The Uncompliant Stranger     pen and indian ink drawing by Sarah Longlands     1 In truth I neither have nor live a name, No syllable upon a nameless shore; The landward margins of the sea, the same Debate beneath a lunar semaphore. No origin is singled to a sun Nor ending to a future's unseen flow: Totality of days perféct to one Might tell the world I see from that I know. There is no cause: no hope is unforetold Where this change lies, and where I now must range, The place the man, the eye the days behold The orbit of the ebb and race of change. No late equations make this one day's end. My sighted soul and I shall not contend.     2 Where comes the shuttered sequence of the days Beneath the session of the pastdirected mind Arraigned within an ordered timebound maze To judge beforehand what the eye may find? The days fall out, whose wintry distant lights Stretch morn and eve through dusty windowglass Upon the witness eye, and restraint flights The hours' elided endings where they pass. Self so arraigned by self within one day, Defenceless, nude, constrained by word-mad laws To make imagination of the way As though the brain's poor vault lacked outward doors. The course of time, time's mirror will refract, For hindsight is the one unfinished act.   3 The arméd thought before the thought of day: No form of thought, nor mind, within the soul; No voice, nor apprehension of the way, The plenum of the origin, the whole. The spirit stands before the making word Unvoiced, beyond the utterance, yet known In action at the instant, being heard: From pregnant calm quick motioned time has grown. Horizons are the days' dimensions furled And in the elemental heavens' light The orb of wisdom is the living world, The humane eye, which opens onto sight. The pupil of the world engulfs the eye; In frailties of sense the swift days die.   4 The last light hour hangs on the general flood Which inundates the green fields of my sight. The water stands, where once my mother stood Beneath a day's unfolding newer light. The grey expanse lies on the broken road Which to the moors' edge hamlet took its way, Where in days past the lamplit windows glowed In rising work before the break of day. The waters' weight, no landmark to the earth, Less deep than is the steady vision's calm Less ruffled than the winds of sightless dearth, Is echo to the time held in the palm. Floods' life, reflex to the fleeter sky: To find true worlds, the eye must know the eye.   5 The journey now in hand within the mind Must leave past houses to their local change; The very door that recall cannot find Is weathered still by every season's range. The journeyer will know that weather well, In wind or hail or thick unpurposed snow; Within the sound of some vast half-heard bell Cognate with ends which point the path I go. I rise from sleep, and know this is a dream; The room surrounds me in a longer night Which for an end takes up the barest gleam And makes time from a momentary light. I measure moveless hours before I leave, As though, awake, I would my stead bereave.   6 The forebears of the first grey orphan hour Are known within the presence of his sight Which touches hilltop summits with his power And in slow warmth lays bare the tracts of night. Long-shaded silence in his level eye Empowers a world to know itself and love: The stony pastures where the oxen lie With golden breath against the night-cold grove. But orphaned blood runs through his wakened mind. His nature is the nature of a man Beyond the vestige of a name: his kind Was silence, not a prior daybreak's span. The orphaned god is mute, and, silent, stands, The world inseparable from his hands.   7 The sun does not rise new upon the day To prove an almanac of indigo And brilliant sparks. The orphan star-dim ray Marks shoreline losses from the ocean's flow. What storm unnamed the orders of the night, Whose waters in a breathing swell now lie, Whose darkest edict, <let there be no light> In tempest drained the elemental sky? These are the forebears of the first light hour. New-shuttered night cannot be fetched to mind: Asleep, unknown, the deep responsive power Makes womb and seed to generate his kind. To those who are alive, this dawn's the last; The faintest light makes orders of the past.   8 Lost calm before the storm is of an hour Which will not hold an arrow of the thought Flighted by the days-and-orders power: An ended time cannot in time be sought. The tempest of the night unnamed and made No antecedents to the time before The journal of the way; the world is laid Where chaos is the wandering of law Upon the shoreline where the lovers stand, The untaught edge, the steady star above The island of two lives in one: the land That bears the firmament of love. The spirit moves upon the waters' face, And all that is, is echo to that grace.   9 The destiny of days is in the child Unborn, who knows the journey of his soul To pure perception through dark worlds defiled By darker moieties within the darkest whole. The turning stars are weights within his mind As is the night-dark movement of the sea; His path is laid through countries of the blind, His way bereft of sighted history. But let a morning in a foreign place Allow a light beneath the morning star And all eternity is in his upturned face And he is home whose soul has wandered far. This winter of the earth has patient eyes For all that changes in the winter skies.   10 The allegoric motion of the stars; The naked force of order of the light; The sense beyond the dead-word mortal bars; The all-perceiving freedom giving sight; The tenements of power, growing bare; The graven stones' lie, scattered by the sea; The roofless artifice, to plainer air; The overarching law without a key; The gate which nothing passes, opened wide; The tutelary phrase's blankened sense; The smooth-backed boulder in the endless tide; The seamless flowing of the waters' tense; The fear-borne self is lost in shifting ground; In fearéd loss, the finer world is found.   11 The time that is the matrix of a life Was born of unknown mother in the night Where streaming fields were her attendant wife And lightning forks the swift surmise of light. But well she knew the moment of her time And smelled the morning close upon the air - The naked child against the cruel rime - The first-drawn breath upon the dawn's long stare. No words call out the still unended day Nor of conception in the fast of dark: Nor voice of age or country, but her way Of hour and sight has drawn the infant's mark. No place to live upon the slow day's face, No life on earth is made, but by her grace.   12 I came here for a day and lived an age And nothing brought nor summoned for my way: A stranger's language did my own engage As stranger gods might shape familiar clay. As days are summed, the world and I are changed; I to myself become an interdict; Against the eye of recall, days are ranged And prophecies unreal my sight restrict. But soundless insight comes upon the form I am, but do not know, as though in sleep Day-wakening were pretended in the term Of steady night, eyes open in the deep. This vision has no words to guide its course Nor attribute, nor form, within its source.   13 Obscure momentum to the pace of change, No hourglass against a hazy sea, Unknown beyond the fracture, and a strange Presentiment of lives that shall not be! Imagined is the land I give my sight And tenantless the ground on which I stand; Unseen the first and final ray of light Through virgin air on printless level sand. What metamorphosis directs my soul And throws my shadow on the edge of dearth, Simulacrum of place and man, poor whole Of obscure provenance, obscurer worth? Through time's immuring wastes the soul stares now To see the end of change upon the brow.   14 Days, roads, ironies of time, nearness Of night, the onward bridge, a river crossed, The finished thing on end, and clearness No lucid script, but writing that is lost. So, silent, in the narrow of the way I meet another man who thinks as I; Though he is gone, th'interstice of his day Shows me a world where widest landscapes lie Half-known to me, possessing freedom's field. And so two ages stare across the bourne That has no living memory: and so must yield Their grip on emptiness: and that's the dawn. All days' one day: an age is springtime wide That finds an apprehension of its guide.   15 The night's compassion holds the dreamless eye Untroubled through the troubled hours of sleep; Hoared boundaries in frost; the vixen's cry; The glassless window in the long night's deep: When limits fail a use, then who am I To fence a home, an acre, and an end, A yard of ground beneath a foreign sky On which a foreign life and art contend. Identities of silence hedge this place; Quick-motioned thought delineates the day; The sleeper wakes within sufficient space To lose his all to sight and take his way. The country of his waking and his name are one; The place put from the mind, and he is gone.   16 The forcing hand of precept never feigns Nor shows an intent by the end it makes; The day that woke it now no longer reigns But lies within contentions that it wakes. Cool thinking must betray its guise of calm; The seeker, sight-line, form of sighted thought In strangest silence through its sinews' palm Embody spirit which cannot by touch be sought. Then what end lay beneath the feigning clause To make me as I am, outside your eyes? To make the world of wandering? No pause Nor land my own beneath these foreign skies, O stranger, uncompliant to my will, Unknown in daybreak's light, and unknown still.   17 The swiftest days are figured by the road Beneath the sun, beneath the changing moon, By winter's time, beneath the hard frost's goad, Asleep while walking to the colder tune. The lands that pass might change me as I walk Into the figure that I do not know; To stop within the speech that feigns my talk To make diverse the single way I go. The journeyer is but a wayward life Of that completeness which I scarcely knew: The landscape under elemental strife Can change no more than he who journeys through. Identities on skylines! Far drawn breath To name and judge in recognition's death.   18 When first I came and rested here the night, No sequence held the road of each day's sun, The past a day-divorced, self-shining light, The spirit's flight, the road for running on, Observant, and the mind a summer swift And fields overflown, a calendar Of time hedge-marked, long day from day, the gift And crest of seasons: and the winter's far. Winter, Night, Night in winter, Winter's night, The sound of fracture, sharper, jaggedness Of years' ends: the sound of shortest light: No witness but a mind of raggedness. And when the mind gives up, that's not the last, Nor when the body shrinks in winter's fast.   19 The adumbration of the road I came Was in myself. The silence of the phrase Stands steadily beneath the past, whose flame, In flickering, casts suns of prior days Unsequenced on the backward-looking eye To hang, perspectiveless, above the wedge Of present and foreshortened day, the sky Portending storm, rain, clean advancing edge Of night. The past's an easy poet's tongue Of shadowings and names he seeks as his; In that my song is all, and all my song, The road I travel is the road which is. Imagined time is worked in time unjust; The days brought back are journeys in the dust.   20 The finished thing cannot be brought to mind Nor sequences of days condense to one Eternity without a tense assigned. But these things are: and when the mind has gone They will remain: but now the footfall sounds Of autumn days, an age unleafing walks, Unmindful multiplicity of wounds Of day on day, whose axe-fall never balks The ageing sinew and the guided stroke: The old man lays the axe upon the tree In naked intent under winter's yoke: The wish to leave upon the wish to be. Commonalty of winters, sighted rage To seize upon the weakness of the age.   21 Against this strait the promontory's side Is massed beneath the rain-dark evening sky And even now the longer shadows slide To days' end coalescence, so to fly A world so nude and blistered by the light And narrowed to the spectrum of the solar hand That other light is darkness: and the sight Behind the eye, the black and haloed brand, The negative of suns. Do days produce Such ages' counter-time of shifting stance Where living is? And do no sounds seduce The rock-wise steersman in the night's advance? Character and person, duressed, quick mote That is unseparate from I, an asymptote.   22 Unbroken sides of day, the limits' mind Unbridled in a dayspring yet unbreached Upon a road that has no way assigned Nor path upon its stones, its end unreached; A plain at daybreak, never seen before, Still lies in sleep. The level shadows flow To skylines in a daybreak from a store Of time and provenance where ages grow And all-potential character may thrive; A multitude of roads one road might span, An eye in animation, and a speech alive The path in words and all intelligence in man. All days that dawn sequester such a day: This morning's light should be its ray.   23 The unseen mountains sheathed within the cloud Perturb the air and generate the storms That end in nightfall, shape the floating shroud That hangs, as over limbs, upon their forms As days defined within one day of life When unseen matter bodies their unrest: Change beyond an end in making's strife Upon that templet which their forms invest. The weight and presence felt; the stranger's days Unlucid acts and agents of days past: Were change a man, his roads were strangers' ways And he himself should weather change's last. Clear time; the moment of a free air, the light To slake a dark, and give a lifetime's sight.   24 This day, one day, distinguished from a line Of days self-folded and beyond the eye, The seeds of dormant thought, the drying vine: Where is the earth to which the dead leaves fly? The field of still succession where new light Grows out amongst the orders of the old? This day, one day, inheritor of sight What do you see? Are all beginnings cold And ordered in these dews and mists, where breath Hangs in the air? Inanimate am I Apart from you: and that's my death: To truly know the earth on which I lie. Led thought, the spurious analogy, Daylight's end, tower of tautology.   25 The single day, borne of a longer sight Of unmade days, detaining to the eye, Making all the past, furthering the light That holds the leaves of time: new sky Above new earth. And I, a man most poor Who has no living in the unfixed place, Must ask the day: as cities ask the moor To bear their weight, their roofs the heavens' face, the will of none. Then who was here before, And spoke with ease a language held in trust? And who art thou, who from a dark time's door, Might stay and read, but goes because he must? All greater time's assumed, beyond our own Recital of a day, and that's soon flown.   26 To see the traveller upon the ridge Is all that I may ask of days. Slow hour From first-sight's distance, that uncertain bridge Crossed by identities and moving powers At the approach, the speculative name Now borne, a person by the skyline thorn, Alive, a character and form aflame, In onward motion where the day is torn, Unknown within one road's divided ways That bear away the naming of a face: One person silent in adjacent days: Or two men talking in a single place. A coming and a going: one distant Twice informed, and silence uninsistent.   27 The hours of the night untied; and one Time-loosened movelessness is all, the sight Unbound in unhorizoned mind, alone Awake, the sun of meditative light That gives the subtle world.       28 The animus awakens in the night To landmarks that I see but do not know; Outpacing senses, quicker than my sight, Holds boundaries as do the night air's flow; Whose local learning is the flat of earth Between myself and some possessive star - Bare, nothing of a name nor thing of worth, A rain-wet form, to cast a shadow far, As he and I inhabit one same land: His pupils, in my sleep, watch through my eyes - My name around him, yet his hand Imprints the patterns in the springtime skies. A name's a time and thing of ornament, Nocturnal gradus in the night's descent,   29 Is my translation of his dialect And seeds of speech, languageless, alone: The chords may sound, the lips inflect, To silent voice the edge of doubt has grown: Beyond the place there is no spoken word, Beyond the self-same stead no hand of thought By which a proud self's nature stands averred In nights of silence. He comes unsought; He has no burden of my prior days And speaks with all the readiness of youth As intuition goes before set ways; His innocence is wider than my truth. Were he to go, then I would nothing be; Were I to go, then he would not be free.   30 The lease that is determined on the house Advances time unlived, to live the more; Gives echo to the time the footfalls rouse And disallows the limits drawn before The wider dawn has pressed upon the door Of every room till they were one; defines the lively road of leaving from a store Most set and strait in ways; and unconfines The cypress path. Places to the end are gone And backward sight is nothing; to the field Fulfilling end of action; a life upon The edge where limits fall away, and yield No void, no numbing to the heart's quick pace: An allegoric person lives a place.   31 I speak, and err, to set my figure here And make myself an image of my own; The hollow of a parlance insincere, A paler self, evicting self half-known: Self-praising waste, ambition of a day; It's then that we invent a world To touch the edge of life and see decay, The birthright spent, the anger hurled. Self so arraigned must make of self a drudge; My own annulment figures my own age; The judgement of the self impugns the judge And temporality is not time's gage. My self is empty in its own defence. My words in other ways frustrate their tense.   32 More true to see my true love's lucid mind As closer to me than my made defence And I a speck in distance, day-designed, And spending out the days at day's expense, And fretting home-returning recall's sight, And taking tracts time-measured to their end. A poor dove wearied, ending outward flight: Quick spirit, home-returning, home subtend! These tracts of heath are something of a home, The wayward path is semblance of a track And days are days. The mire and sour loam Impartial, vacant, in the long days' slack. My love's mysterious: her watching face Affirms as solid this sad hollow place.   33 Not many worlds withstand the sudden night. Few things that the hand has shaped will make The edge of sunrise, and a nature's light. The dusty ages do not flow, but break, And long-drawn in the wilderness of earth A language and a lineage align Upon the simple age and time's rebirth, Old reason new-learned and a mind's design. The antiquity of man is in these lines. The sense is hidden by the present's flow But must outlast the shortest day's confines Must follow me, must be the place I go, And what I am: the world unmade by sense As character is fined when all goes hence.   34 The shadow's image falls upon its source; The sunlit eyes depict the painted plane; The made world's evidence will reinforce The hidden thing within the mind. Day's reign Might show how nature changes, in abuse Of days that went before, unknown, unfound, In ignorance of nature's mind, disuse Of freesight and of love: false nature crowned. Unless the seer lose himself in sight He bears the world, and all its weighted past Unseen, in endless referential light, The road to discord, starless, overcast. There's only one day's light beneath the sun; The speculum of time is nature's pun.   35 Beyond the days that made you as you are, The lands that form the background to your face; Beyond the painted panel, drawn afar, That passes into silence at time's pace; Beyond the reach of distance, and of age, The dust of plains, the figures on the brow; Beyond the point of reason's flight and gauge, The dialect of strangers in time's flow; Beyond the genealogy of name Where lives deferred are judgements of its line; The undefending word denying shame Where sense is perjured in these days' decline: The self you say you are, as you know well, Is to yourself as is the pilgrim's shell.   36 How well I know that prospect of your eye That draws perception of the known world's edge. How well I know that you return to I And draw the mark and make of I a hedge Where to be made is to be seen anew And change the landscape in the eye's first sense: My strangeness on a strange horizon's view Is hedged beyond the stranger self-made fence. There's no such seam in my eye's further range Which sets a beacon for the longer course: It makes the well-acquainted of the strange: The pupils widen in its gazing force. The body's echo can no more delay The prophecies the eye made yesterday.   37 The fast compression of the winter days To one still instance of a single edge No open sense nor hidden search conveys But hangs unsaid, as one recalls a pledge. The waters of this river have no name; Its morning mists have never borne a tense; Its great meanders have no greater claim Beyond their witness by the witness sense. And winter flood is borne within its flow To mirror now the flight of all days' sky, A day in days that time should undergo Within the pupil of the witnessed eye. In being here, this day's extant in you: No image leaves a footstep in the dew.   38 In this still night the image of your face With open eyes refracts the silent air Of this still room, this moveless endtime place. No hour to hang nor vacant thought to wear; No planetary motion cedes a day Whereby this room was made to house a soul: Within the void and vast of time, the way Of being one, we two are made a whole. The poor convention of myself may be A thing in things that furniture the world; But you within, and I in you, are free As days within the one day's light enfurled. I am a day, and in an hour of light The morning is the dayspring of my sight.   39 The lens of sight that marks apart the way As though there were a path where there is none Must take amorphous time and make a day By intuition, for the model's gone. The way that made you and the words that speak Began as landscapes in a time now fled; The hazy plain, the unremembered peak, The habit's dwelling and the form now shed. What instrument now measures out your time To keep contention from the change's edge And measures rhyme to world and world to rhyme, The living day the quickened pulse's pledge? Before your making, you did nothing lack: Remember forward, and remember back.   40 The day that gives and understands your name Might pass as any day time-lost in burning bright From early birdsong to red-pillared flame, Dew-shining slant to distant western light, Except she takes you to herself. Your life renewed; her day relived; a babe, awake, hands' reach to the setting sun; a dying's strife beneath hoar light, the end of night, day's break: All new-drawn water from the well of deep And formless time, cool as dayspring: an hour Flowing through life's every age: no rough-edged sleep Deeper than reflection. Refracted power At the day's long side; all that is, unbound: And in this day of yours, the world is found.   41 When I am distant and the night-slow train Has drawn me from the world where we might live, The lonesome lamp beneath the gusting rain Makes dark the hills which might some solace give As though the world were but that lamp and me And flagstones in a downward cone of light Where nothing was, and nothing more shall be; No day to dawn and burn away the night. And yet my sight is happy this is so. In loneliness I know your soul more clear; The place's sorrow is that I must go; Apart from you I am your witness here. The world of thought is crowded and askew; The well of intuition must rest true.   42 This seeming world cries harshly and unclear; Polluted speeches ratify the age And dread of fear eclipses greater fear Of driven nature's elemental rage. On unpredicted roads the mind unstill Sustains a nature's antiphon of trust. Where is the silence that mute voices fill As every error falls and comes to dust? The deep attenuation of each star No longer seen above the cities' glow Hangs in the sweet soul's landscape, burning far, Fire of intensity to point the way I go. The magnet of the age, so strong at source, At every step relinquishes its force.   43 The age that ends is finished to the sight And seed is set, a form in form, days die And stones grow weak within the night; The stream does not recall the maytime fly. The road with emptiness along its length Hangs on the mind unburdened from the day, Unrecordedness its furthest strength, A gateless and unwalled unlandmarked way. All the years past within a single word; All waking life within the prone form's sleep; The kingdoms of the night are suns deferred And seeds of time are borne upon the deep. Unpredictedness, hybrid, and opaque: Yet reason breeds worse monsters while awake.   44 The furrow's edge is white with winter rime; The harvest's gone, the next beyond all sight; The sleeping seed's unmanifested time Before epiphanies of springtime light. What rules the short days of this winter hour Beyond past orders of the year's round, Before the blooming of the flower Upon the unseen land, now winter drowned? No cause beyond a pace is witness to the sense; No looking forward, nor yet looking back; The evidence is lost within the tense; The winter is herself, and has no lack. In search of laws, no witness will avail For potencies of time do not prevail.   45 I close my eyes and dwell upon the night And see the storm upon the midnight glass. No day is fixed within the ruffled flight No instant caught beneath the lightning's pass. Beneath the flux the speaking sense is dumb Within an age of catastrophic change: What seemed to be a world is bare and numb And all is one that mutes the senses' range. But I am water in a watery flow Where nothing has the power to reform: Wide worlds of want must show themselves and go Unfinished in the unrecording storm. A keen new world shall be, as I foretold, As this is not, the morning of the old.   46 What end-stage shadow horrifies this age And casts all ages past within its frame? Something blocks the light: the poorest rage Is opaque anger's sight-destroying flame: Something blocks the flow of light: the hand against the future's form: days unaffirmed As though an Eden could not understand How, beyond her gates, time is confirmed Against her. Sight is unsustained, no past To hold secure, lest hand and eye dismiss The person that she is. And that's the last. And every age must come to end like this. The end is common, and one backward look enough to read of pasts in future's book.   47 The spectral wind which moans throughout the age Leaves nothing of itself, but in the mind A desolation and a darkened stage No injured eye may name, nor word may find. The half-completed colonnades of time Find their half-fallen form within the soul; The winter's field, now white with colder rime Is spacious in the bourdon's half-heard toll. And that is winter's prospect, made in song, The tenser tuning, and the scarce-touched string; In music of the skyline, days belong: At winter's end, so shall the heart's mind sing. Within that metre and in changing rhyme The end of day becomes the end of time.   48 The sentience of slow evolving dawn Is the fount of feeling; the flooding plain Is endless, and the end of night is borne, A long procession from the light's terrain. The fount of feeling, sightedness of day To give both road and journeyer one course, One light, one apprehension of the way No night can douse, nor recalled habit force A splinter in a multiplicity Of hairline days, a fissured time, unhealing For want of one true day's simplicity And morning's sentience, the fount of feeling. This single source is first and last of days; The speculum of time no time portrays.   49 The constellations are the maps of days Of languages and lives which no more are. The country-dark is gone that fines the ways Of clear-edged night, with every coloured star A wisdom in the density of night, And every footstep solid on the earth, And time, the softsound of the owl's flight. The world's a house of silence, and the lath Of storeyed ceilings open to the air, Entablatures in voids, the windows brief Within the moon's traverse. Cold bones, the bare Anatomy of time removed from life: But days and roads have life; and then I tell The constellations in your soul's deep well.   50 The stars' long field that limits out the soul Is nature to the fullness of the night; The crossroad yew whose winter-broken bole Is found again by intuition's sight, The roads dividing at its spreading root Where we must leave. The mortal heart would sigh For all that leaving is the greenest shoot Upon the mossy baulk. And so the sky Grows light: the step along the way is new And potent is the vacancy of words - Say nothing, now, and go, the hours are few Before a springtime calls the migrant birds. Unlighted ages dim a lucid sky And migrants move to find the clearer eye.   51 The syntax of the sentence of the days Is through the eye brought to a partial sense, For echoes of the unrecorded ways Have present form before the eye's wide tense. To hold the pregnant mother of the night Unchangingness stands in the lowest place Deep to a search, beneath the world of sight, Subtending wisdom and perception's face. Unsensed, it makes, and yet it has no name; No chain of words the way of its enduring Nor adjective by which its being came: Against its freedom, freedoms are immuring. This is the eye from which the world is cast; Within one iris is the first and last.   Index   updated 16th October 2004