The Pain Clinic Part 1

	THE PAIN CLINIC Part 1 PAGE ONE Page Two Part 2 Page One Page Two Part 3 Page One Page Two
	THE PAIN CLINIC Part 1 PAGE ONE
		‘Tell me, how may I know him, how adore From whom I have that thus I move and live, And feel that I am happier than I know’. I leave you after two years, an affair Of the heart something resolute I dare Not resolve, the mind is the spirit's limb And the search of sojourner or pilgrim Towards or from that of saint and martyr Whether history or now or another, Grace is the spirit's breath, grace is the heart. ‘The light of life’ as Bede said but the start Of a poet, that lodging of the end, Outlasting this world, truth without amend. Between the tombstones of St. Cuthbert and St. Bede between destiny and England, The stone sheared for nothing and Cranmer burned And from your closed city a poet turned. The end is illusion and lasts until Magnolia blushing into April, Fastened white each closure holds to remain Fragility whiter than April rain After a storm when blue alternates more Nature's irretrievable metaphor. And the blossom of an April night is The colour of day and diminishes Only eternity, to tell of love After or before is but to tell of The rain that dingy blooms on branching pall A shadow natural as betrayal. The days love used, from each enough to bring The magnolia's storm white opening. I leave behind a poetry from life, Words and their waiting, words for day and night, And I have been a mother and a wife And darkness flaunting seen from depths of light When dawn's reflection turns the earth below, The lasting rise of night trees plunged to snow. Beethoven mapped time a territory fit For sojourn of the diffident spirit And Schubert a lyric for love's folly, Yet love is enough to outlast return Enough also for love's celibacy Love is the spirit and its end alone. I hardly noticed but a love divine That when Bach spoke at last was lodged with mine. These days and their kind will not come again, From the limits of language to explain Without fear how indifference breaks blue Among stripped trees residual and new, Winter's startle is on the origin, Without love should I know how to begin. Wisdom is a journey back to the child Rudimentary without end and wild Once from an unknown travelled horizon Where shadows then were but the bleak unshone Of this world and a stone to point the way. When, before men talking, I tried to say Of love before I left, but to no end, With me calmly suddenly came a friend. What is poetry between then and now Except that you looked long at the landau, Stooping quietly watching everything Wondering whether anything lasting. I thought neither morning nor afternoon Was a casual departure, how soon Must the landau leave, you were not to care, Or for its passengers kept waiting there And the gathered and curious women Remarking, and all the while you watched them The sun was high and dark over midday Privet and darkness on the surface lay. How soon must the landau leave, quietly Waiting, after you could not say to me. Love is a part of Grace as poetry At the last distance of eternity That sublime and inconsolable reach Where man must first take his leave of Nature. Love is its own, the only eidolon And lonely as man's leave taking among Friends and among the stars of his journey, It is poetry's certain and tardy Harbinger, timeless in exultation Before itself long after love has gone. And from humiliation and despair I kept the white snow to form in his hair, Love in the holy blue of a new dawn Is certain as Keats' Ruth among the corn. Hold your hurt deep as the body bereft, As the novelist writes her own story, To leave what is lost, to keep what is left Is a woman becoming her glory. Branches pull with smoke drawn from a willow Ascending and stars transfix their morning, Art cannot imitate Nature to throw As nothing imagination's awning Far over the high and casual dark of Winter trees, as nothing and remaining The stars at daybreak or a woman's love. Love that is memory's last desiring, The smoke drifts downward though love unrealised Must flow as the willow and never dies. Joy came shyly and when all else was gone, After thirty years' searching we were one, Timeless the heart the seamless difference, Joy is the knowledge and experience. I give the learnéd my last vanity To wear the mantle of humility, For to live is to be ready to die, Joy is the only earthly answer why, Nature in time and art is beauty's truth And truth is the joy between man and earth. No longer to know the poet in me Nor all the laurels of eternity For I am the sound of an outworn word, New as the listening I never heard. An Irish immigrant in Coburg Street Gave birth she could not know it would be meet That the Nobel Prize nineteen forty eight Was that evening given to Eliot. In Leeds behind Lewis's for three years The sounds of the synagogue reached my ears, Over Brudenell Road I was to know The permanent anatomy of snow, Survival but the wind upon a wall That for some escape is impossible. And the early Fifties flickered neon By the white wall of Torre Road station, Unnavigable the repetition The darkness between self and horizon. To keep alive the suddenness of love, The memory that poetry dreams of, To receive, though isolate and untold, Nature from the reflected mirror's hold Is to have known with an equivocal Heart the knowledge yet of good and evil. And unwept in Eden these stars once shone And the light from a jet plane pales among Them, poetry is love's diminishing. The end is an infinite reflection, Distance without shadow or beginning And unlit far as the constellation Of a single star or an unlit sea, And love is to approach infinity. With nothing to go on but my own heart, Untaught, I made a poetry apart, Old words and their welding to new courage, Found a truth lost at the end of knowledge. Poetry is love loud enough to hear, Joy the difference of a timeless fear, At the leave-taking a poet is told And the last look backward out of this world Is to salvage for its prodigal worth With a poetry between man and earth. Life is the spirit and its denial, The space of an echo and listening, Where the mind and heart are tongues in a trial Of words to speak the spirit's suffering. Man’s inability to interpret Nature is her legacy, a poet Must learn how to stand in supplication And with nothing to bring but a notion Of the senses, intrepid, in waiting, Just to know her and know her desiring. Then her epiphany usurps the mind And leaves the temporal man behind, Yet restless always, outside my own day, Sometimes life in absolution will lay With me, and the poet urgent between Folly and Nature's passion to redeem, Yet, and in the way of love, receives life With all the trembling wonder of a wife. Early November poplar leaves swathed far And remnant on London's light green smoke are Still formal in a late sunlight, moving With a certain airlessness and breathing With a little breathlessness, tremulous As human diminution. But surface Leaf, unlike man, is buttressed from within, Only the highest leaves are not given, Topmost of the Lombardy and its last Configuration where a leaf is fast Held as a truth, as a man at the end, Darker the poplar than night is darkened. And the alien corn needed no forlorn To toll to my sad self by Keats forborne. If beauty is truth, truth is no more than Time's journeyman seen as a Grecian urn, Truth is this world and neither columnar Evening within the last darkened poplar Leaves, when light is yet preliminary And stillness a delta form as only The Lombardy's column of paper leaf Without wind or rain, where stillness and earth Burn, nor the firmament of memory, For love is the spirit's reality And the last look backward out of this world. If truth were known, love would remain untold And Meaning but a Grecian urn, other Than the time of memory or Nature Or love. The poplar levels a dross of Stars and fixed eternal they tell of love With a poet's indeterminate hand Or the spirit they alone understand, The moments of the asphodel are few As the colour of day that Marlowe knew. Forever before are the pine stars hung, And that lodging of the end left among, A landau's possible finality, Its truth but the spirit's futility Seen as the sun in sojourn in a dream, As love seen when enervate betrayal Is love, random as the spirit between, From truth betrayed, truth is made possible. Truth neither knowledge nor experience Knows and time converges on the difference, Time before itself has laid its burden On me, days as the pine black stars spiral Downwards and the distance of that region Called truth is truth itself and lasts until The dawn that blooms its passing on the bough, Meaning may be no more than the landau, From the equation of life and the earth A poet and a man can answer truth. Love is not love of another only, The space of the spirit and its journey, Though time should rear itself from horizon, As such will I hold love from illusion. I was neither poet nor that evening Your daughter over the phone, by morning But a woman become and you had died And given me to the world as a bride, And such I shall be, though as a widow I journey the ruins of fallen snow. Only the stars remain familiar And to draw a first few from the further Unlit or an evening's hesitation At the sidewalk of London's far neon Is enough as the known unwritten word, The fallen snow over Brudenell Road, Only love is first known in a world where Once falling snow was curling in his hair. Then the epiphany sometimes after Hours and the day's accustomed dullness wears Through and coyly surging makes from laughter And tears, yet new reality and bears On the earth's back news of its memory. And to receive even at the distance Of time, beyond night and day and history, After the knowledge and experience, Is to hear as a child unheard listening And to see with eyes out of this world Where the space between Nature transcending And immanent joy are the words untold, Where man is left with nothing but to find And to tell of the little left behind. Between hearing and memory once heard, Sometimes only silence hears with the will Of poetry harnessed to its last word, While the mind is left to implore until The heart is first known, ripened from remorse, Its refuge but the wind upon a wall, Imagination is the last recourse A reparation after joy unstill. Joy is neither nemesis nor hubris, Existing in time's isolate design And lost as its desiring and stasis, Joy is a poetry no longer mine. The end is memory's first testament, Frail as life when light strikes, its argument. More than thought such is the spirit of man, Derelict wind over level spaces, The end or the words for time alone can Pull through and sometimes the spirit faces Itself, random and new, the way the day Blooms eternal from branching darkening. It goes before and has nowhere to lay Its head, an echo of time aligning Much as the sun on March forsythia Tilts the firmament to a blue below. Memory more than its own idea Apprehends the spirit in its first flow Of joy both lost and won from each last search, Then is the shadow but a passing reach. When I was last at Wentworth Place, the end Of my father's life was unimagined, That night in Hampstead near the end of June, Nine months at most you died to everyone. 'I'm watching the pain level', her final Words remain, remain uncontrollable. He dies 'Looking only in to the eyes Of nuns', he dies 'A blessing in disguise' Quite suddenly at the hands of a fast Driver can anyone recall his last Words something I can remember nothing. 'But don't you think his death was a blessing In disguise,' I was unable to tell You father, 'I'm watching the pain level.’ My father was unable to be told. How can I write without Him who made me, Without whom my days are now as nothing. Enough it was to wait for poetry To struggle with the heart and its meaning, Here I wait for I know not how to find Him or how to follow without a star To steer by at the masthead of my mind From those that burn through a darkened poplar, Reminding me with their heat that I live Over levels of tidal undertow As nothing more than a need to believe, Between air and earth a wind to follow. Here I wait for I know not where He goes, Death is a woman in beautiful clothes. Innocence contains its own betrayal As April lies uneasy on the bough, Black where the reaches of a poplar pale Against necessity or here and now. When words are facts and cannot be unsaid, Poetry must learn to write itself, then Can the spirit speak as the open dead To those to come, of the unconfessed men Who need only themselves and rise or fall And know enough of the range of the heart From the passion of their own betrayal To that innocence at the spirit's start. Morning makes shadows from blossoms as few, April breaking is a blur over blue. April is the poet's month, alternate With the lasting once of its own wildness When evening's moving rapids flare a late Horizon and the day's distance and less Than its light left in a storm of poplar Leaves to flood black over an April rain. Splintered boughs are the colour of a far Time and ransom for a rosary's gain, Perish and bloom the cherry and apple As cloud in a blue tumult to become. April and infinite over evil And blossom yet poetry's opened womb, So the word born as briefly to defy Must sing of its forbears and never die. The world is smaller now that you are gone, Time, that mirror image of horizon, Waits in the wings at journey's end and makes A mockery of destiny and breaks, Imagination's fugitive breaks and Falls as the mind's shadow over England. Poetry matters, before you without Words and less afraid an old man about To die could not be told, would not be told, The heart cannot hold, only the words hold. No longer a daughter I watch a storm Clouding low over Cholsey and Pangbourne, But before it breaks such cloud waits, enough, Unlike time, to gather form or the ruff Of a Tudor king. So many are the nights at the world's end And with nothing to show to a new day, Dear heart, poetry alone cannot lend Hope for that which is too far off to say. The watch listens as the condemned must wait, Imagination runs the mind to ground, Often is the heart itself and too late For poetry's mercury to be found. The words always existed, their author Time alone, life the waiting yet to be, And the spirit has nothing to confer Higher than a wind levelling the sea. Yet known unknown the diffident spirit And the consolation for its retreat. The times when poetry seems to answer Nothing and that written is held in doubt, And Nature is not always an offer Of refuge for the mind with no way out. The heart remains in an open entrance, Vacated and sudden the room is found, That unleashed sojourner the spirit once, Its loss as its desiring and uncrowned. April wind moves in the space of nature, Clearing still cloud from a face of marble And the poet’s heart dictates a metre, Resolute as the knowledge of evil Where even the spirit can be afraid And poetry and prophecy are made. And so my father went to the Selby Road, sent out high on morphia to be Killed and some say he tried to move away As though he had something to do that day, Afterwards drawn on the coroner's plan His shopping bag where it lay and the man. His conversation was almost cheerful, No one thought anything remarkable, And the relatives, even as he hurled Between until surgery and this world, And the relatives, and the veteran, One of the few to come through Burma, can Pull through, and the relatives said you were Terminal that once you were my father. To fear the self is to suffer evil Both in its knowledge and experience, Enough to remain though the spirit fail, Vulnerable even as innocence. Random once, as joy inherits the earth, Its language the beauty of truth's fable, Found with a hallmark outlasting Keats' truth To form proof of the spirit's betrayal. A jet soars not more surely to the sky, Its first and downward wake remaining pure To a diffusion further from the eye Than evil's anchorage or man unsure, And poetry hurts at the source of pain That the end of life is written in vain. Your face came back to me after so long And you spoke with your eyes reminding me Of something forgotten in a last throng Remembered at the end of a journey Unprepared for, and unheard, my father. Morning cloud crowns the flaming tongues of May When leaf full turning loosens the poplar, Something unsaid that will not go away, Leaf hold such as the close flight of a moth, Its delta form a green unstill to live, Impossible to divide man from wrath, There is only the time left to forgive. The sky has flung its foam from shallows wide The firmament marble on the ebb tide. Poetry is a helpless surrender To a future charged as the memory, An order of words nothing can alter, An inextinguishable wish to be. Equally helpless before suffering, As such the stammer after earth's beauty Stunned into muteness, a poet can sing From the heart's unrehearsed futility, And pain held as fast closed hands of the young. There is nothing after the spirit's cry That rearranging in a makeshift tongue, Poetry or voice of an unasked why, Turned to words from courage enough to fear, Unreachable, their faces disappear. Words to turn the wandering spirit round, Worthless that usage of the heart without, Meaning is no more than a mirror found Self- reflecting, its end outlasting doubt. Poetry is born alone in the breech Position having no other way out, Unable to crown its labour of speech Unless the spirit tears from pain life's shout. When May broke light the world rolled like a blue Iris backward at the retina of Time, for the hours of the spirit are few And bewildering in a wake of love. Bach scored two violins as love could be, Love such as only the spirit can free. Over the window glass at Wentworth Place And London as memory was starless, Truth before beauty was poetic truth That exaltation of Cortez and Ruth. For the urn was largely bravado, not The whole truth but the senses only, what Is truth but a man watching a landau And wondering. Then or now are as though Immaterial and know not either Guilt or remorse, mostly we are somewhere Between hope and despair, mostly between What chance has done and choice has left undone, And truth is irresolute as fear is, Truth is the undone, the undone that is Done and is starless as memory or London starless. From the ruins of your Love I am more your daughter, such ruin, Love was never like this, love is first known By its own infinity as glass so Reflected, itself diminishing shows, From darkness further than horizon's hold, A mirror in the dark, love is last told. And you said nothing at the end, nothing Mattered, though love at the end was something That mattered and snow was curling in his Hair, such ruin, love was never like this. And I am more your daughter than I know And glass so reflected never lets go, Her lifetime for a moment held his love. I have not written for this world but for The spirit, remaining uncertain here, Wondering where the words will come from or Afraid always when poetry's own fear Of emptiness leaves me yet with nothing But time itself in passing and aside, And words unknown and beyond my knowing Before an ordinary silence died. I am no more than the unerring flight A few birds make of themselves from among, Carelessly following a new day's height, August's calm and northward repetition. I'm tired of my years and the word's owing, The end no nearer to its first knowing. And a time will come when these words will not Be mine but love in passing must remain Love whether that of Liu or Turandot, Trembling before it breaks into a name Known once or beauty seen from aftermath, Love once known is held by the spirit fast. Such a cold it leaves, a planetary path Where that lost is remembered at the last As a shadow's inexorable hold, As darkness only time can consummate, Where Nature points the way to truth untold And love, poet or man, is isolate. Poetry must first unclamp love to start Dismantling its scaffolding from my heart. I have seen a poplar still as saffron, The colour of high drift and Turandot, August restless trembles into late sun And sky nearer than the Thames surface. What Am I enough to hear Sylvia cry Or love yet know as once from memory, What is poetry if the sun must die, Love in another form if love could be. The heart is a far uncharted planet Seen from the light of a star's interval, La vita è così bella but the heart Remembered holds the dip of the world's hull. And utmost yet the way that love is brief The poplar draws a river to its leaf. To learn to love the world that cannot love Back, and this is a poet's hardest task, To live without return and to know love When time is a last struggle to unmask The glazed eye unflinching from a passion- Flower's day long late and blue September. Poplar leaves darkened olive blown begin To pall and a poem must suffer Nature, At the fall of the firmament a star Rayed with the blue of a day from its dart Of life to the end opens both hands far, Thrusting bewildered a fugitive heart, A closed blond hinged over darkness, to fail Threefold, a seed hold over betrayal. I who know nothing of the absolute Value of words and can only show you My heart, forborne and yet irresolute Even as heaven and earth or those few Moments when their alignment and time on Hold and knowledge a tardy eloquence, Where Nature's definitive expression From love's reach and the heart remembered once, How from truth and the tumult of language, A space such as the poplar's night and day And new words for old outlasting their age, Poetry is born with nothing to say. And morning breaks its gold only to flow Back, impenetrable, through the willow. There is nothing this night from which to heal, Moving indivisible stillness, love Must be as both being universal Enough to salvage from a refuge of Darkened stars something with which to redeem Nothing, a day's difference, winter's young Imagination and darkness when seen As blue transfixed or passing after flung. The beginning missed is urgent and new Where winter has grained under bark light, how In dreams an open road runs straight and through The heart, its way a waking to avow. Yet to surrender and to such control Show me the end before and make me whole. How shall I address the world when with you I could not speak at Garden Avenue Where roofs ascending slope a downward wall And the cherry blooms imperishable. And for four hours you said nothing of her While I talked to control the utmost near, The freedom of spiritual murder And further yet than the freedom of fear. And more than the unsaid the unwept tears Of Eden for the knowledge of my years Or the simple tears that would have saved you. Beyond poetry, or then and now you Looked at her in the landau, my father, And for four hours you said nothing of her. Unopened rests the green magnolia, Trees from the lake raise unapproachable Horizons, Hymnus Paradisi, a Blown smoke blown levelling its form while pale Winter receives the waters of Kenwood. Less than a day's random, that unlit space Where earth has sunk its cornerstone, and should The shadow falter the poet must face, To follow as once, journeying high snow And drifts of words along the way to form Love such as only the spirit can know. Magnolia unfolding April's storm, Before the retina from colour seen, Walls of closed carbon darkness lay between. What is the life of a man worth on this Night of war where Nature waits as before Calm with stars when time, a token of his Life, from memory what am I here for Listening to darkness incongruous With birdsong over a world no more than A day's journey, a night the sound of us. London's blackened boughs without leaf or man Rust gratuitous pale bark from neon, Drifting silenced through the new day's bird cry Indifferent residual saffron. The spirit is ready only to die As a poem defiant enough to live With the hallmark of a last need to give. To wake to that first morning after war And men among distant trees were moving, The cut sound of a poplar from its saw And love away from its own believing, Until and leaving me emptiness more Than love's denial further than reaching, To remain rearranging new and raw And Nature left over open breaching. Earth's depths nearing traced branched and darkened snow London domed yellow with snow's reflection, Palpable only in dreams as the slow Shadow runs or love's configuration, The spirit dancing each honeycomb cell, A poplar's incline branching time until. When the early cherry bloomed earlier Than snow time was a casual repair, Time as such and less than the space between, Man is a reckoning of horizon, Towards or from, and the space of Nature Random as the purple in the fuchsia. Distance or the heart, only time is seen And love, the distance fallen in a dream, Man less than his own length when distance stalls And truth no more than where the shadow falls. No more than your end or the way the green Rapidity of the century, green And almost formal at the motorway, Beat a green oscillation where you lay. Before and after and the words untold And April's leaf dark halo to immure, But a woman become to walk the world With an isolate controlling rapture. Late wind a black tide smooth over branch moan April sepulchral bleeds magnolia Forsythia flames in blond abandon A night cut from stars and Primavera. While out of the languid featureless dark And London's high shadow rain softly laid Its burgeon, to colour first with night bark And day and passing seem and never fade, Ordinary, the way of poetry, Or how impossible love waits on me. Dismantled from a dream where cut trees were Carried from the air to level and core April opens at mountain fires further Than the fall of Kurdish children and war. Emerging bloom whitens on urgent bough To pall to night clouds’ darkest hemisphere, Between love and war leaving then and now That consummation the end has with fear. Or that of a willow yet pruned exposed Projecting the highest roof of heaven Falling calmly dust and shadow, as closed Space arches out unbroken leaf and rain. Downward from Kenwood and Parliament Hill The sun smokes on tree dark impassable. Green of the coldest London and April And sky full unreached grey at the world's shore, Shadow at leaf start lets its colours fall Lasting months of uncontrollable war. Memory obscured yet undiminished Soars, and with a last leaf crowns its ruin, As sad green dark forsythia finished Burns to green aftermath waiting for rain. How can a poet suffer or be sure, Experience alone for mentor, where Donne and Lowell were masters of Nature And poetry now unrecognised prayer. From an arc of night and day as shadow Inexorable light flows the willow. The first star leafless at the season's height Draws through a poplar and an evening's light The disparate the grey stars of London, Man and Nature's reach for consolation. Nature takes her form from a memory Before time and is governed restlessly By stars yet man is her shadow, Nature Subject to itself or as betrayer But his own refuge, an oblivion Starless as the heavens' recognition Or the grey stars beyond his counting. We Are the children of chance or memory And the star's journeying, memory makes The man as the last dark a poplar takes. Wind blown at the sky's edge and night moving, Startling light to the heart of a willow, And space round horizon's corner turning Beneath cut leaf the space of love's shadow Falling from darkness and night leaf open And surging a star's tumultuous day, Endlessly enclosed, burdened, unbroken, Closed willow arching overflowing May. Beheld happening yet cut and utmost, The balanced whitened rapid melt of flame, Cloud drifts marble leaf darkened pearl and lost, Space unrealised softly wells night rain, Love's beginning, the end that will not let Go and love is an infinite regret. Light of the willow, June listless among Leaf torn disarray, heavy with storm pull, Arching high collapse, darkness as day hung, Opening the earth at a willow's full And plunging hollow and shifting of heft, Of leaf shuddering blue and hewn surmise, Morning's black burning through planetary cleft, Light igniting leaf as flame cindered lies. And love burned its last within black willow, Sun dark's vertical still dissolution Unarched uplifting fused torrential flow, Blazing existing sacrificial June. Poetry or love's unfaltering age, An empty actor on an empty stage. PAGE TWO BACK TO TOP