Somewhere a dead leaf lies in wait for me, just as, somewhere,
A goods train waited for you; whether brought into play by the planets
Or timed by a dandelion clock, since nothing is really haphazard.
It will be a warm day later on; one would scarcely think it November.
Though a slight chill dims the window-pane, as we lumber down Fore Street,
And the head of a sycamore-tree, cut off by the mists of Autumn,
Hangs still like a golden light, in an alley beside the bus stop.
Why think of that other head, cut off by the wheels of a goods train,
In the yards of the Magyar town, whose name (though I cannot pronounce it)
I can never forget? Why recall how you lay down and let it all happen?
First the right wrist, then the neck, then the left wrist, clumsily severed;
And the trunk still pumping blood, as the driver (poor fellow!) descended,
To save what was left. Did you know he would likely never recover?
He had taken a human life; he had also destroyed a great poet,
Though he wasn't to know--few did!--and he wasn't to blame for either.
But he'd blame himself--and the Doctors! They'd allowed a poor schizophrenic
To wander loose on the track. And that sight would be always with him.
I was two years old when you died; now I'm thirty years older than you were;
I have seen your dreams and mine reduced to a uniform rubble;
My dreams of a Ständestaat, your hope for a world of brothers;
For it came while I was a child, the War you had always predicted--
We survivors have spent our lives absorbing a kind of shellshock,
A nostalgie de la guerre that destroys the affections it feeds on--
And the Russian tanks came, bringing in the régime you had always longed for,
And Stalin's quislings came back, old Comrades who might have killed you
If you hadn't been safely dead. But they turned you into an icon,
Victim of Capitalism and Poet of the Proletariat,
And now, that too is all gone, like the age of Attlee and whale-meat.
What would we poets be at? Cloning a shadow, or teaching
A mirror to read our thoughts. Last night I heard that the sunsets
On Mars are a vivid blue--it's clever the things they're learning
Since I was a boy--and I thought of that vivid hallucination,
Your Ode; like Sicilian waves, whose rapidly overlapping
Blades seem to heliograph, from the depths of a menacing azure,
A secret only the blind may read, or the mad may interpret.
I talked to an actress once, who said she could hear, in those verses,
As they rapidly came to an end, the wheels of the train that killed you.
For me, when I read the Ode, it is always that Summer evening,
And I am still young. The pulse of the late June sun, still burning
The windowpane, beats slantwise on the face of an exiled Magyar,
(That self-deprecating voice!) as he reads, in his own translation,
Your Ode. We listen. No! that's the wrong word, since the mind of a poet,
That pitiless spectroscope, where words break down into colours,
Assays, at the heart of the poem, that splitting of words and experience.
Now think how the searing light of the first atomic explosion,
As it boiled the Nevada Desert sands into glass, would have blasted
The average spectroscope, and you'll see why I never recovered.
There's been a decline since you, and a bigger decline since Eliot;
We are plagued by a smaller breed, pathological Life Affirmers.
What can I do against so many? Talk foot-rot with R.S. Thomas?
Bang about on the Yorkshire Moors with the rest of our sorry provincials?
Or, wallowing in Nature's nastiness, by the banks of the Humber,
Relish the stench of dead dogs and the copulation of spiders?
So I lead this intractable mind through the blue of a Martian sunset,
Where the threat of Sicilian waves seems held in a kind of limbo,
And it talks, half through itself, in the tones of a schizophrenic,
More echo than voice, of the Magyar who taught me to be a poet
(Strange man, with a voice that seemed, like his aura, retreating inwards)
And the evening he showed me that ghost who would shortly become my Master.

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