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VOLUNTARY EXILE
Aix-en-Provence & Bournemouth
A Dedication Castle i From the grey rafters of the sky, down they come, old men with children's flower faces and the young whose eyes are as old as rain. ii The past was a grand hotel, full of long corridors which led all to tall mirrors where I met the dead. And in each corner of each room there bloomed a neatly tailored tree where Eve and Adam smiled and smiled like waxen statuary. And queens, undressed like peasant girls lounging on beds of purple grass, coaxed the clumsy minotaur to chant such lays as filled the azure night with gilded rivers of the zodiac. Ah, then! how sweetly did he croon down the long lift-shaft of the dim-lit years! iii Leagues have I sailed since, yet the old sea beats murmur still. Here in these foreign boyish hills stars flock like dust in the beams of dark. The night air folds and enfold like soft gloved hands or words of love. I am lost in the sea's cool suck where god becomes girl becomes flights of doves. iv The sun will not rise today. The clouds' rococo dome squirms like a plaster battlefield where rotting angels storm and fret like maggots in a dreamless skull. Despite the black entrails say to hermits shut in homely cells— the sun will not rise today. v Safe for eternity, within such walls as rise immaculate beyond the brown and curling tides that wrack my sleep, they stand. Poised in their hands, day, night, the sun, the moon, both birth and death, and song, and silence wait. vi We thought them kin to fish and tree and hill kin to the errant wind that sighs through our tents. See, they come down to feed our tiny fires with worn-out rags we took for lips and hands. We build and break and live to tell the tale yet they'll not change for all our flames and names. Morning Under closed lids your eyes rove in the day of sleep: all the street's grey shutters open, neighbors stand framed beyond yellow walls, plane trees speak, and in each grated cell white beaded fingers tell the bang of a bell. Where your dream close eyes, open and still, lie in doors. Mountain Beyond our tent of trees the mountain slides huge muscled flesh of Titans; speared by the grey veined trees the host falls. This and the market stalls hung with a people pierced through hands and eyes my lover indicates, smiling, bequeathes the story of the first apocalypse. Memory Her hair like a thrush's wing, softly behind shutters my love sleeps. (Through the glades of the golden street the host of heathen cats dart by the shuffling feet; the dust her slippers sift is all fatherlands, At a bag of cherries her simian fingers pick, thin lips void fleshed pips, familiar cats recalling sons and grandsons gone beyond mourning. As the sun swings at every street's ending I meet this withered woman shading her blind red eyes against the pain of light since she lost the use of dreaming.) The noon is a tower of gulls where softly Annie turns and smiles in sleep. | Noon Still air enfolds the hills' long limbs while through your arching hair silent and small birds slip. The wind waits like a tower. The sun sits in the pine. In the spines and cones of light your shoulders crush thyme. Saint-Paul-de-Mausole Pillars crowned with a knot of lizards, screen of shades—a young priest strides through the purple noise of dust. Lent, and the hooded cross burns loud in its cave. By the ragged eyeholes of the hill, Vincent, outlawed, half-blind, looked and near died, left paint-splashed stones under the cypresses slim-boned as cats. In half light the bunched lizards, coiled and cowled in lenten purple, mourn now for all the mad. Where shadows cross on priestly paw the stone cat stalks still. Vernègues Destroyed by Earthquake, 1909 Breughel's babel is a hive of mirrors, a blueprint carapace Argus-eyed. The frail husk of the lizard under sun wrinkles. His paper belly is the maggots' prison. Here, one day, because here was a village the small hill shrugged. Cellars opened dry eyes. Roadside Oratory A girl who bears a weightless son proud in her elbow's crook stands pedestaled and niched in the sun-pocked wall, barren as the desert of my seeking. This finding—the small stern woman standing at my elbow, facing the things I face—she, whose eyes are quiet sky, denies divinity, demands no brandished sun, yet promises as much of resurrection as all that time-tilled wonderland beyond the other girl's stone gaze. Bournemouth Our cell is fashioned out of wallpaper. It is as snug as Samarkand. One wall frames a square hole, huge as a newspaper. It is the closely-written sea. So far have I read in this autumn light, and can turn no further. Sea Mist Through fingers thinner than rain the sun's blond flower into the sea's wide placid lap sheds softer grain than sand or song. Lost under fertile eaves of light blinded we drift under the silence of her shifting skirts where all landfall is lost. Fell Side As the stream's glass shelves still, white too is the wind in the valley folds. And not a grass has moved. With crouching hills that gaze like sculptured lions you share the wintry lark's tall poise. Should you speak, you would the white air let loose. Then, like uncertain sea, would the causeway suddenly dance. Rendezvous Fishes in the meshes of the ocean's hair: fingers. Pale fragile phalanges of neuter bone beckon and strangle in the purple waves where islands lie like whales. Tricked in fine silver weave you stand here on the shore. My hands reach out to seize your marble hands. Yet you lie farther than the falling stars or those frail charts that lightning scrawls across the summer skies. Landscape Garden Pine trees grapple the blind sky like antique wrestlers; snapped in brown broken Rome tame fountains drone. I tie my horse to a bronze stork and in silence drown. In the Valley Gardens The woods are still are arches of brick. Here the sun is a white flower on a stalk of silence poised, awaiting the voice that should one day break the dead rind of trees. The woods wait, like a painted pot. And a leaf falls, and another. They flicker, dip like dancers, together. Their fall is like the noise of night. They fall and float awhile upon the dark, then, look, they sink. They sink. Coastline Iron-red and black, stone flames still in perpetual gales of whitest days and sea. In the spires of rock we mistook for men the bald crow hops and clucks his tongue and cocks his eye old and small as the sun. A white sheet is drawn over the wreck-filled gulf where dark stars whirl and sand is born. Visitors In pastel statuary and labeled shrubs of winter gardens, shriek strange sharp-beaked Arctic visitors. (Reeking of firs and horses barbarians rode through cardboard Rome, found nothing left to ape or rape.) The ladies of fashion wrapped now in diaphanous aspen mist loiter with chalky lions and tame war memorials of Eldorado past where poets wield the spade and sieve and chuckle over gilded bones. Proud stranger birds speak, at least prosaically, of home, where yet the seasons clash like champions in the lists. Saint Aldhelm's Head Forever, away from the sea wrapped in thin dark weeds of the rain, Black thorn trees moan. Gone are the faces of May, long drowned in the spray of their years. Grown dim are the fretted miles of shore which once bore wild shoals of boats. Their fish-blind eyes are hidden, cowled behind hands that storms have searched and scoured. Faceless they lean over the empty charts of land. The wind burns like sand between. The Tarn i Of nights he dreamed he texture of the winter fell barer than the sea's white hill and refuge in the knot of trees on the tarn's edge sought and heard the wind's word skate across the lake, the world twisted through glass. ii On the frozen marsh his heel paused quick above skylights of ice that glazed the stench of the black years' bog, but could not strike for the voices lost in the thorny nests were not of birds but of his decease. Spring, England Like a huge blind eye the sun slides behind welded trees and glass brick of sky. From here, in all ways, lie long galleries of painted days like yesterday, and green. The gilded frame of things sets all awry. Unseen suns flower and die. Traffic Through the trees' eaves a river rushes, a highway noise: of evenings all roads pour eastward. Fishes and leaves brawl to be only still under the sky's thatch where swallows flit like stars. Silence High sun and wind fling a handful of sixpences through the little trees; mint-bright sea-fire scampers from our feet. The pitcher tilts a wind-spilt rainbow dropped at our feet. Hear the clatter of silence when the wind stops. The Snowman Within her robin-redbreast sleep a snowman stood, silk-hatted sentinel of fairyland where love is true. For fifteen Christmases he kissed her mittened hand then melted, foolish, in the morning sun, for love is true. And now within her dreaming arms the summer lies hot-scented, and yet the giant snowman screams that love is true. Nocturne Where the sun marked the street's time (sidled by dust and puddles) by night behind wooden windows the small hours chime like a blinded nightingale. A Crystal Head A jewel, her cheek and jowl contain no shadow, her neat grin shuts in no relic of a musty tongue. birds, beasts that we are lost among (a zodiac wreathes her brow) are focused on each hollowed eye. Bright in the blankness of the grave an empress, waking, lies— her crystal head, death's negative. Folksong Black desert swallow, fly back home to the appletrees; speak to the girl with the autumn eyes, ask will she dye her bright skirts black. How mant times have I left this place, have fought the bright blades of the thicket rain, have succumbed to the wicked sun which is always there when I turn my face? I saddle my horse and it stands unsaddled. I buckle my sword and it hangs unbuckled. I draft her a message—see the page is blank. Snowstorm Back to another wall. The world swoops howling overhead steered down the windlong snow, and downwind, a field behind, you seem to linger but lean into winter's arms, fight forward but no nearer. Overhead on dead wings a bird rips, past, over the fields where double footprints fill and are lost with his unheard cry. Behind us the lines of black stone walls lie broken by the tidal waves of snow, and your silly hands beat on the blizzard cliffs that silence, blind, while I wait, inches beyond. Summer Bride The moon's cold circle will forbid you flesh, bride, whose cornflower eyes smile and burn, out of every spring. Always your body will conspire with night to cuckold my dream's soaring. Always even in your leaves' embrace, your summer smile, the thin scream of an owl, a knife from the velvet dress of dark rips out dead breasts of stone. Communion As always she waits. Framed in her looking glass the empty room has changed to a woodcut landscape peopled with token trees. In a stiff white paper dress on the edge of the bed's unfathomed lake, she waits for the hand that makes no shade to stop her prayer. Statue Ground ivy pours a thick sea of darkest green, slow, around trees; contemptuously, silver shins straddle her shadow-dappled thigh, haunch, and back of hand-worn marble. Lashed by the spray of ivy, she surrenders herself to none less than the sea, whose pace, to our eyes, is imperceptible. A Woman Seen I see her red and brown like living sand. Her hands spread and fall like the deep blue shadows of leaves. She is the tide, whose rich cloth laps and burns me whiter than the cockle of the tin sun. I see her as when lightning cuts out of night pale flesh roped with rain like ivy, and time grips her wrist and knee and smile of privacy. I see that she never moves. The dark sea shuts, an iron hand where lies the gold of what she was. A Reflection The naked slim-thighed goddess candlewhite, snakelike floats in the foliage of the pool. Like lilies or like moons hand, foot, and knee solicit shamelessly the noon's kiss. The mirror image of the rotten tree, she is a thin white bone— stiff totem in an apse of leaves, A Solemn Music A white tree turned on a dancer's toe slowly, her slender bud unfolding glass hands. Wave beyond wave the hills slid and fell, white crests crashing into distance. Then all stood still. Year's End I have built on the endless shore, stronghold of maidens, a fort of bones. Like stubborn grass or sparrows green hands inhabit the masonry of the stilled air. I have laid the worn coins of words upon the dead eyes of night, eyes without lids, doors without walls. There are tongues in the stopped air my lips can never quiet. Moon i Countless and minuscule cockle skulls roll tenantless under the milk-white fringes of the sea. Through the pale thighs of trees the swordlike wind burns. Slim sisters flute through metal throats. Theirs is the breath of horses and of waves. ii Stripped of her colored frocks earth becomes moon taut and dry as an arched bone. Nor flame, nor sand shall quench her stark dream. the shrill-nerved stretch of shore fingers (gryphon-clawed with trees) the sky, the white sea. Here remembrance stops: like piano keys, the waves chop. iii This convent is my palace: paper its naked walls with tales! Unlace the nurse's bodice, fondle her body's codfish scales. Does the razor-lipped steel chalice bubble with dog-eyed bull-black whales? iv This side the sill they weave red ribbons through their serpent hair— Bitter, Cruel, Unnamable— on iron beds of love, the Kindly Ones. This side the sill. v Pass! Through the waiting rooms, through plaster seas, door after door, a journey make (preoccupied in columns in silence wait the gold-faced dead to be unslain) into the wide and vacant dark, pass! vi Sweet bride! To hounds and horse she rides, naked as light! Past death, and being dead, her lovers breathe and (apple for apple) give and have!
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