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

shakes and quakes.

‘YOU TAKE MY HEART WITH SUCH UNFORMED GRACE’

You take my heart with such unformed grace,

One, at times, with the heartbreak earth

And its children, fur or bone – fawn, mouse,

Palpitating duckling, stumbling calf.

In touching you, silk, silver, I touch half

Of the whole dreadful mystery of birth.

I dread you faring forward into the world,

Carrying your beauty like an innocent gift

Among the grown beasts. I am appalled

At the scratching of hungry fingers at the door,

Already. Two handfuls of years, no more,

And what of this heartbreak changeling will be left?

‘BERYL IS THE DAUGHTERLY DAUGHTER’

Beryl is the daughterly daughter:

The rankest filial piety oozes

From the flesh that she washes in greasy water

And the pallid pie that the cat refuses.

Mother and womb must come to dust;

The gone, what else can compensate?

In sheer devotion then she must

Inherit the entire estate.

EPIGRAPH ON A PRINTER

He, who did not originate the Word,

Yet brought the Word to man when man was ripe

To read the Word. But that ill-bound, absurd

Book of his body’s gone. A mess of type

That death broke up reads greater nonsense now.

Now God re-writes him, prints him, binds him, never

To fail or be forgotten: God knows how

To make one copy that is read for ever.

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

I have raised and poised a fiddle

Which, will you lend it ears,

Will utter music’s model:

The music of the spheres.

By God, I think not Purcell

Nor Arne could match my airs.

Perfect beyond rehearsal

My music of the spheres.

Not that its virtue’s vastness –

The terror of drift of stars

For subtlety and softness

My music of the spheres.

The spheres that feed its working

Their melody swells and soars

On thinking of your marking

My music of the spheres.

This music and this fear’s

Work of your maiden years.

Why shut longer your ears?

Look how the live earth flowers!

The land speaks my intent:

Bear me accompaniment.

‘NOT, OF COURSE, THAT EITHER OF US THOUGHT’

Not, of course, that either of us thought

We were too good for this world. No such thought

Had ever entered heads lacking in thought.

But shall I say there was a sort of hopelessness, a sort of

Sickness which further living could not cure,

Aggravate rather. We started off with those certain loves

Of desires for love which men have, such as,

Being English, a desire to love England.

But we saw England delivered over to the hands of

The sneerers and sniggerers, the thugs and grinners,

England become a feeble-lighted

Moon of America, our very language defiled

And become slick and gum-chewing.

Oh, and the great unearthed and their heads

Kicked about for footballs. We saw nastiness

Proclaimed as though it were rich natural

Cream and the fourth-rater exalted

So long as her tits were big enough. Alas

For England. England is not an England

We would wish to stand and see defiled further –

We’ve all betrayed our past, we’ve killed the dream

Our fathers held. Look at us now, look at us:

Shuddering waiting for the bomb to burst,

The ultimate, but not with dignity, oh no.

Grinning like apes in pointed shoes and grinning

National Health teeth, clicking our off-beat fingers

To juke-box clichés, waiting

For death to overtake us, rejecting choice

Because choice seems no longer there. But to two at least

Choice shone, a sun, a gleam of Stoic death.

Better out of it steak and kidney

Steak meets kidney and asks to dance

KNOCK KNOCK

The band strikes up with one-er two-er three

It might as well be steak and kidney pie I can always

Boil some potatoes no need for a second

Vegetable

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

‘IN THIS SPINNING ROOM, REDUCED TO A COMMON NOUN’

In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun,

Swallowed by the giant stomach of Eve,

The pentecostal sperm came hissing down.

I was nowhere, for I was anyone –

The grace and music easy to receive:

The patient engine of a stranger son.

His laughter was fermenting in the cell,

The fish, the worm were chuckling to achieve

The rose of the disguise he wears so well.

And though, by dispensation of the dove,

My flesh is pardoned of its flesh, they leave

The rankling of a wrong and useless love.

‘PERHAPS I AM NOT WANTED’

‘Perhaps I am not wanted then’, he said

‘Perhaps I’d better go’,

He said. Motionless her eyes, her head,

Saying not yes, not no.

‘I will go then, and aim my gun of grief

At any man’s or country’s enemies.’

He said. ‘Slaughter will wreak a red relief.’

She said not no, not yes.

And so he went to marry mud and toil

Swallow in general hell his private hell.

His salts have long drained into alien soil,

And she says nothing still.

‘TOMORROW THERE WILL BE LOVE FOR THE LOVELESS, AND FOR THE LOVER LOVE’

Tomorrow will be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.

The day of the primal marriage, the copulation

Of the irreducible particles; the day when Venus

Sprang fully armed from the wedding blossoms of spray

And the green dance of the surge, while the flying horses

Neighed and whinnied about her, the monstrous conchs

Blasted their intolerable joy.

Tomorrow will be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.

The swans, with garrulous throats, crash through the pools

In a blare of brass; the girl that Tereus

Forced to his will complains endlessly

Among the poplars, desperately forcing

The heartbreak message through, but only forcing

More and more ironic sweetness till

The ear faints with excess of sweetness.

Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.

The scrubbing and dusting, the worry about what to eat,

The stretched elastic of wages and housekeeping money

Ready to snap, the vertigo vista of debt

Shall no longer seem important; the housewife’s fingers

Shall love their creases of grime; the husband’s hair,

Receding, will give him a look of Shakespeare. Honey

Will flow from the lips that meet in perfunctory greeting;

The goodnight kiss will suddenly open a door,

And sleep then will be a bouquet with lights and music.

Tomorrow shall be luck for the luckless, and for the lucky luck

The luckless punter will have unbelievable luck

And the bookmaker doubt his vocation. Houses will echo

With a fabulous smell of frying onions, steaks

Will be feather beds of salivating thickness.

Beer will bite like a lover and prolong its caress

Like cool arms in a hot bed. And clocks

Shall, in the headlong minute before closing time,

Not swoop to the kill, but hover indefinitely,

Like beneficent hawks.

Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.

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