ORFEO
Sepulchral, widely wandering, I went to the ford where the dead,
still in open rebellion then, encroached. And as God himself appeared
in the form of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, as at Frankenhausen
in April 1525, the self, I realised, is allegorical. Then Fortune,
moving the planets, encircled that omnipotence; and now she,
victorious, inducts via the incantatory command and I, absorbed,
walk behind the wheel, the queen above me on her throne, draped
in tarpaulins, her ladies looking back along the columns of the dead.
Beside the creek, a figure, crouching, moves half-lit in the vapours.
This ghost denoting my anxiety or, Arcadian emblem, a man working
on the marshes at low tide. Leached. Pallid November. Old ropes in
the mud. A boy filled with feminine allure, Miss World imagery,
mysteries and wars, running down Clubbs Lane to be absorbed
within the mass of children in the front three rows, at the pictures,
eager for futures predicted; and this not even briefly intuited present,
the loss of definition I look back from, beckoning from the screen.
Looking over my head to those behind, one lady holds out a flower
labelled Ioye; and the dead, reflecting, loudly pledge their loyalty
to her playfulness. The force that animates the corpse,
in lustres dolorous, smiles through the beauty she has robbed
from one not too long deceased; now, anything perceived becomes
a symbol linked to states that, generating motion or faltering,
indicate how mortal joys decay and why the dead still agitate.
Reliquias receptas. Through these songs, recovered from antiquity,
I also was drawn to reconsider what once I would not have,
that tradition denies the past, leaving those long gone forlorn.
Childish or innocent, unselfconscious love, memorialised, informs
the one who rises when there is no other option, lifeless and
cold, from the effigy of everything we have forgotten, or denied,
that body perilous within which all hopes and liberties are bound.
That first evening, the pilgrims gathered in the bar to celebrate
their victory. Our ancient dead beyond the ruined wall; bright
jollity and pretty girls and drink. Catching sight of himself,
the priest lifted onto the bar sees Death behind him as the spirit
lights his face. Thus unusually aware, the man might now confess
that this was transcendent joy, or nothing but a harmless kiss,
as he reflects, seeing them all as they’ll be judged
outside the pub when only the idea of love lives on.
As I sat reading quaint hermetic verse, a hair pressed between
the pages, tickling my hand, moved me to inspect the place where,
as in some ambush, it was caught. And so, much like a trap,
the book lay open. To know what justified this low device
I ventured in and lost myself, primordial, amongst the leaves.
Amidst Honters with hornes and their hounds, the hind, desolate,
fell as thai halowyd hi hi full joyful, whilst ‘drery Dethe’, drawn
there by its cries, unmoved by what he saw, looked down on me.
Summoned, the witness explains how the man, unsuspected
by others, left his lodging to go at night on Stiffkey marshes.
He raised his torch above a submarine form. Surfacing, the poem
recalls the great marine serpents of the past and the watcher--
a schoolgirl in this version—loyal to an Empire otherwise engaged,
raises the alarm. It lifts its head and History occults within her
glamour whilst in him the essence of tradition is betrayal.
Briefly lit against the dark, she crouches lest he turn and look.
I saw the maiden lift her skirts to Death and thought how I’d
give anything to crack the hourglass and pick up the scythe;
untethering that dirty bitch from her ironic pose, unleashing
a traditional lament, I’d love her. But now you, returning, eclipse
what I thought I’d want and all my wished for pleasures, poised
to take their place in me, become the shambles I would rather
not consider; avoided intimacies, love displaced and all that
living might imply. Now, fold the hands and gently close the eyes.
Melisende and Blanche, and Margaret of Burgundy, and Isabella,
then twelve years old, and Eleanor of Aquitaine; those maculating
figures of romance. It was how I had imagined myself, passive
and exposed, the creature looking back at me, caught whilst
sorting through her things. The bust of some classic beauty
now unseen but famous once—the body, statuesque I thought,
and queenly, but for those puerile hips—and these I checked
against my own, her watered-satin basque like a salvaged torso.
Lopped off at the crown, the trees that flanked the church
propped up an image: where matter stacked against the light
cast shadows making bodies dense, a glimmer from the other side
drained substance from that dark interior. Corruption makes
the wicked stink but her body smells sweet. Pulled back
the hood to see the head within the shroud; in deep enduring
sleep the monarch, rooted in the body politic, signified that love,
despite the rot that people think, is always messy and profound.
It was late and the shadows of low things stretched long as I,
knowing who was outside, opened the gate. And there she was,
forced like a bulb, her paper-white face prepared during the frigid,
dreary months of winter, in which each act of congress intensified
the light in that doomed bud. And then I knew
that as the moon drains radiance from the objects
it illuminates, with remembrance we prevent the dead
from operating through what we would otherwise not do.
Although clues abound, I realised too late that History had
gone into reverse. Time is its own undoing and we, as shadows
from the past, are cast by something up ahead. It is already over.
Seen through a long delay we’ve yet to find an image for,
the universe collapses and oblivion, although seemingly to come,
is now our element. I felt the force of her and understood
how she falls backwards into the abyss and I—like one
reaching into my first memories—am pulled in with her.
The drowned man on the beach, pumped to force the essence out,
made death itself miraculous and, in how it was performed,
theatrically fake. The chest, splayed and compressed—a bellows
when they turned him—squirting brackish waters from his mouth;
I saw the face of a fountain statue spitting, the sea personified.
Archaic then, it sagged as they sat it up, the human part absent.
Enthralled by powers in the undertow, he rises from
my depths, engulfing me with knowledge of the flesh.
In summer heat to honour Mab, the fairy queen, the Royal Hunt
with sundry beasts rising and falling and there they are—turning
in the blur—a lacquered horse, a cheerful dad, imago antelope and
golden car where Brenda, bound within the dress that shows each fold,
now lurid under lights, with painted lips, accelerates the image with
her passing. Pearls or berries where the woodwork is so adorned.
On the edge of the abyss she waits for no shepherd. The tangent
nerve from this nulled form voids the shadow on the marshes.
It was the 1960s and, in those days, we didn’t know we laboured
to maintain an old aesthetic, linking the attractive to the good;
the grateful, governed through Imperial measures in subordinate
orders too complex to be consciously detected, symbolised what
they denied: that empires falling between states create a new
aesthetic order. I put down my kaleidoscope and looked about.
The women in the living room, pausing when they dropped a stitch,
smiled at me oblivious of what is left when love moves on.
The smoker, featured by the flaring match, shone in contrast
to the dark; but turning at the door, electric light overflowing,
his face was all shadow. I prefer old fashioned things, the way
the world gets in between the pages of a book. The cowslip marks
the place and the stained page retains a semblance of its flowering.
And now I see her exactly as she was in 1974, on the screen,
crossing the Buttlands, honoured by a prize, following the queen
she still outshines in a present tense that isn’t there to touch.
We had gone to the Labyrinth, with all its connotations, to see
the Perseids and, stumbling with no light where wanton youth
may dance in early summer, waited. Tradition, percipient, identifies
and raises into consciousness the necessary forms. Whatever comes,
in the void, we’ll face it when we must. Above the M3,
a vein of light moves through the murk within which lurks the
monstrous serpent and the hero who, as the sparks begin to fly
from the chaos of creation, lights terrifying spaces from afar.
The star shining through the clouds insists but I deferred when Time,
personified, invoked in me the restless dead. He opened the gates
whilst I was sleeping. Grainy and indistinct, the silent Maenads,
enraptured, dancing backwards, recede with the recently departed.
I see it now. In The Regal, figures of that Force Imperial flickered
in the blaze above the seats. And not through insight did I know
truth and its virtues from the cost, for neither felt nor often
understood, the soul isn’t anything but loss that goes unrecognised.
And then the grandeur of Death’s standard bearer, framed
by the breach, some risen half-rotted thing from which
she advances, lamenting, “What is death for?” I edge forward
as we accelerate, my face closer to the glass, seeing nothing
but fog and some dark absolute beyond the lighted mist
we journey through, leaving nothing behind, with no star now
but this, imaged at the centre, making light of emptiness
and what the body promises, a final disarticulated kiss.
Sepulchral, widely wandering, I went to the ford where the dead,
still in open rebellion then, encroached. And as God himself appeared
in the form of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, as at Frankenhausen
in April 1525, the self, I realised, is allegorical. Then Fortune,
moving the planets, encircled that omnipotence; and now she,
victorious, inducts via the incantatory command and I, absorbed,
walk behind the wheel, the queen above me on her throne, draped
in tarpaulins, her ladies looking back along the columns of the dead.
Beside the creek, a figure, crouching, moves half-lit in the vapours.
This ghost denoting my anxiety or, Arcadian emblem, a man working
on the marshes at low tide. Leached. Pallid November. Old ropes in
the mud. A boy filled with feminine allure, Miss World imagery,
mysteries and wars, running down Clubbs Lane to be absorbed
within the mass of children in the front three rows, at the pictures,
eager for futures predicted; and this not even briefly intuited present,
the loss of definition I look back from, beckoning from the screen.
Looking over my head to those behind, one lady holds out a flower
labelled Ioye; and the dead, reflecting, loudly pledge their loyalty
to her playfulness. The force that animates the corpse,
in lustres dolorous, smiles through the beauty she has robbed
from one not too long deceased; now, anything perceived becomes
a symbol linked to states that, generating motion or faltering,
indicate how mortal joys decay and why the dead still agitate.
Reliquias receptas. Through these songs, recovered from antiquity,
I also was drawn to reconsider what once I would not have,
that tradition denies the past, leaving those long gone forlorn.
Childish or innocent, unselfconscious love, memorialised, informs
the one who rises when there is no other option, lifeless and
cold, from the effigy of everything we have forgotten, or denied,
that body perilous within which all hopes and liberties are bound.
That first evening, the pilgrims gathered in the bar to celebrate
their victory. Our ancient dead beyond the ruined wall; bright
jollity and pretty girls and drink. Catching sight of himself,
the priest lifted onto the bar sees Death behind him as the spirit
lights his face. Thus unusually aware, the man might now confess
that this was transcendent joy, or nothing but a harmless kiss,
as he reflects, seeing them all as they’ll be judged
outside the pub when only the idea of love lives on.
As I sat reading quaint hermetic verse, a hair pressed between
the pages, tickling my hand, moved me to inspect the place where,
as in some ambush, it was caught. And so, much like a trap,
the book lay open. To know what justified this low device
I ventured in and lost myself, primordial, amongst the leaves.
Amidst Honters with hornes and their hounds, the hind, desolate,
fell as thai halowyd hi hi full joyful, whilst ‘drery Dethe’, drawn
there by its cries, unmoved by what he saw, looked down on me.
Summoned, the witness explains how the man, unsuspected
by others, left his lodging to go at night on Stiffkey marshes.
He raised his torch above a submarine form. Surfacing, the poem
recalls the great marine serpents of the past and the watcher--
a schoolgirl in this version—loyal to an Empire otherwise engaged,
raises the alarm. It lifts its head and History occults within her
glamour whilst in him the essence of tradition is betrayal.
Briefly lit against the dark, she crouches lest he turn and look.
I saw the maiden lift her skirts to Death and thought how I’d
give anything to crack the hourglass and pick up the scythe;
untethering that dirty bitch from her ironic pose, unleashing
a traditional lament, I’d love her. But now you, returning, eclipse
what I thought I’d want and all my wished for pleasures, poised
to take their place in me, become the shambles I would rather
not consider; avoided intimacies, love displaced and all that
living might imply. Now, fold the hands and gently close the eyes.
Melisende and Blanche, and Margaret of Burgundy, and Isabella,
then twelve years old, and Eleanor of Aquitaine; those maculating
figures of romance. It was how I had imagined myself, passive
and exposed, the creature looking back at me, caught whilst
sorting through her things. The bust of some classic beauty
now unseen but famous once—the body, statuesque I thought,
and queenly, but for those puerile hips—and these I checked
against my own, her watered-satin basque like a salvaged torso.
Lopped off at the crown, the trees that flanked the church
propped up an image: where matter stacked against the light
cast shadows making bodies dense, a glimmer from the other side
drained substance from that dark interior. Corruption makes
the wicked stink but her body smells sweet. Pulled back
the hood to see the head within the shroud; in deep enduring
sleep the monarch, rooted in the body politic, signified that love,
despite the rot that people think, is always messy and profound.
It was late and the shadows of low things stretched long as I,
knowing who was outside, opened the gate. And there she was,
forced like a bulb, her paper-white face prepared during the frigid,
dreary months of winter, in which each act of congress intensified
the light in that doomed bud. And then I knew
that as the moon drains radiance from the objects
it illuminates, with remembrance we prevent the dead
from operating through what we would otherwise not do.
Although clues abound, I realised too late that History had
gone into reverse. Time is its own undoing and we, as shadows
from the past, are cast by something up ahead. It is already over.
Seen through a long delay we’ve yet to find an image for,
the universe collapses and oblivion, although seemingly to come,
is now our element. I felt the force of her and understood
how she falls backwards into the abyss and I—like one
reaching into my first memories—am pulled in with her.
The drowned man on the beach, pumped to force the essence out,
made death itself miraculous and, in how it was performed,
theatrically fake. The chest, splayed and compressed—a bellows
when they turned him—squirting brackish waters from his mouth;
I saw the face of a fountain statue spitting, the sea personified.
Archaic then, it sagged as they sat it up, the human part absent.
Enthralled by powers in the undertow, he rises from
my depths, engulfing me with knowledge of the flesh.
In summer heat to honour Mab, the fairy queen, the Royal Hunt
with sundry beasts rising and falling and there they are—turning
in the blur—a lacquered horse, a cheerful dad, imago antelope and
golden car where Brenda, bound within the dress that shows each fold,
now lurid under lights, with painted lips, accelerates the image with
her passing. Pearls or berries where the woodwork is so adorned.
On the edge of the abyss she waits for no shepherd. The tangent
nerve from this nulled form voids the shadow on the marshes.
It was the 1960s and, in those days, we didn’t know we laboured
to maintain an old aesthetic, linking the attractive to the good;
the grateful, governed through Imperial measures in subordinate
orders too complex to be consciously detected, symbolised what
they denied: that empires falling between states create a new
aesthetic order. I put down my kaleidoscope and looked about.
The women in the living room, pausing when they dropped a stitch,
smiled at me oblivious of what is left when love moves on.
The smoker, featured by the flaring match, shone in contrast
to the dark; but turning at the door, electric light overflowing,
his face was all shadow. I prefer old fashioned things, the way
the world gets in between the pages of a book. The cowslip marks
the place and the stained page retains a semblance of its flowering.
And now I see her exactly as she was in 1974, on the screen,
crossing the Buttlands, honoured by a prize, following the queen
she still outshines in a present tense that isn’t there to touch.
We had gone to the Labyrinth, with all its connotations, to see
the Perseids and, stumbling with no light where wanton youth
may dance in early summer, waited. Tradition, percipient, identifies
and raises into consciousness the necessary forms. Whatever comes,
in the void, we’ll face it when we must. Above the M3,
a vein of light moves through the murk within which lurks the
monstrous serpent and the hero who, as the sparks begin to fly
from the chaos of creation, lights terrifying spaces from afar.
The star shining through the clouds insists but I deferred when Time,
personified, invoked in me the restless dead. He opened the gates
whilst I was sleeping. Grainy and indistinct, the silent Maenads,
enraptured, dancing backwards, recede with the recently departed.
I see it now. In The Regal, figures of that Force Imperial flickered
in the blaze above the seats. And not through insight did I know
truth and its virtues from the cost, for neither felt nor often
understood, the soul isn’t anything but loss that goes unrecognised.
And then the grandeur of Death’s standard bearer, framed
by the breach, some risen half-rotted thing from which
she advances, lamenting, “What is death for?” I edge forward
as we accelerate, my face closer to the glass, seeing nothing
but fog and some dark absolute beyond the lighted mist
we journey through, leaving nothing behind, with no star now
but this, imaged at the centre, making light of emptiness
and what the body promises, a final disarticulated kiss.