The Singing Season

Rhapsody At Two PM

On holiday from profundity,
after morning sit-ups, sitting out,
a coffee cup is sea enough,
and curving walls of earthen world
in baking sun and terminator shade,
that hands may grasp with alibi
of just a sip, at times (smiling
at the story of Thor with the drinking horn
giants trick-filled with the ocean)
in a garden attentive, otherwise,
to blackbird's Eden oratory.

In the lanterned grass, seed globes
in their synchronized dozens
await a golden breeze, blessed with sun-milk.

A book of Wistan's wise wide-windowed wit
enough to balance present marvels

(a pigeon lit on the rimmed edge -
so lightly done you heavy fowl -
no tipping fresh-filled bird trough / bath,
and as dapper as a painted toy, bent to water -
'Peck a drop then up, peck a drop then up' -
brazenly shy, one eye must flick
then leaping over washing line and hedge,
the heavy beats oar air
                                               and,
                                                         vortex gone)

this still, parching, suncreamed day in May,
sown with the hawthorn's ease,
droned with fairweather prop-planes,
                                                                             that
although financial matters roll along
(and mother's home be all cleared out by now?)
and though May lurch disastrously to June
debacle in a land thick on the ground -
too many fools and Tories -

I might imagine... or rather
just become quite old inside, unfocus,
gape with a genial vacancy,
chop chop the lips (as had no teeth),
practice 'Eh? Eh?' turn and lose
myself so ever deeper in the leaves
of grass and wood-pulp pages
silver-sliver live with words.

........................

It is is in free form, with a kind of rhetorical propulsion I would call a rhapsody.

Thor visited the land of the giants who belittled him through their magic tricks, getting him to wrestle the hag Time - which no one can beat, putting mountains invisibly in the way of his blows when asking him to hit one of them, and requiring him to drain a drinking horn which they had magically connected to the ocean. Though the level of liquid hardly moved in the horn, he made a great low tide in the ocean, he was later told when the giants cheered him up by explaining their tricks as he took his leave of them.

Wistan is W. H Auden, whose collected poems currently travels about with me.