Photo by Caroline Forbes

Canzone: In memoriam WSU

It’s no good, sometimes you have to think of it,
the possibility that haunts the idyllic morning
like a morning on the other side of it
but somehow darker, more cussed, as if it
hadn’t quite got up but was still asleep,
as if for ever, its eyes tight shut. You know it
in your pyjamas at the mirror. Or you see it
through an open window as it rises and falls
and darkens. And now the wind picks up, rain falls.
You look through the window and feel: So that’s it,
that is what being over is like, just like a cloud,
a cloud riding in on top of another cloud.

Or else you ignore it, accept a different cloud,
the one of unknowing, and simply trust it,
crying out to the face that rides the cloud,
following its drift, taking notice of cloud-
shapes, reading clouds, reading the morning
for rain, the grace of rain, the heart of cloud.
It is as if you were walking through a cloud
of words while word itself was asleep
and dreaming you. As if the word could sleep!
As if words fell out of a mysterious cloud!
And look outside now, watch as rain falls
like grace on everything that rises and falls.

Out in the war-torn world a body falls.
The streets are all smoke and cloud.
You’re on your motorbike as night falls
across the valley, or is it a bomb that falls?
You dream and there is the strangeness of it,
the dream, the memory that, like a pattern, falls
into place and becomes familiar. Man falls
into dream, world into room: the ritual of morning
with its alarm clock; the regular morning.
And here too the rain is falling fast. It falls
far and near, on life, on death. It falls while we sleep,
as if rain itself were merely a falling asleep.


How easy it is sometimes to fall asleep.
Power falls, time falls, body falls, then life too falls:
it falls with pain, indignity, with broken sleep,
brief wakefulness that’s followed by light sleep
and lighter memory. Youth is an electric cloud
full of lightning. Sometimes it strikes in sleep,
the fullness of it pressing against sleep
then bursting into light and sound. How it
dazzles as if all life were dazzling. Can it
ever have been so bright, disturbing our sleep?
Once life was forever moving into morning,
yesterday morning to tomorrow morning.

And so there is always something that is morning,
something of morning about us. Fast asleep,
we wake of a sudden. The body cries morning:
the clock, the birds, the light, whatever is morning
arrives in a rush, in a thunder of footfalls
on the bare boards of consciousness where morning
is setting out furniture. Welcome, brisk morning!
Body withers and fades, disperses like cloud
but memory has its own way with cloud,
seeking the light inside it, looking for morning.
Look it is there, it exclaims. Look! Can you see it?
And morning is there, and all the mornings beyond it.

Now, look, can you see him? What is it
moving there like a man in a body of cloud?
Clouds weep, we say, being human. When rain falls,
clouds are weeping. So language shifts in sleep,
and then we wake and soon enough it is morning.


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The sixth canzone, this one written for Bill. The strange obsessive pattern of the canzone forms a kind of ritual progress with a certain craziness at the heart of it. I am learning to live with it.