 |
Selections from The Reasoner Poetry |
78
How much impartiality should we try for?
We look up for an answer? Up.
Down. Straight ahead.
The floaters are stirred up
like the flake in a snow-globe
Blackpool tower in a white-out.
Blink. Blink and blink again.
Slowly it settles and the viewing platform
returns to view.
And somewhere everything is understood.
Up there – that is the old idea, as frescoed,
and this is the new idea:
the hot news from the ice-cores;
the definitive history
of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation;
every lareage docket ever filed.
These are what move me hither and thither, impartially.
79
‘History would make a stone weep’
John, what takes you back to Evensong so late?
Did History fail you?
I, who have spent no time at all in archives or the field,
have to say it is still the Book of Where Things Happen,
The Book Endlessly Corrected, the Book of Witness,
The Book of Expectant Understanding. It absorbs us and it should.
. . . .
When Deian’s mobile went off
I heard you guffaw from the coffin.
That’s a fact. No it’s not. Who else heard it?
But how much impartiality should we try for?
I’m talking to you John, not ‘for’ you . . .
. . . sometimes in ‘conversational French’:
. . . le grand vin blanc de Bourgogne . . . le grammaire
des civilisations . . . how actuel is
le monde actuel? . . . does it just roll through us,
and bye the bye absolve us from any blame attached?
How much impartiality should we try for?
. . . .
Surprising you in the backmost pew,
I’m curious to know if it be the music or the words?
Can I catch you murmuring Now lettest Thou . . . ?
Thou of whom it is said: Thou knowest all things,
Of whom it is said: Thou canst do all things
Of whom it is said: is in all things just
Who will grant us grace
because we find we are not
and cannot do these things
as History shows
and need these things
as History shows
at least to imagine them
as History shows.
And we are not absolved.
. . . .
John, reason with me,
am I hearing you aright?
80
I meditate before a smeary window now,
dried rivulets between the panes,
not quite randomised,
morrains where the runnels halted.
Apparently it can be known who I am
by the particular way I sneeze.
81
Like with a sermon in a high wind
it becomes uncertain who is speaking to whom.
My friends, I am doing my best to find
what it is I have to say,
but I end up shrugging at the street-corner.
Of course others will break in,
and so they should, they have every appearance
of entitlement.
Others will be murmuring together,
as though making some necessary plan
and are clustered across the road, heads together,
glancing over their shoulders
and something of what they say carries here.