Basil Bunting's Complete Poems--Sonatas

Briggflatts is part of the Sonatas but will have its own post.

My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies.

*

                                    our doom

is, to be sifted by the wind,

heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.

We are less permanent than thought.

*

precision clarifying vagueness;

boundary to a wilderness

of detail; chisel voice

smoothing the flanks of noise;

catalytic making whisper and whisper

run together like two drops of quicksilver

"Villon"

Out of puff

noonhot in tweeds and gray felt,

tired of appearance and

disappearance;

warm obese frame limp with satiety;

slavishly circumspect at sixty;

he spreads over the ottoman

scanning the pictures and and table trinkets.

(That hand's dismissed shadow

moves through fastidiously selective consciousness,

rearranges pain.)

*

                        In the morning

clean streets welcomed light's renewal,

patient, passive to the weight of buses

thundering like cabinet ministers

over a lethargic populace.

"Attis: Or, Something Missing"

(the first passage is the opening of the poem)

But their determination to banish fools foundered

ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Fear of being imputed

naive impeded thought.

*

Have you seen a falcon stoop

accurate, unforseen

and absolute, between

wind-ripples over harvest? Dread

of what's to be, is and has been--

were we not better dead?

His wings churn air

to flight.

Feathers alight

with sun, he rises where

dazzle rebuts our stare,

wonder our fright.

"The Spoils"

Basil Bunting's Complete Poems (Bloodaxe, 2000) is available at The Book Depository.