October

(To Doctor Napier)

The sugar beet crop is late.

A circus encephalograph

Of grey silver-shiftless fog

Squirms for the audience and last erotic laugh,

Dances and dies before judicial headlight,

Before truth, falsehood—is entered and repealed

By one hundred pulpit-thumping extrovert big

Lorries along their way;

But frolics at leisure with street-lamps burning all night

And the famished sun all day,

With loins of tree, of earth itself, and gorsefield.

Ancient stimuli govern the tumbler leaves

While Pierrot (the always grieving) bows and grieves.

The committee room: two lolling candles

For a Mass; the pale green wall.

And fog. Electrodes of voices

Jot wriggling channels of time and space to fall

On jaded photographs, dejected bundles

Begging peace from silver grey mythos without scruple.

The robed aldermen and councillors with hangdog faces;

And doctors: Fredk. Healey

Outstares nothing resolutely; grey silver chorus dandles

October’s most rueful valley,

Being Charlton Hall’s huge nervy grin; and a ripple

Of shoaling leaves talks in the very caves

Where Rice (the always grieving) glooms and grieves.

To tell your wide weariness

Is not my part: for we batten

On shreds of your childhood

Offered, pale simulacra, to our headlights, we fatten

As fog fattens on your breath expelled and hapless.

Revolves the turntable of our grudge and toy;

Nibbles the stylus of our trivial good;

Frontal, parietal, occipital

Are the silver grey occlusions of our distress

With fog intangible

As the grey silver antics of our joy.

So limp these roads like a someone who believes

While Ego (the always grieving) moons and grieves.

Pull on your silver grey doughty

Reappraisal of this man and this man;

For we have some innocence

When the graph’s Alpha runs rhythmic for a span.

But around us all the recalcitrant jacketed mighty

Countries howl as each atom of their hearts is riven

And forests of spikes and waves run from the pens.

Years ago, at a loss,

Potholed in the Castle dungeons, the foglike petty

Knave scratched with his chain a Cross

Visible to this day: any clown of the troupe who has given

—Though the sugar beet crop is late—receives, receives;

While Pierrot (the always grieving?) is All that grieves.