the bare yard or the passers-by.
Wild garlic, bugloss, toadflax – how you relished
The names of wayside flowers! It was as if,
In making words, your larynx, lips and tongue
A second time created the great world
And all its rich redundancy. We are
Sculptors of air and what we make is speech,
The given world as moulded to our needs
In our design. So coursing through our frames
The matter of our speech is briefly molten,
Soon to be set in grammar, prosody
And vocables. And so, in naming flowers,
Your beauty makes a beauty that knows theirs –
Teaches that what I name cannot be mine,
Who, living in my words as in the world,
Work to give utterance to that which is.
You lead me to the desert. As we go,
You name the flowers we pass, gratuitous
In their abundance and variety.
But when the richness leaves us, you leave it,
And stone, sand, thorn and the stigmatic flesh
Become the matter of the universe.
Here is the proper place for meditation.
Where you confront the nothingness of things,
What space for someone added unto you?
*
And as for me, neither holy nor whole,
‘My poetry is fragments, because I
Am fragments’, yet the thought so often ours
Of being oned with God, your thought as mine,
Was brokenly revealed to me in all
The nothingness you brought upon my flesh.