M A L C O L M L O W R Y
Nocturne
This evening Venus sings alone
And homeward feathers stir like silk
Like the dress of a multitudinous ghost
The pinons tear through a sky like milk.
Seagulls all soon to be turned to stone
That seeking I lose beyond the trail
In the woods that I and my ignorance own
Where together we walk on our hands and knees
Together go walking beneath the pale
Of a beautiful evening loved the most
And yet this evening is my jail
And policemen glisten in the trees.
Happiness
Blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water,
A wild sky full of stars at rising
And Venus and the gibbous moon at sunrise,
Gulls following a motorboat against the wind,
Trees with branches rooted in air —
Sitting in the sun at noon with furiously
Smoking shadow of the shack chimney —
Eagles drive downward in one,
Terns blow backward,
A new kind of tobacco at eleven,
And my love returning on the four o'clock bus
— My God, why have you given this to us?
No Company But Fear
How did all this begin and why am I here
at this arc of bar with its cracked brown paint,
papegaai, mezcal, hennessey, cerveza,
two slimed spittons, no company but fear:
fear of light, of the spring, of the complaint
of birds and buses flying to far places,
of girls skipping with the wind in their faces,
but no company, no company but fear,
fear of the blowing fountain: and all flowers
that know the sun are my enemies,
these, dead, hours?
____________________________
MALCOLM LOWRY
The Voyage That Never Ends
fictions poems fragments letters
New York Review of Books, 2007
Malcolm Lowry's mysterious demise
