Songs from The Beggar’s Opera: Air XVI-“Over the Hills, and Far Away”

God speaks to the soul
And God said to the soul:
I desired you before the world began.
I desire you now
As you desire me.
And where the desires of two come together
There love is perfected.

Written for the Nativity of Our Lord, Puebla, 1689. Since Love is shivering
in the ice and cold,

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

What are you going to do
With what is left of yourself
Now among the rustling
Of your maybe best years?
This is not an auto-elegy
With me pouring my heart
Out into where you
Differently stand or sit

1.

Far from the sea far from the sea
of Breton fishermen
the white clouds scudding
over Lowell
and the white birches the
bare white birches
along the blear night roads

Ugliest little boy
that everyone ever saw.
That is what everyone said.

Even to his mother it was apparent—
when the blue-aproned nurse came into the
northeast end of the maternity ward
bearing his squeals and plump bottom
looped up in a scant receiving blanket,

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:

I inhabit these fugitive words,
I live, my face my face’s lone companion,
And my face is my path,

In your name, my land
That stands tall, enchanted and solitary;
In your name, death, my friend.

December 1938 About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood

I tell thee, Dick, where I have been,
Where I the rarest things have seen;
Oh, things without compare!
Such sights again cannot be found
In any place on English ground,
Be it at wake, or fair.

At Charing-Cross, hard by the way,

I lay down under language
it left me and I slept

—You, the Comforter, came into the room

my blood, my mouth
all buttoned away—

Makers of houses, books, clothes-
makers, goodbye—

What’s geography? What difference what mountain
it is? In the intimacy of this altitude
its discolored snowfields overhang half the world.

On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky,
feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind
spinning the blood-weighted body head downward.

The mountain that had become a known profile
on the day’s horizon is a gesture of earth

And have we done with War at last? Well, we've been lucky devils both, And there's no need of pledge or oath

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin,
We wish that one should lose, the other win;
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots, like in each respect:
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

Rotting in the wet gray air
the railroad depot stands deserted under
still green trees. In the fields
cold begins an end.

There were other too-long-postponed departures.
They left, finally, because of well water
gone rank, the smell of fungus, the chill
of rain in chimneys.

Out of a high meadow where flowers
bloom above cloud, come down;
pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice.

Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir,
surprise in the perfect leg-stems
and queries unstirred by recognition or fear
pooled in the deep eyes.

Come down by regions where rocks

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Dear Charles XII, the Poltava battle Has been fortunately lost. To quote Lenin’s burring rattle, “Time will show you Kuzka’s mother”, ruins along the waste, Bones of post-mortem bliss with a Ukrainian aftertaste.
It’s not the green flag , eaten by the isotope , It’s the yellow-and-blue flying over Konotop , Made out of canvas – must be a gift from Toronto – Alas, it bears no cross, but the Khokhly don’t want to.
Oh, rushnyks and roubles, sunflowers in summer season!

There is no radical shift of light
or redwings calling areas of marsh
their territories yet, nor plovers
probing for copepods. Only a yellow
front-end loader laying out a new berm
on the beach, from tubes too heavy
to be called hoses, its audience one man
and his protesting dog. No frosted

In what sense
I am I
a minor observer
as in a dream
absorbed in the interior,

a beardless youth
unaccountably
remote yet present