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On the Periphery
45 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
4 people want to read
About the author
Veronica Forrest-Thomson
10 books8 followersVeronica Elizabeth Marian Forrest-Thomson was a poet and a critical theorist brought up in Scotland. Her 1978 study Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry was reissued in 2016.
Veronica was born in Malaya to a rubber planter, John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean, but grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She opted to hyphenate the surname, having originally been published under the name Veronica Forrest.
She studied at the University of Liverpool (BA, 1967) and Girton College, Cambridge (PhD, 1971) where her first supervisor was the poet J.H. Prynne. Her Cambridge friends included the poets Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley.
Forrest-Thomson later taught at the universities of Leicester and Birmingham.
Her poetry collections included Identi-kit (1967), the award-winning Language-Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976). Subsequent gatherings of her work include Collected Poems and Translations (1990) and Selected Poems (1999). A further Collected Poems, minus the translations, was published in 2008 by Shearsman Books with Allardyce Books.
Forrest-Thomson was married to the writer and academic Jonathan Culler from 1971 to 1974. She died in her sleep on 26 April 1975 at the age of 27, after an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol.
Veronica was born in Malaya to a rubber planter, John Forrest Thomson and his wife Jean, but grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. She opted to hyphenate the surname, having originally been published under the name Veronica Forrest.
She studied at the University of Liverpool (BA, 1967) and Girton College, Cambridge (PhD, 1971) where her first supervisor was the poet J.H. Prynne. Her Cambridge friends included the poets Wendy Mulford and Denise Riley.
Forrest-Thomson later taught at the universities of Leicester and Birmingham.
Her poetry collections included Identi-kit (1967), the award-winning Language-Games (1971) and the posthumous On the Periphery (1976). Subsequent gatherings of her work include Collected Poems and Translations (1990) and Selected Poems (1999). A further Collected Poems, minus the translations, was published in 2008 by Shearsman Books with Allardyce Books.
Forrest-Thomson was married to the writer and academic Jonathan Culler from 1971 to 1974. She died in her sleep on 26 April 1975 at the age of 27, after an accidental overdose of prescription drugs and alcohol.
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January 19, 2022
In Defence of Leaves: The Common Pursuit
the:
the mentioning - run
ubiquitous, Victorian, similar
chism.
Shall topoi, conventional
- momentarily -
elaboration?
Had they conceits?
*
In Defence of Graham Hough: Style and Stylistics
Study Linguistics
Literary General
Different is a close: the
"of we literary"
*
The Transcendental Aesthetic
cannot of
against the
*
To R.Z. and M.W.
the figure of
the darkness of
walking with
each other
how is this
between
the figure:
each other
*
*
Selection Restrictions on Peanuts for Dinner
Tenacity was sticking to the topic
and walnuts, French: noix
One word can include two unities;
is to recognise when this is the case:
blankets: the weave of two senses
makes nothing of six-term dinner
bu do they, even securely tucked
comprehend a unity?
than tears;
The words
or unity.
*
For the Spider Who Frequents Our Bath
First there is secure, scuttling
the waste-pipe, no
which lacks only a corner
But the end is enamelled
a white field for
which coloured globres of
*
An Arbitrary Leaf
Printed in natural colours, we find a way always
to deny the world; even its "aerial view" from
"the tower itself". A biro-cross marks the place
where our arcades and buttresses dissolve in air;
bu still it is a "carte-postale de luxe" bought as
reminder of an "extraordinary experience".
These occasions have a way of multiplying.
The treads uneven, between steps with "five-hundred years of wear";
and darkened to an height of - wouldn't you say -
about the same number of feet. This would never be allowed
in England: such sudden and insouciant lack
of the next step. Give me your hand.
Shall we exorcise the colours that contrast us
with the evening walk? Any next walk must be this one,
now that we have given it the article, consciously
evoked in word and gesture: our shadowy design to
undermine the objects on our path.
So that this dead leaf, in lack of colour and
perfected shape is like fan-vaulting discerned
in the abbey - communication having been accepted -
But no finality in such a text can justify
a reference to Clément and his castle, Villandraut.
*
The Dying Gladiator
Di pensier in pensier
from impasse to impasse, from Christmas tree
to jelly-fish, stranded on the sandy bed
of the semiotic sea, his network in the dust;
his vehicle for macroscopic structures,
dismembered by bicycle handlebars
as we crossed King's Parade
From valley to valley;
his eyes upon his native hills, every
marked path hostile to the tranquil life
where mist folds knot in nodes
of light, in the multivalence
of an implicated calculus
but torn out of our hands
by his estranged fish-spear
from mouth to ashtray
from thread to needle,
from
leaning on an elbow,
he dies
*
*
Address to the Reader, from Pevensey Sluice
If it were quicksand you could sink;
something needing a light touch
soon and so simply takes its revenge.
Slightly west of Goodwin Sands
the land hardens again with history,
resists the symbol.
Chalk requires an allegorical hand,
or employee of Sussex Water Board
who sets a notice here:
DANGER SUBMERGED STRUCTURES
and all at once Transformational Grammar
"people" the "emotional landscape"
with refutation.
You may head its melancholy
long withdrawing roar
even on Dover beach watching
the undertow of all those trips
across to France.
Follow the reader and his writer,
those emblematic persons
along their mythic route
charting its uncertain curves and camber;
for to be true to any other you must -
and I shall never know - recover
a popular manœuvre known mostly as,
turn over
and go to sleep.
*
On the Periphery
Ducks flee into the undergrowth
like eponymous heroes as we approach
the past, walking slowly on a path
beside a water-way or something.
These stories are committed to memory
and writing only when they have reached
a high degree of sophistication (we
have reached). Sanctioned and solacing
polythene buttercups strew our way
with images of "natural"
regeneration, inevitable.
Somewhere the table's set far from the traffic
jam, thus she spoke, turning, mov'd
the third heaven, that popular memory.
So many images now set revolving &
oh, that reminds me (poetry fuctions
as tribal mnemonic) who are we
having for dinner tomorrow.
*
The Aquarium
Many pills, Matilda, does that make tonight?
But you must tell if you take the yellows.
The eyeball, listless under its tiny lid, moves
so slowly that downstairs in the cloakroom
were four rubber boots all left feet (this is a
Pedestrian Controlled Crossing but read as you
may you will find no mention of fish) covered even
ly with blood (groping in mud for a sound) whoever
however (and a collision is highly likely to occur)
controls the eyeball ignores this collision and takes
many yellows without telling any; hangs over books
brooding on mud. I, therefore, have nothing to add
to the scene transcribed above and the word that is
murder will fit very well. Over the boots but under
the eyeball are raincoats and hats and quotation
marks all wet through (or with name if you wish
to make plain the pills that we take for our)
into the garden it passes suffused now with pain
like an evening in spring the garland so fresh
and the roses so sweet she gave with intent to perceive.
Freckled by a glance the glass flickering advanc
es away into greenery untouched by the sun. Moreover
the grass also is green, so slowly the eyeball
did turn bloodshot in its emptying socket.
*
On Reading Mr. Melville's Tales
When sunlight wounds me I think of thousands
it has killed on crowded beaches stripped like
knives whetted for sacrificial your hand is on my arm
your lips are on my cheek your eyes are on my eyes
whence water drips theories since Plato strolled
along those shores we have not seen such de
constructed presences of speech and sense so run
the traces through our history like scarlet woven in
a sailor's rope to say it is the King's (is any simile
more inappropriate) generally disseminated like take
O take your hands off me in the civilisation of the West
who ruled the evil and the good (some say that Claggart
is the devil) Shall I be cold and dead my love shall
I unweave the thread but we have superseded such banal
dichotomies as these or shall I join the rest in
holding off the meaning from the form lines present in inter
textual strands I should not like to hang despite Platon
Like Billy Budd my heart would stop; it has stopped;
the differment remains, remains and
*
Approaching the Library
You never would have believed it could be so easy;
it played into one's hands, the unpremeditate paysage,
as Stevens said, crossing the fen, suddenly confronted
with such expanse of unpretentious waters as visit
our dreams. Elle resta, comme le dit Flaubert,
melancholique devant son rêve accompli.
Poetic diction performed for me two outstanding services:
in confirming that the subject I proposed treating
was a worthy one; and in feeding and clothing me
after I had, in a moment of abstraction, fallen
into Holme Fen Engine Ditch;
It partakes of the clay's history of human blood
and strife, like Devil's Dyke, our excursion to which
is hereby premeditated. Thus we are rescued from
the abstract ditch we dig with our fundamental
disagreement about the proper form for a picnic.
It is disturbing to find oneself on a level
with the river, smooth-flowing with pronouns
where we grub, like ducks, for whatever they eat,
in unexpected pools. A drastic diminution
of pronouns in the early weeks of marriage
(lack of third persons, not to mention more banal examples)
leads to this retracted meadow in which comparisons
must be deployed, the meadow she crosses now,
noting its blossoming synecdoches, on her way
to the library, carrying her Heffers Cantab Students
Notebook, ref. 140, punched for filing.
*
Leaving the Library
These daffodils are piston-rods which turn
faster and faster carrying (me). Insomnia
results from coffee and stimulating
company. Toilet rolls oscillate wildly
in all the cubicles as the train gathers
speed, etc. And so much for that image.
Exhuberant pronouns flourish like baroque
cherubs in the spring air beckoning.
It would be possible to contact the
"actual world" if they flourished more
like the threatening anonymity of real
children, stumbled over in a street.
But this grace is denied (me).
Shoulder your skis or your umbrella and
glide with the pronouns over the bridge
past daffodils thumping like your
insomniac's heart, your shopping bag
is filled with the week's supply of
toilet rolls, which is a kind of integr-
ation between the image and reality.
*
Facsimile of a Waste Land
And if Another knows I have a little nut-tree cultivated indoors
I know that in this climate nothing will it bear
despite much watering with sighs and tears.
I know little of horticulture but a silver anguish
supplemented by sundry domestic details not Christmas tinselled
and a golden fear of succumbing to the violet typing-ribbon,
Who only know that in return for the kiss you gave to me,
not here, O, Adeimantus, but in another world,
there is no more noise now I hand you the fruit of
More than a year struggling with the violet and the orange peel
which is so alien to my little nut-tree embedded
in the present context of its final version.
*
Pastoral
They are our creatures, clover, and they love us
Through the long summer meadows' diesel fumes.
Smooth as their scent and contours clear however
Less than enough to compensate for names.
Jagged are names and not our creatures
Either in kind or movement like the flowers.
Raised voices in a car or by a river
Remind us of the world that is not ours.
Silence in grass and solace in blank verdure
Summon the frightful glare of nouns and nerves.
The gentle foal linguistically wounded
Squeals like a car's brakes
Like our twisted words.
*
Not Pastoral Enough, homage to William Empson
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,
Landing every poem like a fish.
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.
Glittering scales require the deadly tolls
Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish.
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.
Yet languages are apt to miss on souls
If reason only guts them. Applying the wish,
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.
Ignores the fact that poems have two poles
That must be opposite. Hard then to finish
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.
Without a sense of lining up for doles
From other kitchens that give us the garnish:
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.
And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals
To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish.
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.
"Unhuman forms must not assert their roles".
*
Le Signe (Cygne)
Godard, the anthropological swan
floats on the Cam when day is done.
Levi-Strauss stands on a bridge and calls:
Birds love freedom; they build themselves homes;
They often engage in human relations.
Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here. The halls
of Clare and Trinity, John's and Queens'
echo the sound with scraping of chairs
and cramming of maws. A red-gowned don
floats by the swan. We must try to explain
to the posturing dancers that this is an image
of human existence; this is the barre-work
of verbal behaviour; this knife in the corpse
that they shove through a window to float
down the Cam when day is done
is Godard, the anthropological swan.
*
Conversation on a Benin Head
You must come to terms with T.S. Eliot
If you are doing the twentieth-century.
At Girton my gloves and my heart under
My gloves. Words as they chanceably fall
From the mouth change colour whatever
The source, pages or brain or midway
Between window and chair. These colours,
Brown wood air grey ink black, we didn't
Create them. We don't believe they are there
Whatever they are or this is a dagger.
We know it's a dagger or nothing whatever:
A scream, a sentence, a phantom, a reading
Of Laing. Believe that my neck is supported
By circuits of communication, gold rings,
I know that and hundred in number, remember
Believe that my throat will collapse; flat
Nose and fat lips disintegrate quickly under
Your touch. Listen. I know it's a dagger.
Whatever it was I didn't do it.
A man must do something. If one
Thinks of other however the chances
Of seeming to cover a single event,
Not in the mind of the doer, the point
Of departure is hard to recover. It all
Goes to clothes and the moves
Of the wearer infinite in number
Between window and bed and he
Turned as he said it all goes to show
You have never been whether
Reluctant to swallow the trace of another
Or touch at your own. We'll collect
Them tomorrow. Such momentums over
The gathering quick of your pink
Little finger furrowing under the bone
Of my skull. Own this armour at least,
This stylistic skeleton caught in the last arabesque
but one.
*
In Memoriam Ezra Pound, obit first November nineteen seventy two
Transpontine Ovid made his ovoid obsequies
unto the only emperor, the emperor of ice-cream.
In his elegies Teddy Bear is having picnics.
Can you find four ice-cream cornets hidden
in this elegiac picture? I pasture the pastel
colours of the heart, a part from and partial sense
of lethal elegies hidden in the provinces
of desolation and ice-cream, "the lost land
of Childhood", and the defeat past. Eyes
of a sleeper waked from fantasies (and this
is something more than fantasy) stance of a suicide
above the precipice of emptiness knowing that it must fill:
the fingers find the eyes and type. Take down the book.
Sometimes I think that this is the only thing, the
only stance, first slurp of ice-cream down the throat,
what Krishna meant as when he admonished Arjuna
on the field of battle. Pluck the petal
in the orchard where the factions act on emblematic
colours, red and white; leap with Nijinsky always
poised for entrance in Le Spectre de la rose. This
spectred isle, defying death with gesture. Awhile
to porpoise pause and smile and leap into the past.
He is not here he has outsoared the shadow
of our right. 'Tis life is dead not he. And
ghastly through the drivelling ghosts on the bald
street breaks the blank day of critical interpretation
staining the white radiance of eternity, every
little pimple had a tear in it, a fear of many
coloured glass, the noise of life strains the white
radiance of an elegy. How does the stress fall
on an autumn day. Remember remember the first
of November where history is here and nowhere:
the room in Poi
the:
the mentioning - run
ubiquitous, Victorian, similar
chism.
Shall topoi, conventional
- momentarily -
elaboration?
Had they conceits?
*
In Defence of Graham Hough: Style and Stylistics
Study Linguistics
to texture received: readerunity literary
Literary General
to impression: strivings, as -the language
kind technical
imagery
Different is a close: the
"of we literary"
*
The Transcendental Aesthetic
cannot of
- of time subjective -
against the
- the thatlimited?
*
To R.Z. and M.W.
the figure of
our own friends in
the darkness of
our familiar city
walking with
their arms around
each other
"perhaps"
how is this
relationship "going":
between
two friends &
the figure:
the familiar city of
each other
walking.
*
On Naming of Shadows
Thus the morning's shadow of
a pigeon's wing
became pretext for each darkness
in the day,
for the naming of wings &
moths and move-
ment of leaves, justified each
by its shade.
I have actually just two
elements, platinum &
chromium, also some uninterpreted
spectra, a box
of them, lying around, more
than I can
fit into a formulated crystal
the colour of
leaves (green) pigeons (multi) moths
etc. It is
a jump of several orders of magni-
tude from shade
to this: a ray of light
entering a
tourmaline, split up in
two ways
one, the ordinary, perpendicular
the other,
extraordinary, parallel, vibrates
to the prin-
cipal axis of a bifurcated
obsession.
Its general appearance (the stone)
colourless &
clear, or black & opaque; but
(the jump)
also various shades of brown
red, yellow
green, blue, banded hues where
we deal
not with absorption, but emission, for there
is visible, light.
*
Selection Restrictions on Peanuts for Dinner
Tenacity was sticking to the topic
of blankets
and walnuts, French: noix
noisette: a hazel nut.
One word can include two unities;
the difficulty
is to recognise when this is the case:
a little nut; or take
blankets: the weave of two senses
under them
makes nothing of six-term dinner
table textures
bu do they, even securely tucked
at the corners,
comprehend a unity?
Sweat is not more impure
than tears;
and indeed it is often followed by them.
The words
were too hot for blankets
or unity.
An acorn developed into every oak.
*
For the Spider Who Frequents Our Bath
First there is secure, scuttling
in the rustic darkness (
the waste-pipe, no
Freusdian repository)
which lacks only a corner
to hang a web on.
But the end is enamelled
allegory; its dazzle (
a white field for
Chaucerian spring)
which coloured globres of
Bubble-Bath do not evade.
*
An Arbitrary Leaf
Printed in natural colours, we find a way always
to deny the world; even its "aerial view" from
"the tower itself". A biro-cross marks the place
where our arcades and buttresses dissolve in air;
bu still it is a "carte-postale de luxe" bought as
reminder of an "extraordinary experience".
These occasions have a way of multiplying.
The treads uneven, between steps with "five-hundred years of wear";
and darkened to an height of - wouldn't you say -
about the same number of feet. This would never be allowed
in England: such sudden and insouciant lack
of the next step. Give me your hand.
Shall we exorcise the colours that contrast us
with the evening walk? Any next walk must be this one,
now that we have given it the article, consciously
evoked in word and gesture: our shadowy design to
undermine the objects on our path.
So that this dead leaf, in lack of colour and
perfected shape is like fan-vaulting discerned
in the abbey - communication having been accepted -
But no finality in such a text can justify
a reference to Clément and his castle, Villandraut.
*
The Dying Gladiator
Di pensier in pensier
from impasse to impasse, from Christmas tree
to jelly-fish, stranded on the sandy bed
of the semiotic sea, his network in the dust;
his vehicle for macroscopic structures,
dismembered by bicycle handlebars
as we crossed King's Parade
Did someone speak to me?
From valley to valley;
his eyes upon his native hills, every
marked path hostile to the tranquil life
Of reassurance in physical properties
like chrysanthemums in a yellow jug
where mist folds knot in nodes
of light, in the multivalence
of an implicated calculus
but torn out of our hands
by his estranged fish-spear
Like the date on the calendar or
a chair for someone I love to sit
reading, or a new salad-bowl
from mouth to ashtray
from thread to needle,
from
A point of light that reaches through
water to the sea-bed where
like carnivorous anemones
we open
leaning on an elbow,
he dies
and close.
*
Le vin est objectivement bon mais la bonté du vin
est un mythe. The veins are obviously bloodless
but the blood in the veins is mine. A vision
of ordinary beauty resembles the v in the mind.
The v is obvious in but. It makes beauty
in verbs a myth. Vacillations of opening blood
burst the beauty of v that is mine. V
in an ordinary bottle is the breakdown of verbs
in the mind. Violent and opening beauty, the bursting
of verbs is a myth. Violence objective and but
is this beauty of veins in the mind.
"If you smash that glass, my dear, you know
you'll simply have to sweep it up again aftrwards.
And anyway it's a waste of good wine!"
*
Address to the Reader, from Pevensey Sluice
If it were quicksand you could sink;
something needing a light touch
soon and so simply takes its revenge.
Slightly west of Goodwin Sands
the land hardens again with history,
resists the symbol.
Chalk requires an allegorical hand,
or employee of Sussex Water Board
who sets a notice here:
DANGER SUBMERGED STRUCTURES
and all at once Transformational Grammar
"people" the "emotional landscape"
with refutation.
You may head its melancholy
long withdrawing roar
even on Dover beach watching
the undertow of all those trips
across to France.
Follow the reader and his writer,
those emblematic persons
along their mythic route
charting its uncertain curves and camber;
for to be true to any other you must -
and I shall never know - recover
a popular manœuvre known mostly as,
turn over
and go to sleep.
*
On the Periphery
Ducks flee into the undergrowth
like eponymous heroes as we approach
the past, walking slowly on a path
beside a water-way or something.
These stories are committed to memory
and writing only when they have reached
a high degree of sophistication (we
have reached). Sanctioned and solacing
polythene buttercups strew our way
with images of "natural"
regeneration, inevitable.
Somewhere the table's set far from the traffic
jam, thus she spoke, turning, mov'd
the third heaven, that popular memory.
So many images now set revolving &
oh, that reminds me (poetry fuctions
as tribal mnemonic) who are we
having for dinner tomorrow.
*
The Aquarium
Many pills, Matilda, does that make tonight?
But you must tell if you take the yellows.
The eyeball, listless under its tiny lid, moves
so slowly that downstairs in the cloakroom
were four rubber boots all left feet (this is a
Pedestrian Controlled Crossing but read as you
may you will find no mention of fish) covered even
ly with blood (groping in mud for a sound) whoever
however (and a collision is highly likely to occur)
controls the eyeball ignores this collision and takes
many yellows without telling any; hangs over books
brooding on mud. I, therefore, have nothing to add
to the scene transcribed above and the word that is
murder will fit very well. Over the boots but under
the eyeball are raincoats and hats and quotation
marks all wet through (or with name if you wish
to make plain the pills that we take for our)
into the garden it passes suffused now with pain
like an evening in spring the garland so fresh
and the roses so sweet she gave with intent to perceive.
Freckled by a glance the glass flickering advanc
es away into greenery untouched by the sun. Moreover
the grass also is green, so slowly the eyeball
did turn bloodshot in its emptying socket.
*
On Reading Mr. Melville's Tales
When sunlight wounds me I think of thousands
it has killed on crowded beaches stripped like
knives whetted for sacrificial your hand is on my arm
your lips are on my cheek your eyes are on my eyes
whence water drips theories since Plato strolled
along those shores we have not seen such de
constructed presences of speech and sense so run
the traces through our history like scarlet woven in
a sailor's rope to say it is the King's (is any simile
more inappropriate) generally disseminated like take
O take your hands off me in the civilisation of the West
who ruled the evil and the good (some say that Claggart
is the devil) Shall I be cold and dead my love shall
I unweave the thread but we have superseded such banal
dichotomies as these or shall I join the rest in
holding off the meaning from the form lines present in inter
textual strands I should not like to hang despite Platon
Like Billy Budd my heart would stop; it has stopped;
the differment remains, remains and
*
Approaching the Library
You never would have believed it could be so easy;
it played into one's hands, the unpremeditate paysage,
as Stevens said, crossing the fen, suddenly confronted
with such expanse of unpretentious waters as visit
our dreams. Elle resta, comme le dit Flaubert,
melancholique devant son rêve accompli.
Poetic diction performed for me two outstanding services:
in confirming that the subject I proposed treating
was a worthy one; and in feeding and clothing me
after I had, in a moment of abstraction, fallen
into Holme Fen Engine Ditch;
It partakes of the clay's history of human blood
and strife, like Devil's Dyke, our excursion to which
is hereby premeditated. Thus we are rescued from
the abstract ditch we dig with our fundamental
disagreement about the proper form for a picnic.
It is disturbing to find oneself on a level
with the river, smooth-flowing with pronouns
where we grub, like ducks, for whatever they eat,
in unexpected pools. A drastic diminution
of pronouns in the early weeks of marriage
(lack of third persons, not to mention more banal examples)
leads to this retracted meadow in which comparisons
must be deployed, the meadow she crosses now,
noting its blossoming synecdoches, on her way
to the library, carrying her Heffers Cantab Students
Notebook, ref. 140, punched for filing.
*
Leaving the Library
These daffodils are piston-rods which turn
faster and faster carrying (me). Insomnia
results from coffee and stimulating
company. Toilet rolls oscillate wildly
in all the cubicles as the train gathers
speed, etc. And so much for that image.
Exhuberant pronouns flourish like baroque
cherubs in the spring air beckoning.
It would be possible to contact the
"actual world" if they flourished more
like the threatening anonymity of real
children, stumbled over in a street.
But this grace is denied (me).
Shoulder your skis or your umbrella and
glide with the pronouns over the bridge
past daffodils thumping like your
insomniac's heart, your shopping bag
is filled with the week's supply of
toilet rolls, which is a kind of integr-
ation between the image and reality.
*
Facsimile of a Waste Land
And if Another knows I have a little nut-tree cultivated indoors
I know that in this climate nothing will it bear
despite much watering with sighs and tears.
I know little of horticulture but a silver anguish
supplemented by sundry domestic details not Christmas tinselled
and a golden fear of succumbing to the violet typing-ribbon,
Who only know that in return for the kiss you gave to me,
not here, O, Adeimantus, but in another world,
there is no more noise now I hand you the fruit of
More than a year struggling with the violet and the orange peel
which is so alien to my little nut-tree embedded
in the present context of its final version.
*
Pastoral
They are our creatures, clover, and they love us
Through the long summer meadows' diesel fumes.
Smooth as their scent and contours clear however
Less than enough to compensate for names.
Jagged are names and not our creatures
Either in kind or movement like the flowers.
Raised voices in a car or by a river
Remind us of the world that is not ours.
Silence in grass and solace in blank verdure
Summon the frightful glare of nouns and nerves.
The gentle foal linguistically wounded
Squeals like a car's brakes
Like our twisted words.
*
Not Pastoral Enough, homage to William Empson
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls,
Landing every poem like a fish.
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.
Glittering scales require the deadly tolls
Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish.
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.
Yet languages are apt to miss on souls
If reason only guts them. Applying the wish,
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.
Ignores the fact that poems have two poles
That must be opposite. Hard then to finish
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.
Without a sense of lining up for doles
From other kitchens that give us the garnish:
Unhuman forms must not assert their roles.
And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals
To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish.
It is the sense, it is the sense, controls.
"Unhuman forms must not assert their roles".
*
Le Signe (Cygne)
Godard, the anthropological swan
floats on the Cam when day is done.
Levi-Strauss stands on a bridge and calls:
Birds love freedom; they build themselves homes;
They often engage in human relations.
Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here. The halls
of Clare and Trinity, John's and Queens'
echo the sound with scraping of chairs
and cramming of maws. A red-gowned don
floats by the swan. We must try to explain
to the posturing dancers that this is an image
of human existence; this is the barre-work
of verbal behaviour; this knife in the corpse
that they shove through a window to float
down the Cam when day is done
is Godard, the anthropological swan.
*
Conversation on a Benin Head
You must come to terms with T.S. Eliot
If you are doing the twentieth-century.
At Girton my gloves and my heart under
My gloves. Words as they chanceably fall
From the mouth change colour whatever
The source, pages or brain or midway
Between window and chair. These colours,
Brown wood air grey ink black, we didn't
Create them. We don't believe they are there
Whatever they are or this is a dagger.
We know it's a dagger or nothing whatever:
A scream, a sentence, a phantom, a reading
Of Laing. Believe that my neck is supported
By circuits of communication, gold rings,
I know that and hundred in number, remember
Believe that my throat will collapse; flat
Nose and fat lips disintegrate quickly under
Your touch. Listen. I know it's a dagger.
Whatever it was I didn't do it.
A man must do something. If one
Thinks of other however the chances
Of seeming to cover a single event,
Not in the mind of the doer, the point
Of departure is hard to recover. It all
Goes to clothes and the moves
Of the wearer infinite in number
Between window and bed and he
Turned as he said it all goes to show
You have never been whether
Reluctant to swallow the trace of another
Or touch at your own. We'll collect
Them tomorrow. Such momentums over
The gathering quick of your pink
Little finger furrowing under the bone
Of my skull. Own this armour at least,
This stylistic skeleton caught in the last arabesque
but one.
*
In Memoriam Ezra Pound, obit first November nineteen seventy two
Transpontine Ovid made his ovoid obsequies
unto the only emperor, the emperor of ice-cream.
In his elegies Teddy Bear is having picnics.
Can you find four ice-cream cornets hidden
in this elegiac picture? I pasture the pastel
colours of the heart, a part from and partial sense
of lethal elegies hidden in the provinces
of desolation and ice-cream, "the lost land
of Childhood", and the defeat past. Eyes
of a sleeper waked from fantasies (and this
is something more than fantasy) stance of a suicide
above the precipice of emptiness knowing that it must fill:
the fingers find the eyes and type. Take down the book.
Sometimes I think that this is the only thing, the
only stance, first slurp of ice-cream down the throat,
what Krishna meant as when he admonished Arjuna
on the field of battle. Pluck the petal
in the orchard where the factions act on emblematic
colours, red and white; leap with Nijinsky always
poised for entrance in Le Spectre de la rose. This
spectred isle, defying death with gesture. Awhile
to porpoise pause and smile and leap into the past.
He is not here he has outsoared the shadow
of our right. 'Tis life is dead not he. And
ghastly through the drivelling ghosts on the bald
street breaks the blank day of critical interpretation
staining the white radiance of eternity, every
little pimple had a tear in it, a fear of many
coloured glass, the noise of life strains the white
radiance of an elegy. How does the stress fall
on an autumn day. Remember remember the first
of November where history is here and nowhere:
the room in Poi
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