Time period: 1966-1972
Poet: Michael Longley
Permanent URL: http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/17m0c
Sources:
A change of tune, then,
On another zither,
A new aesthetic, or
The same old songs
That are out of key,
Unwashed by epic oceans
And dipped by love
In lyric waters only?
Given under our hand
(With a ballpoint pen)
After the Latin of Gaius
Sextus Propertius,
An old friend, the shadow
Of his former self
Who - and this I append
Without his permission -
Loaded the dice before
He put them in his sling
And aimed at history,
Bringing to the ground
Like lovers Caesar,
Soldiers, politicians
And all the dreary
Epics of the muscle-bound.
In lieu of my famous last words or
The doctor's hushed diagnosis
Lifting like a draught from the door
My oracular pages, this
Will have fluttered on to the floor -
The first of my posthumous pieces.
As a sort of accompaniment
Drafted in different-coloured inks
Through several notebooks, this is meant
To read like a riddle from the Sphinx
And not my will and testament -
No matter what anybody thinks.
Two minuses become a plus
When, at the very close of play
And with the minimum of fuss,
I shall permit myself to say:
This is my Opus Posthumous -
An inspiration in its way.
The one saddle and bit on the island
We set aside for every second Sunday
When the priest rides slowly up from the pier.
Afterwards his boat creaks into the midst.
Or he arrives here nine times out of ten
With the doctor, They will soon be friends.
Visitors are few. A Belgian for instance
Who has told us all about the oven,
Linguists occasionally, and sociologists.
A lapsed Capuchin monk who came to stay
Was first and last to fish the lake for eels.
His carved crucifixes are still on sale.
One ship continues to rust on the rocks.
We stripped it completely of wash-hand basins,
Toilet fitments, its cargo of linoleum
And have set up house in our own fashion.
We can estimate time by the shadow
Of a doorpost inching across the floor.
In the thatch blackbirds rummaging for worms
And our dead submerged beneath the dunes.
We count ourselves historians of sorts
And chronicle all suck comings and goings.
We can walk in a day around the island.
We shall reach the horizon and diappear.
Its decline was gradual.
A sequence of explorations
By other animals, each
Looking for the easiest way in -
A surgical removal of the eyes,
A probing of the orifices,
Bitings down through the skin,
Through tracts where the grasses melt,
And the bad air released
In a ceremonious wounding
So slow that more and more
I wanted to get closer to it.
A candid grin, the bones
Accumulating to a diagram
Except for the polished horns,
The immaculate hooves.
And this no final reduction
For the ribs began to scatter,
The wool to move outward
As though hunger still worked there,
As though something that had followed
Fox and crow was desperate for
A last morsel and was
Other than the wind or rain.
Pushing the wedge of his body
Between cromlech and stone circle,
He excavates down mine shafts
And back into the depths of the hill.
His path straight and narrow
And not like the fox's zig-zags,
The arc of the hare who leaves
A silhouette on the sky line.
Night's silence around his shoulders,
His face lit by the moon, he
Manages the earth with his paws,
Returns underground to die.
An intestine taking in
Patches of dog's-mercury,
Brambles, the bluebell wood;
A heel revolving acorns;
A head with a price on it
Brushing cuckoo-spit, goose-grass;
A name that parishes borrow.
For the digger, the earth dog
It is a difficult delivery
Once the tongs take hold,
Vulnerable his pig's snout
That lifted cow pats for beetles,
Hedgehogs for the soft meat,
His limbs dragging after them
So many stones turned over,
The trees they tilted.
To begin with, the hedgehog does not
- Forgive me, John Clare -
Impale on his spines
Windfalls, rolling over
On to a bed of nails
To collect apples, soft pears
As in Pliny or
The medieval illuminations.
Pushed in his prickly cape
To the back of the mind,
He punctures with needles
Hunger and cold,
Mates with as little fuss
As he absorbs from wasp and hornet
Their poisons, the corrosives
Of the viper's mouth.
A hedgehog on the motorway
- Flattened to parchment -
Reminded me that it might be better
If these things were said.
A knife-thrower
Hurling himself, a rainbow
Fractured against
The plate glass of winter:
His eye a water bead,
Lens and meniscus where
The dragonfly drowns,
The water boatman crawls.
Its breast a warning,
A small fire
Lit beside the snow
That does not go out -
The robin shadows
The heavy-footed, the earth-
Breakers - bull's hoof
And pheasant's too -
Is an eye that would -
If we let it in - scan
The walls for cockroaches,
For bed-bugs the beds.
I have laid my adulteries
Beneath the floorboards, then resettled
The linoleum so that
The pattern aligns exactly,
Or, when I bundled into the cupboard
Their loose limbs, their heads,
I papered over the door
And cut a hole for the handle.
There they sleep with their names,
My other women, their underwear
Disarranged a little,
Their wounds closing slowly.
I have watched in the same cracked cup
Each separate face dissolve,
Their dispositions
Cluster like tea leaves,
Folding a silence about my hands
Which infects the mangle,
The hearth rug, the kitchen chair
I've been meaning to get mended.