The Assent

A Sonnet Sequence

For Fernando Maza, painter

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Without form there can be no emptiness,
Without emptiness there can be no form.
Heart Sutra, Buddhist Scripture

I

I focus on the darkness in the mind
And find a fractured coastline, islands, waves
Of colour. Yet I might as well be blind,
The landscape shifts with thought and misbehaves:
The vision that I have is strangely fixed,
So that with every step the walking eye
Goes ever further into stillness, hexed
And spelled to the same spot, undone thereby,
So anchored to the sameness in the shift
Of time, of tide, of travel, and of speech
That everything stands empty in its form,
A formulaic world, a quantum beach
On which I wander, combing sand and foam
For clues to the way out, and the way home.

II

But those who look for truth have no repose,
And those who look for love, no recompense
Which can be stated in accountant's prose
Or numbered in the annals of good sense;
Like ships which pass beyond the edge of night
And reach out from illusion into space
To find reflection where an island was
And mirages uncharted in its place
They have no foothold in this world of trade
And small betrayals in the everyday,
For love's truth does not rest in lusts that fade
Nor is it given for promises to pay;
So many, when they speak of love, must lie
Because they do not yield themselves thereby.

III

Beside myself? Well, there is self beside,
You are another who has been so given,
Has won and lost, been used and cast aside,
Known Dante's hell, through which he walked to heaven,
In search of Beatrice, the exile's hope,
As you must be for me, and in due course
The fool's refrain, the prophet's dream, the leap
Of inspiration in its measured verse
That must defy the facts, refuse the mere
Banality of age, and place, and time
To make another world beyond despair,
Another body full of life in rhyme
Where my desire is neither wrong nor sad,
But a great love to drive a poet mad.

IV

There is no future in a broken vow,
A broken promise, like a broken lock
Allows for entrance by the high and low,
The gates of reason hanging loose from shock,
All trueness bent, the footings of the mind
Unstepped and shattered, so the open wound
Cries out like a loud mouth for hands to bind
And sense to stop it, living, breathing band
To tie up time and make the days process
Where older habits sunder and remind
Of past contents and broken happiness;
A bandage lust to dress up and to blind
Those eyes too wide, those nights too white, those days
Too much alone with error of one's ways.

V

The contemplative life is without let
Or hindrance to the numinous, the fire
Of angels. If they have not touched you yet,
Be still more quiet, be silent in desire,
And meditate till every wish shall burn
With a clear flame, with brushing tongues of light
That spring from the beginning and the end
Of every life and thought, intense delight
Which licks the body at the edge of death,
Removes us from ourselves in sexual heat
And leaves us crying at the end of breath,
Erased by a design far more complete;
I wait upon your gift, and cannot rise
Without retouching, where there are no eyes.

VI

Perception without sense; here matter shakes
And trembles in defeat, coherent speech
Collapses into moans, conception breaks
In sweet and bitter looks of each to each
As conscience in the dying animal
Makes one of two, and struggles to conclude
The Tantric genesis that fills our fall
From separateness in urgent interlude
Where all games lose except the brutal flight
Of flesh inciting flesh to race and rise
Up the blind mountains of immortal night,
To climb a Himalaya of warm thighs
And singing nerves, where fission once a man
And a young woman joins with the unseen.

VII

The other shore, then, after all is done
And said, is without murmur or complaint
For what is perfect is a finished sun
And shines forever, without blot or taint;
We journey to completion and return
Again to where we were, but somewhat changed,
Reborn from the great fire in which we burn
However else we fail, become estranged;
Though if we would be graceful, learn to dance
With such renewal in the living flame
Then there are marriages beyond romance
And sacraments that stand and have a name;
There are such promises as shall defy
All usage in this world of forms that die.

VIII

The formal dying and informal birth
Of something without limits is my wish,
Without conditions full of dust and earth,
A trust renewed in awe and rendered flesh
Where there is no more choice but only grace,
The honest drawing from the given day,
The trust that comes from living face to face
Without the churnings of some roundelay
Habitual in its spin, the word that kills,
The slight that numbs, the absentness of taste,
The going out with others to excess
And coming back to lay the hearth to waste;
There is so little time, it should be spent
With feeling and not drowned in sentiment.

IX

You have another; others will appear
When things are out of focus, out of sight,
And reason is not balanced in the war
Of justice with the sources of delight;
The broken gate, the sundry visitors
But no more visitation by that heat
Which memory reproaches, absent cause
Of all this searching, to a limping beat
When silence is the cure, and pause
For observation of the middle ways,
Not taking any gifts of purloined fare,
Of faith as of resources, since love stays
Only where there is freedom, and the air
Goes where it will, untainted by despair.

X

The poet Sappho fell, as I still fall
In love with someone ancient, an old soul
And when he would not touch her, fetched a pall
And, wrapping herself in it, climbed a hill
And leapt to plunge in earnest to her death.
I do not need to jump to die like that;
Already I have felt that icy breath
That makes the blood run cold, refusing heat
Because I am refused, shut out, betrayed
Back to the old continuous present pace
Which travels without being moved, the staid
And laboured desert empty of his face,
But that is past, and what your presence holds
Is for the future, as your will unfolds.

XI

Each time I see you it is like the first;
My heart stops, and I feel that I must die
Or faint at least a little. To be kissed
Is far too much to hope for, since nearby
She waits for you, and so I am surpassed
Before you pass me by, before you come
Anywhere near me. Solitude at last
Reclaims me, when I take your shadow home,
An aged angel, plenitude in grey,
A man for every season of this world,
Whose glance enlightens with an inner day,
Whose touch remakes the hand that it has held;
I cannot have you, all that I can keep
Is this pale image to disturb my sleep.

XII

Come live with me, my friend, and be my love,
My only love without another's care,
And I will give you all the time I have
Apart from what the Muse requires, to spare
Till substance ends and we are made to part
By forces that no mortal can deny,
Except we shine immortal in our art,
And in that I may help you by and by,
If only as a guard to what small peace
This age affords us for our work to flow
Unhindered, for our minds to find release
And pleasure, whilst our bodies still can know
Such joy, before our antique, ancient lust
Is turned to paint and ink, defying dust.

XIII

But you are not my love, and cannot be,
If friendship suffers from the truth, then so
Be it, but since I cannot see to see,
So near and yet so far have I to go
To find you in your self and not in trust
To someone else, who also states her claim
To love you, whilst I do not yield to lust
Alone to be more lonely in its name,
Nor can I reach to take what is not mine
Since stolen kisses have a bitter taste,
And must, respecting what I hold divine,
Refrain from laying others' hearts to waste
Who though I do not know them, soon will tell
What kind of woman sends them to this hell.

XIV

But nothing lasts, and therein lies my hope,
My only hope, that changing, things may change,
That she will keep her vows, renew her step
Along the straight and narrow. Rich and strange,
The ways of women in their later life
As beauty gathers in irrelevance
And leaves them with the diet and the knife,
The paint-box and the salve to keep romance
Alive within the mirror and the bed.
I will not last that long, I do not need
Cosmetic thoughts and tricks to keep my head,
The furies and the surgeon come to bleed
My life away, I have a quarter-age
And then my name is painted from the page.

XV

Death does not frighten me since he has come
More often to my bedside in the past
Than others know of, I have walked him home
And kissed him on the lips. The icy blast
Of Titan's breath that takes all sense away
Has filled my lungs and stopped my mouth, where sight
Inverts and sees another night and day,
An emptiness filled up with solid light,
Another universe with other rules,
Whose substance is what seems most transient here,
The love and understanding we poor fools
Reject out of our ignorance and fear;
But if I die, with never having known
Your love, your touch, I truly die alone.

XVI

I live alone, I die alone, I am
A singularity of broken parts,
Without establishment or private home,
A multiple of disciplines and arts,
A renaissance of spirit without soul,
A creature of all ages and all times,
A lover, and a lunatic and fool,
A formula for ecstasy that rhymes,
A traveler without a place to sleep
And call my own, except it be your bed,
My own is not secure, I cannot keep
More than a knapsack by its shaky head;
I am about to leave, I know not where,
But Paris is a city that is fair.

XVII

The vast electric city never sleeps,
Her wires are full of chattering and sighs,
Her multicoloured jewels are lights she weeps
Like tears all night, until dawn fills the skies,
We are her children and her symbiotes
Who serve her in our millions till we die,
Small busy teeming worker-ants and motes
Of brilliant fire that murmur quickly by;
We are as numerous as heaven's stars
Set in an earthly, concrete firmament,
A neon rainbow grid of shops and bars
Where lives and deaths and loves and hates are spent,
A paradise of business that's hell
Unless you will be there for me as well.

XVIII

You are not there for me, but for the world
Of art and painting your own hands have made,
Each stroke of brush and finger, pencil held
To gauge a distance or to scribble shade
In evocation of a curve or wall,
An ampersand implying the extent
To which we do not know this earth at all,
To which all visions still are innocent,
Because still ignorant of what will come
To call upon us in sequential time,
Whilst memory enjoins the mind to roam
Projecting meanings on primeval slime
And broken masonry beyond its days
Except to painters, drawing out their gaze.

XIX

And as it is above, so here below
In little as in large, in woman, man
Specific gravities pull down the slow
And speed the quick towards the golden mean
The middle way, the moderate, gentle beat
That hearts have in repose, that sleepers breathe
When free of dreams, that meditators note
When watching how the body tends to seethe
With revenants when at rest, a flood of hosts
Of idle wandering thoughts, with ample space
Between them for clear sight, between the ghosts
Of our desire the void that leads to grace;
But they are legion; demons don't confess
Between our heavens and hells lies emptiness.

XX

Ah, Bacchus, Dionysus, poisoner
Of agony and deadener of pain,
The healer and the salve of troubled souls,
Dark conqueror, become my love again
And in the mansions of your purple night
Lend me a bed in which to make my peace,
A fond confessor who will share delight
In your communion wine of sweet release
And balm of velvety forgetfulness
Where all that is beloved is at ease
In warm confusion, liquid happiness
Where I may breathe his name, and shed a tear
Of passion without shame, and without fear.

XXI

To not take stuff that clouds the mind, to speak
Always the truth, and not to bear false tales,
To exercise alertness, stay awake
While all the species dreams its fairytales
That lead the sleepwalker to the world's rim
To try for flight, without a pair of wings
To chase the phantoms of Elysium
Into the black abyss of nameless things;
This I have sworn, and now my myriad lies
Swarm round my face and buzz with foetid lust
To enter by my nose, and ears, and eyes
To repossess their birthplace. They insist
There is no truth within this head of mine,
Except that found most certainly in wine.

XXII

Here I lie naked. Others' barefaced lies
Cannot compare to what I do and will
To show my spirit to your painter's eyes,
To strip my heart, and openly reveal
The emptiness that I would have you fill
With vision, and the dramas that rehearse
In private theatres where the curtains fall
Upon a small, expanding universe
Which plays for you alone, and works as well
As any spectacle without an eye
To watch and criticize, to stop and tell
The actor what rings true, and what's awry
In love's revealing, the eternal game
Of our undressing, costumed in your name.

Continued—»