At Puyloubier.

1.
At noon, outside, the centred shadows
of cypress trees on the sun-singed lawn,
a set of draughts drawn up before the game
under the mastering Augustan sky:
the garden was pregnant with light bees.
Hoverflies, grasshoppers and scorpions
ruled sectors of the irrigation rills,
in the yard of our Maas of golden stone.
Geckos, those silent comedians,
feigned death behind the window shutters,
while lizards flicked their instant flight
across the rose-beds' unmown, brittle scrub.
Crickets spat from brown blade to grass blade.
The dessicated leaves of past autumns;
nettle tree, fig, sweet chestnut, olive
and vine had been rustled up into ghosts
by the South wind up from Trets, as if they
had a purpose of their own.The rhythm
of cicadas was insistent, urgent.
They burred the sunlight with a throat of rich,
instinctual energy.The iron church bell
sounded the centuries, visible in
its hundred-year, barred belfry, allowing
the Mistral to blow through its lattice cage.
It chimed the hour twice, once for those in
the mountain, or the hills, once for the town ;
a sound for arriving and departing
with the hour. Like the bell and cicadas ;
we have not said the final word. All day,
you appeared and disappeared before me,
in this garden crowded with unknown trees.

Now, the scent of shrub tobacco and roses
seethes in the heavy air. You lie alone
and asleep, brooding, like the strange locked room
in this house we have rented. I turn off
piano music on France Trois to go out
into the still night and look at the mountain,
which frames the Maas and the cypresses,
wondering how it came to remain
when so much has worn to oblivion.
People once made gods of mountains like these,
as if we had a need to make a shelf
on which to store the verb "to be" for use.
Yet a tectonic skew of a few angles
could have shifted these rocks away,
before Hercules, a local, was even fable.
The whole planet slowly turns, blanketed
so insecurely, under poised atmospheres.
It , too, can have no 'is' to call its own.
A few years ago, a sudden fire
destroyed the maquis on the mountain,
melting brush to the living rock,
losing the landscape of Cezanne and Pagnol
for ever. Our fragile skin of plants
and living creatures could be scorched to ash
and no change take place in the tetany
of silences and the frigid zones of space.
A few light years out and the solar system
would have burnt to nothing, save a cold star,
before there could be a D.N.A.;
a billion years further no cosmos, too.
The universe could have rotted to nothing
in its huge, inconceivable age
and everything in nature ceased to be
unless, elswhere, there is being beyond.
Something that sustains our living strength.


2.
Aren't our lives, in turn, as aimless
as these leaves? This eerie, burning wind
that swirls the generations of dross
as if they were dealers on the floor
of an exchange, pretending will-power,
yet only a part with the shaping trend.
Insistently, the cooler air gusts in
to increase the leaves' futility,
for they seem so urgent.They do not have
the casualness of human work,or play.
Though we risk joining the futile urgency,
the purposelessness of making saves us.
My verse will never be a craft, never
the Daedalus mask ; always the sweat
of uncunning pain, seeping through greasepaint
and suburban pallor. An addiction
to creativity seems always
elsewhere from the world; loyal to the moment,
yet disloyal to the hour, a deceitful
fidelity . My trite leaf-dance of words
will never move within the sway of this
retarding sphere. A career in dreaming
has only one life to live and will not waste
its efforts with music merely visible,
when it can be still with the pure ecstasy
of His elsewhere, that endless actuality.
Here I am alone with the balance
of the days; my career, my family,
my friends, my relaxation, weighed against
this patter of syllabic discourse.Who can say
it is not a denial of the real ?
Who can say it is not a self-deception,
the great ego-defence against
the ruin of failure, broken relationships
and simple, sad incompetence ?
Why do I know to write is to do good.
There is no true creation except outside time.
Only existence itself can create it
and what has been created can be imitated
which sustains the moral right to imagine.
That is why poets have an affair with stars
in the main sequence ; to make light from
burning unstable elements .They have no now.
Their past alone is visible at unknown futurity
and later at nightfall, we will be under Orion,
which splits the dark, a gorge in the darkness.
It upturns minds in its casual hugeness.
The sky is a child's unsure geometry,
thrown into luminous reverse relief.
Each uncertain point, a scattered fire,
through which flows a million silent flares.
It is not the cross we are used to,
no safe piece of Anglican plate,
but an awesome form, scarring the sky.
We have so few words not of our making
and yet we have no words for love except
those He gave us, when His beloved came
down this road and passed on to oblivion.
The love of that man is not some summary
of ourselves, projected onto old stones,
or onto a therapist's furry toy.
An ecstasy so distant cannot be
brought to touch us at any price, even death.


3.

Eyes meant to love do not not see their love
in this night of moths and dizzying flies.
The understanding intellect is blind
to its own sight ; the seen not the seer.
I walk in the terraces, holding love
to be as incomprehensible
as the locked room, full of books and pictures.
I wonder if my love will survive
our hard, mutual sincerity.
Must I , holding your pliant, resisting
shoulders, kissing those feathery lips,
embrace you, wanting to feel everywhere,
knowing it hurts to touch as you have
become insubstantial, knowing I
have turned back in my outward journey from
Cocteau’s bomb-site hell to answer the cry
that is the last of love at the brink of its re-birth?
It 's easy to make a knowledge of love.
Living and not losing, gives the lie to sex.
Experience outwits youth; no heart stays sharp
which is why it has youth to protect it
and is let down by the calculating
who have learned their passion.
We are a knowing people, clumsily
twisting the natural into duplicity
with the trite.Sexual pleasure
always seeks itself, which is why we are
made in His image, to love each other
in ourselves and Him in us, conceived
and present. Or are we doomed lovers
in the staged Verona of our legacy,
Romeos and Juliets, each rising
tired from the tomb of contractual
exhaustion? The charnel-house at dawn.
Enter the lover to find her cold.
While later she wakes to find him snoring
in a lethargy.She sleeps.He rises.
She sleeps.You lie. I pace, wishing to rise,
fateless, unburdened, without progeny,
without the weight of age, like the star shape,
freedom cuts, pure and lactic, through
the friable night, like cluttered knowledge
and it seems so high, so abstractly cold,
because our world prefers to leave it
unrehearsed. Jesus takes on death because
it is the only way to fall into
that crevice and live in God's light.
Our words cannot conjure
perfection before a death;
no rising into life before we die.
We have spent our hours living
and rising , unknown in him,
without a thought of dying.Yet he hangs
here, dying a death so strong, it makes
our suffering a firefly parsec.
Who would not smell these musk-dank roses?
Who would not thrill to this place,
drunk with its dusky wines, its sinuous charm?
It lights us with its own light.That great sign
above us, pouring an uncreated
fire into its fissure of flames. My answer
to you dear one, as the Saxons would have it
leof is that our very rows have
their centre in our hearts, a Lord contest.


4.

We have woken in a world where women
cannot live, as their instincts counsel them.
Those beautiful faces gone with Him
into nothingness, with nothing left
to wear but treasured white, no longer
worn for love . Women are no longer
in this world . They have followed the children
into the genetic mountain where the
travestied androids of D'Annunzio,
Wilde, Moreau, Flaubert and Debussy thrive
and plot mission controls with androgyne hands.
The voices of children lessen on
the playing fields, while priests and poets
kill themselves in the restless silence.
What place is there for Christ
in a world that cannot find room for fools
that sees humility as an ineptness ?
To be disinterested is an obsolete word,
to be purposeless, unspiritual.
Christianity seems a cliche,
because it was not forseen.
It was not intuited, not anticipated
in some gradual law.
Nothing struggled to be born
Like death itself it came from outside.
To deny its affirmation,
there can be no submission to
the reality of the moment,
as ecstasy is only real infor ever.
Maurice Blondel, a spirit of these places
who lies buried in this mountain
at LeTholonet with his confessor,
Dechamps, made a forgotten man
of himself in Aix, because of his
belief that no absolute could be found
in nature.There is no purchase on God,
just because we know of the creation.
We will find nothing of light
in these stars.He held that the stars
were enlarged on the horizon
because God wanted us to see the closeness
of these distant lights and the distance
of their neighbourhood; that yielding
of known desire to the unknown’
This is why these blurred stars hold such thrall
because together they sum up a
brokenness, a vulnerability
a capacity to be breached by nature,
yet not vile, but a weakness for wholeness.
This abyss of mysterious light
burns silent and pale, above my children
sleeping in their fairy-tale rooms
and you, the woman whom I love
who sleeps in silent anger
at my incompetent and unfirm will,
burn the purest flame that habit cannot end.


5.

An unheard music would be truer
said of death. It shows how far away we are
to death in living how close to life in dying.
How little the stratagems of delight
take it into their account and how
telling that they do not, we look
for an incomprehensible comfort.
with brain cells enough for a thousand years,
calculations and seed for a thousand,
thousand generations. I have made a law
out of this starry waste and used it
to justify a cowardice of faith, to judge Him
in my own Sanhedrin.of fear.

The cypress still rears massive,
behind the log pile. Sweet chestnut,
figs and cherries and the vines are huddled
in the dark. Floodlit car parks and
street lights glow from Trets,
to the haunting percussion of the cicadas.
The church bell clangs. Have we said
the final word? The garden is hollowed
in the dark . The scent of bushes
too unusual to name and roses mingles
despite the warm breeze.The air is alive with
a sensuous excitement. The strange,
locked room is darkened above the courtyard.
Two stars hang in this night sky,
itself a loft, suspended from the beam
of St Victoire which lies soaring
behind us; the first is Betelgeuse
and the second,Rigel.
Where have you gone?
To lie naked in the heat of our little bedroom?
I do not know what you are looking for in me
You cannot take His church,
His priests, His epoch- rejected words.
There is a way of knowing the world
and keeping a faith so personal
that reason can make no entry.
It is better to be an atheist
of one's own illusions than the believer
of one's own ruin, but who has the strength ?
Hence love is only at war with love,
a cliche of this place.This rock of the wolves,
huddled in hilltop defence of rival Christs.


6.
And yet how these stars blaze on.
Despite the Zola dams, the drug
laboratories and the intelligence parks.
I have discovered the greatest meaning
is to accept a purposelessness,
to be as uselessas the latest embryo
dug out to bleed in the white, ceramic
purity of the surgeon's tray
and to be despised the more because
I appear to be more. This place does not tell
of a secret in the world but of secret
that calls us inevitably from it,
that because it calls us from the world calls
us to it.
These little farms crowded
on a hillside round a dank citadel
over the oratory mountain from
Vauvenargue’s chateau where Picasso
lived publicly and publicly died.
The houses below the oratory
mountain and the Pic des Mouches.
The recent growth of brush and pine
once almost melted into the rock
by the heat of the blaze that destroyed
Cezanne's mountain, a vision always
both objective and true to the personal eye,
natural rather than subservient to the moment
the dusty road that winds down to Trets,
or the craggy pass to les Puits de Rians.


7.

Christ is the master-artist revealing
the familiar in an unseen light
of a love more timeless than this wind
We have become unsighted critics
in a gallery of landscapes satisfied
we have seen enough in abstract
or Renaissance monarchs relying on
cunning portraiture to estimate
a partner's looks An intellectual
mimicry of love is the worst betrayal
because intelligence is so exact
it has the precision the fine, stunning
play on the heart but not the life ,
the clumsy life. We awe at the fine
without its life because we can preserve it
even the fly in aspic was a fake
and not a paradigm of eras The branches
of this cypress tree that sways in the garden
when they are pleasing show a balance
sombre, raucous or ecstatic.
The finished draws us on where we would sooner
not be seen to go. not like the oarsmen
on the Pequod obsessed at Ahab's dead
hand water has drowned still waving them on.
Like us, who know the sense of being here
we cannot be elsewhere yet take reference
like a triangulation,from our being here.
And yet it is only in this fearing
uncertainty beyond employment,
beyond talent, beyond prospects,
beyond practicality that I begin
to feel myself a man who makes response.
to a call that is beyond me and in me,
beyond the scope of competence.
I am becoming the words of his call
speaking through myself in sounds alone
I can understand and yet shaken
by the wind the Bougainvillea,
lures dumbfounded moths
to become creatures of the shadows.

To keep this fixed light only he who is
stretched on that cross can heal,
because through his Father, He annulled
more than himself, a Godhead died.
Too often I make a superstition
of my circumstances, a fateful
addiction to the vagaries of living
something meant to carry fame
or pay for my response, yet feel these stars
in their massive numbers to have sympathy
for the universe in its vast vulnerability
an antidote to selfishness
like a playground in the rain, freedom,
a function of being called away.


8.

Make me a child who can carry love
once the world begins to answer its maker.
It is as if He never acted ,yet he always acts.
All blood has come through his heart at some time
even the driest stain on that insulting
crown once flowed in warmth and passion
deep within Him.What shall we do now we have time
to gather and words to speak and all
is not that habit of brokenness,
which is the self-sufficiency
of natural love-making.
We must do nothing. Look at his love.
We must always act: to love, it is enough
to look to have the alacrity
to accept the instant's sacrament
A momentous precision
that climbing limestone mountains
teaches us yesterday I climbed
Mont St Victoire with my little son
in rage with everyone,with the calculus
of practicalities and breathed in
the world of this myth -gouged valley
upon which Marius murdered a pristine
population, a hill of disasters
full of stars and lethal rocks.
Nothing can win against this motiveless
murderer, who shadows us through life
history is a master from the schoolroom
leading us to retake a failed exam.
All positives despair if death is your limit.


9.

It is not the great height or the giddy edge
but the laborious undertow of scree.
treacherous and deadly because
it is so close to the level ground
and to fall is to risk a clownish
somersault and that old cerebral break
which is the cost of a return
to what always should have been.
We cannot meet here any more
for our dreams have reported us
They want us to be their witmesses
to see what the sun can lay bare
They want us to be spirtual now
to give their fictional thrills such life
They want us to take over and give
their fantasies some room here.
They want us to thrill under a closed night.
They want us to make a skill out
of our thirsts,not a foolishness,
for the dream looks only for professionals.
Yet I will see you outside of this
plague of imaginings that has shut us
in this hill of clamouring iron.
The pattern of the lampshade falls on your
sleeping skin, a pelt of inverted stars.
maked in the airless bedroom.
I am becoming the voice
that speaks to me out of my tribal,
cairn-thick mind’ the effort to understand
the stars is better in my own tongue.

10.

Poets, my parents, my children,when
shall I see you again.I am becoming
consecrated and whole in his healing death.
To live forsaken, consenting
for him is a perfect choice to be,
unfathomable as the bed of
a dried out river that has become a torrent.
I am growing into the depths of the past
and the height of the future and the breadth
of the present to vanish into the point
of his cold, chiselled death,of his starry heart
to be weak for the one who is loved
like a tired father too fond to be impatient
my answer will still resonate,
as the cicadas do, echoing the word
an answer made to a silent other
in a lost place. The heart was always
the centre of things and those who could not know
him see him now a conversation of sight
whose leaves will not fall in a room
whose closure has completed the house
in daylight that expands from this crevice.
I am growing into the the mountain's broken past
and the vertigo height of its future
and the earthen roadways on route-lamps.
I am grown into human, death and his heart
whose weakness circulates his blood
throughtnhe red shift of all the nebulas
His to be weak for ; the one who is loved
My answer will still resonate
as the cicadas do, echoing the word.
Green light spills in from Grasse or Bandol
Blue light laps from Aix en Provence.
Soon it will be dawn, the shapes break shadow.
We will resume our games of being two
under the species of ambiguity.
The garden stirs with stealthy thrushes
come to clamour the temporal worms
in the sleeping yard. The ghosts of almond,
and lotus are laid by the iron hours.
Unspeaking, I climb the simple staircase
towards your single sensitivity.
Love that cannot be and yet still, must be,
wait until our site has no built church

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 12.11.2010

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Widmung:
To Clare McGibbon