Donald Alfred Davie

A queer thing about those waters: there are no
Birds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.
...

Chemicals ripen the citrus;
There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,
And on the shoreline
Hygiene, inhuman caution.
...

No moss nor mottle stains
My parents' unmarked grave;
My word on them remains
Stouter than stone, you told me.
...

X, whom society's most mild command,
For instance evening dress, infuriates,
In art is seen confusingly to stand
For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.
...

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall
At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal
With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came
...

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then.
The seasonable or more rabid heats
Of love and summer in some other cities
Unseal the all too human: not in his.
...

"stooped to truth and moralized his song"
Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time.
Vernal a little. Primavera. First
...

A queer thing about those waters: there are no
Birds there, or hardly any.
I did not miss them, I do not remember
Missing them, or thinking it uncanny.

The beach so-called was a blinding splinter of limestone,
A quarry outraged by hulls.
We took pleasure in that: the emptiness, the hardness
Of the light, the silence, and the water's stillness.

But this was the setting for one of our murderous scenes.
This hurt, and goes on hurting:
The venomous soft jelly, the undersides.
We could stand the world if it were hard all over.
...

Chemicals ripen the citrus;
There are rattlesnakes in the mountains,

And on the shoreline

Hygiene, inhuman caution.



Beef in cellophane

Tall as giraffes,

The orange-rancher's daughters

Crop their own groves, mistrustful.



Perpetual summer seems

Precarious on the littoral. We drive

Inland to prove

The risk we sense. At once



Winter claps-to like a shutter

High over the Ojai valley, and discloses

A double crisis,

Winter and Drought.



Ranges on mountain-ranges,

Empty, unwatered, crumbling,

Hot colours come at the eye.

It is too cold



For picnics at the trestle-tables. Claypit

Yellow burns on the distance.

The phantom walks

Everywhere, of intolerable heat.



At Ventucopa, elevation

Two-eight-nine-six, the water hydrant frozen,

Deserted or broken settlements,

Gasoline stations closed and boarded.



By nightfall, to the snows;

And over the mile on tilted

Mile of the mountain park

The bright cars hazarded.
...

No moss nor mottle stains
My parents' unmarked grave;

My word on them remains

Stouter than stone, you told me.



"Martyred to words", you have thought,

Should be your epitaph;

At other times you fought

My self-reproaches down.



Though bitterly once or twice

You have reproached me with how

Everything ended in words,

We both know better now:



You understand, I shall not

If I survive you care

To raise a headstone for

You I have carved on air.
...

X, whom society's most mild command,
For instance evening dress, infuriates,

In art is seen confusingly to stand

For disciplined conformity, with Yeats.



Taxed to explain what this resentment is

He feels for small proprieties, it comes,

He likes to think, from old enormities

And keeps the faith with famous martyrdoms.



Yet it is likely, if indeed the crimes

His fathers suffered rankle in his blood,

That he find least excusable the times

When they acceded, not when they withstood.



How else explain this bloody-minded bent

To kick against the prickings of the norm;

When to conform is easy, to dissent;

And when it is most difficult, conform?
...

Northward I came, and knocked in the coated wall
At the door of a low inn scaled like a urinal

With greenish tiles. The door gave, and I came



Home to the stone north, every wynd and snicket

Known to me wherever the flattened cat

Squirmed home to a hole between housewall and paving.



Known! And in the turns of it, no welcome,

No flattery of the beckoned lighted eye

From a Rose of the rose-brick alleys of Toulouse.



Those more than tinsel garlands, more than masks,

Unfading wreaths of ancient summers, I

Sternly cast off. A stern eye is the graceless



Bulk and bruise that at the steep uphill

Confronts me with its drained-of-colour sandstone

Implacably. The Church. It is Good Friday.



Goodbye to the Middle Ages! Although some

Think that I enter them, those centuries

Of monkish superstition, here I leave them



With their true garlands, and their honest masks,

Every fresh flower cast on the porch and trodden,

Raked by the wind at the Church door on this Friday.



Goodbye to all the centuries. There is

No home in them, much as the dip and turn

Of an honest alley charmingly deceive us.



And not yet quite goodbye. Instead almost

Welcome, I said. Bleak equal centuries

Crowded the porch to be deflowered, crowned.
...

When it is cold it stinks, and not till then.
The seasonable or more rabid heats

Of love and summer in some other cities

Unseal the all too human: not in his.

When it is cold it stinks, but not before;



Smells to high heaven then most creaturely

When it is cold. It stinks, but not before

His freezing eye has done its best to maim,

To amputate limbs, livelihood and name,

Abstracting life beyond all likelihood.



When it is cold it stinks, and not till then

Can it be fragrant. On canal and street,

Colder and colder, Murphy to Molloy,

The weather hardens round the Idiot Boy,

The gleeful hero of the long retreat.



When he is cold he stinks, but not before,

This living corpse. The existential weather

Smells out in these abortive minims, men

Who barely living therefore altogether

Live till they die; and sweetly smell till then.
...

"stooped to truth and moralized his song"

Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time.

Vernal a little. Primavera. First

Green, first truth and last.

High time, high time.



A high old time we had of it last summer?

I overstate. But getting out the maps…

Look! Up the valley of the Brenne,

Louise de la Vallière… Syntax collapses.

High time for that, high time.



To Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis

Rooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay

Or so the song says, an amoral song

Like Ronsard's where we go today

Perhaps, perhaps tomorrow.



Tomorrow and tomorrow and… Get well!

Philip's black-sailed familiar, avaunt

Or some word as ridiculous, the whole

Diction kit begins to fall apart.

High time it did, high time.



High time and a long time yet, my love!

Get out that blessed map.

Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.

Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire.

High time, my love. High time and a long time yet
...

Time passing, and the memories of love
Coming back to me, carissima, no more mockingly
Than ever before; time passing, unslackening,
Unhastening, steadily; and no more
Bitterly, beloved, the memories of love
Coming into the shore.

How will it end? Time passing and our passages of love
As ever, beloved, blind
As ever before; time binding, unbinding
About us; and yet to remember
Never less chastening, nor the flame of love
Less like an amber.

What will become of us? Time
Passing, beloved, and we in a sealed
Assurance unassailed
By memory. How can it end,
This siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,
No doubts defend?
...

Hearing one saga, we enact the next.
We please our elders when we sit enthralled;
But then they're puzzled; and at last they're vexed
To have their youth so avidly recalled.

It dawns upon the veterans after all
That what for them were agonies, for us
Are high-brow thrillers, though historical;
And all their feats quite strictly fabulous.

This novel written fifteen years ago,
Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home,
These poems about ''abandoned workings'', show
Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome.

The Anschluss, Guernica ? all the names
At which those poets thrilled or were afraid
For me mean schools and headmasters and games;
And in the process someone is betrayed.

Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke
Might carve his own initials on our desk,
And yet we'd miss the point because he spoke
An idiom too dated, Audenesque.

Ralegh's Guiana also killed his son.
A pretty pickle if we came to see
The tallest story really packed a gun,
The Telemachiad an Odyssey.

2

Even to them the tales were not so true
As not to be ridiculous as well;
The ironmaster met his Waterloo,
But Rider Haggard rode along the fell.

'Leave for Cape Wrath tonight!'' They lounged away
On Fleming's trek or Isherwood's ascent.
England expected every man that day
To show his motives were ambivalent.

They played the fool, not to appear as fools
In time's long glass. A deprecating air
Disarmed, they thought, the jeers of later schools;
Yet irony itself is doctrinaire,

And, curiously, nothing now betrays
Their type to time's derision like this coy
Insistence on the quizzical, their craze
For showing Hector was a mother's boy.

A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.
And yet it may be better, if we must,
To praise a stance impressive and absurd
Than not to see the hero for the dust.

For courage is the vegetable king,
The sprig of all ontologies, the weed
That beards the slag-heap with his hectoring,
Whose green adventure is to run to seed.
...