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

part of time –

‘AT THE END OF THE DARK HALL’

At the end of the dark hall he found his love

Who, flushed and gay,

Pounded with walking hand and flying fingers

The grinning stained teeth for a wassail of singers

That drooped around, while on the lid above

The dog unnoticed, waiting, lolling lay.

He noticed, cried, dragged her away from laughter.

Lifts on the frantic road

From loaded lorries helpful to seek safe south

Slyly sidestreeted north. Each driver’s mouth,

Answering her silly jokes, he gasped at after

The cabin-door slammed shut: the dogteeth showed.

At last, weary, out of the hot noon’s humming,

Mounting his own stair

It was no surprise to find a mother and daughter,

The daughter she. Hospitable, she gave him water.

Windless, the shutters shook.

A quiet voice said: ‘I’m coming.’

‘Oh God God it’s the dog’, screamed the daughter,

But he, up the miles or leaden water,

Frantically beat for air.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Anciently the man who showed

Hate to his father with the sword

Was bundled in a dark sack

With a screaming ape to claw his back

And the screaming talk of a parrot to mock

Time’s terror of air’s and light’s lack

Black

And the slimy litheness of a snake.

Then he was swirled into the sea.

But that was all balls and talk

Nowadays we have changed all that

Into a cleaner light to walk

And wipe that mire off on the mat.

So when I knew his end was near

My breath was freer

Aerating a shedding then

Of all the accidents of birth,

And I had a better right to the earth

And knew myself more of a man,

Peeling the last squamour of the old skin.

But never underestimate

The comic cunning of the dead.

The snake that slithers in at night

To occupy most of the bed

Has learnt to wear my father’s head.

And one day in the filthy shop

Of ancient rubbish I wound up

A 1914 gramophone

To a parrot voice intone

Some nonsense about sun and air,

The two things that were lacking there.

And, like a fetal marmoset,

Something is swinging when I fix

Eyes upon eyes in the bathroom glass

A load of stupid monkey tricks

Turns me to him as the months pass:

Hair, eyes, jowl, teeth.

I hear him mine the floor beneath

Muffled: You’ll not be rid of me.

Each morning when you shave you’ll see.

‘THEY FEAR AND HATE’

They fear and hate

the Donne and Dante in him, this

cold

gift to turn heat to a flame, a kiss

to the gate

of a monster’s

labyrinth. They hold

and anchor a thin thread

the tennis party, the parish dance:

stale pus out of dead

pores.

‘SO WILL THE FLOW OF TIME AND FIRE’

So will the flux of time and fire,

The process and the pain, expire,

And history can bow

To one eternal now.

The greenstick snaps, the slender goldenrod

Here cannot probe or enter. Thin spring winds

Freeze blue lovers in unprotected hollows, but

Summer chimes heavy bells and flesh is fed

Where fruit bursts, the ground is crawling with berries.

SEPTEMBER, 1938

There arose those winning life between two wars,

Born out of one, doomed food for the other,

Floodroars ever in the ears.

Slothlovers hardly, hardly fighters:

Resentment spent against stone, long beaten out of

Minds resigned to the new:

Useless to queue for respirators.

Besides, what worse chaos to come back to.

Home, limbs heavy with mud and work, to sleep

To sweep out a house days deep in dirt.

Knowing finally man would limbs loin face

Efface utterly, leaving in his place

Engines rusting to world’s end, heirs to warfare

Fonctionnant d’une maniere automatique.

SUMMER, 1940

Summer swamps the land, the sun imprisons us,

The pen slithers in the examinee’s fingers,

And colliding lips of lovers slide on sweat

When, blind, they inherit their tactile world.

Spectacles mist, handveins show blue, the urge to undress

Breeds passion in unexpected places. Barrage balloons

Soar silver in silver ether. Lying on grass,

We watch them, docile monsters, unwind to the zenith.

Drops of that flood out of France, with mud and work

Stained, loll in the trams, drinking their cigarettes,

Their presence defiling the flannels and summer frocks,

The hunters to hound out safely, spoil the summer.

SPRING IN CAMP, 1941

War becomes time, and long logic

On buried premises; spring supervenes

With the circle as badge which, pun and profundity,

Vast, appears line and logical,

But, small, shows travel returning.

Circle is circle, proves nothing, makes nothing,

Swallows up process and end in no argument,

Brings new picture of old time.

Here in barracks is intake of birds,

The sun holds early his ordered room,

The pale company clerk is uneasy

As spring brings odour of other springs.

The truckdriver sings, free of the war,

The load of winter and war becomes

Embarrassing as a younger self.

Words disintegrate; war is words.

THE EXCURSION

The blue of summer morning begs

The country journey to be made,

The sun that gilds the breakfast eggs

Illuminates the marmalade.

A check is smiling on the desk.

Remembered smells upon the lane

Breed hunger for the picaresque

To blood the buried springs again.

Here is the pub and here the church

And there our thirty miles of sun,

The river and the rod and the perch,

The noonday drinking just begun.

Let beer beneath the neighbour trees

Swill all that afternoon away,

And onions, crisp to sullen cheese,

Yield the sharp succulence of today.

Today remembers breaking out

The fire that burned the hayfield black.

An army that was grey with drought

Shows to my stick its fossil track.

Returning evening rose on rose

Of pomegranate rouge and ripe;

The lamp upon the pavement throws

The ectoplasm of my pipe.

EDEN

History was not just what you learned that scorching day

Of ink and wood and sweat in the classroom, when mention

Of the Duke of Burgundy lost you in voluptuous dream

Of thirst and Christmas, but that day was part of history.

There were other times, misunderstood by the family,

When you, at fifteen, on your summer evening bed

Believed there were ancient towns you might anciently visit.

There might be a neglected platform on some terminus

And a ticket bought when the clock was off its guard.

Oh, who can dismember the past? The boy on the friendly bed

Lay on the unpossessed mother, the bosom of history,

And is gathered to her at last. And tears I suppose

Still thirst for that reeking unwashed pillow,

That bed ingrained with all the dirt of the past,

The mess and lice and stupidity of the Golden Age,

But a mother and loving, ultimate Eden.

One looks for Eden in history, best left unvisited,

For the primal sin is always a present sin,

The thin hand held in the river which can never

Clean off the blood, and