Wednesday, 26 October 2011

November Notes

Now that we are deep in autumn - "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness..." - my mind turns to another of my early efforts in syllabics - 'November Notes'. My autumn is much harsher than Keats's: in fact, I'm more or less launched into winter.
   Reading my poems of this period - the early 1980s - it is striking how often I returned to a meditation on what it means to be a consciousness aware of itself and how often I ended up pondering on, and falling silent before, silence - the silence within the self, the silence which enshrouds all the sounds of nature, and the silence of the universe, and within which I find hints of something more, something other.

----

The days have drawn in: the first freezing
   Night has squeezed indigo hands
On an abandoned geranium,
   Slaughtering its watery
Tissues. Domestic junk in the shed
   Grows a fungus of frost whilst
Delicately, sporadically, white
   Spirit in a jar reflects
The solar system back at itself.
   Despoiled on an ash heap a
Cindered guy unceasingly stares at
   My lighted window where I
Pause to consider the platinum
   Glow of the moon. What absence
Is this, what death, when every August
   Thought, hewed into system by
The summer sun, thins to a breath on
   The pane? I cheered myself with
The chatter of sparrows, the evening
   Shout of the blackbird, but now
There is silence: soon, in the copse, the
   Bodies will congregate, starved,
Abandoned like mittens in the snow.
   It defeats me this silence –
Tongue-tied, impassible, attracted
   By death; but what else can a
Victim cling to, propped-up, his lifeblood
   Trickling over fingers like
A watchchain, before the sirens shriek
   Their mourning? When the alleys
Are searched for their daily cargo of
   Corpses, when a scream cuts short
In the Stuyvesant slums, we find them –
   Slumped, puzzled by their detour
Into reticent matter, but blessed
   By an icon-otherness,
Having slipped behind the silence and
   Shrugged off the troubled splendour
Of their lives. Such absence is presence:
   I pull curtains, huddle at
My fire, question the T.V. listings;
   But the absence, the silence,
Inhabit my brain like knowledge. What
   Thoughts are adequate to such
Impalpable pressure? Perhaps in
   The end all it offers is
The bliss of extinction, a body
   Subsiding in a shuffle
Of molecules. Or can a wise man,
   Scooping the silence in his
Palm like water, feel the presence of
   A Person, its fingers in
His hand, reassuring? Outside, the
   Days fade toward December,
Winds shatter the deciduous woods,
   Chastening my flesh to its
Dying. Philosophy, Socrates
   Knew, is a practice for death.
At the end he lay down, a cloth on
   His face, speaking hardly at
All. No one knew when he died. Once born
   We must wait upon silence.

© November 1982