So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. 

Moments ago walking up the hill from home to studio
Birdsong in pre-dawn darkness pulled me to pause
One sharp sound answered softly, each seeking each
Standing still on the stony path peering beyond tree tops
A meteor sweeping across the black, prophet of the sun
Still to come, first taste on this Feast of the Ascension.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

We talk of art important others jobs fears old memories emerging hope
And more, but even more we listen for what is unsaid cannot be said
But can be heard with long silences forgiving smiles and knowing nods
There remains a separation but there is also, for now, shared becoming
A beginning to be. It takes time, we finish with brandy older than me.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

They clear the table, leaving us to finish our wine. There were reasons
Things I wanted thought I needed that caused me to invite you here
But none of that really matters, what I am now seeking is to truly be
With you without artifice or worry or want or even need… And as my hand
Reaches for yours he brings a French-press coffee and two rhubarb tarts.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

Why are we here, you ask as they pour the Pinot Noir and plate the duck
To which I respond by closely examining the steaming Brussels sprouts
Sparkling with bacon fat, finally raising my glass and eyes to yours:
“To the whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen
And the wild strawberry, the laughter in the garden, and echoed ecstasy.”

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind us of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

A cold crab bisque dusted with paprika paired with an aromatic Moselle
Recalling our last lunch celebrating the view you commend the bread
Am I dribbling the bisque is something caught in my teeth is the Riesling too sweet
A beautiful scene scent of wisteria waves washing ashore wonderful food
And you – yet still I am separate divided in space and time and even self.

IV.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That quesions the distempered part;
Beneath ,he bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

A ménage à trois of still-sizzling oysters in bed with vinegar-tossed frisee
A very dry champagne, sitting in the sun surfers sliding over sand
Both of us a bit numb at the edge of our head from flying too far too fast
Thank you for coming, I say. Thanks for asking, you smile
I am dazzled you’re here and suddenly feel utterly hopelessly dumb.

In order to possess what you do not possess
     You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
     You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

What is to be done with beauty…
Opportunity… love…
These cannot be had, but
Inspire conspire or tempt
Entering again into our selves
Finding bliss or burden
Claiming cause or outcome
Choosing life or death
Whatever our choosing
Finding all is ours always
Desire a prelude to despair
Or overture to joy
Depending on how
Subject and object coincide
Desire empowering and deflecting
Our each and every motion
“To every action there is
Always opposed an equal
Reaction: Or the mutual actions of
Two bodies upon each other are
Always equal, and directed
To contrary parts.”

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
     You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstacy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
     You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

Hunger opens to absence
Desire is different
Aroused by proximity
More and more prompting
Deeper yet deeper yearning
Bread is eaten
Water swallowed

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

(I have departed purposefully from Eliot's architecture)

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Dressing each in a silver gown
Sliding each into a pre-warmed
Three hundred- twenty degree oven
Where they slowly roasted
While I was baptized in a metal tub
Behind the altar where that afternoon
I would be married
Making time to baste the birds
Then remove the gown and
Allow the flesh to gently brown.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-

Anointing each with olive oil
Massaging their loose white flesh
Feeling frosty crystals break
Breasts and thighs warming to my touch
Adding pepper garlic and plenty of thyme
Placing each in a buttered basting pan

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.

Covering each turkey
In a warm saltwater bath
Then fixed myself a coffee
Listening to birds begin the day
With their turf-protecting concertante
About 7:40 patting each dry

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

The morning of our wedding
Just past dawn I removed one
Carcass then another
Pouring off the blood
Claiming from the insides
Liver, gizzards, neck and kidneys

Three scallops
A crisp chardonnay
Pacific breaking below
Sitting alone
Sun slowly setting
Resolving self with other selves
Sea and sky become as one
Καιρός του ποίησις

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

About 1 o’clock we docked
The crew telling Emmanuelle
They would return with lunch
Endive crispy calamari and Roditis
Anchored off Salamis in the sun
With a slight breeze when we were young
Emmanuelle meaning
God, She, is with us
Καιρός του ποίησις

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
but all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Jeannie Emmanuelle and me
My wife and Mr. Sabbagh’s Italian translator
On his yacht sailing where
We would have seen a Persian fleet
Assembling before defeat
While the Acropolis burned
Clearing way for the Parthenon

The knowledge inposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

We were not yet thirty
All others over forty
So we were sent sailing
In the Saronic Gulf
Less wine dark than green-blue
A cloudy Pinot Blanc

The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.

“Go ahead,” said Fred
And Bill gently laid the whole mess
Of catfish tail to snout into the oil
While Rita, Laura, Ruthie, Mae, Shirley, and Aunt Onley
Cleaned the corn, frosted cakes, brought out plates
While cousins played in the shallows watching for snakes
Wearing water lilies as hats squishing their toes
In the Mississippi’s mud (not) waiting for the meal
Καιρός του ποίησις

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?

Testing the temperature by tossing
Dabs of cream and cornmeal into the vat
Looking for tan or brown or black
“It’s time,” said Bill
“Just right,” Bob nodded

That was a way of putting it - not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.

The oil did not boil but did bubble a bit
Seven inches deep in a pan 2x4 feet
Liquid gold in August’s midday sun
Briquettes burning bright beneath
Uncle Bob Uncle Bill and Grandpa Fred

Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

And wades again to shore.
Where he had set a small fire
Well before his guests arrived
Compacted now to bright burning coals
Just right for a crispy exterior flaky interior
Καιρός του ποίησις

Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars

What were waves pulled taut at each end
Struggle exploding across cascading calm
Lifting this catch beside his blonde head
The boy turns toward those watching
His smile enough to say, “That’s how it’s done”

II

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high

Retrieving his cast the boy’s wrist twists again
String pulsating looping unleashing waves
Sweeping over the watery flux
There now just now leaps the trout
Here now just how a tug sets the hook

     Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

    “Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream”

As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Authoring their own destiny
Beyond genetic legacies.
One spring evening beside a flowing stream
The siblings meet a fisher boy knotting his string
Smiling welcome gesturing for quiet
He slips smoothly into the knee-high current.

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

Necessity imposing limitations
Often ignored, occasionally exceeded
Each trying to transcend
Parental authority, Time’s tyranny
Necessity’s incessant claims

Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Desiring more than
Necessity’s austere affection
Constantly restless Chaos
Passive but persistent Aether
Time setting goals

                In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
the association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie˜
A dignified and commodious sacrament.

              Chaotic conception and concoction
Ethereal absorption and reflection
Each twin shares the dark eyes
Of their peripatetic father
But resist temporal discipline
Chaos rebellious
Aether languorous
Each jealous for their mother’s attention

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the elctric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl.

Undulating orgasms
Precisely combined
Culminating in
Chaos and Aether
Precocious offspring
One troubled but productive
The other serenely indolent

        In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field,, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

        Kronos comes
Coupling with Ananke
Primordial coitus

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

Time is one measure
Among many
With which we seek to
Define infinity
Convert eternity