Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy Read Online Free Page B

stones and then the world.
    If you should dip your hand in,
    your wrist would ache immediately,
    your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
    as if the water were a transmutation of fire
    that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
    If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
    then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
    It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
    dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
    drawn from the cold hard mouth
    of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
    forever, flowing and drawn, and since
    our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. 
    ELIZABETH BISHOP

Snow
    The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
    Spawning snow and pink roses against it
    Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
    World is suddener than we fancy it. 
    World is crazier and more of it than we think,
    Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
    A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
    The drunkenness of things being various. 
    And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
    Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
    On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
    There is more than glass between the snow and the huge
         roses.
    LOUIS MACNEICE

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
    Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels .
    SEFERIS , Mythistorema
    ( for J.G. Farrell )
    Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
    Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
    To a slow clock of condensation,
    An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
    Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft,
    Indian compounds where the wind dances
    And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
    Lime crevices behind rippling rain-barrels,
    Dog corners for bone burials;
    And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford, 
    Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
    Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
    A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
    This is the one star in their firmament
    Or frames a star within a star.
    What should they do there but desire?
    So many days beyond the rhododendrons
    With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
    They have learnt patience and silence
    Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood. 
    They have been waiting for us in a foetor
    Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
    Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
    Of the expropriated mycologist.
    He never came back, and light since then
    Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
    Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
    And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
    A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
    Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

    There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
    Into the earth that nourished it;
    And nightmares, born of these and the grim
    Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
    Those nearest the door grow strong –
    ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
    The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
    Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
    For their deliverance, have been so long
    Expectant that there is left only the posture. 
    A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
    Poor preparation for the cracking lock
    And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
    Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
    Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
    And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
    At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
    Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
    Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
    They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith. 
    They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
    To do something, to speak on their behalf
    Or at least not to close the door again.
    Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
    ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
    ‘Let the god not abandon us
    Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
    We too had our lives to live.
    You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
    Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’ 
    DEREK MAHON

Unwittingly
    I’ve