loving desperately

VI

Between bay window and hedge the impenetrable holly
strikes up again taut wintry vibrations,
The hellebore is there still,
half-buried; the crocuses are surviving.
From the front room I might be able to see
the coal fire's image planted in a circle
of cut-back rose bushes. Nothing is changed
by the strength of this reflection.

IX

On chance occasions--
and others have observed this--you can see the wind,
as it moves, barely a separate thing,
the inner wall, the cell, of an hourglass, humming
vortices, bright particles in dissolution,
a roiling plug of sand picked up
as a small dancing funnel. It is how
the purest apprehension might appear
to take corporeal shape.

XIII

Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received:
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks:
tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and Pontic sludge:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringing a capella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?

XVII

If the gospel is heard, all else follows:
the scattering, the diaspora,
the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye.
Penitence can be spoken of, it is said
but is itself beyond words;
even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews
of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors,
keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years,
doubly outcast: even so I would remember--
the scattering, the diaspora.
We do not know the saints.
His mercy is greater even than his wisdom.
If the gospel is heard, all else follows.
We shall rise again, clutching our wounds.

XXVIII

As I have at times imagined: Melancholy,
the more inert we are, thrusts us
into the ways of things violently
uprooted. And there, for her own
increase, grants us a little possession,
that we may then lose all. Boerenverdriet--
peasant sorrow? peasant affliction?--you cannot
cease feeling their uncouth terror, whose flesh
is our own. The slaughterers relish their work
of sport: landsknechts as Callot depicts them,
hideously-festive-death's foragers;
so he draws them among us,
slouch-feathered, shin-booted, jangle
of slove-worn iron: ruyter, ritterkind,
rutterkin, over the low shrub hill--hoyda!
hoyda!--heel-kicking their nags.

XXXVIII

Widely established yet with particular
local intensities, the snow
half-thawed now hardens over again,
glassen-ridged, or pashed
like fish-ice: refracted light
red against copper. The hedged sun
draws into itself for its self-quenching.
If one is so minded, these modalities
stoop to re-enter the subterrane of faith--
faith, that is, in real Being;
the real being God or, more comprehensively, Christ--
as a sanctuary lamp treadles its low flame
or as the long-exiled Salve Regina was sung
in the crypt at Lastingham on the threshold
of a millennium.

LXXVIII

You say how you are struck by the unnatural
brightness of marigolds; and is this music,
or what. Are clowns depressives? The open
secret is to act well. Can the now silent
witnesses be questioned? What hope remains
to get him out alive? I'm sorry, her.
Tomorrow he died, became war-dead, picked
off the sky's face. Fifty years back, the dead
will hear and be broken. Get off the line.
Who are you to say I sound funny.

from CIX

No matter that the grace is so belated;
no matter who staked out and reaps
the patent-commodity; no matter how
grace is confused, repeatedly, with chill
euphoria. Ad te suspiramus,
gementes, flentes: Which, being interpreted,
commits and commends us to loving
desperately, yet not with despair, not
even in desperation.

CXXI

So what is faith if it is not
inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns
are breast-high, head-high, the days
lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.
Light is this instant, far-seeing
into itself, its own
signature on things that recognize
salvation. I
am an old man, a child, the horizon
is Traherne's country.

CXXXIV

Machado who, to say the least, is your
grand equal, sat out his solitude, habitué
of small, shaky, wicker or zinc tables--
still-life with bottle, glass, scrawled school-cahiers--
put his own voice to slow-drawn induration.
I admire you and have trained my ear
to your muted discords. This rage twists
me, for no reason other than the site
of anarchy coming to irregular order
with laurels; now with wreaths: Duomo drone-
bell, parade-mask shout, beautifully-caught
scatter of pigeons in brusque upward tumble,
wingbeat held by a blink.

CXLVIII

Obnoxious means, far back within itself,
easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud
anger is, I find, a related self
of covetousness. I came late
to seeing that. Actually, I had to be
shown it. What I saw was rough, and still
pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more.
Pride is our crux: to be angry, but not proud
where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi's
words or--to be accurate--BV's English
cast of them: when he found Tasso's poor
scratch of a memorial barely showing
among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It
seemed a sad and angry consolation.
So--Croker, MacSikker, O'Shem--I ask you:
what are poems for? They are to console us
with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.
Let us commit that to our dust. What
ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad
and angry consolation. What is
the poem? What figures? Say,
a sad and angry consolation. That's
beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry
consolation.

Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love