Susa literatura - Poesia kaiera

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels, / Forged in man’s minerals, the brassy orator / Laying my ghost in metal, / The scales of this twin world tread on the double, / My half ghost in armour hold hard in death’s corridor, / To my man-iron sidle. // Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels, / Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season / Worked on a world of petals; / She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble / Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain / Out of the naked entrail. // Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels, / Image of images, my metal phantom / Forcing forth through the harebell, / My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal, / I, in my fusion of rose and male motion, / Create this twin miracle. // This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril, / A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless, / No death more natural; / Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil, / In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance: / The natural parallel. // My images stalk the trees and the slant sap’s tunnel, / No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire / Mount on man’s footfall, / I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles, / In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower, / Hearing the weather fall. // Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals, / Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour, / Finding the water final, / On the consumptives’ terrace taking their two farewells, / Sail on the level, the departing adventure, / To the sea-blown arrival.

They climb the country pinnacle, / Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture, / Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral; / They see the squirrel stumble, / The haring snail go giddily round the flower, / A quarrel of weather and trees in the windy spiral. // As they dive, the dust settles, / The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily, / The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel / Turn the long sea arterial / Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy / Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall. // (Death instrumental, / Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey, / Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple, / The neck of the nostril, / Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody / The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral; // Bring out the black patrol, / Your monstrous officers and the decaying army, / The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles, / A cock-on-a-dunghill / Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity, / Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.) // As they drown, the chime travels, / Sweetly the diver’s bell in the steeple of spindrift / Rings out the Dead Sea scale; / And, clapped in water till the triton dangles, / Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman’s raft, / Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial. // (Turn the sea-spindle lateral, / The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning / Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table, / Let the wax disc babble / Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping. / These are your years’ recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles, / Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling, / The flight of the carnal skull / And the cell-stepped thimble; / Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel / Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran. // Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule, / Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly / Star-set at Jacob’s angle, / Smoke hill and hophead’s valley, / And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father’s coral, / Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile. // Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble, / Be by the ships’ sea broken at the manstring anchored / The stoved bones’ voyage downward / In the shipwreck of muscle; / Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle, / Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels. // And in the pincers of the boiling circle, / The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time, / My great blood’s iron single / In the pouring town, / I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam’s cradle, / No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile. // Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel, / Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes, / Time in the hourless houses / Shaking the sea-hatched skull, / And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail, / All-hallowed man wept for his white apparel. // Man was Cadaver’s masker, the harnessing mantle, / Windily master of man was the rotten fathom, / My ghost in his metal neptune / Forged in man’s mineral. / This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl, / And my images roared and rose on heaven’s hill.