Hush! We have fallen like statues on the grass, footsore, sundrunk, blind. Your face falls on my sleeve like a petal, the words empty themselves out of it into the silence. No continuity any more in the fable, but the warm naked statue under the dress. Heraldic? Time shut off, as sure as the invisible hand in the charnel house shuts off the breath of the dead. As the bee hangs, softly trembling above a flower, then lapses between the lips, a furry torpedo, so the fingers of their unique dream of logic follow the dumb curve of the statue downward, moist, to the final terminus of dream. Gently your body rides out and hangs above the lacquered river: an image not sponged out, or carried downstream among the Ophelias. They say we love only our own reflection in the faces of others, like cattle drinking from their own faces in a river. The heraldic Narcissus in your face has learned something at last. The true meaning of chastity is knowledge.
The long planes of water run through us like seed or spears. Here is a beautiful pupa stiffened in the crook of an arm, overlooked by a cloud of amazed corn. The music? What has the music to do with this moment in an old world? Nothing. We are as if dead. Death, but there is something left behind, which blows in and out of the nostrils, washes from the throat in a soft wave of invisible ashes; there is something here which dims candles in churches, evanescent — suds or spores or smoke. You have three sets of lips superimposed on one another softly. Such a thing as a kiss would melt, falling from dimension to delicate dimension of sense; the bland face in its surprise could play no part in it. Queer to think that we, who are here on a playing card, fixed for ever in an exclusive memory of desire, now share the “necrobiosis” (Tarquin) of the age. It is so easy to burst through the temporal stuff and delude ourselves. You are warm and ripe under the garish dress. I have entered you quietly without fever. The rain rattles among the leaves like dust-shot; the unwinking river is flowing at your head. An instant’s vision of the underwater girl, thighs drawn back in an arch to admit rape, tangled in the flowing weeds and fucus. I am with you to the hilt now, Excalibur bedded in the warm stone flesh, pushing open new continents, new vistas of emotion. The inexorable reaping penis stiffened in a field of parched corn. The trees are dragging their heads, caught in the wind. The river is glacid. The kingcups shine and shine, and scent of the crushed marshflower enters us. You are weeping now with delight, and everything is washed away in this effortless, happy weeping. The river has sponged away the dust, the recriminations, the platitudes, the agonies. We are caught in a loom of feeling, woven to water, to rock, to plant by this action. The axle of the world wavers, trembles, and begins a faster, a more nervous rotation: we are spun round with rocks and hills and chimneys. It is all so effortless; a warm plural moan — and the long still entry, shut off, drifting to harbour, home. The womb emptied like a bucket of musk into silence. The river flows. The kingcups shine and shine.
Now that our accidental separation is over I walk for whole days at a time in the aura of the life you carry under your dress. I rub my throat on it like a cat. I caress it. It is like a small baffling centre of blackness, of magic, among days and ways too easily understood. That is only one of the reasons I went across to the piano, snatched up the score of To England and slung it into the fire. Let us have done with all this once and for all. Let us stop all these corpses drinking their own pus like this. I am tired of Tarquin, sitting there in his rubber gloves, playing the wet modulations of the music. If this is an epitome of the English death, then I can make a better one: as an umpire, an onlooker, not a participant. If I find all this difficult to justify, it is because I am young, miserable, and looking for the way out. “My score,” moans Tarquin. “My beautiful score, you little vandal.” Whereupon there is nothing to do but sink into the armchair, and go into a sulk. I could kill you for the look of surprise on your face. No compris? No speek English, eh? Well, let us talk Lettish. “Fuck? What is fuck?” I remember you saying. Now you have the same puzzled look on your face. O.K. then, I deny it all, I revoke it, every ounce of it: the corn, the dust-shot, the river. You can take the music and stuff it up that windpipe anus of yours …