The poem is written in rhyming couplets of alternating alexandrines and pentameters - the old Greek elegiac metre. I have used it previously for more personal poems: "Washington Square Revisited", here, and "A Dream", here. It was also meant to have masculine line endings throughout but feminine endings slipped through, embarrassingly early, in lines 21/22, so, in a weird attempt at symmetry, I allowed one couplet in the second part to have feminine endings - lines 191/192. The poem is 226 lines in length.
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Despite the larch tree’s glitter in the summer sun
The standfast colour of the world is dun,
Yes, even in the tropics where the light is fat
The heavy dust and leathern leaves are matt.
On well-groomed beaches or expensive skiing slopes
Where belles wear little or their beaux’ fur copes,
Unnoticed at the root of all that has a gleam
A shadow tempers, dulling gloss to cream;
For all that glitters in the dancing hard-drilled light
Is metaphor for man’s deflecting rite,
That rubric of insouciant self-accorded praise
Confecting lard-thick flesh and cocksure ways
To sacraments of money, health, good looks and youth,
Matter-impounded and the prime of truth,
So that success, flip happiness and game show fun
Define the essence of a life well won.
Ignored but present like the soot which darks the fire
Death drabs this partying and chokes the lyre;
For merest quizzing of the dawn-cold world which squats
In misted twilight east of Eden’s plots
Bodes forth the grindstones of existence turned by beings
Embodied in their huntings, trappings, fleeings,
The creatures gnawing blood-drenched meat from screaming prey –
Perhaps the haloed lion, keen to slay,
The sneaking fox which tears apart a new-born calf,
Or scooping bear which chews a fish in half;
As well the rock-and-water littoral where towns
Are roasted when volcanoes rent their gowns,
And storms with howling basalt waves a building high
Capsize a ship and drown each deckhand’s cry;
Inland, the deserts parch; a camel’s ribs are stripped
By famishing hyenas, gobbet-lipped;
In cities of the plain a high-speed train derails
And abdomens and skulls are crushed like pails.
O Calvary of creatures! All organic things
Despoil in death; nor that which flies nor clings
Remains, engrounded but ignored by dust and stones;
For inorganic being weeps no moans
However much it shapeshifts for its nature stays
Untouched, and that which never dies nor greys
Can ache no thought for hapless trees or wind-thrown scrub,
For wasps, for sharks, bacterium or grub,
And self-harm man – all suds which daily writhe and die,
Dung to the earth and apple of no eye.
And so the world is dun because it’s death-embraced,
And man the thinking molecule, shock-faced,
Must thread the matrices, the mesh of things in time,
Like Theseus aghast in bloody grime,
Tasting the consequence of carbon’s helter growth,
Body-moulding and dying, blank in both.
Hence, blatantly at sunrise when the light enfoils
The purple hills with gold and steams the moils,
Again at sunset as the coal-thick sea of night
Engulfs all conning sense of width or height,
The measure which gives meaning to these own-lawed states
Is human death, and whether at the gates
In rich-robed judgement or entailed in flint-strewn fields
Man takes from death whatever hope he wields.
His value, consciously and fully lived in will,
Impassibly corralled by death’s blank sill,
Must stretch its legs and fill its lungs in daily view
Of time’s encircling cloudbank with its hue
Of leaden depth, unsearchable and like a noose
Which in its bounding, boding as the deuce,
Creates man’s meaning by obliging him to live
Aware of self’s demise in death’s dank sieve.
From that first port of seed with egg, though dumb for years,
Time, death’s procurer, bides then pucely rears
Into that heaving cloud-line tall in dusk-dark threat
Which ever tightens to a storm-raged fret
Enwhelming of an instant one who had an age
But now in seconds must sign off his page.
Although man’s fiat, “I will live despite of death,”
Absurd, impetuous, a waste of breath,
Necessitates a choice which presses like a thirst
For meaning, rich as if a seed pod burst,
And value, piercing as a draught of mountain air,
(What if life’s hasty like a match’s flare?)
To grasp which, reason’s forceps in a probing hand
As in a theatre sectioning some gland,
Are brought to use, though reason, plain in theatre light,
Itself is meaning, value – three locked tight.
Coherence is their gift, a name which limns the good,
For in coherence there’s both “is” and “should;”
Opposed is chaos where brute winds and billows rive,
Where nothing can, nor consciousness, survive.
Hence, man’s flung pledge that in unnerving hope he’ll guard,
Undoing-death ignored, though being-scarred,
Is also good: what plaint of death might then be sung
To justify its choking of the tongue?
And yet, upon a slab a geography lies prone,
An otherness unnamed, of flesh and bone,
And here were eyes, here lips, these panhandles were arms,
This plain a stomach and these clearings palms.
In sunken shafts, once wet and hot, its lymphs and nodes
Had fashioned chemic into complex modes
Which in the brain’s twist clefts and luscious bready meats
Enmeshed to personhood which loves and cheats.
Each contour, scarp or tableland of that spent isle
Co-bodied being for a sunlit while,
But now it’s drawn and pallid, cold as winter earth,
And frigid absence locks its length and girth.
This heap, Aquinas tells, is bankrupt as a husk,
For wanting soul’s warm milk to soft the rusk
The human is unhuman, spoil beside the track,
A thing unpresent, bodied in its lack,
And what was Kurtz is buried by the river’s way
To hide a nothing, purple in decay:
Ah, language, butt of Heidegger’s tormenting quiz,
Breaks down in struggling to express “not-is.”
The flinch-cheeked disavowal in the Western pale
Of death’s all-presence like unwanted mail,
Replaced by public capering in games and grins,
By paradox confirms that goods and sins
All find their motives weighed by death’s purporting gaze
Which winnows creatures in their ends and days
And makes a bawd of mind’s tempt aptitude to lie
And smirch its freedom to ask what and why.
But this refusal, deathlike in itself, enmoulds
A polity of twitching curtain folds,
Gigantic sentiment and fey banality,
A trite and ego-centred nullity,
Which like dementia-weakened brains has whittled down
To misplaced morals and a hang-mouth frown.
Gone paper-skinned, anaemic and amnesiac,
This urbs, consumptive, like a stiffened sack
Encrusts with frost which glitters on a winter’s day
Yet with a boot-swing can be swept away.
And striding from the burning plains and desert skies
Are sun-browned regiments with dust-matt eyes
Emboldened by their Book and rage-conducive Laws
To snatch by numbers’ weight and unsheathed claws
Demesnes and concourse from their fuddled squeamish hosts,
Upending neighbourhoods from town to coasts.
In driving cabs, kebab shop work, on building sites,
They spend their lives, collecting blights and slights,
Inheritors, for focused, hardened by their creed,
With will and stamina to sweat and bleed
They glean advantage from their toil with wheel or hod
And find a purpose blatant in their god.
For every tribe, consistent in its public stand
Which guides its youth in love of res and land
Has cult as heartwood, stabilizing core and rim
To tenored act which trumps all freelance whim.
At shove, all facts, all theories, humbugged, spread their capes
That true religion, though the wise-wit gapes,
Might process, gifting answers to the shouted plea,
“What means existence? What means death to me?”
That tribe which fouls its cult and makes of appetite
And self new gods to promulgate a spite
Against its past will founder, for its heartwood sawn
Its crown of right belief like clothes in pawn
Will slump and moral urgency will be no more.
Of point is that confession of the four
Evangels for within its Cross-torn depths is found
The flesh-point where the All kissed man and bound
Creation to its riddling Fount that matter might
Assume a status where had once been blight.
The gift which consecrates the grape and wheat bestows
A sour-sweet context for man’s likes and blows,
His pain-irked doubtful grasping like a game at chess
Which plays within and out his consciousness.
Reject that gift, failing to dung its fruiting vine,
Endroughts the land and leaves mere shards for swine;
Its rich estates caressed by Western sun and winds
Have thrived on concepts which envigoured minds
Now squalidly decayed in self-defeating quest
To magnify untruth and call it best:
Destroying what once grew does not create a field
Where one and all, as glebe, produce a yield
Rather it throws the gate for moon and star black flags,
Cheered in by Marxists hung in theory’s rags,
To stultify the garden’s gift of grain and fruit
For where the prayer call’s grating cry takes root
There’s wilting of the crop, both of the mind and goods,
Horizons close, cult becomes rote, and roods
Are banished; law in monochrome entights its fist
And nothing singular may then exist,
True hope expires, the matts and glooms of death are hugged
And licity is like a tomb well-fugged,
For rather than birth mindplay from those clauses’ grip
There’s glum eventlessness like water’s drip.
And “Christ’s Men, Cross Men!” will that cry again be heard,
Pressing for deeds in favour of the Word?
External – seizing back the geography of Truth;
Internal – moulding self to Gospel couth,
For man’s fulfillment is in time-freed sanctity
Called to the steps of the God-Man that He
Who knows the Father might by power resurrect
The corpses that “unhuman” – meaning wrecked –
They might be glorified to fullness that’s eternal.
Indeed, all matter, footloose and primaeval,
Will, justified, be lifted into that new state
Where all is all and in the All, and date
And fate, disarmed by splendour of the Hope of Hopes,
Dissolve in being that’s the end of tropes.
And so, when death, so ardently avoided, knocks
Finding a man bed-bound and tocked by clocks,
With arms across his breast and fever-active eyes
Anguished that life is now his blue-lipped cries,
Midnight’s humidity thick-pulsing in his veins,
His brain on fire, his limbs enscorched with pains,
Will he by soothly gesture of the Lord of Days
At toppling point when thought’s become a haze
Be thrust an ice-clear flash which scours the ache and heat
Forcing a heartbeat’s quavering that, fleet,
Shows forth in eye-distending clarity of point
That life is only life through death’s anoint?
That death and all its agencies endured in time
Compacts man’s import from his fakes and mime
Because that dire horizon to the hid beyond
Reeves motive, action, outcome that, au fond,
Were purpose-driven to what’s good or to the ill,
And all the consequence for plus or nil
Transfixedly now seen gives final summa to
The life that’s done, and some first sanctioned clue
Of what’s to come. (Will God have mercy; who can bear
That justiced gaze, the reaper’s of the tare?)
Did Kurtz in his last lurid moments brinked between
Flesh-fire and what, in tremor, will be seen
Have such a coup, so pure in truthfulness that words –
“The horror!” – thrashed and died like back-broke birds?
Ah, vain the glamour, glitter, of this heat-sinned world,
For all are judged, the man in drab or pearled;
Death doomed or death redeemed, it’s why, come all, come one,
The standfast colour of the world is dun.
====================
© October-November 2016, December-January 2016/17 and May 2019. Revised January 2023
Endroughts the land and leaves mere shards for swine;
Its rich estates caressed by Western sun and winds
Have thrived on concepts which envigoured minds
Now squalidly decayed in self-defeating quest
To magnify untruth and call it best:
Destroying what once grew does not create a field
Where one and all, as glebe, produce a yield
Rather it throws the gate for moon and star black flags,
Cheered in by Marxists hung in theory’s rags,
To stultify the garden’s gift of grain and fruit
For where the prayer call’s grating cry takes root
There’s wilting of the crop, both of the mind and goods,
Horizons close, cult becomes rote, and roods
Are banished; law in monochrome entights its fist
And nothing singular may then exist,
True hope expires, the matts and glooms of death are hugged
And licity is like a tomb well-fugged,
For rather than birth mindplay from those clauses’ grip
There’s glum eventlessness like water’s drip.
And “Christ’s Men, Cross Men!” will that cry again be heard,
Pressing for deeds in favour of the Word?
External – seizing back the geography of Truth;
Internal – moulding self to Gospel couth,
For man’s fulfillment is in time-freed sanctity
Called to the steps of the God-Man that He
Who knows the Father might by power resurrect
The corpses that “unhuman” – meaning wrecked –
They might be glorified to fullness that’s eternal.
Indeed, all matter, footloose and primaeval,
Will, justified, be lifted into that new state
Where all is all and in the All, and date
And fate, disarmed by splendour of the Hope of Hopes,
Dissolve in being that’s the end of tropes.
And so, when death, so ardently avoided, knocks
Finding a man bed-bound and tocked by clocks,
With arms across his breast and fever-active eyes
Anguished that life is now his blue-lipped cries,
Midnight’s humidity thick-pulsing in his veins,
His brain on fire, his limbs enscorched with pains,
Will he by soothly gesture of the Lord of Days
At toppling point when thought’s become a haze
Be thrust an ice-clear flash which scours the ache and heat
Forcing a heartbeat’s quavering that, fleet,
Shows forth in eye-distending clarity of point
That life is only life through death’s anoint?
That death and all its agencies endured in time
Compacts man’s import from his fakes and mime
Because that dire horizon to the hid beyond
Reeves motive, action, outcome that, au fond,
Were purpose-driven to what’s good or to the ill,
And all the consequence for plus or nil
Transfixedly now seen gives final summa to
The life that’s done, and some first sanctioned clue
Of what’s to come. (Will God have mercy; who can bear
That justiced gaze, the reaper’s of the tare?)
Did Kurtz in his last lurid moments brinked between
Flesh-fire and what, in tremor, will be seen
Have such a coup, so pure in truthfulness that words –
“The horror!” – thrashed and died like back-broke birds?
Ah, vain the glamour, glitter, of this heat-sinned world,
For all are judged, the man in drab or pearled;
Death doomed or death redeemed, it’s why, come all, come one,
The standfast colour of the world is dun.
====================
© October-November 2016, December-January 2016/17 and May 2019. Revised January 2023
