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Arthur Terry
THREE LEMONS
Mild January. Beneath
the plentiful green air, things
today have lost their awkwardness,
nor is the place arid. Look:
three lemons, set
on the roughness of a slab.
Because they are soaked in sun
and you can consider
with neither doubt or haste
the metrical simplicity
which links them each to each,
do you believe they mean something?
Ravished heart,
renounce from now on,
be silent. You will not assimilate
the meeting of three lemons
on the roughness of a slab.
And you will make no protest
before you lose it.
No leap of recollection
will abolish the peaceful
way of dying
that memories have.
THESEUS
A single thread gilds
your dark memory,
runs through the tapestries
in which you have figured.
Do you return?
Tread lightly,
and you will suffer your eyes
to follow the pattern
down the ancient corridors.
You travel through gaps
of successive fear,
if only there flicker
images of faith
that, somehow identical,
someone you could say
was yourself, continually
walks beside you.
You will not recover
the density of your shadow,
the fluid purpose
with which you betray,
until you emerge where,
in the light of the sun
("which one? which one?" calls
the crow), gathered together,
the women await you.
MIST
Long before to them you are old and grey,
the shadow of my cloud upon the expanse
of heath and fields of crops - your own domain -
like a thin layer of ash, invisible
to all the rest, though not as yet to you:
when one pale, final wind sweeps it away,
its shape will curl and shudder in farewell
and leave you to recall an ancient chill.
I know how, then, the sun's wide avenues
will stretch before them, when, in the manifold
surprise of noble leaves, their ears are pierced
by the deft, infernal flute of your high noon.
I know it, now my mist obscures the depths
of your first early morning light. All hope
of rising gone, I tear myself on briars
and fill with tears the rain-scored slopes of doubt.
FLORAL
That Spring of nineteen fifty two, the girls
all wore white blouses and green cardigans,
and in the streets we heard the sudden rustling
of flowers and leaves in which there lay concealed
the dark rind of the almond trees. And I
had just turned thirty, which I also felt
was premature. No wind, thiough, can condemn
those years. There they remain, implausible
and lean, beneath succeeding ones that come
to heap new layers on that distracted time,
the astonsihed whiteness and the bitter green,
and that tiny breeze along the endless streets
of girls and flowers and leaves, the thought of which
strays off, in sheer confusion, towards the future,
turns to desire, and memory grows unripe.
ALTRA MATER
It is too big, the field
of bracken tossed by the wind
from off the sea.
Here, such an open place?
And why so flat? And the feet
tread carefully,
lest a hole trip them
suddenly, like a snake.
And why so silent? The eyes,
clawed by the sun, spy
shadows. Where is she, the terrible one,
who has scared off the voices?
Until the shed of zinc
and mossy wood
which comes to meet you
like a dark beggarwoman,
wild with sores (you, why return,
old woman, the place of fear
was you?) opens its belly
stuffed with metal foetuses
(all the evil you bore inside,
you have performed):
left-over bombs
A lizard vibrates.
The grass devours the rust.
No one comed out. They have ceased to guard
these piles of refuse.
The dry crust of memories
breaks apart.
A civil war.
A few poor aerodromes.
END OF THE WORLD
I can repeat the phrase which has carried off
your memory. That's all I know of you.
This insistent stream of words,
continually rising, is dirtying the banks
of the life I thought was real.
The tedious, stony earth on which
I walk, and the trees which strike
my eyes with a delicate branch,
so vividly malign, convincing
with the best of evidence, with tears,
it seems that they are nothing. They give themselves
to the grey expanse, streaked
with pale, sickening sperm, and float
without image, or sink forever.
Everything makes sense, but only sense, everything is
as I have said. Now I know nothing of you.
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