LATE POEMS 1969–73

St Therese and the Child

So too the swaddled mites of mountains taste

Milky droplets of air, old rhymes rolled on the palate

Vowel by vowel westward; and beyond all west

Tablelands of musk are saturating the billet

Where infant or tribe shall toss and turn and drowse,

Blue veins slackening a little: estuaries

Of blood and moon-pulse; and this tented rose

Before me while sulky darkness gnaws at our trees.

Your beauty now is all for the King’s delight.

Now the last blue lisping bird, Heaven’s fondest fool,

Patters after the passionless spindles of light;

Woof and warp wasting, this way and that from the spool.

From some staircase you have let drift one ultimate rose,

Nebulous of skin, but intact as dromedaries

Of the sun at his pride, his prime. To that carnage flows

A little staid creek of cassia, myrrh, aloes.

Madian and Epha, Orange and Lisieux...

You are disengaged from the One, and feel your way down

To set amid malnourished arteries of blue

This infant (mother insane, father unknown),

Small passions twitching at his face: holy Therese,

A child of two months sleeps here; your sanctuaries

(As if weatherboard breathes) open, open and close

About this so delicate, so inviolable rose.

I am the sun on ticket-of-leave, disconsolate,

Wrack all about me—even the mantled blue

Will not look back. Child, just to consecrate

My last threads of fire to a single blue vein of you...

Child at glum sleep’s arrest, my parent galaxies

Solicit your calms, times, musing tributaries,

And your Saint—to swing with the tide, to luff and doze

Near your seamless garment of azur, and or, and rose.