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[Pearse Hutchinson: gedichten]
Concession to swans
Behind the maids and the coats of mail,
Is it in silent rushes now pursuing
some timid image of rejected grail,
that waits upon the water,
Or is it fast asleep, having heard so often
this king who sits beneath a perfect tree
and lifts a resonant voice above
the patient audience that knows a fighter
and man of many words when it sees one?
Behind the shields and the fat golden tresses
and the fat nacre dresses,
what is the swan doing? -
as the baby-faced hero in silver storms
in the forest of women's arms and warriors' arms?
Is it rehearsing, in its solitude,
the legendary cargo it must bear,
heavy as Lohengrin, upon its back:
the weeping three in the north sea, the crude
sexual appetites of leading gods, the fear
of being itself transformed - man, god, or duck?
Or is the swan, behind the rows of extras,
engaged in prayer to poets of an isthmus
to break words over it so that tomorrow
it may become an owl, and shake the sorrow
of nineteen hundred scooped-out symbols
into forgotten water and watch them float
like empty ice-cream cartons toward the throat
of some clean-limbed anthologist, that gambles
on finding paste pearls at morning in diluted water?
Tho it is now perhaps too late
to call that Mexican very great.
But, at the end, surprisingly,
the chorus having backed away,
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the swan comes in, like certain kinds of music.
It must have left the scene - to have a quick one, make
fondled by some misguided stage-hand? Play
is something swans have never understood
with ease. Perhaps they would
if we had less admiringly
in squat ink-bottles, fanlights, and in parks
put swans - honors that we have not accorded sharks.
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Rubén Darío in the Paseo Sagrera
Searching, in patios and cloisters,
in patios owned by aristos
and cloisters owned by monks,
I, that would gladly be rich but
that hate God and the tonsured doctors
who keep him lingering alive
but might not find it easy to refuse
searching in patios and cloisters
for beauty like a tourist for things about which
to say to his wife: ‘C'est joli, ça!’
found, in the end, what I needed,
when from the flowers toward the palmtrees
the unsparing likeness of an ugly man.
Palma de Mallorca: 2 October 1951
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A grain of grass
At first (when he arose in that compact room,
full of us, packed with our set pet positions,
and said: ‘The thing is not to see’,
and, after the boredom of some, the not quite saving
indignation of others, and the dísgusted, dísbelieving
turning back of the rest to the set pet
common wisdom attitudes of the glass,
went on: ‘The thing, I said,
is rather - The thing, I said, is too -
not to see more than: it is to see:
a grain in a world of sand,
of books, punks, drinks, leaf, uranium, snow,
or sand. It is to see Heaven,
my sweet pleasure principals of smoky schools
of poker, thought, poetry, and serious drinking,
or in itself; never in a wild camelia, catastrophe, or caligula,
and never in a tame one, or in itself.
A grain was not good enough for him,
nor should it be for us; nor a world believed in.’),
at first, when he arose, we did not believe him.
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An act of contrition
Forgive me, life, and everyone
these words enter deep and close like the sunlight
into a summer evening just before it sleeps,
and everyone they glint off giving casual pleasure,
like the white light of a roaring noon
on the broken bottles for foiling fun
along the wall of a skinflint orchard:
Forgive me for all nausea, distaste, revulsion
from human beings ugly with filth or distortion,
for all mind-wanting to pick them up,
like anything semen-soiled and like dead slugs,
between little finger and thumb, and flush
them down the john in the hall.
Small old women, thin-white-haired, insufficiently veiled,
noses cancer-cancelled; lead-poisoned mauve-skins;
people with jaundice, the dense color of their necks
an off-the-mark parody of the most wonderful, yellow;
children (fond of me) born with one hand
fingerless, a raw red mound of flesh, not even round;
club-footed clumpers, with no Byronic act;
prinked, primping, presumed prickless
petits mignons, witty with women in swoon-voices,
handing round patisserie and balancing die demi-tasse
with incredible skill, but roving over only
the golden go-boys with globe-eyed glances;
seedy, shabby, balding, unsuccesful,
slightly shamefaced and shifty perverts,
like the middle-aged moneyless one in the gods at the Gaiety,
that slid an unshone black shoe
genteelly gingerly around about in the dark;
the gawky ogánachs in their giggle-stupidity,
crass as the arse of Balaam's classic ass,
and as unaware of Mozart as they are of pain;
whores - like the one I caressed, an Easter Monday night,
with my drunken arms, the one whose prodigiously white
face looked soft enough to crumble away at a finger-flick -
white and soft like blancmange, marshmallow,
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the blob that grows on the mouth of a stout-bottle,
when, opened, it's left over-long unpoured;
the harmless idiot: the duine-le-Dia; paralytics -
especially those on the alert, when they catch
our snow-and-granite gaze - or is it worse with those
who never look at anyone, who take good care
to remain officially unaware
of the watchers they could so vindictively convict?
I write down my hope that they forgive me,
watching my own exquisite long soft hand,
supple and assured, cover the patient paper
with a script, for the elegance and legibility of which
I am, among friends and acquaintances, properly famous.
An increasingly ugly young man, with slovenly habits,
and less simple than a stallion in sex-matters,
I write down today my sorrow and shame.
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