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MARIGOLD PENDULUM, by                    
First Line: Dear, with this tawny marigold
Last Line: The better to see your face.
Subject(s): Love


I

Dear, with this tawny marigold
I send you Ophir,

I send you Spain,
high galleons from Peru
wallowing slow in parrot green water,

I send you the gold house of Nero on the Aventine,
the throne of Babur, the bed of Semiramis,

I send you the dromedaries of Zenobia,
the beryl jaguars of Domitian,
the yellow desert beyond Baalbek,
fresh minted drachmae of Heliopolis,
rugs of Sultanabad, amber and green.

Love, look with favor on the gift
and the rest of my wealth shall be yours
by the next caravan.

II

Will no one deliver me from the haunted moon?
When I lie abed thinking chaste thoughts
she crosses the floor, slips under the sheet,
and cuddles her icy flank against mine.
If I move to another room she is there before me.
If I flee to the other side of the house
she looks at me from a neighbour's window,
or stands on a rain barrel to wink at me.
Now I am always listening for her step.
On dark nights I fancy her hiding in the garret.
In the cellar I look to find her flushed and tipsy,
sitting cross-legged on a claret cask.
She is faithful as an unloved wife.

Once when her scattered hair lay on my pillow
I threatened to kill her. In derision
she drew a cloud over her breasts
and hid in the water jug on my washstand.
My thirsty knife severed only a long tress.
For a week now I have not seen her.
One of these summer nights I must find the way
to slip a knotted cord under her ears.

III

All night the wind ran round the house
hugging his sides with laughter.
Thunder tramped clumsily to and fro in the garret
dragging trunks and old bookcases over the ceiling.
The women folk pattered up stairs and down,
closing draughty doors, seeking each other's beds
to mix their long undone hair
and gibber like bats in cavernous twilight
when lightning thrust a yellow paw
in at the window.
I alone was glad of the tumult,
glad of the storm that kept me awake
to put my arm around the lightning's neck,
and clasping the tawny leopard against me,
to hear once more overhead,
through the hiss and crackle of rain
on the smouldering world,
the apple tree's gnarled hands
caressing the weathered shingles
on a night when I held
in the circle of two arms
all the sun's hoarded gold.

IV

Who tethered that white balloon
to the hilltop grainfield?
How it bellies and tugs,
whipping the guy ropes,
bending the oak tree pegs,
swelling rounded and higher,
crowding the very swallows out of heaven.

Knee deep in the hayrick
the sun at rest on his pitchfork,
in overalls stitched from a double breadth
of blue sky denim,
watches the glistening bag of silk
that fills and fills
with mounting vapour of ripe meadows.

Oh, love, to climb with you
into the wicker basket of the wheatfield.
Oh, to loose the straining ropes of twisted sunlight
that tie the white cloud to the hillcrest,
and rise and sail
dazzlingly over houses and steeples,
to see red barns and zigzag fences,
pastures shouldering green elm parasols,
rumbling carts that yellow dust clouds lope behind,
dangling thirsty tongues,
chugging engines that pant
sweating up long hills in nodding bonnets
of curled ostrich or aigrette,
snaky rivers striped with bridges
writhing across the haze of level plains
till the sea sets an icy green heel
on their envenomed heads,
while swarming houses run to crowd the wharves
and dabble their toes in the surf,
where the sailing ships
clap shining hands on the horizon
and steamers toss dark windy hair.

Then at evening to rise yet higher,
rung after rung up the laddered atmosphere,
through emptiness like a hollow dish
to the highest shelf of thunder,
and there above cockcrow, above cannon,
peeping over the world's tanned shoulder
down the pale abyss where the sun stables at night
to brighten his rusting harness,
and the stars polish their silver cups by day,
to loose a pigeon of lightning
from a hamper of storm.

V

On the barn's peak the moon sits washing her whiskers.
Now she blinks a green eye, slowly arches her back,
and walking along the gable on satin pads
glares at me hungrily.
All day she looked so demure.
When I lay on my back in the deep grass,
watching her prowl the sky eaves, and leap
over fences of blue
I never guessed she could show so thirsty a tooth.
To-night I am afraid of her.
I wish she had not seen me here at the window
observing her antics.
She is not nearly so attractive as by day,
sly creature, rusted with mange,
and one ear gone, I see, in the fight she had
with the orange leopard that owns the morning.

VI

Thunder hops on the garret roof,
rain scampers over the shingles,
old father God with a flash of his testy eye
slams the gold window of Paradise,
pulls a torn shade across eternal splendour.
On these rotted silks
where the moths' scissors slashed and snipped,
the years have wiped their yellow brushes.
Fold them away, dear, with the wasp-waisted spoons
in their flannel dressing gowns.
Let us wonder no more to whom they belonged.
It is enough to remember they will still be here
when we and our love are dust.
But let us sit with an open book on our knees
turning pages the pedantic worms have annotated
with crabbed wisdom and obscure geometry,
where mildew inscribes with a blue pencil
poems in forgotten alphabets,
and when the storm pauses
to shake the dank hair from his eyes
and resin the bow of his cracked fiddle,
we shall hear through the green humming of rain
as it lays a cold cheek on the cobwebbed glass,
all those curious noises that the dust makes
gently settling
on the cracked furniture of discarded lives.

VII

Summer's gold pendulum slowlier swinging
gleams through the fog-dimmed glass
of the year's tall clock.
Come with me, love, wrap your bright shoulders
warm in the swallow's cloak, and fly with me
over the brown stubble of reaped fields,
to rest side by side on a telephone wire
watching the loaded hay carts crawl important
like fat caterpillars down a leafblade of road,
or at evening to bend against the silver trance
of still pools where the sunset holds
long and long
the print of our wing tips,
till we find a lost blue key
that winds the intricate spring
behind a red pumpkin moon
and a nipped marigold sun.

VIII

They are all yours:
images plucked with the wild Turk's-cap lily
in deep reedy meadows guarded
by the darting regiment
of dragonflies in burnished cuirass.

Yours the songs I make
when weary with searching
I come with the tang of salt winds on my lips
and the beating of moth wings in my blood,
to hold my joy in the blue leaping world
and the tall dancing sun with yellow hair
against the wheel of my mind,
as the Greek cutter wrought
in the hard translucence
of sard or of jasper
the body of Eros.

Yours because all loveliness
is a polished shield in whose hollow
I see your eyes.

And my poems are a fire
lighted on the brink of night and death
where I hurl like driftwood
moon, stars, and sun,
kingdoms, galleons, caravans,
with hell and god and the four archangels,
the better to see your face.





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