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

thought, and created hell.

Light shimmered in miraculous refraction

As, like a bloody thunderbolt, he fell.

2

Bells broke in the long Sunday, a dressing–gown day.

The childless couple basked in the central heat.

The papers came on time, the enormous meat

Flowered in the oven. On deep carpets lay

Thin panther kittens locked, in clawless play –

Bodies were firm, their hair clean and their feet

Uncalloused. All their wine was new and sweet.

Recorders, unaccompanied, crooned away.

Coiled on the rooftree, bored, inspired, their snake

Crowed in Black Monday. A collar kissed the throat,

Clothes braced the body, a benignant ache

Lit up a tooth. The papers had a note:

That act may mean an empire is at stake.

Sunday and this were equally remote.

3

A dream, yes, but for everyone the same,

The thought that wove it never dropped a stitch.

The Absolute was anybody’s pitch,

For, when a note was struck, we knew its name.

That dark aborted any urge to tame

Waters that day might prove to be a ditch

But then where endless growling ocean, rich

In fish and heroes till the dredgers came.

Wachet auf! A fretful dunghill cock

Flinted the noisy beacons through the shires.

A martin’s nest clogged the cathedral clock,

But it was morning – birds could not be liars.

Keys cleft an age of rust in lock and lock.

Men shivered by a hundred kitchen fires.

4

They lit the sun, and then their day began.

What prodigies that eye of light revealed!

What dusty parchment statutes they repealed,

Pulling up blinds and lifting every ban.

The galaxies revolving to their plan,

They made the conch, the coin, the cortex yield

Their keys, and in a garden, once a field,

They hoisted up a statue of a man.

Of man, rather: to most it seemed a mirror:

Augustus on a guinea sat up straight

Proud of those stony eyes unfilmed by terror.

Though marble is not glass, why should they care?

Later the time for vomiting the error.

Someone was bound to find his portrait there.

5

Augustus on a guinea sat up straight

The sun no proper study but each shaft

Of filtered light a column: classic craft

Abhorred the arc or arch. To circulate

(Blood or ideas) meant pipes, and pipes were straight.

As loaves were gifts from Ceres when she laughed

Thyrsis was Jack, but Crousseau on a raft

Sought Johnjack’s rational island, loath to wait

Till sun, neglected, took revenge so that

The nodding columns melted, and were seen

As Gothic shadows where a goddess sat.

For, after all, that rational machine,

Granted to Jack’s tribe by the technocrat

Chopped logic, hence became his guillotine.

TO VLADIMIR NABOKOV ON HIS 70TH BIRTHDAY

That nymphet’s beauty lay less on her bones

Than in her name’s proclaimed two allophones,

A boned veracity slow to be found

In all the channel of recorded sound.

Extrude an orange pip upon the track,

And it will be a pip played front or back,

But only in the kingdom of the shade

Can diaper run back and be repaid.

Such speculations salt my exile too,

One that I bear less stoically than you.

I look in sourly on my lemon trees,

Spiked by the Qs and Xes of Maltese,

And wonder: Is this home or where is home?

(Melita’s caves, Calypso’s honeycomb).

I seek a cue or clue. Just opposite,

The grocer has a cat that loves to sit

Upon the scales. Respecting his repose,

One day he weighed him: just 2 rotolos.

In this palazzo wood decays and falls;

Buses knock stucco from the outer walls,

Slam shut the shutters. Coughing as they lurch,

They yet enclose the silence of a church,

Rock in baroque: Teresan spados stab

The Sacred Heart upon the driver’s cab,

Whereupon, in circus colours, one can read

That Verbum Caro Factum Est. Indeed.

I think the word is all the flesh I need –

The taste, and not the vitamins of sense,

Whatever sense may be. I like the fence

Of black and white that keeps those bullocks in –

Crossboard or chesswood. Eurish gift of Finn –

The crossmess parzel. If words are no more

Than pyoshki, preordained to look before,

Save for their taking chassé, they alone,

And not the upper house, can claim a throne

(Exploded first the secular magazines

And puff of bishops). All aswarm with queens,

Potentially, that board. Well, there it is:

You help me counter the liquidities

With counters that are counties, countries. Best

To read it: Caro Verbum Facta Est.

THE SWORD

De Kalb, De Kalb, Flatbush Avenue: there, that bright March Saturday, I stood

With sclerotic toothache in kalb or calf, heavy on my cane,

A third leg, a British sword sheathed in cherrywood

For passive support, no tool or weapon. Wind, pain

Toothached in from East River. Well then, I thought, here you are,

Middleaged, claudicant, ignominiously propped

On a sheathed sword, wanting a cab, while car after car

Grinned by under the sun, Saturday gift for those who shopped. No cab stopped.

So I claudicated to the subway, wanting Brooklyn Heights (Clark),

But, instead of the Tunnel train, I caught the one for the Bridge:

Miles of metal and river and light, no expected comfortable dark

Fit for a middleaged Saturday with, at the end, the hermitage

Of the warm apartment and time to make myself seem younger

Or, at least, less middleaged and put that sword away,

At least for the evening. Canal (Centre). The cabless street, the hunger

To bury sword and myself out of the shameless Manhattan day

Increasing to worse toothache, though I am sure it was the wind

That mocked-up wet self-pity. More and more angrily I waved

The sword at the mocking full cabs. But then a sepia-skinned

Cabman responded and stopped. I entered, I was saved.

Back to Brooklyn. The driver, Alvin Lewis, found the street

And I found my key, but, to my incredulous shock,

The apartment door would not open. In bathrobe and flat wet feet,

The woman below came up: no good: something wrong with the lock.

So what could I do but do the rounds of the bars –

Harry’s, the Golden Rose, Jed’s Bar and Grill

And the nameless others? Martinis, cheap cigars,

The nameless others, underwater caves with the shrill

Radio the voice of up there, the TV images like divers

Looking in on this mouthing world, fish, drinking like fish,

Lonely men glass-twirling, making it last, and truck-drivers

Swilling one down, then away, and no matter how much I would wish

To clean off the middleage for the evening and her, I had to accept my dirt

And the dirty brown taste of my mouth, unanaesthetised

By the ice, my flat