Anthony Burgess: Enderby Outside

a.b.

There arose those winning life between two wars,

Born out of one, doomed food for the other,

Floodroars ever in the ears.

Slothlovers hardly, hardly fighters:

Resentment spent against stone, long beaten out of

Minds resigned to the new:

Useless to queue for respirators.

Besides, what worse chaos to come back to.

Home, limbs heavy with mud and work, to sleep

To sweep out a house days deep in dirt.

Knowing finally man would limbs loin face

Efface utterly, leaving in his place

Engines rusting to world's end, heirs to warfare

Fonctionnant d'une manière automatique.

Summer swamps the land, the sun imprisons us,

The pen slithers in the examinee's fingers,

And colliding lips of lovers slide on sweat

When, blind, they inherit their tactile world.

Spectacles mist, handveins show blue, the urge to undress

Breeds passion in unexpected places. Barrage balloons

Soar silver in silver ether. Lying on grass,

We watch them, docile monsters, unwind to the zenith.

Drops of that flood out of France, with mud and work

Stained, loll in the trams, drinking their cigarettes,

Their presence defiling the flannels and summer frocks,

The hunters to hound our safety, spoil the summer.

War becomes time, and long logic

On buried premises; spring supervenes

With the circle as badge which, pun and profundity,

Vast, appears line and logical,

But, small, shows travel returning.

Circle is circle, proves nothing, makes nothing,

Swallows up process and end in no argument,

Brings new picture of old time.

Here in barracks is intake of birds,

The sun holds early his orderly room,

The pale company clerk is uneasy

As spring brings odour of other springs.

The truckdriver sings, free of the road,

The load of winter and war becomes

Embarrassing as a younger self.

Words disintegrate; war is words.

The blue of summer morning begs

The country journey to be made,

The sun that gilds the breakfast eggs

Illuminates the marmalade.

A cheque is smiling on the desk.

Remembered smells upon the lane

Breed hunger for the picaresque

To blood the buried springs again.

Here is the pub and here the church

And there our thirty miles of sun,

The river and the rod and the perch,

The noonday drinking just begun.

Let beer beneath the neighbour trees

Swill all that afternoon away,

And onions, crisp to sullen cheese,

Yield the sharp succulence of today.

Today remembers breaking out

The fire that burned the hayfield black.

An army that was grey with drought

Shows to my stick its fossil track.

Returning evening rose on rose

Or pomegranate rouge and ripe;

The lamp upon the pavement throws

The ectoplasm of my pipe.

History was not just what you learned that scorching day

Of ink and wood and sweat in the classroom, when mention

Of the Duke of Burgundy lost you in a voluptuous dream

Of thirst and Christmas, but that day was part of history.

There were other times, misunderstood by the family,

When you, at fifteen, on your summer evening bed

Believed there were ancient towns you might anciently visit

There might be a neglected platform on some terminus

And a ticket bought when the clock was off its guard.

Oh, who can dismember the past? The boy on the friendly bed

Lay on the unpossessed mother, the bosom of history,

And is gathered to her at last. And tears I suppose

Still thirst for that reeking unwashed pillow,

That bed ingrained with all the dirt of the past,

The mess and lice and stupidity of the Golden Age,

But a mother and loving, ultimately Eden.

One looks for Eden in history, best left unvisited,

For the primal sin is always a present sin,

The thin hand held in the river which can never

Clean off the blood, and so remains bloodless.

And this very moment, this very word will be Eden,

As that boy was already, or is already, in Eden,

While the delicate filthy hand dabbles and dabbles

But leaves the river clean, heartbreakingly clean.