from One Day’s Poem

So here he is,

your man, the Modern Languages Teacher

(late occupant of the ghost-chair,

ahem, of gaya ciencia,

the nightingale’s apprentice)

in a dark sprawl somewhere between

Andalusia and La Mancha.

Winter. A fire lit.

Outside a fine rain

swithers between mist and sleet.

Imagining myself a farmer,

I think of the good Lord astride

the tilled fields, tapping the side

of his great riddle, keeping up

the steady murmur

over the parched crops,

over the olive-groves and vineyards.

They’ve prayed hard

and now they can sing their hosannas:

those with new-sown wheat,

those who’ll pick

the fattened olives,

those, who in their whole lives

aspire to no more luck

than enough to eat;

those who now, as ever,

put all their little silver

on one turn of the wheel,

the terrible wheel of the seasons.

In my room, brilliant

with the pearl-light

of winter, strained

through cloud and glass and rain,

I dream and meditate.

The clock

glitters on the wall,

its ticktock

drifting in and out

of my head. Ticktock, ticktock,

there; now I hear it.

Ticktock, ticktock, the dead click

of its mechanical heart …

In these towns, one fights –

oh for a second’s respite! –

with those bleak hiccups

from the clock’s blank face

that count out time as emptiness,

like a tailor taking his measuring-tape

to yard on yard of space.

But your hour, is it the hour?

Your time, friend, is it ours?

(ticktock, ticktock) On a day

(ticktock) you would say had passed

death took away

the thing that I held dearest.

Bells in the distance.

The rain drums harder

on the windowpanes.

A farmer again,

I go back to my fields of grain …

… It’s getting darker:

I watch the filament

redden and glow;

I’d get more light from a match

or the moonshine.

God knows where my glasses went –

(if one had to define

the pointless search!)

amongst these reviews, old papers …

who’d find anything?

… Aha. Here we go.

New books.

I open one by Unamuno –

the pride and joy

of our Spanish revival –

no, renaissance, to hell

with it … This country dominie

has always carried the torch for you,

Rector of Salamanca.

This philosophy of yours

you call dilettantish,

just a balancing act –

Don Miguel, it’s mine too.

It’s water from the true source,

a downpour, then a burn, a cataract,

always alive, always fugitive … it’s poetry,

a real thing of the heart.

But can we really build on it?

There’s no foundation

in the spirit or the wind –

no anchorage, no anchor;

only the work –

our rowing or sailing

towards the shoreless ocean …

Henri Bergson: The Immediate

Data of Consciousness. Looks

like another of these French tricks …

This Bergson is a rogue,

Master Unamuno, true?

I’d sooner take that boy

from Königsberg

and his – how’d you put it –

salto inmortal …

that devilish jew

worked out free will

within his own four walls.

It’s okay, I guess – every scholar

with his headache, every lunatic

wrestling with his …

I suppose it matters

in this short, troublesome affair

whether we’re slaves or free;

but, if we’re all bound for the sea,

it’s all the same in the end.

God, these country backwaters!

All our idle notes and glosses

soon show up for what they are:

the yawns of Solomon …

no, more like Ecclesiastes:

a solitude of solitudes,

vanity of vanities …

… The rain’s slacking off.

Umbrella, hat, gaberdine, galoshes …

Right. I’m out of here.