Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

signs and selling signs. Their pores

Sweat signs. But signs of what? Ah come, resign

Ourselves to this: a sign’s a sign’s a sign.

Or, if you will, signs lead to other signs –

Signposts mean signs lead to cities. See, the sun declines

From his high noon on this – a southern town,

The somnolence of afterlunch falls down

Gentle, like dust, on young, old, and young-old.

Cars move in stupor. Stories that are told,

Ideas put forward, all allophones

Of yawns. Unwilling as trundled stones.

The great dead and the little living move

Down time, down streets and prove – what do they prove?

That signs are signs and signs are signs again.

And dogs are as significant as men.

Men move, and women move, beneath the groin

Of passages where quick and dead conjoin

Looking for signs to sign some cosmic letter.

Accept the universe – by God, you’d better.

Accept this town, cede victoriam

To horns that honk and honking cry I am.

To clanking girders, trufflings in the earth

To bring some new enormous sign to birth.

Signs ride the streets, unnoticed in the shouts

Of streetlife, see the daffodils put out

Their signs, the fruit upon the barrows too.

Be drunk with signs – what else is there to do?

Yet, if you would ask, ask what colours mean.

We mean ourselves no more, say red and green.

But try this – take us all, the flame, the sky,

The hue of flesh, the flash of the cat’s eye.

Mix all these colours even and, how odd,

The end’s a blank – or the white light of God.

Any word, any image, will do

To begin with. In the beginning was God.

Why not Dog? In other language God ought to be

Dnuh, enac, but it doesn’t

Work in the other languages. But in English, yes.

You can begin with God seen from the rear –

That strange view vouchsafed to some prophet or other –

Dog. Polytheism, polycynism – dogs. Looking up

Down, unable to separate the Godmade from the manmade

Artifact – all things equal – rooms, carpets, air,

Water, gravel, piano, curtain, dogs.

What makes men different from dogs? The hindleg habit,

So that forepaws may hold drinks, the hebetude of the

Sense of smell. A longer ritual before the act of

Coupling. Dogs mark out territory through

Golden libations. Men make cities.

‘AUGUSTINE AND PELAGIUS’

He came out of the misty island, Morgan,

Man of the sea, demure in monk’s sackcloth,

Taking the long way to Rome, expecting –

Expecting what? Oh, holiness, quintessentialized,

Holiness whole, the wholesome wholemeal of,

Holiness as meat and drink and air, in the

Chaste thrusts of marital love holiness, and

Sanctitas sanctitas even snaking up from

Cloacae and sewers, sanctitas the effluvium

From his Holiness’s arsehole. On the village road

Trudging, dust, birdsong, dirty villages,

Stops on the way at monasteries (weeviled bread,

Eisel wine), always this thought: Sanctitas.

What does thou seek in Rome, brother? The home

Of holiness, to lodge awhile in the

Sanctuary of sanctity, my brothers, for here

Peter died, seeing before he died

The pagan world inverted to sanctitas, and

The very flagged soil is rich with the bonemeal

Of the martyrs. And the brothers would

Look at each other, each thinking, some saying:

Here cometh one that only islands breed.

What can flourish in that Ultima Thule save

Holiness, a bare garment for the wind to

Sing through? And not Favonius either but

Sour Boreas from the pole. Not the grape,

Not garlic not the olive, not the strong sun

Tickling the manhood in a man, be he

Monk or friar or dean or

Burly bishop, big ballocks swinging like twin censers.

Only holiness. God help him, God bless him for

We look upon British innocence.

And the British innocence.

And the British innocent, hurtful of no man,

Fond of dogs, a cat-stroker,

Trudged on south – vine, olive, garlic,

Brown tits jogging while brown feet

Danced in the grapepress and the

Monstrous aphrodisiac danced in the heavens

Till at length he came to the outer suburbs and

Fell on his knees O sancta urbs sancta sancta

Meaning sancta suburbs and…

But wherever he went in Rome, it was always the same –

Sin sin sin, no sanctity, the whole unholy

Grammar of sin, syntax, accidence, sin’s

Entire lexicon set before him, sin.

Peacocks in the streets, gold dribbled over

In dark rooms, vomiting after

Banquets of ostrich bowels stuffed with saffron,

Minced pikeflesh and pounded larkbrain,

Served with a sauce headily fetid, and pocula

Of wine mixed with adder’s blood to promote

Lust lust and again.

Pederasty, podorasty, sodomy, bestiality,

Degrees of family ripped apart like

Bodices in the unholy dance. And he said,

And Morgan said, whom the scholarly called Pelagius:

Why do ye this, my brothers and sisters?

Are ye not saved by Christ, are ye not

Sanctified by his sacrifice, oh why why why?

(Being British and innocent) and

They said to him cheerfully, looking up

From picking a peahen bone or kissing the

Nipple or nates of son, daughter, sister,

Brother, aunt, ewe, teg: Why, stranger,

Hast not heard the good news? That Christ

Took away the burden of our sins on his

Back broad to bear, and as we are saved

Through him it matters little what we do?

Since we are saved once for all, our being

Saved will not be impaired or cancelled by

Our present pleasures (which we propose to

Renew tomorrow after a suitable and well-needed

Rest). Alleluia alleluia to the Lord for he has

Led us to two paradises, one to come and the other

Here and now. Alleluia. And they fell to again,

To nipple to nates or fish baked with datemince,

Alleluia. And Morgan cried to the sky:

How long O Lord wilt thou permit these

Transgressions against thy holiness?

Strike them strike them as thou once didst

The salty cities of the plain, as though

Phinehas the son of Eleazar the son of Aaron

Thou didst strike down the traitor Zimri

And his foul whore of the Moabite temples Cozbi

Strike strike. But the Lord did nothing.

He strode in out of Africa, wearing a

Tattered royal robe of orchard moonlight

Smelling of stolen apples but otherwise

Ready to scorch, a punishing sun, saying:

Where is this man of the northern sea, let me

Chide him, let me do more if

His heresy merits it, what is his heresy?

And a hand-rubbing priest, olive-skinned,

Garlic-breathed, looked up at the

Great African solar face to whine:

If it please you, the heresy is evidently a

Heresy but there is as yet no name for it.

And Augustine said: All things must have a name

Otherwise, Proteus-like, they slither and slide

From the grasp. A thing does not

Exist until it has a name. Name