A Tribute to David Gascoyne and Kathleen Raine

           Zero

Who can by now not hear
The hollow and annihilating roar
Of final disillusion; or not know
How our condition is uncertain and obscure
And difficult to bear? Yet through
The blackness of his dungeon there still peer
Man's eyes, unmoving, lit by their desire
To see the worst, and yet not die
Of their lucid despair
But in such vision persevere
Through time into Eternity
For this is Zero-hour
When the most penetrating gaze can see
Only the Void, the emptier than air,
The incoherent Nada of the seer:
Who blind is yet not blind, being aware
Of the Negation's double mystery!

Tomb of what was, womb of what is to be.

- David Gascoyne

           TIME-LAG

Words spoken long ago, unheard, unheeded then,
Voices of friends unprized in time's day-to-day
Only now in this long after where I am
I have heard messages, from one or another
Whose past is present to me,

And before life-time memories,
Those spacious regions of the mind,
That immemorial imagined land
Where remembered words were spoken,
Heard here and now, a world away.

Drawn to our times and places, who can say
What law of that remembered country we obey,
Those friends who come and go knowing no more than we
What purposes join hands and hearts
From the ends of the earth, from the beginning of time.

No truth of the living,
Told or untold, can cease to be,
And will, on some predestined day
Be understood, as I have heard
Wisdom that circles the world
Spoken long ago by loved familiar voices

-Kathleen Raine

Entrance To A Lane

Memento rectangled to lead the gaze
From outer levels of a hub of white,
An elsewhere that recedes from coiling planes

Sequestered rural scene reputed Welsh,
Season's regalia reduced to tones
Of veld and verdure, leaves to sprays of blotch

A static vortex wherein ochre glows
Softly in strata linked by streaks and zones
Of compact shade and layers of virid light

The felt-floored lane leads to a blank where hues
And perceptions vanish as fast as time
Into the non-lieu beyond mortal reach

Where red is not an opposite of rot
Or devastation the reverse of peace
And all those things that were the case resume.

-David Gascoyne