nor sleep nor shit have our shepherds had,
and treaties are signed (with secret clauses)
by Heads who are not all there.
Can Sixty make sense to Sixteen-Plus? What has my camp in common with theirs, with buttons and beards and Be-Ins? Much, I hope. In Acts it is written Taste was no problem at Pentecost.
To speak is human because human to listen,
beyond hope, for an Eighth Day,
when the creatured Image shall become the Likeness:
Giver-of-Life, translate for me
till I accomplish my corpse at last.
April 1967
91
Forty Years On
Except where blast-furnaces and generating-stations
have inserted their sharp profiles or a Thru-Way slashes harshly across them, Bohemia's contours
look just as amiable now as when I saw them first (indeed, her coast is gentler,
for tame hotels have ousted the havocking bears), nor have her dishes lost their flavor since Florizel was thwacked into exile
and we and Sicily discorded, fused into rival amalgams,
in creed and policy oppugnant. Only to the ear is it patent something drastic has happened,
that orators no more speak of primogeniture, prerogatives of age and sceptre:
(for our health we have had to learn the fraternal shop of our new Bonzen, but that was easy.)
For a useful technician I lacked the schooling, for a bureaucrat the Sitz-Fleisch: all I had
was the courtier's agility to adapt my rogueries to the times. It sufficed. I survived and prosper
better than I ever did under the old lackadaisical economy: it is many years now
since I picked a pocket (how deft my hand was then!), or sang for pennies, or travelled on foot.
(The singing I miss, but today's audience would boo my ballads: it calls for Songs of Protest,'
and wants its bawdry straight not surreptitious.) A pedlar still, for obvious reasons
I no longer cry my wares, but in ill-lit alleys coaxingly whisper to likely clients: Anything you cannot buy In the stores I wiIl supply, English foot-wear, nylon hose, Or transistor radios; Come to me for the Swiss Francs Unobtainable in banks; For a price I can invent Any official document, Work-Permits, Driving-Licences, Any Certificate you please: Believe me, I know all the tricks, There is nothing I can't fix. Why, then, should I badger? No rheum has altered my gait, as ever my cardiac muscles
are undismayed, my cells perfectly competent, and by now I am far too rich for the thought of the hangman's noose
to make me oggle. But how glib all the faces I see around me
seem suddenly to have become, and how seldom I feel like a hay-tumble. For
three nights running now I have had the same dream of a suave afternoon in Fall. I am standing on high ground
looking out westward over a plain, run smoothly by Jaguar farmers. In the eloignment,
a-glitter in the whelking sun, a sheer bare cliff concludes the vista. At its base I see,
black, shaped like a bell-tent, the mouth of a cave by which (I know in my dream) I am to
make my final exit, its roof so low it will need an awkward duck to make it.
"Well, will that be so shaming?", I ask when awake. Why should it be? When has Autolycus ever solemned himself?
1968
92
Ode to Terminus
The High Priests of telescopes and cyclotrons keep making pronouncements about happenings on scales too gigantic or dwarfish to be noticed by our native senses,
discoveries which, couched in the elegant euphemisms of algebra, look innocent,
harmless enough but, when translated into the vulgar anthropomorphic
tongue, will give no cause for hilarity to gardeners or housewives: if galaxies bolt like panicking mobs, if mesons riot like fish in a feeding-frenzy,
it sounds too like Political History to boost civil morale, too symbolic of
the crimes and strikes and demonstrations we are supposed to gloat on at breakfast.
How trite, though, our fears beside the miracle that we're here to shiver, that a Thingummy so addicted to lethal violence should have somehow secreted a placid
tump with exactly the right ingredients to start and to cocker Life, that heavenly
freak for whose manage we shall have to give account at the Judgement, our Middle-
Earth, where Sun-Father to all appearances moves by day from orient to occident, and his light is felt as a friendly
presence not a photonic bombardment,
where all visibles do have a definite outline they stick to, and are undoubtedly at rest or in motion, where lovers recognize each other by their surface,
where to all species except the talkative have been allotted the niche and diet that become them. This, whatever microbiology may think, is the world we
really live in and that saves our sanity, who know all too well how the most erudite mind behaves in the dark without a surround it is called on to interpret,
how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor, it sinks into a driveling monologue, too literal to see a joke or distinguish a penis from a pencil.
Venus and Mars are powers too natural to temper our outlandish extravagance: You alone. Terminus the Mentor, ' can teach us how to alter our gestures.
God of walls, doors and reticence, nemesis overtakes the sacrilegious technocrat,
but blessed is the City that thanks you for giving us games and grammar and metres.
By whose grace, also. every gathering of two or three in confident amity repeats the pentecostal marvel, as each in each finds his right translator.
In this world our colossal immodesty has plundered and poisoned, it is possible
You still might save us. who by now have learned this: that scientists. to be truthful,
must remind us to take all they say as a tall story, that abhorred in the Heav'ns are all self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an audience, utter some resonant lie.
May 1968
93
August 1968
The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain. Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
September 1968
A New Year Greeting
(After an Article by Mary J. Marples in Scientific American, January 1969)
(FOR VASSILY YANOWSKY)
On this day tradition allots
to taking stock of our lives, my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,
Bacteria, Viruses, Aerobics and Anaerobics:
A Very Happy New Year to all for whom my ectoderm is as Middle-Earth to me.
For creatures your size I offer
a free choice of habitat, so settle yourselves in the zone
that suits you best, in the pools of my pores or the tropical
forests of arm-pit and crotch, in the deserts of my fore-arms,
or the cool woods of my scalp.
Build colonies: I will supply
adequate warmth and moisture, the sebum and lipids you need,
on condition you never do me annoy with your presence,
but behave as good guests should, not rioting into acne
or athlete's-foot or a boil.
Does my inner weather affect
the surfaces where you live? Do unpredictable changes
record my rocketing plunge from fairs when the mind is in tift
and relevant thoughts occur to fouls when nothing will happen and no one calls and it rains.
I should like to think that I make
a not impossible world, but an Eden it cannot be:
my games. my purposive acts, may turn to catastrophes there.