Tombeau
i.m. John Purdy, d.
January 1976
Beside. The row of headstones.
Pointing fingers. Sentences down the hedges. At me. First thick blank page of
his body. Was found the sloped field. The record jumps inscriptions on the
misty wet air walking straight. Straight. To nightsky sleep. Straight to the
grave. Drunk whatever. You decide. When you are. Horrible series. Is. Is. Is
right. He. Escaped no thing the continual face. To face these sayings depended
on. On. The way back home from friendships he’d said dead. Nothing. To say your
grave or mine on. Save a leaf on. Should not go wasted. Wait. You. Made us
somewhat. What you. Are in cutting off my left. Elsewhat and here right. On
time twice. Black head. Stone name. Myself to weep or do anything of that. Date
of that. That attempt at verse never. Wanted to be. Never never faced. The
road. To face. The marble language. Persists fleeting. Breath mobile. The
treble breath trembles in ecstasy. Pulls you out of breath. On the breeze
singing the bridges down below. Not to you. A valley of bungalows. Mention
those. Grains. Shivering in the heart. The roof sinking cannabis. Was found.
Glittering against. Tomorrow’s sky horses munch untethered in the field down
home that mocks. ‘Flying’ on the Downs. But fifty years this grave I will ever
grow. Full throated dynamite elegy so. Old pointing fingers. At me your energy.
Again a fragment of something. Did you. He said. In every sentence. Try it. I write.
It. On the wall looking straight. At you my tongue tires with. This wound
against my lip. Lap of earth. Browned grass. Sunken. As though in your slumber
you’ve turned
July
2002, recovered 2026
This poem, which was written during
the time I wrote the poems collected in Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter
Believes (and in its prevalent prose style), was unpublished, ‘lost’ for a quarter of a century,
in memory of a friend who died a quarter of a century before that. Assembling
my archive for archiving (as it were) I have recovered, restored (to the book)
and lightly revised the poem. I am posting it on the possible day he died, in
mysterious circumstances, in Sussex. In 2009 I returned to this incident in my
piece on Malcolm Lowry, who also died in the locality in mysterious
circumstances. That text, ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ is found in my Aquifer book Doubly
Stolen Fire. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/10/doubly-stolen-fire-new-book-of-hybrid.html.
