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Swimming Chenango Lake
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CHARLES TOMLINSON
Swimming Chenango Lake
SELECTED POEMS
edited by David Morley
Dedication
to Brenda Tomlinson
When you wrote to tell of your arrival,
It was midnight, you said, and knew
In wishing me Goodnight that I
Would have been long abed. And that was true.
I was dreaming your way for you, my dear,
Freed of the mist that followed the snow here,
And yet it followed you (within my dream, at least)
Nor could I close my dreaming eye
To the thought of further snow
Widening the landscape as it sought
The planes and ledges of your moorland drive.
I saw a scene climb up around you
That whiteness had marked out and multiplied
With a thousand touches beyond the green
And calculable expectations summer in such a place
Might breed in one. My eye took in
Close-to, among the vastnesses you passed unharmed,
The shapes the frozen haze hung on the furze
Like scattered necklaces the frost had caught
Half-unthreaded in their fall. It must have been
The firm prints of your midnight pen
Over my fantasia of snow, told you were safe,
Turning the threats from near and far
To images of beauty we might share
As we shared my dream that now
Flowed to the guiding motion of your hand,
As though through the silence of propitious dark
It had reached out to touch me across sleeping England.
from ‘Winter Journey’, The Return (1987)
Acknowledgements
The editor thanks Anne Ashworth, Ian Brinton, John Greening, Peter Larkin, Michael Schmidt, Justine and Juliet Tomlinson, and William Wootton for their contributions to the realisation of this book. The largest debt of gratitude is to Brenda Tomlinson, without whom it would not exist.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
to Brenda Tomlinson
Acknowledgements
SELECTED POEMS
Prologue
Swimming Chenango Lake
Relations and Contraries (1951)
Poem
The Necklace (1955, 1966)
Aesthetic
Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting
Sea Change
The Art of Poetry
Fiascherino
Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960)
The Atlantic
Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole
How Still the Hawk
Glass Grain
Tramontana at Lerici
Paring the Apple
More Foreign Cities
A Meditation on John Constable
Farewell to Van Gogh
Cézanne at Aix
At Holwell Farm
Civilities of Lamplight
Fire in a Dark Landscape
A Peopled Landscape (1963)
Winter-Piece
The Farmer’s Wife: At Fostons Ash
The Hand at Callow Hill Farm
The Picture of J.T. in a Prospect of Stone
Up at La Serra
Head Hewn with an Axe
American Scenes and Other Poems (1966)
The Snow Fences
A Given Grace
Arizona Desert
Arroyo Seco
Ute Mountain
Maine Winter
The Well
On a Mexican Straw Christ
The Oaxaca Bus
Weeper in Jalisco
Small Action Poem
The Way of a World (1969)
Prometheus
Eden
Assassin
Against Extremity
The Way of a World
Descartes and the Stove
On the Principle of Blowclocks
Words for the Madrigalist
Arroyo Hondo
A Sense of Distance
The Fox Gallery
To be Engraved on the Skull of a Cormorant
Oppositions
Skullshapes
The Chances of Rhyme
Written on Water (1972)
On Water
Stone Speech
Variation on Paz
The Compact: At Volterra
Ariadne and the Minotaur
Hawks
Autumn Piece
Event
The Way In and Other Poems (1974)
The Way In
At Stoke
The Marl Pits
Class
The Rich
After a Death
Hyphens
Hill Walk
The Shaft (1978)
Charlotte Corday
Marat Dead
For Danton
Casarola
The Faring
A Night at the Opera
Mushrooms
The Gap
In Arden
The Shaft
Translating the Birds
The Flood (1981)
Snow Signs
Their Voices Rang
For Miriam
Hay
Under the Bridge
San Fruttuoso
Above Carrara
Fireflies
Instead of an Essay
The Littleton Whale
The Flood
Notes from New York and Other Poems (1984)
Above Manhattan
All Afternoon
At the Trade Center
To Ivor Gurney
Black Brook
Poem for my Father
The Beech
Night Fishers
The Sound of Time
The Return (1987)
In the Borghese Gardens
In San Clemente
The Return
Catacomb
In Memory of George Oppen
At Huexotla
A Rose for Janet
Ararat
Annunciations (1989)
Annunciation
The Plaza
The House in the Quarry
At the Autumn Equinox
The Butterflies
Chance
The Door in the Wall (1992)
Paris in Sixty-Nine
Blaubeuren
The Door in the Wall
Geese Going South
Picking Mushrooms by Moonlight
Jubilation (1995)
Down from Colonnata
Jubilación
The Shadow
Walks
The Vineyard above the Sea (1999)
The Vineyard Above the Sea
Drawing Down the Moon
The First Death
In Memoriam Ángel Crespo (1926–1995)
By Night
Skywriting (2003)
Skywriting
Death of a Poet
Cotswold Journey
If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper
Cracks in the Universe (2006)
Above the City
Bread and Stone
A Rose from Fronteira
The Holy Man
Eden
Epilogue
The Door
Afterword by David Morley
About the Author
Carcanet Classics include
Copyright
Selected Poems
Prologue
Swimming Chenango Lake
Winter will bar the swimmer soon.
He reads the water’s autumnal hesitations
A wealth
of ways: it is jarred,
It is astir already despite its steadiness,
Where the first leaves at the first
Tremor of the morning air have dropped
Anticipating him, launching their imprints
Outwards in eccentric, overlapping circles.
There is a geometry of water, for this
Squares off the clouds’ redundances
And sets them floating in a nether atmosphere
All angles and elongations: every tree
Appears a cypress as it stretches there
And every bush that shows the season,
A shaft of fire. It is a geometry and not
A fantasia of distorting forms, but each
Liquid variation answerable to the theme
It makes away from, plays before:
It is a consistency, the grain of the pulsating flow.
But he has looked long enough, and now
Body must recall the eye to its dependence
As he scissors the waterscape apart
And sways it to tatters. Its coldness
Holding him to itself, he grants the grasp,
For to swim is also to take hold
On water’s meaning, to move in its embrace
And to be, between grasp and grasping, free.
He reaches in-and-through to that space
The body is heir to, making a where
In water, a possession to be relinquished
Willingly at each stroke. The image he has torn
Flows-to behind him, healing itself,
Lifting and lengthening, splayed like the feathers
Down an immense wing whose darkening spread
Shadows his solitariness: alone, he is unnamed
By this baptism, where only Chenango bears a name
In a lost language he begins to construe –
A speech of densities and derisions, of half-
Replies to the questions his body must frame
Frogwise across the all but penetrable element.
Human, he fronts it and, human, he draws back
From the interior cold, the mercilessness
That yet shows a kind of mercy sustaining him.
The last sun of the year is drying his skin
Above a surface a mere mosaic of tiny shatterings,
Where a wind is unscaping all images in the flowing obsidian
The going-elsewhere of ripples incessantly shaping.
from The Way of a World (1969)
Relations and Contraries (1951)
Poem
Wakening with the window over fields
To the coin-clear harness-jingle as a float
Clips by, and each succeeding hoof fall, now remote,
Breaks clean and frost-sharp on the unstopped ear.
The hooves describe an arabesque on space,
A dotted line in sound that falls and rises
As the cart goes by, recedes, turns to retrace
Its way back through the unawakened village.
And space vibrates, enlarges with the sound;
Though space is soundless, yet creates
From very soundlessness a ground
To counterstress the lilting hoof fall as it breaks.
The Necklace (1955, 1966)
Aesthetic
Reality is to be sought, not in concrete,
But in space made articulate:
The shore, for instance,
Spreading between wall and wall;
The sea-voice
Tearing the silence from the silence.
Nine Variations in a Chinese Winter Setting
I
Warm flute on the cold snow
Lays amber in sound.
II
Against brushed cymbal
Grounds yellow on green,
Amber on tinkling ice.
III
The sage beneath the waterfall
Numbers the blessing of a flute;
Water lets down
Exploding silk.
IV
The hiss of raffia,
The thin string scraped with the back of the bow
Are not more bat-like
Than the gusty bamboos
Against a flute.
V
Pine-scent
In snow-clearness
Is not more exactly counterpointed
Than the creak of trodden snow
Against a flute.
VI
The outline of the water-dragon
Is not embroidered with so intricate a thread
As that with which the flute
Defines the tangible borders of a mood.
VII
The flute in summer makes streams of ice:
In winter it grows hospitable.
VIII
In mist, also, a flute is cold
Beside a flute in snow.
IX
Degrees of comparison
Go with differing conditions:
Sunlight mellows lichens,
Whereas snow mellows the flute.
Sea Change
To define the sea –
We change our opinions
With the changing light.
Light struggles with colour:
A quincunx
Of five stones, a white
Opal threatened by emeralds.
The sea is uneasy marble.
The sea is green silk.
The sea is blue mud, churned
By the insistence of wind.
Beneath dawn a sardonyx may be cut from it
In white layers laced with a carnelian orange,
A leek- or apple-green chalcedony
Hewn in the cold light.
Illustration is white wine
Floating in a saucer of ground glass
On a pedestal of cut glass:
A static instance, therefore untrue.
The Art of Poetry
At first, the mind feels bruised.
The light makes white holes through the black foliage
Or mist hides everything that is not itself.
But how shall one say so? –
The fact being, that when the truth is not good enough
We exaggerate. Proportions
Matter. It is difficult to get them right.
There must be nothing
Superfluous, nothing which is not elegant
And nothing which is if it is merely that.
This green twilight has violet borders.
Yellow butterflies
Nervously transferring themselves
From scarlet to bronze flowers
Disappear as the evening appears.
Fiascherino
Over an ash-fawn beach fronting a sea which keeps
Rolling and unrolling, lifting
The green fringes from submerged rocks
On its way in, and, on its way out
Dropping them again, the light
Squanders itself, a saffron morning
Advances among foam and stones, sticks
Clotted with black naphtha
And frayed to the newly carved
Fresh white of chicken flesh.
One leans from the cliff-top. Height
Distances like an inverted glass; the shore
Is diminished but concentrated, jewelled
With the clarity of warm colours
That, seen more nearly, would dissipate
Into masses. The map-like interplay
Of sea-light against shadow
And the mottled close-up of wet rocks
Drying themselves in the hot air
Are lost to us. Content with our portion,
Where, we ask ourselves, is the end of all this
Variety that follows us? Glare
Pierces muslin; its broken rays
Hovering in trembling filaments
Glance on the ceiling with no more substance
Than a bee’s wing. Thickening, these
Hang down over the pink walls
In green bars, and, flickering between them,
A moving fan of two colours,
The sea unrolls and rolls itself into the low room.
Seeing is Believing (1958, 1960)
The Atlantic
Launched into an opposing wind, hangs
Grappled beneath the onrush,
And there, lifts, curling in spume,
Unlocks, drops from that hold
Over and shoreward. The beach receives it,
A whitening line, collapsing
Powdering-off down its broken length;
Then, curded, shallow, heavy
With clustering bubbles, it nears
In a slow sheet that must climb
Relinquishing its power, upward
Across tilted sand. Unravelled now
And the shore, under its lucid pane,
Clear to the sight, it is spent:
The sun rocks there, as the netted ripple
Into whose skeins the motion threads it
Glances athwart a bed, honeycombed
By heaving stones. Neither survives the instant
But is caught back, and leaves, like the after-image
Released from the floor of a now different mind,
A quick gold, dyeing the uncovering beach
With sunglaze. That which we were,
Confronted by all that we are not,
Grasps in subservience its replenishment.
Oxen: Ploughing at Fiesole
The heads, impenetrable
And the slow bulk
Soundless and stooping,
A white darkness – burdened
Only by sun, and not
By the matchwood yoke –
They groove in ease
The meadow through which they pace
Tractable. It is as if
Fresh from the escape,