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THE FIFTH SEASON Poems from the Etruscan
Foreword
The ancient village stands on the shore of a deep
volcanic lake. It has a tussle with time, and with Faustian time, time in
reverse – as if you watched the wake of your aeroplane flowing backwards as you
cruised forward. There are riderless horse races through the streets; at
carnival the schoolchildren dress as Minnie and Mickey Mice on the floats.
Circuses come and go. There is a little airport where they launched trial
military planes over the lake. This is the borderland between Etruria and Rome,
the Etruscans transforming the area into a vast, moist city of the dead. The Fifth Season martial lizards on their toes, aloft our mercenaries benevolent: the Mickey Mice are scattered by the wings and cries of falling angels. ‘The shortest knife, the smallest gun if frightening’s your aim’, but then, if quality’s your game your Doctor Faust is here, and there, a line of blue across the blue, his time runs dialectically, the spiral up and down – banal. But now God leaves the genocide to us, invents our flight, earth, lizard- ships that never land – steady, unheeded on his screen. Project or chaos, a straight bright line the vital signs maybe. Just planing, steady on the edge of brightness as it slices through past and to tomorrow. He’s time and its master. A time here broken, re-ordered in the fifth, our, season. The other country. Etruria: October wood under stairs the summer fires pass into mist: magpie feigns a nest the chairs outside back into black we don’t belong in nature, understand the right to kill, or species. Spider, various, climbs up nothing to the roof school again, and class: sausages for tea, band practising: the small white owl is lost fumbles down the street Shoreline Boat makes own shorelines, moves on,
from, through it. Boat green, hard edge, cuticle green on Chinese white
– water out of its element. Strata in the water – they too more colour than
substance: a touch of violet, wrinkles moving, could be monsters underneath, but
truly all we see is travelling gunmetal against the white. Sky too is white,
fizzling out with thick drops of mist from the trees stickied by spiders. The
hills make another line of white, greyer than the other whites, serrated,
rocking, but if we could isolate that white from all the others – it’s a white
of mist and water, memories and minds of dead legionaries ticking over, idling
in deep sleep, pure brain, unscanned, rest. Boat on its
own divide, between identical elements, its colour only, like a cold
animal’s, and movement, making distinctions, wake and landfall, in the white. Early Fall Lake turquoise pales to eggshell – blue-green and chalk, around are songs of dying airmen. Moths and worms infest the mushrooms, green beneath. Cat gnaws on trout’s fins and its guts – Serpent is here. Not sacred not benign, but present, ready for the rite, indifferent, promiscuous to reverence. Cat growls: eel’s ears she cannot chew give her a mandarin air. She cannot last a winter here: has bitten off a surfeit and she spits, will puke, doesn’t see the new green, things breaking up. Ara della Regina of sacrifices, blood naturally of others, fields of thistles drunk with it; 307 prisoners – one day, or spread over? – fields of sacrifice. Wind blows horribly, lifts whole slopes – fly over, not crossing sun. Blocks are honey, slate, draw down the sun. Warship of blank sensation. Throats offered to October sun; always unseasonable, death deferred crops into winter. Brown chards, thistles, broken pots. Still Day faded lead on white ripples come on, when they stop birds step on white. Child’s notebook drowned, moved on, promoted, uncomplete, tracks of small beasts take over: gull moves on lake from paper on to paper; circus comes and goes – the youngest jugglers, finest trumpeters move us on, promoted, even a diploma – through the few leaves; pause and watch gull fish through misty paper, a single line of lead almost makes the shore. Horse-racing Horse is ruined: racing down the road leg broke as tomb fell in – all damp and underwater dream invaded by the seep. No muscles, to climb up the wall: dreamers awakened, paddle round in death, still all walled up, dreams even of the gods cut off. Last jump of ghosts in tomb, fall back again – the rush of air on water seals and steals a second time: image is air on air, pots, bracelets, olives long just stones. Horse breaks down privacy maintained by cherry tree outside, figs for forgetfulness, a rose Snow snow’s a memory, although lake sucked it down, the blotted cows had plodded it to mud: squalls from our toy volcanoes plunge in the waves – a proper change of face, fields useless and pre-human warning of cold in ditches; cats keep company, bus skids. Snow blocks the trip, a memory of snow fades back to green – a memory I’d seen from other sides, contained: a private fall. Airman bloated, coming down with magic mushroom powered above – eyes two freshly boiled blue barley sugars, sucked in the lake, breaking legs, surface not soft at all: kite waits on shore fish settle back wait dragged down all of us Necropolis wet dreams let Etruscans melt away – a dream of dreams. Those baked in pots, instead, a sudden go, with hopes of some more startling dream. But tomb slow cool – the dream will last for ever, rich serene, cats gaunt around the rocks – a calm eternity with everything to hand or else for slaves a spark: race with two dreams, pots and the flame because they knew in tombs the rich ones rot with everything to hand: staked all, the cooking, moment of truth or end of the game. Robbing Tombs dip the blade a bit clay opens an ellipse a tomb where we shaved down the wall is under water: promise of gold false teeth cups of an orgy, pizzle-pricks of horsemen, the long trip of psychic death, sleep which goes on and key to sleep, bagpipes and scrotums, wine and the chase: death is unriddled – the dream no longer morning-sweated, it doesn’t end, a dream in tufa all together, safe and rich – dream chambers, dream eternal – wood and the wife in stone, frizzed into peperino, only the stone and pots bits of the dream – the gold teeth smiling on through happy dreams. Mickey eternal, women at last beside, money to spend carousal of the mind, but quiet await two thousand years of seepage and the plough; a good dream stolen. Clouds Down of winter, nothing to be said TILT of seasons gulls indifferently on sky, on water, divided by a palm line Etruscan smoke appears sometime as hope of warmth, of fish hauled out – the cat knows better: lights at noon, faces red and frightened in the glass. Drivers Insighted by the Rain boar inedible mashed up in back of special garbage truck – strong pizza smell: prospects of flight with dying fish, sold to a slavery not understood – esprit de corps of gladiators, of wayside warriors, mashed down; of lake all occupied, fish driven out all middling, gulls sulky. Perhaps one day my little fish will dive against those beaks the clouds with claws and feathers – no pots anonymous, no tombs that took all winter and an industry. Apricots, too late, tended by Medes with love, or rather with not too much regret. Rain Interrupts the Vegetable
Harvest dark camera recalls absences walking hesitantly out of frame Latin prepared for epitaphs, ex patria. Languages smother, embower, swag of officers, wet piles of sampietrini, clots of oft-dead things. Dark rainy fields of chicory, kids go hooting home to TV. A guard like the empty deadman in his cape, artillery uninvented, stylish exit fades left, pen or cane incising memoirs. Highland mist and hills block sunset. Were those fields wind-burnt, just one film ago? Retired Officers eyes used to wandering in wider margins civilisations bumped and scored like touching wheels gods carried off to guard the orchards fates planned for prisoners, spectacles, a time for writing, and for clients, shabby trophies, enough words for Persian slaves: blood pudding steaming, chopping swords and shaman’s masks, straw huts thrown down, shards of inner empires, tarred stoppers, plumes of egrets, languages half-learned, heavens away. Conscience – wax tablet, sarcophagus a long stone
bath. Look out on lake: the alien streams, bean farmers, goose girls, penetration in cane brakes Etruscan Cities cities now are little ones – the ginger donkey in plusfours has made a store of droppings in the chapel tower: sheep to their pens like figures round the clock – the Princess tomb is gingerbread, a plastic bag for pottery floats on the floor. Through limestone to the tufa streams run two ways: rose hips and old man’s beard. Etruscans guarded now by brambles, shepherds in the rock with candles – left us a city of the dead, a massive citadel, no huts or palaces: tombs gutted, evacuated. Mountains we can’t live in, huge resurrection, stones rolled aside or stolen – bodies sink down through the rock. Nettles and brambles block the little doors, lintels immense. Realists, they left dead cities; fried in pots or tired seeping into tufa, impress with dying, left wooden roofs cut out in stone. Dying Dog hard day: I think my paw was split but back is worse – can’t piss, embarrassing, the people round would sooner leave me this last day: the visitors would have someone with the guts to take a gun and – here in this flowerbed – uncivil, polish me off: pity and piety, good friends, – lying in my skin all broken up, they back off me. This last day is not without its sense, a flowerbed, lake, last clouds, a breeze to mend the breaks Lake under Rain ugly: glum gulls, shrewd and spiteful rain busy with itself: fire a latent cat with devil’s eyes. The trees are half bare emperors, mushrooms submerged, rain mottles lake like pitted subway paint; surface hedges its bets, drops metered exact and will be still when trees are trees and gulls see clear the goldfish – beetle makes tracks, the rain comes in. The Other Lake Path runs over Etruscan tombs stone robbers’ jars looters in turn dead for millennia. On the hill the broccoli pickers are doubled up. Bored horse herds cows, the glorious bantam rules – the primal childhood, country, fallacy. But then there is the other lake, below the tombs and brambles, where the track is riven out with water: a few gulls, in threes or plaintive, castle and tower, two tractors purr in spells. The empty tombs go back into prickly underbrush – sort of company, need for each other. Deaths of Lakes just needs joining up, the pumps and drains; the lake may die, but never has: was born of fire, and dips and rifts subsiding into water: may die a merely possible death, born of what fires, waters, friends of fish and birds at battle there – below, salts and hot water bubbling up. Our city knows the lake will die with troopers riding round. Lake is body, not a pet, but still a population, seeks no lies. Day Closed in by Scirocco fish are quartered out in nets for dying under water – gulls follow us about, the slow discharge of humans; glass the third band near the shore – age of aquariums, the other lakes one riffed, one distant, smoky, tacked by one sail, one windsurf three kinds of water, discovering Chinese whites, small meshes. The Hunt, the Sun pushing to summer swifts fall to stubborn jaws of cat: dancing in the street to greet the certainty of victory Roma, Roma, Roma. The wolves have gone, the terrace holds its civil wars: swift wings too perfect, but the lizard’s tail’s cut for survival and the cat’s soft mouth. Walk Deferred going to take the walk: mud hides the goldfish in the lake sun lights odd fields, the rain which rusted everything last night just swells the glass: the mushroom hunt was premature – an easy sport unless mistake pink underside, pegleg takes classical revenge. The marigolds in flower, salads of fallen leaves. And we defer the walk, that leads us back, the walk where gulls fish, and little flies surprised, leap back into the glass, and drown. Waves and Blue It could be the sea mane bubbling down on lions, or sheep. But paint-box blue or crimson – no need or reference to draw the lines – are marked on lake or sea; nets squared off like fish in boxes. Relentless hammer of renewal: gourds sacrificed again, the sucking lambs – they are enough to get us through. Again the forts, the soldiers, tanks, the fall, looked squarely in the eye – a choice obligatory. So many second thoughts, and comings: memo says, seek wisdom, but on primal page asserts its power. Eels lost all their rights, becoming legless too. Not rights rule here, but blue and winds. Epiphany time can’t remember; incontinent, seeps in everywhere. Ah yes, the tombs. But Master Faustus in his leathers guns back to childhood and beyond before he was, the lake fresh-formed the eels engendering the legend of the Serpent is words that cannot die and never lived |