I Climb The Knoll, 1970

Ladies and gentlethings, Ezra Pound.

If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love

If I were tickled by the rub of love,
A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
If the red tickle as the cattle calve
Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
I would not fear the apple nor the flood
Nor the bad blood of spring.
Shall it be male or female? say the cells,
And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
If I were tickled by the hatching hair,
The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
The itch of man upon the baby’s thigh,
I would not fear the gallows nor the axe
Nor the crossed sticks of war.
Shall it be male or female? say the fingers
That chalk the walls with greet girls and their men.
I would not fear the muscling-in of love
If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
I would not fear the devil in the loin
Nor the outspoken grave.
If I were tickled by the lovers’ rub
That wipes away not crow’s-foot nor the lock
Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,
Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
The sea of scums could drown me as it broke
Dead on the sweethearts’ toes.
This world is half the devil’s and my own,
Daft with the drug that’s smoking in a girl
And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone,
And all the herrings smelling in the sea,
I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail
Wearing the quick away.
And that’s the rub, the only rub that tickles.
The knobbly ape that swings along his sex
From damp love-darkness and the nurse’s twist
Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,
Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast
Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six
Feet in the rubbing dust.
And what’s the rub? Death’s feather on the nerve?
Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?
My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?
The words of death are dryer than his stiff,
My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
I would be tickled by the rub that is:
Man be my metaphor.
- Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas fetish, continued. Last one, I promise.

A process in the weather of the heart

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.
A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.
A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.
A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.
A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.
- Dylan Thomas

I’ve got a Dylan Thomas bee on my bonnet lately. I have no idea why. Posting poetry is a very newbie-blogger gimmick, but what the hell.

I’ve only had three cups of coffee today. The caffeine levels in my bloodstream are dangerously low.

Endymion

Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Coyle:

Earth, despite all the astronomers say, has not one moon but many.
All save the one called the Moon are inhabited, all have distinctive,
frankly fantastical climates and landscapes. Initiates know this,
meteorologists, farmers, sportsmen and almanac keepers
know what was once, in the antediluvian world, common knowledge.
They have conspired for six thousand years, now, to keep it a secret,
fearing that we, if we knew of inhabited worlds in near orbit,
might be so taken with them we’d neglect our terrestrial business.
And they are right. Having unearthed their secret I’ve found myself growing
arrogant, distant, bored with the every day details of living,
pale and exhausted from gazing all night at the heavens. Oh stranger,
stranger whom I, both by chance and design, entrust with the secret,
do not take lightly my warning; do not believe for a moment
you can believe in such things without gradually growing inhuman.
Think of the Harvest Moon, patchworked with wheatfields, orchards and vineyards;
think of the Hunter’s Moon, teeming with prey unafraid of the arrow;
think of the Hunger Moon, peopled by figures from Giacometti;
think of the Flower Moon, the Ice Moon, the Strawberry Moon and the others.
You, if you ever return to your life, will return as a stranger.
The Moons of Earth from The God Of This World To His Prophet

I’ve been limping back to my book, a little painfully. It’s a busy week at work -it’s always a busy week, but this week we’ve got a whole thing going on, complete with external consultant -don’t ask- plus an AGM to cap it off on Friday, and a big contract we’re pitching for Thursday. Sigh. As if that wasn’t enough, last Friday I hadda go get my head examined.

Bada-boom.

It all started with the tentative diagnosis of migraine. The pills weren’t working and the blood tests came back normal, except that I’m apparently a mutant -I may be carrying the genetic trait for thalassemia, though as far as the headaches are concerned that seems neither here nor there. The doctor suggests a CT scan. I say okay. Always being one to leap headlong into things, I have the CT scan done immediately. An incredibly ancient crone-nurse jabs me with an unnecessarily large needle. Very extremely ancient, with the kind of face that has three times as much skin as necessary. I have my head strapped to a conveyor belt and stuck into a doughnut for twenty minutes. It makes whirring and clicking noises. Sometimes you wonder with machinery like this: to be perfectly blunt, it all looks so fake. Sure, you’re zapping my brain with many x-rays. You’re not really just using the same brain pictures you’ve been using for everybody for the last fifteen years.

“Close your eyes. Now open your eyes. Don’t move your head.” says the doughnut operator.

I open my eyes and there’s a little sign on the inside of the doughnut that says DO NOT STARE DIRECTLY INTO APERTURE and now I can’t remember if the last thing he said was “close your eyes” or “open your eyes”, and for a moment I panic, knowing that I’m about to go blind and it’s all a horrible mistake.

After it’s all over and I’m in a cab going home, there’s a sudden pain in my chest from where I imagine my heart is. It lasts for nearly half an hour. I have a cup of coffee and try to breathe deeply and -incongruously with the last- have a cigarette or two, and it goes away. I chalk it up to stress. I like it because it is bitter and it is my heart -who was that, Stephen Crane?

I’m not the only one stressed by the proceedings. “I really wish the doctor hadn’t used the T word,” N. says. N. is, in the parlance of our times, my special lady friend. Even if the context is on the lines of “let’s rule out the T word with a scan, eh?” there are times when you just don’t want to hear the T word.

If that brain scan report comes back with bad news, I will title my next blog post “Goodbye Cruel World”. Heh heh. If not, it’ll probably end up being something utterly banal, and I’ll be out four and a half grand for the damn CT scan for no reason at all. You can’t win.

Yes, getting your brain scanned is fucking expensive.

The Bill Coyle is via Fungible Convictions. Dramatic re-enactments of brains being scanned are via my unreliable memory.

Interlude with Dylan Thomas

Reading I Fellowed Sleep:

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planing-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept, I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

‘My fathers’ globe knocks on its nave and sings.’
‘This that we tread was, too, your fathers’ land.’
‘But we tread bears the angelic gangs,
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.
‘These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.’

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
An old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers’ ghost is climbing in the rain.

Now, I know I came across this particular link while reading my feeds -but I’ve had the tab open for a little while and I can’t figure out who the OP was. Also, this is an awkward moment to discover that there’s no full-text search in Google Reader.

(Update: it’s via Mind Hacks. Thanks, Technorati!)