LOUIS GOLDING (QUEEN’S)

TICK-TOCK! the moon, that pale round clock, Her big face peering, goes tick-tock! Metallic as a grasshopper The far faint tickings start and stir. All night tinily you can hear Tick-tock tinkling down the sheer Steep falls of space. Minute, aloof, Here is no praise, here no reproof. Remote in voids star-purged of sense, Tick-tock in stark indifference! From ice-black lands of lack and rock, The two swords shake and clank tick-tock. In the dark din of the day’s vault Demand thy headlong soul shall halt One moment. Hearken, taut and tense, In the vast Silence beyond sense, The moon! From the hushed heart of her, Metallic as a grasshopper, Patient though earth may writhe and rock, Imperturbably, tock, tick-tock! Till, boastful earth, your forests wilt In grotesque death. Till death shall silt, Loud-blooded man, her unchecked sands From feet and warped expiring hands Through fatuous channels of the thinned Brain. Till all the clangours which have dinned Through your arched ears are only this, Tick-tock down blank eternities, Where still the sallow death’s-head ticks As stars burn down like candle-wicks.

WHO taps? You are not the wind tapping? No! Not the wind! You straining and moaning there, Are you a cold branch in the black air Which the storm has skinned? No! Not a cold branch! Not the wind! Who are you? Who are you? But you loved me once, You drank me like wine. The dead wood simmers in my skull. I am rotten. And your blood is red still and you have forgotten, And my blood was yours once and yours mine! Are you there still? O fainter, O further ... nothing! Nothing taps! Surely you straining and moaning there, You were only a cold branch in the black air? ... Or a door perhaps?

WHAT seek you in this hoarse hard sand That shuffles from your futile hand? Your limbs are wry. With salt despair All day the scant winds freeze your hair. What mystery in the barren sand Seek you to understand? All day the acute winds’ finger-tips Flay my skin and cleave my lips. But though like fame about my skull Leap the gibes of the cynic gull, I shall not go from this place. I Seek through all curved vacancy Though the sea taunt me and frost scar, I seek a star, a star! Why seek you this, why seek you this Of all distraught futilities? The tide slides closer. The tide’s teeth Shall bite your body with keen death! Of all unspaced things that are Vain, vain, most hideously far, Why seek you then a star? I seek a wild star, I that am Eaten by earth and all her shame; To whom fields, towns are a close clot Of mud whence the worm dieth not; To whom all running water is Besnagged with timeless treacheries, Who in a babe’s heart see designed Mine own distortion and the blind Lusts of all my kind! Hence of all things that are Vain, most hideously far, A star, I seek, a star!