Collected Poems by Anthony Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) 📕

tautest then.

Tragic the parabola

When the sticks reel down again.

‘AND IN THAT LAST DELIRIUM OF LUST’

And in that last delirium of lust

Your image glows. Love is a blinding rain,

Love crow all the cocks, love lays the dust

Of this cracked crying throat whose thirst is pain.

‘EPITHALAMION’

The cry in the clouds, the throng of migratory birds,

The alien planet’s heaven where seven moons

Are jasper, agate, carbuncle, onyx, amethyst and blood-ruby and

bloodstone.

Or else binary suns

Wrestle like lions to a flame that we can stand,

Bound, twisted and conjoined

To an invertebrate love where selves are melted

To the primal juice of a creator’s joy,

Before matter was made,

Two spheres in a single orbit

Swollen with cream or honey

The convalescent evening launches its rockets,

Soaring above the rich man’s gala day,

In the thousand parks of the kingdom

Which radiate from this bed

Anoint the ship with wine! On ample waters,

Which always wear this ring, that the earth be humbled

Only away from cities, let it dance and ride

And you whose fear of maps

Set buzzing the long processes of power,

Resign your limbs at length to elements

Friendly or neutral at least,

Mirrors of the enemy

And even the dead may bring blue lips to this banquet

And twitter like mice or birds down their corridors

Hung with undecipherable blazons

For two at least can deny

That the past has any odour. They can witness

Passion and patience rooted in one paradigm; in this music recognize

That all the world’s guilt can sit like air

On the bodies of these living.

TO TIRZAH

You being the gate

Where the army went through

Would you renew the triumph and have them decorate

The arch and stone again?

Surely those flowers are withered, the army

Now on a distant plain.

But some morning when you are washing up,

Or some afternoon, taking a cup

Of tea, possibly you will see

The heavens opening and a lot

Of saints singing, with bells swinging.

But then again, possibly not.

‘YOUR PRESENCE SHINES ABOUT THE FUMES OF FAT’

Your presence shines about the fumes of fat,

Glows from the oven-door.

Lithe with the litheness of the kitchen cat,

Your image treads the floor

Ennobling the potato-peel, the lumps

Of fallen bread, the vulgar cabbage-stumps.

‘Love!’ cry the eggs a-whisk, and ‘Love!’ the beef

Calls from the roasting-tin.

The beetroot blushes love. Each lettuce-leaf

That hides the heart within

Is a green spring of love. Pudding and pie

Are richly crammed with love, and so am I.

‘THE DRAGON’S MOUTH WILL CONSUMMATE OUR SEARCH’

The Dragon’s mouth will consummate our search

For pillars of the borough and the Church,

Whose bar-side stance bespeaks their propping function.

There stands the Vicar who, with extreme unction,

To flesh and blood will transubstantiate

The cups that Sunday abstinents donate.

This generation, wiser than the luminous,

Thus gains vicarious contact with the numinous.

Here ruined farmers, in new hacking-coats,

Pour Scotch and ram fat bacon down their throats;

And children, obdurately red and flaxen,

Proclaim the crass inbreeding of the Saxon.

Observe the maidens who, with brawny arms,

Gush the seductive fragrance of the farms.

They feel the body should be mainly meat,

That ankles have no function and that feet,

Disdaining shape and glorying in size,

Should shout a curious kinship to the thighs.

But lest with so much weight the streets should rock,

The desiccated matrons of good stock

(Though not for soup) tune their patrician tweeds,

Then hog the pavements with their barking spouses

Before they seek their deathwatch-rotting houses,

Where flies die in the port and rabbit, stewed,

Provides for dog and man a basic food.

The manor gates are down, the past is dead.

American police patrol instead,

Save there, where feudalism’s greasy scraps

Still touch the villagers who touch their caps

To soap king’s lady or to upstart lord

Who licked the party’s boots or swelled its hoard,

Trimming like mad or clinging like a louse

To be translated to the Upper House,

Whence now he comes to dogmatise and hector,

Sway the church sycophants and hound the rector.

‘WHERE SWEAT STARTS, NOTHING STARTS. TRUE, LIFE RUNS’

Where sweat starts, nothing starts. True, life runs

On in a way, in rings of dust like Saturn’s,

And creating is creating arid patterns

Whose signature prove, always, the arid sun’s.

‘LAND WHERE THE BIRDS HAVE NO SONG, THE FLOWERS’

Land where the birds have no song, the flowers

No scent, and time no movement; here

The rhythms of northern earth are frozen, the hours

Set like ice-cubes; the running of the year

I stopped and comma’d only by the moon’s feasts,

And the sun is Allah, never an avatar;

In sight of that constant eye life crumbles, wastes

To the contented champing patterns of the beasts

Which live in day’s denomination. Far

The life of years and works that yet a day’s

Flight can restore…

‘CRACKS OPEN THE LEADEN CORNCRAKE SKY WITH CRASS, ANGELIC’

…Cracks open the leaden corncrake sky with crass, angelic

Wails as round

as cornfruit, sharp as crowfoot, clawfoot,

Rash, brash, loutish gouts of lime or vinegar strokes

Till the crinkled fish start from their lace of bone

But loss, too, is at least a thing which, in the dark,

We can hold, feeling a sharpness, knowing that a knife

Is a double-edged weapon, for carving as well as killing.

The knife in the abattoir is also the knife on the table,

The corpse becomes meat, the dead stone heart the raw

Stuff of the sculptor’s art.

In moments of crisis hunger comes, welling

Up through the groaning tubes, and feeding-time

Is the time of waking of perhaps the time before

Night settles on the land, endless night.

Light, whether of dawn or evening, turns

The river to glow-gold syrup, the trees

To a fairyland of fruit.

‘THE AFTERNOON HOUR HAS STRUCK FOR YOU TO’

The afternoon hour has struck for you to

Enter, become your body, pay

The forced grin of affection due to

What is now you. That is to say:

You are this pate and mouth of missing teeth.

You are these sagging bulbs and bags beneath,

And the leering social face in that far mirror

Recognized with sock (but no, no error) –

That is you, too.

Youth was a knife and lakes and air,

Metal and glass; you could bestow

Your body as a gift of swords to spare.

It was different then. It was not you –

Be patient. I will learn to be concise

Again, the hot room shrinks to austere ice.

The silver will evoke a salmon’s leap,

And bone-rungs strong enough for a single step

Will make a one-way stair.

‘RICE-PAPER LAND, O LOTUS-FOOTED’

Rice-paper land, O lotus-footed,

Whose tiny trees are tiny-rooted,

And cherry-blossom bells tingle over the lakes

And old Fujiyama