From the waxwing winter
In Central Southern England
Where the robins quarrel,
I cannot be content with divination.
Meekness, at least, we can be certain
Is necessary for the survival of a world
Natural in every way, even political.
(The sole community, other than a single parish
To offer any base for loyalty.)
And, to survey the wreckage
Of a willow patterned plate
Upon a gravelled beach, is to survey
Our ancestry and our locality,
And confirms our latency.
But anywhere would be sufficient.
The universal pride in place is not for me.
I do not travel with a determined mission
Willingly to see a dying rarity
Whether a bird or culture.
I should prefer my accidental home
To artificial rootedness
Inside an English Heaven.
An accident that was determined
By livelihood silently, sufficiently, arising
From an unpredicted skill;
Neither worse nor better, merely comfortable.
Who shares my own perceptions
Of my roots? We are all deep
But depth of persons and profundity
Are not the same, are disconnected.
Here I live, from here I stay or go.
The occupying memories
Billeted squarely after a great retreat
Promote dissatisfaction.
A shudder that recurs again;
I said something silly when I was four.
What have I done or been?
With no abiding friendships
Am I non-existent?
It can seem so, lacking the ready skill
To make the right remarks come
Defining axioms of difference.
The phrases and the images all vanish
Unlike the memories of embarrassment
Which all persist.
Time has transfigured them; I wish it would.
And would I welcome the encounters:
Those smirks of sacral certainty
Asserting absence of beatitude?
Acquaintances are not supporters of ambition,
And all the others, many of them,
Time condemned to dust.
So how will I manage to record
The ways in which to be and live
These random final days,
Final but indeterminate in number?
And even now fulfil an accurate intention,
Structured, coherent, systematic?
A thin prize to win, and barely verse.
Can I be taught to write the truth?
Does a pigeon aim high?
Call it a dove and it becomes a higher symbol
And of such is the kingdom.
My second chances have been taken;
Do they count, and validate my love?
A scientific empire, capable of refutation,
When refuted falls to civil war
Fought by ignorant armies.
Is there any other sort?
The liberal conscience disdains
The witness of conviction.
Words of the wise:
Life is not a rehearsal;
I suspect it is exactly that.
Life isn't fair, that's true,
But whose demanding duty
Is to implement injustice?
Perhaps it's best to be provincial
And battle alcohol and anger in isolation,
Judged only by our tolerance of fools,
Fools that still reject the sunlit truth.
Who could hold the world together
With absolute unquestioned rule?
They say that some have tried;
That empires were the best division
Of the only worthy sphere.
So wish ones foes, sincerely,
Action, and a wild epiphany
With differential fortitude,
So that, their minds, or brains, enabled,
They can with redoubled energy
Assert their new and shining certainty.
And in the last, when every faith
Is weakened by the undermining
And suction of an ebbing tide,
What can be said and done
To pacify commitment
That will not listen, will not read?
Noah's raven did not want for carrion.
This is the trickiest one.
Pleasant as the parish ought to be,
This is the hardest discipline.
Where we should all find enjoyment?
Am I fulfilling others fantasies?
A short way to depression.
Am I just a fallen sparrow
At home in hedge or house or tree?
Well that's clear: banality not jollity.
Who am I trying to change with rustic cheeriness,
With heart and outlook, and a trace of conversation?
Against the divisions of extreme acidity.
Unshared enthusiasms are, we know,
For the unreflective, far beneath contempt.
But let me try to build myself a place
Since to avoid the fatuous descent
To flippancy requires numeric prudence
Which gives such scope for taste.
In brief, this is all beyond my craft
And to persist would just reverse
My topic of enjoyment.
Much as I might envy the quiet elder
Perched in the bar corner
Absorbing, if not hearing, mirth
Within a tavern that surveys
The mingled measure
In tin or oak or crystal,
I shall remain, alone, apart, and small.
If I am slow to find the words
And soon forget each phrase
Leaving it all behind,
I'm left with paradox and puzzle:
Language is all we have
But language is not everything.
Another scrap of doubtful wisdom,
Announced by the world: it is good to talk.
Perhaps, I might prefer the silent city.
Dull implications do not make a narrative
And this is not a story. It is written;
Inscribed in sand or mercury.
Estuarine, the ring necked parakeets
Flock through familiar royal parks
Placing, imperfectly, apostrophes.
They must be English, prouder of their history
Than of their language - resounding brass:
It is the blowing of the horn.
And as my, very minor, ailments multiply
They do not contribute to righteousness
Or help to value stasis.
Stability is good, but certainty
Is the sure path away from truth
(Like turning over several pages unaware.)
My speech is almost catching in my throat.
Nothing that only others love has value.
Is this the case? Well, permit me just
A last and rather mild enthusiasm.
I am not a kindly soul.
The world grows old with me
And grief brings inadvertent memories.
But I can feel the effort in my brow
To judge professions of conspiracy
That form my sense of difference.
What is it that they know
The doctors, in their secret guilds?
But the relief of pain is very welcome.
Patently these multiple alleviations,
Prescriptive cures and remedies
Add nothing more to sense or virtue,
And nothing to reverse or even stop
My own collapse of competence.
Where is the best advice?
And as for law and politics, tiresome,
They hate each other, but they hate us more
And place us at the end of every queue.
Life is getting faster, and real people fewer.
The comforts are dissolving in the skies.
A leaden city state is all we have.
The talons of a falcon rip our feathers off
As those before were taken,
We lose our comfort and our rest.
We die, as others died, and will,
What may be good and right about our going,
We, unsuspected, have no need for fame.
I have a need for Lethe.
The strict kingdom of the persecutor
Justifies its inventions
By primogeniture.
But kindlier monarchies persist
At least in the magical imaginations
Of mindful eccentricity.
We are allowed to rule ourselves
As long as rule is circumscribed
By unrevealed conventions of the good.
What are these good things?
Can they reconcile each other:
The nation, market, and the individual,
And the unfamiliar elementary spirit?
Is there any magic but a form of hope
That needs, but fails to find a truth?
We seem to want a fantasy,
A fiction and a daydream,
Far from the chess board,
To take us from precision
Using the rosy cheeks of wine
In which was truth.
The contemplative owl hoots,
Hoots with wisdom and derision,
At our intense delusions of a choice.
The fancy cannot cheat so well,
But cheat it does and usefully.
So we construct our lies
To comfort us with myth and fairy tale.
Stories that sell, and images that tell
Of nonexistent crowns away from care.
I would rather know the truth.
Patterns exist, in full complexity
Exceptions exist, objects of interest,
The Trepidation of the Spheres.
Yet there is mystery:
Of existence, personhood, and good;
Though certainty leads nowhere.
Yes, we are all justified
By one beatitude at least;
And who can say which one it is?
Look beyond good;
If there is good,
Beyond it there is more.
Look beyond evil;
If there is evil,
Beyond it there is nothing.
My beliefs please no-one,
And my precepts are above me:
Quit shoving; grow up; dream well.
None of these can I achieve.
Even the task, to find expression of them
With concentrated skill, defeats my aura.
I shove and push;
I still remain a foolish child;
And all my better dreams disintegrate.
The Holocene Extinction looms
To take me with it. One question:
Is there a swift eternity beyond it?
And that concludes the eightsome reel.