Michael Schmidt: Selected Poems E-Book

Michael Schmidt

• Herausgeber: The Poetry Business
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 158

Beschreibung

The Selected Poem ebooks are a new 'digitalonly' series drawn from the works of smith|doorstop poets published during the last 26 years. Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University and a Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received an O.B.E. in 2006 for services to poetry.

Leseprobe

This ebook original Selected Poemspublished 2014 bysmith|doorstop BooksThe Poetry BusinessBank Street Arts32-40 Bank StreetSheffield S1 2DS

www.poetrybusiness.co.ukCopyright © Michael SchmidtISBN 978-1-910367-14-8

Michael Schmidt hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design and ebook generation by alancoopercreative.co.uk

smith|doorstop Books is a member of Inpress,www.inpressbooks.co.uk. Distributed by Central Books Ltd., 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN.

The Poetry Business is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation

Contents

fromDesert of the Lions (1972)

Away

Scorpion

fromMy Brother Gloucester(1976)

Words

My Town

The English Lesson

The Sleigh

Natalya’s Dream

A Change of Affairs(1978)

A Dream for C. H. Sisson

The Brother

Absalom

A Carol

Sisera

‘Until I Built the Wall’

Choice

A Change of Affairs

Piano

Here and There

The Honeysuckle

Choosing a Guest: Selected Poems(1987)

Faith

The Road

The Pond

Adam

Habit

Choosing a Guest

The Love of Strangers

‘His father was a baker . . . for A.G.G.

Pangur Bàn

Iberian Clichés

Don Juan

Jacob and the Angel

The Resurrection of the Body

Furniture for a Ballad

Between

Not Yet

Third Persons

Wanting to Think

John Gilpin Eludes the Hunt

Victor Casasola, Photographer

Inordinate Desires

Agatha

In the Woodcutter’s Hut

Present Tense

The Stories of My Life

Death of the Novel

After Hours

Also, poor Yorick

The Stove

On the Morning of Christ’s Crucifixion

Family Tree

A Carol for Edward Taylor

fromDesert of the Lions (1972)

Away

He left the room abruptly

dreaming, on a horse.

Still in bed of course

he rode, rode to the sea.

Behind him, his life strung

mile-lengths of wire back

over sand to a shack

where a telephone rang

unanswered. At the sea-side

water made no sound.

Deaf conches strewed the sand.

Seabirds on still air rode

above giant turtles, thick

headed, like fists or a thought.

Silence caught:

the rider could not come back.

His wife grunted in sleep

her dream of housework done.

In its moon-cradle his sin

slept its tiny clenched sleep.

The sea, silent and plain,

lay like a field of weed.

He dismounted and did

what a man will do in pain.

He took off coat and shirt.

He took off skin and bone.

He spread them out on stone:

rose, hyacinth, and heart.

Scorpion

for John Schmidt

Under its stone, it pleats

and unpleats ebony, it digs

a bed which is a body-print

exactly, room for pincer, tail

and sting. If it elbows out, it leaves

cold accurate evidence of tenancy.

Bedded with it, less precise,

ambling grubs and sloe-worms

eat and burrow deep sometimes

as earthworms, never disturbing

that fast eel of their element –

its nerves flinch at a grain’s shift.

I follow you hunting with jar and trowel,

with gloves, this poison tail. Each time

you turn the right stone up--warm flat stones

which roof an airless square of dark

and hold all night the sun’s warmth

for the black king-pin of the poor soil.

The stone raised, the creature poises

tense and cocked. Tail curled, it edges

forward, edges backward -- its enemy

so big he is invisible (though a child)

hunched over it, who trembles too

at such a minute potency.

And you flick it with the trowel

into the jar, where it jerks and flings

its fire in all directions at hard

transparency. It asks no mercy.

You bear it to an anthill, tip it on the dust.

Like a cat it drops right side up,

into a red tide of pincers. It twitches its tail

to a nicety and twice stings itself –

to death. Piece by piece it is removed

underground by the ants -- a sort of burial –

perhaps to be reassembled as a kingly effigy

somewhere deeper than we care to think

bound homeward with our empty jar:

and the field, full of upturned stones.

from My Brother Gloucester(1976)

Words

(after Hofmannsthal)

Child, your eyes will darken soon with wonder --

and darken ignorantly till they’re blind.

We will pass by you as we were passed by.

The fruit is bitter. It will sweeten in the dark

and drop into your hands with broken wings.

Cherish it a day. But it will die.

The wind comes down to you from history.

It chilled us too. The phrases it repeats

are stale with pleasure, stale with punishment.

The paths lead from the garden to the world,

to places where light burns among the trees

that raise their wings but cannot hope to fly.

Who cast the root of everything so deep

that nothing flies away that we can name?

Why can we laugh and in a moment cry

and give a name to laughter and to tears?

What is the illness that our eyes grow dark?

-- We are men because we are alone

we touch and speak, but silence follows words

the way a shadow does, the hand draws back. -

The curtain blows and there is no one there.

What removed you to this solitude,

into this common light, this common twilight?

It is that word, twilight, that called you down --

a word the wind has handed on to us

undeciphered, and it might be love --

rich with a honey pressed from hollow combs.

My Town

It’s as though the whole town is on ice.

Skaters with a speed of birds

greet each other on reflected cloud

mid-stream, up-stream, past the crippled boats.

There is a horse and sledge.

A bonfire burns its censer shape into the cold.

Someone sells grilled fish

again today: it’s weeks the river froze,

and a man dared walk out

on the water. No one’s looked back

since, ice-fishermen

with saw and string, schools

of children, the slower

shopkeepers like large sedate fish.

The habitual town has ceased. It’s chosen

another better world, a world of days

prayed for, persistent beyond hope,

a flowering of impossibilities.

Buildings line the shore

derelict like plundered sea-chests

and the pirate is the ice.

I tie on my skates and find the air

moves me like a feather from the shore.

I leave town for the frozen falls.

I fly up-stream, I come home

and pass by for the sea, and turn again.

Sun sparks my blades, I send up

grit of ice like quick flame.

But today the air is warmer, our days

are numbered. The falls are dripping

and the sea barks and barks

into the brittle river mouth. It’s like

sailing at the end of a brief world, beyond

responsibility, and time is purposeless,

pure of daily history and bread.

To put on wings is an authentic dream, and yet

up on shore the dirtied nest of facts

is patient in the sun, tall and lowering

above the vistas of the heart, and even now

beneath the ice the other world continues

undisturbed, the weeds are spun by currents,

the small fish feed, are fed on,

the great round-eyed flounder old as water

subsist on certainties among stilled keels

and out to sea, by rough boulders and the light,

the wrecked laden hulls, the mariners . . .

If the inhabitants of that world look up

they perceive hairline cracks, and our veined

shadows pass against the light like baits

they will not take, but wait -- acolytes, whose business

is each candle and the dark.

The English Lesson

(after Pasternak)

When it was Desdemona’s turn to sing

and only minutes of her life remained,

she did not mourn her star, that she had loved:

she sang about a tree, a willow tree.

When it was Desdemona’s time to sing

her voice grew deeper, darker as she sang;

the darkest, coldest demon kept for her

a weeping song of streams through rough beds flowing.

And when it was Ophelia’s turn to sing

and only minutes of her life remained,

she was dry as light, as a twig of hay:

wind blew her from the loft into the storm.

And when it was Ophelia’s time to sing,

her dreams were waning, all but the dream of death.

Bitter and tired -- what tokens sank with her?

In her hair wild celandine, and willows in her arms.

Then letting fall the rags of human passion,

heart-first they plunged into the flowing dark,

fracturing their bodies like white tinder,

silencing their unbroken selves with stars.

The Sleigh

(after a theme of Turgenev)

The colours have gone out.

It is like death -- blind white

and the sun is white: we speed

the way we always wished --

a sleigh, the harness bells -- across the snow.

It’s not what we expected.

Afraid on the ice road

we ring to the empty farms

that we’ve come their way but not to stop.

Who set the burning pennies on our eyes?

Think -- if the runners struck a rut

and hurled us into temporary graves

face-down like heretics; or if the jingling

ceased and we flew silently

on into the open throat of night.

Speed and the snow

blend field and hedge and landmark

in one whiteness like a future.

Perhaps the thaw will turn it up like new --

and yet we cannot see that far today.

Under the arcane dunes

suppose the past is unreclaimable

too truly for March sun and its tired miracle.

What if a half-hearted wish for warmth

is all we bring ourselves, and bring no love

hot to melt the things it cannot love?

What if we trust all changes to the snow?

I think the snow will see us off:

we’re going to die

whirling, two flakes

of headlong colour

over the unmarked brink.

In a flash of white, as though we are to hang,

we shall relive our separate short lives.

-- We have not touched or taken

the feather weight of pain.

If it was war, then we were traitors there.

If it was famine, we ate on and on; and now

we’re turned to cowards in a day we owned,

returned as serfs to fields we ruled as czars,

we plough the snow where once

we led the hunt through hedge and stream-bed

up to the lodge and there were ladies there.

It is neglect and snow leave open graves

we ride from to worry at a world

we partly chose, and where

forgetfulness makes easy graves we go

across a brilliance like purity

to no known place.

The driver turns and points but we are blind.

I dread a destination and the thaw

that will set us down and leave us to ourselves

as we are now. We are

the dying penitent who feels too late

the cold breath of the beggar on his hand.

I wish I could look on

rather than be here a piece of blindness.

I would not call

to those who go together

and seem upon the snow as cold as snow,

but from a distant cottage I would watch

a tiny horse advance,

a faint pulsing of bells

drawing its burden, as a spider draws a fly

across its web of light into the dark.

Natalya’s Dream

(for N. E. Gorbanevskaya, detained in prison mental hospital)

Her heart peers out

between her breathing shoulder-blades

curious, fist-sized.

It gazes down the spine

as down a highway. From its high vantage

it observes unbroken snow,

the broken slumber, broken snow.

Under glacial contours of the skin

the lakes persist, dilate; the rivers

irrigate so deep cartographers ignore them.

Aya, Raya, her Estonian names

conjure their villages,

the farmers who received her

in their houses and their language:

how they are squinting,

blinded by their fields of snow,

how the one road leads

one way and loses them.

There, at the highway’s end,

Tartu, a pole of exile.

Here, between the shoulders,

the other pole of exile is the heart --

renewing the old journeys

with each syllable of pulse --

until it flickers like a candle, votive,

ignited to the guardian of exiles,

shadowed out by the twin blades of bone.

She wakes to the ward smell

and sound of other dreaming,

in a frayed prison smock, in the early light;

to her face reflected from the dusty pane

a face of Russia with no caption, with no

black border, no number and no name.

A Change of Affairs(1978)

A Dream for C. H. Sisson

I had a dream on good authority

That fastened on me like a stitch in skin:

Construct a boat, God said, along these lines

And spread the plan out on his cloudy knee.

So many cubits wide, and here the masts,

And make the hull as large as a hotel.

The animals, of course. Reptiles? and bugs?

Each animal, and two of those in love.

There will be forty nights without a star

And forty days go by without a sun

And when the clouds break there will be nowhere

Till oceans find another hemisphere.

That dream is some time past. The fields are full

Of grain, the mating creatures now give birth.

I come home evenings a puzzled man,

Hearing the infants cry, touching the solid earth.

I tell the dream and reason thus with Shem:

‘Dear boy,’ I say, ‘if we construct this thing

The flood may come and we will be the cause.

God does not act until his will is done.’

‘The earth will all be ours, though,’ says Shem:

‘Imagine, all the ground from here to night,

And God will fix his eye on us alone

And make our offspring rich, our furrows full.’

Japheth is lazy. When I worry him

He says, ‘Let’s have it built, then we can sleep

For forty days under the care of God

And settle later in a quiet grove.’

Ham is a craftsman, handy with a saw.

I hardly told the dream when he began

Pricing old planks and readying his tools.

He worries me, his eye on destiny.

Shem tallies, Japheth dreams, and Ham prepares.

Our neighbours have heard nothing though the wave

Hangs over them and I could make it break.

I don’t believe the dream was meant for me.

The Brother

Why is his sacrifice

More suitable than mine?

I give the grain I’ve sown

And he, sheep from his flock.

Mine is a laboured gift,

His a giving back.

It is not what I give --

Rather, my shape you despise.

You light his flame to see

A body nicely formed

For sitting on a hill

Above a bleating flock

And playing on a reed

A parody of praise.

You make my flame slow

And smokier than light.

My arms and legs are scarred

From moving in sharp grass.

I am no idol for

The god who made the snake

Or the abhorrent tree.

My praise is in the field

Enacting punishment.

If beauty’s not my tithe,

But only what I do,

If what I am attracts

No more than a slow flame,

I know what I can kill

To draw your eye to me.

Absalom

It’s Absalom who mouths the famous prayer --

‘David, David, father, O my father’ --

Meanwhile his father king is treading air,

A fist of twigs has clutched him by the hair;

He walks and walks, the tree won’t let him down --

It holds the head although it lost the crown.

The air is cooler when the sun has spilled

Its cordial red along the sterile hills,

Imbibed the sweat of battle by degrees,

Leaving the salt, the man, the faithful tree.

The son is victor and his golden hair

Lights like a torch the court’s grey atmosphere

And for an evening, mourning victory,

Keeps to the forms of grief with a dry eye.

Perhaps I, David, who once bore the head

Of brute Goliath that my stone struck dead,

And freed my people to their wilderness

And made my body their intelligence --

Beautiful, articulate and just -- am now

Only a weariness. I see him grow

Into the shadow that time shed from me

As though it suited him; and from this tree

I worship him as my loves worshipped me;

Desire’s old logic in a head that’s grey,

Gnarled fingers, and the once eloquent heart

Give way like stone the sharp frost cleaves apart

And leaves. I take my human medicine

And do not curse him, my usurping son,

But close my eyes to hold him in my head --

Here in this tree, his lover, hanging dead.

A Carol

It is a winter sky.

I take a fist of stars --

A hundred if you please --

And seed dark vacancies.

They choose a hundred lands

To throb above.

Each land is cold and yet

Not closed to miracles.

A hundred miracles

Would strain credulity:

If man can love no more

Than once in a blue moon

A God loves his bad world

One time in history

At most, and pours his blood.

He’ll come next time as fire.

But in a hundred lands

The shepherds leave their flocks

To seek a manger child

Following my stars.

And in a hundred Easts

The wise men pack their bags

And leave their palaces

And people to the snow.

Each manger’s visited.

There’s one beneath each star.

There is only one child,

One miracle. One star

Tells the truth and stays.

The others draw their line

And fall into the sea

With their false promises.

The sheep have strayed meanwhile.

The people die of cold.

The shepherds will not stop

Their scrabbling in the straw.

The wise men have not homed.

They wait upon the child

Although he died and rose

Too long ago for love

Except by miracle.

Sisera

I was simply asleep.

There was a sound in my ear --

A form moved in my tent,

A hammer and a spike.

The spike pricked my brow

And then the hammer fell.

I feel the years. Impaled,

I lie within my tent.

My army dies, the flies

Have come and gone away.

I know who she was.

She may return. I lie still

And do not speak or cry.

I let her do her will.

My name is Sisera.

I will not say her name:

She may still be alive.

‘Until I Built the Wall’

Until I built the wall they did not find me.

Sweet anarchy! attending quietly

To wild birds or picking the blackberry.

Trespassers did not know they erred and came

In and away, leaving the land the same.

The hunter went to richer ground for game.

Tending, profitless, my property

Which no map mentioned, where no metal lay

In veins beneath the surface of hard clay

And bristle grass, I watched my livestock -- scores

Of lizards, armadillos, and the birds --

Free citizens. I had concealed no snares.

Mere ground. Mere nothing harvested or sown.

But how the shadows made the rough design