It comes to mind,
Where there is room enough, that water goes
Between tall mountains and between small toes.
Or, if I like,
When the sun rises, his first light explores
Under high clouds and underneath low doors.
Or (doing it still)
Darkness can hide beside all that it hid
Behind a nightfall and a dropped eyelid.
Why do I add
Such notions up, unless they say what’s true
In ways I don’t quite see, of me and you?
In my eye I’ve no apple; every object
Enters in there with hands in pockets.
I welcome them all, just as they are,
Every one equal, none a stranger.
Yet in the short journey they make
To my skull’s back, each takes a look
From another, or a gesture, or
A special way of saying Sir.
So tree is partly girl; moon
And wit slide through the sky together;
And which is star – what’s come a million
Miles or gone those inches farther?
Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.
A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.
I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me – as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.
Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.
If we lived in a world where bells
truly say ‘ding-dong’ and where ‘moo’
is a rather neat thing
said by a cow,
I could believe you could believe
that these sounds I make in the air
and these shapes with which I blacken white paper
have some reference
to the thoughts in my mind
and the feelings in the thoughts.
As things are
if I were to gaze in your eyes and say
‘bow-wow’ or ‘quack’, you must take that to be
a despairing anthology of praises,
a concentration of all the opposites
of reticence, a capsule
of my meaning of meaning
that I can no more write down
than I could spell the sound of the sigh
I would then utter, before
dingdonging and mooing my way
through all the lexicons and languages
of imprecision.
Leaving the Museum of Modern Art
I went out from the unsheltered world of art
into the unsheltered world,
and there, by the door –
Picasso’s Goat –
a shape of iron entered into by herds,
by every aspect of goatishness.
(What are you to say of a man
who can carve a smell, who
can make a goat-smell out of iron?)
This is the lie of art
telling its great truth:
a shape of iron, destructible and
created, being a revelation about life,
that is destructive and
indestructible.
From now on,
whatever of life passes
my understanding, I know more of it
than I did, being
a professor of goats, a pedant
of goatishness.
The blue jar jumps forward
thrust into the room
by the colours round about it.
I wonder,
since it’s thrust forward,
what true thing lies
in the fictitious space
behind it.
I sink into my surroundings,
leaving in front of me a fictitious space
where I can be invented.
But the blue jar helplessly
presents itself. It holds out a truth
on a fiction. It keeps its place
by being out of it.
I admire the muscles of pigments
that can hold out a jar for years
without trembling.
Events come
bringing me presents –
more, as has been said, than the sands of the sea,
more, as has been said oftener, than the stars in the sky.
There’s no refusal.
I’m the lucky possessor
of the ones that please me. I try to be
only the caretaker
of the ones I hate.
They won’t let me.
behind the delicate jar
and it moves to the front.
I think about you
in as many ways as rain comes.
(I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphors – their exactness
and their inadequacy.)
Sometimes these thoughts are
a moistness, hardly falling, than which
nothing is more gentle:
sometimes, a rattling shower, a
bustling Spring-cleaning of the mind:
sometimes, a drowning downpour.
I am growing, as I get older,
to hate metaphor,
to love gentleness,
to fear downpours.
You have to be stubborn.
You have to turn away
from meditation, from ideologies,
from the tombstone face
of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
You have to keep stubbornly saying
This is bread, though it’s in a sunset,
this is a sunset with bread in it.
This is a woman, she doesn’t live
in a book or an imagination.
Hello, water, you must say, Hello, good water.
You have to touch wood, but not for luck.
You have to listen to that matter of pitches and crescendos
without thinking Beethoven is speaking
only to you.
And you must learn there are words
with no meaning, words like consolation,
words like goodbye.
You try to help, and what happens?
You hurt also.
You hoist a sail on a boat
and one day, gusted sideways,
the boat is scattered in timbers
round a slavering rock.
You put violets in water, and what happens?
They lose all their scent.
And you give absence and loneliness and fear
when you give love – that full sail,
that sweet water.
I said, Never again will I write
about love, or frogs, or absence
or the heart-stopping intrusion
of steep-down, steep-up mountains.
Satisfied, I sat down and was overwhelmed
with sheet lightnings of revelations
of new things, of absolutely new things.
Twitching with joy, I scribbled for days
– about what?
About love and frogs and absence ...
etcetera.
Oh, William Blake and your grain of sand,
what a consolation you are to me.
I’ll scuttle happily in my matchbox labyrinth
seeking no way out,
meeting my small marvels round every corner
till I meet the last one
swaying his heavy horns
in that shadowy dead end.
Landscape and I get on together well.
Though I’m the talkative one, still he can tell
His symptoms of being to me, the way a shell
Murmurs of oceans.
Loch Rannoch lapses dimpling in the sun.
Its hieroglyphs of light fade one by one
But re-create themselves, their message done,
For ever and ever.
That sprinkling lark jerked upward in the blue
Will daze to nowhere but leave himself in true
Translation – hear his song cascading through
His disappearance.
The hawk knows all about it, shaking there
An empty glove on steep chutes of the air
Till his yellow foot cramps on a squeal, to tear
Smooth fur, smooth feather.
This means, of course, Schiehallion in my mind
Is more than mountain. In it he leaves behind
A meaning, an idea, like a hind
Couched in a corrie.
So then I’ll woo the mountain till I know
The meaning of the meaning, no less. Oh,
There’s a Schiehallion anywhere you go.
The thing is, climb it.