Occasional Impressions

The Gemini Poets

Lazarus

The first things were not difficult:
To pour the scalding air again
Into my unaccustomed lungs, to let the blood wake
And spin again in the whirlpool veins, to boil and drown
My shrivelled limbs. Darkness, heavy with the smell
Of my new-found decaying (four days old, they said),
Beat on my stretched and hollow skin, another's fingers
Flogging and scratching me to sound and breath.
But then,
They brought me out. They pressed words into my ears
Until I screamed, afraid the drums would split,
Afraid the tender new stretched skin,
Over my whirlpool bran, would split -
The sucking vacuum too quickly filled.
I have seen
The soft pale underside of things. Why?
Why do you spin these ropes of sand around these shadows?
What knot of words is tight enough to stop
The shadow leaking out,
Eating away your net?
There is nothing
That can be talked about.

(They were surprised - Tell us, they said,
Tell us what it is like. But there is nothing to be told, I said,
forgetting they could not hear me.)

This is the worst, the knowing I must
Close my eyes and grasp the thing with words,
Learning to forget the soft shadowside
That slips away from grasping,
That lets words sink and die and disappear into it,
Swallowing them painfully: the vivisection
Of an unanaesthetised reality.

Let me go back.

The soft shadowside I put my hands to
To let the shadowed water wash away
The sticky clinging smell of living and decaying
(But all the waters cannot sweeten, cannot
Sweeten these murdered hands),
But found there answering hands
That groped and seized for mine
To tear them through the pale soft shadows
Into his face. O Lord
Thou hast deceived me and I was deceived.

(But, they said, tell us, what is there?
Look at the man beside you, I said,
Look at the man beside you,
Forgetting they could not hear me.
Let me go.)

They took the stinking clothes away, and still
I saw they could not hear me, except one.
I said, Why do you make me break
Tortured into the world again? Why
Have you come into the warm shadowed pit
To wrench me out? What have we to do with thee,
Let me alone, art thou come to destroy us?
I know thee who thou art. Why did you
Love me too much to let me rest?
rdw - may 1972

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