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

bed will be no monster’s labyrinth,

But spirals winding to a blinding apex,

Sharp as a needle, where the last shred of self

Is peeled off painlessly, and space and time are bullied

Into carrying their own burdens. Tomorrow

Shall be love for the loveless

And for the lover love.

The map of love, spread on our knees, disclosing

The miraculous journey, shall not terrify

With lack of compass points, with monstrous patches

Of terra incognita. Every sea-lane

Leads us home to each other, and always home

Is a new continent, of inconceivable richness.

‘TO ENDYMION’

The moon awaits your sleeping: fear to be kissed.

Tepid her light unblenching, but will twist

Your features to strange shapes; though blind, those

Beams

Get in the mind’s slime monsters for dreams.

‘THE STOAT’S CRY’

The stoat’s cry tears long slivers of the night,

And, luminous, the owl in the rustling fruit

Draws up the sweating lovers by the root;

They warm in water-blankets worlds of fright –

‘AND HIS HOOVES HAMMER ME BACK INTO THE GROUND’ ’

And his hooves hammer me back into the ground,

The four gospel hammers, till, in that corn death,

I am promised to be queen of the bellied wheat.

I pray a last thanks in my killing breath,

Glad to be ripped, torn of the panting hollow,

While his one eye glows, the angels carry away

The suffocating forge to become the sun,

Who throbs in waves to suck the fainting day.

‘PIGS SNORT FROM THE YARD’

Pigs snort from the yard.

Above, gulls mew and heckle.

Memory’s shadows speckle

The blind, with its swinging chord.

‘GASPING IN THE DUNNY IN THE DEAD OF DARK’

Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark,

I dream of my boola-bush, sunning in the south,

And the scriking of the ballbird and Mitcham’s lark,

And bags of the sugarwasp, sweet in my mouth.

For here in the city is the dalth of coves,

Their stuff and their slart and the fall of sin,

The beerlout’s spew where the nightmort roves

And the festered craw of the filth within.

God’s own grass for the porrow in my tail,

Surrawa’s lake for this puke and niff,

Prettytit’s chirp for the plonky’s nipper’s wail,

And the rawgreen growler under Bellarey’s Cliff.

‘DRAGGED FROM HIS DOINGS’

Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth,

Snipped like the stem of a caldicot flower

Snarled time’s up ere he’d quaffed his hour,

Tossed to the tearing of the dour dog’s tooth.

Bye, my brad, let the bright booze pour

That is suds of stars in the Milky Way,

And its door swing open all the joylit day

And the heavenlord landlord cry you time no more.

‘ARCHANGELS BLASTING FROM INNER SPACE’

Archangels blasting from inner space,

Pertofan, Tryptizol, Majeptil,

Parstelin and Librium.

And a serenace for all his tangled strings.

‘BELLS BROKE IN THE LONG SUNDAY’

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

Sang in the oven. On the thick carpets lay

Thin panther kittens locked in clawless play –

Bodies were firm, their tongues 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 Monday in. A collar kissed the throat,

Clothes braced the body, a benignant ache

Lit up a tooth. The papers had a note:

‘His death may mean an empire is at stake’;

Sunday and this were equally remote.

‘USELESS TO HOPE TO HOLD OFF’

Useless to hope to hold off

The unavoidable happening

With that frail barricade

Of week, day or hour

Which melts as it is made,

For time himself will bring

You in his high-powered car,

Rushing on to it,

Whether you will or not.

So, shaking hands with the grim

Satisfactory argument,

The consolation of bone

Resigned to the event,

Making a friend of him,

He, in an access of love,

Renders his bare acres

Golden and wide enough.

And this last margin of leaving

Is sheltered from the rude

Indiscreet tugging of winds.

For parting, a point in time,

Cannot have magnitude

And cannot cast shadows about

The final kiss and final

Tight pressure of hands.

CURTAL SONNET

And so the car plunged in the singing green

Of sycamore and riot-running chestnut and oak

That squandered flame, cut a thousand arteries and bled

Flood after summer flood, spawned an obscene

Unquenched unstanchable green world sea, to choke

The fainting air, drown sun in its skywise tread.

But the thin tuning-fork of one of the needs of men,

The squat village letter-box, approached, awoke,

Call all to order with its stump of red;

In a giant shudder, the monstrous organ then

Took shape and spoke.

‘SHREWSBURY, SHREWSBURY, ROUNDED BY RIVER’

Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river

The envious Severn like a sleeping dog

That wakes at whiles to snarl and slaver

Or growls in its dream its snores of fog.

Lover-haunted in the casual summer:

A monstrous aphrodisiac,

The sun excites in the noonday shimmer,

When Jack is sweating, Joan on her back.

Sick and sinless in the anaemic winter:

The nymphs have danced off the summer rout,

The boats jog on the fraying painter,

The School is hacking its statesmen out.

The pubs dispense their weak solution

The unfructified waitresses bring their bills,

While Darwin broods on evolution,

Under the pall of a night that chills –

– But smooths out the acne of adolescence

As the god appears in the fourteenth glass

And the urgent promptings of tumescence

Lead to the tumbled patch of grass.

Time and the town go round like the river,

But Darwin thinks in a line that is straight.

A sort of selection goes on for ever,

But no new species originate.

‘I SOUGHT SCENT’

I sought scent, and found it in your hair;

Looked for light, and it lodged in your eyes;

So for sound: it held your breath dear;

And I met movement in your ways.

‘THE URGENT TEMPER OF THE LAWS’

The urgent temper of the laws,

That clips proliferation’s claws,

Shines from the eye that sees

A growth is a disease.

Only the infant will admire

The vulgar opulence of fire

To tyrannize the dumb

Patient continuum.

And, while the buds burst, hug and hold

A cancer that must be controlled

And moulded till it fit

These forms not made for it.

FROM ‘THE CIRCULAR PAVANE’

They thought they’d see it as parenthesis –

Only the naked statement to remember,

Cleaving no logic in their sentences,

Putting no feelers out to the waking dreamer –

So they might reassume untaken seats,

Finish their coffee and their arguments,

From the familiar hooks redeem their hats

And leave, with the complacency of friends.

But strand is locked with strand, like the weave of bread,

And this is part of them and