Poems 1960-2000 Read online

  of an aeronautic show.

  Easier, such a free fall in reverse,

  higher than clogging snow

  or clutching gravity, than the awkward local

  embrace of rocks. And observe

  the planets coursing their elliptical race-tracks,

  where each completed curve

  cinctures a new dimension. Mark these patterns.

  Mark, too, how the high

  air thins. The top of any mountain

  is a base for the sky.

  5

  Further by days and oceans than all my flying

  you have gone, while here the air insensibly flowing

  over a map of mountains drowns my dumbness.

  A turn of the earth away, where a crawling dimness

  waits now to absorb our light, another

  snowscape, named like this one, took you; and neither

  rope, nor crumbling ice, nor your unbelieving

  uncommitted hands could hold you to living.

  Wheels turn; the dissolving air rolls over

  an arc of thunder. Gone is gone forever.

  Beauty Abroad

  Carrying still the dewy rose

  for which she’s bound to payment, Beauty goes

  trembling through the gruesome wood:

  small comfort to her that she’s meek and good.

  A branch cracks, and the beast appears:

  she sees the fangs, the eyes, the bristly ears,

  stifles a scream, and smooths her dress;

  but his concern is for his own distress.

  He lays his muzzle on her hand,

  says ‘Pity me!’ and ‘Can you understand?

  Be kind!’ And then goes on to praise

  her pretty features and her gentle ways.

  Beauty inclines a modest ear,

  hears what she has decided she should hear,

  and with no thought to ask ‘What then?’

  follows the creature to his hairy den.

  The beast, like any hero, knows

  sweet talk can lead him to la belle chose.

  Knife-play

  All my scars are yours. We talk of pledges,

  and holding out my hand I show

  the faint burn on the palm and the hair-thin

  razor-marks at wrist and elbow:

  self-inflicted, yes; but your tokens –

  made as distraction from a more

  inaccessible pain than could have been

  caused by cigarette or razor –

  and these my slightest marks. In all our meetings

  you were the man with the long knives,

  piercing the living hopes, cutting connections,

  carving and dissecting motives,

  and with an expert eye for dagger-throwing:

  a showman’s aim. Oh, I could dance

  and dodge, as often as not, the whistling blades,

  turning on a brave performance

  to empty stands. I leaned upon a hope

  that this might prove to have been less

  a gladiatorial show, contrived for murder,

  than a formal test of fitness

  (initiation rites are always painful)

  to bring me ultimately to your

  regard. Well, in a sense it was; for now

  I have found some kind of favour:

  you have learnt softness; I, by your example,

  am well-schooled in contempt; and while

  you speak of truce I laugh, and to your pleading

  turn a cool and guarded profile.

  I have now, you might say, the upper hand:

  these knives that bristle in my flesh

  increase my armoury and lessen yours.

  I can pull out, whet and polish

  your weapons, and return to the attack,

  well-armed. It is a pretty trick,

  but one that offers little consolation.

  such a victory would be Pyrrhic,

  occurring when my strength is almost spent.

  No: I would make an end of fighting

  and, bleeding as I am from old wounds,

  die like the bee upon a sting.

  Instructions to Vampires

  I would not have you drain

  with your sodden lips the flesh that has fed mine,

  and leech his bubbling blood to a decline:

  not that pain;

  nor visit on his mind

  that other desiccation, where the wit

  shrivels: so to be humbled in not fit

  for his kind.

  But use acid or flame,

  secretly, to brand or cauterise;

  and on the soft globes of his mortal eyes

  etch my name.

  Incident

  When you were lying on the white sand,

  a rock under your head, and smiling,

  (circled by dead shells), I came to you

  and you said, reaching to take my hand,

  ‘Lie down.’ So for a time we lay

  warm on the sand, talking and smoking,

  easy; while the grovelling sea behind

  sucked at the rocks and measured the day.

  Lightly I fell asleep then, and fell

  into a cavernous dream of falling.

  It was all the cave-myths, it was all

  the myths of tunnel or tower or well –

  Alice’s rabbit-hole into the ground,

  or the path of Orpheus: a spiral staircase

  to hell, furnished with danger and doubt.

  Stumbling, I suddenly woke; and found

  water about me. My hair was wet,

  and you were lying on the grey sand

  waiting for the lapping tide to take me:

  watching, and lighting a cigarette.

  Unexpected Visit

  I have nothing to say about this garden.

  I do not want to be here, I can’t explain

  what happened. I merely opened a usual door

  and found this. The rain

  has just stopped, and the gravel paths are trickling

  with water. Stone lions, on each side,

  gleam like wet seals, and the green birds

  are stiff with dripping pride.

  Not my kind of country. The gracious vistas,

  the rose-gardens and terraces, are all wrong –

  as comfortless as the weather. But here I am.

  I cannot tell how long

  I have stood gazing at grass too wet to sit on,

  under a sky so dull I cannot read

  the sundial, staring along the curving walks

  and wondering where they lead;

  not really hoping, though, to be enlightened.

  It must be morning, I think, but there is no

  horizon behind the trees, no sun as clock

  or compass. I shall go

  and find, somewhere among the formal hedges

  or hidden behind a trellis, a toolshed. There

  I can sit on a box and wait. Whatever happens

  may happen anywhere,

  and better, perhaps, among the rakes and flowerpots

  and sacks of bulbs than under this pallid sky:

  having chosen nothing else, I can at least

  choose to be warm and dry.

  For Andrew

  ‘Will I die?’ you ask. And so I enter on

  the dutiful exposition of that which you

  would rather not know, and I rather not tell you.

  To soften my ‘Yes’ I offer compensations –

  age and fulfilment (‘It’s so far away;

  you will have children and grandchildren by then’)

  and indifference (‘By then you will not care’).

  No need: you cannot believe me, convinced

  that if you always eat plenty of vegetables

  and are careful crossing the street you will live for ever.

  And so we close the subject, with much unsaid –

  this, for instance: Though you an
d I may die

  tomorrow or next year, and nothing remain

  of our stock, of the unique, preciously-hoarded

  inimitable genes we carry in us,

  it is possible that for many generations

  there will exist, sprung from whatever seeds,

  children straight-limbed, with clear enquiring voices,

  bright-eyed as you. Or so I like to think:

  sharing in this your childish optimism.

  For a Five-Year-Old

  A snail is climbing up the window-sill

  into your room, after a night of rain.

  You call me in to see, and I explain

  that it would be unkind to leave it there:

  it might crawl to the floor; we must take care

  that no one squashes it. You understand,

  and carry it outside, with careful hand,

  to eat a daffodil.

  I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:

  your gentleness is moulded still by words

  from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

  from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

  your closest relatives, and who purveyed

  the harshest kind of truth to many another.

  But that is how things are: I am your mother,

  and we are kind to snails.

  Comment

  The four-year-old believes he likes

  vermouth; the cat eats cheese;

  and you and I, though scarcely more

  convincingly than these,

  walk in the gardens, hand in hand,

  beneath the summer trees.

  Miss Hamilton in London

  It would not be true to say she was doing nothing:

  she visited several bookshops, spent an hour

  in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Indian section),

  and walked carefully through the streets of Kensington

  carrying five mushrooms in a paper bag,

  a tin of black pepper, a literary magazine,

  and enough money to pay the rent for two weeks.

  The sky was cloudy, leaves lay on the pavements.

  Nor did she lack human contacts: she spoke

  to three shop-assistants and a newsvendor,

  and returned the ‘Goodnight’ of a museum attendant.

  Arriving home, she wrote a letter to someone

  in Canada, as it might be, or in New Zealand,

  listened to the news as she cooked her meal,

  and conversed for five minutes with the landlady.

  The air was damp with the mist of late autumn.

  A full day, and not unrewarding.

  Night fell at the usual seasonal hour.

  She drew the curtains, switched on the electric fire,

  washed her hair and read until it was dry,

  then went to bed; where, for the hours of darkness,

  she lay pierced by thirty black spears

  and felt her limbs numb, her eyes burning,

  and dark rust carried along her blood.

  The Man Who X-Rayed an Orange

  Viewed from the top, he said, it was like a wheel,

  the paper-thin spokes raying out from the hub

  to the half-transparent circumference of rind,

  with small dark ellipses suspended between.

  He could see the wood of the table-top through it.

  Then he knelt, and with his eye at orange-level

  saw it as the globe, its pithy core

  upright from pole to flattened pole. Next,

  its levitation: sustained (or so he told us)

  by a week’s diet of nothing but rice-water

  he had developed powers, drawing upon which

  he raised it to a height of about two feet

  above the table, with never a finger near it.

  That was all. It descended, gradually opaque,

  to rest; while he sat giddy and shivering.

  (He shivered telling it.) But surely, we asked,

  (and still none of us mentioned self-hypnosis

  or hallucinations caused by lack of food),

  surely triumphant too? Not quite, he said,

  with his little crooked smile. It was not enough:

  he should have been able to summon up,

  created out of what he had newly learnt,

  a perfectly imaginary orange, complete

  in every detail; whereupon the real orange

  would have vanished. Then came explanations

  and his talk of mysticism, occult physics,

  alchemy, the Qabalah – all his hobby-horses.

  If there was failure, it was only here

  in the talking. For surely he had lacked nothing,

  neither power nor insight nor imagination,

  when he knelt alone in his room, seeing before him

  suspended in the air that golden globe,

  visible and transparent, light-filled:

  his only fruit from the Tree of Life.

  Composition for Words and Paint

  This darkness has a quality

  that poses us in shapes and textures,

  one plane behind another,

  flatness in depth.

  Your face; a fur of hair; a striped

  curtain behind, and to one side cushions;

  nothing recedes, all lies extended.

  I sink upon your image.

  I see a soft metallic glint,

  a tinsel weave behind the canvas,

  aluminium and bronze beneath the ochre.

  There is more in this than we know.

  I can imagine drawn around you

  a white line, in delicate brush-strokes:

  emphasis; but you do not need it.

  You have completeness.

  I am not measuring your gestures;

  (I have seen you measure those of others,

  know a mind by a hand’s trajectory,

  the curve of a lip).

  But you move, and I move towards you,

  draw back your head, and I advance.

  I am fixed to the focus of your eyes.

  I share your orbit.

  Now I discover things about you:

  your thin wrists, a tooth missing;

  and how I melt and burn before you.

  I have known you always.

  The greyness from the long windows

  reduces visual depth; but tactile

  reality defies half-darkness.

  My hands prove you solid.

  You draw me down upon your body,

  hard arms behind my head.

  Darkness and soft colours blur.

  We have swallowed the light.

  Now I dissolve you in my mouth,

  catch in the corners of my throat

  the sly taste of your love, sliding

  into me, singing;

  just as the birds have started singing.

  Let them come flying through the windows

  with chains of opals around their necks.

  We are expecting them.

  Regression

  All the flowers have gone back into the ground.

  We fell on them, and they did not lie

  crushed and crumpled, waiting to die

  on the earth’s surface. No: they suddenly wound

  the film of their growth backwards. We saw them shrink

  from blossom to bud to tiny shoot,

  down from the stem and up from the root.

  Back to the seed, brothers. It makes you think.

  Clearly they do not like us. They’ve gone away,

  given up. And who could blame

  anything else for doing the same?

  I notice that certain trees look smaller today.

  You can’t escape the fact: there’s a backward trend

  from oak to acorn, and from pine

  to cone; they all want to resign.

  Understandable enough, but where does it end?

  Harder, you’d thin
k, for animals; yet the cat

  was pregnant, but has not produced.

  Her rounded belly is reduced,

  somehow, to normal. How to answer that?

  Buildings, perhaps, will be the next to go;

  imagine it: a tinkle of glass,

  a crunch of brick, and a house will pass

  through the soil to the protest meeting below.

  This whole conspiracy of inverted birth

  leaves only us; and how shall we

  endure as we deserve to be,

  foolish and lost on the naked skin of the earth?

  I Ride on My High Bicycle

  I ride on my high bicycle

  into a sooty Victorian city

  of colonnaded bank buildings,

  horse-troughs, and green marble fountains.

  I glide along, contemplating

  the curly lettering on the shop-fronts.

  An ebony elephant, ten feet tall,

  is wheeled past, advertising something.

  When I reach the dark archway

  I chain my bicycle to a railing,

  nod to a policeman, climb the steps,

  and emerge into unexpected sunshine.

  There below lies Caroline Bay,

  its red roofs and its dazzling water.

  Now I am running along the path;

  it is four o’clock, there is still just time.

  I halt and sit on the sandy grass

  to remove my shoes and thick stockings;

  but something has caught me; around my shoulders

  I feel barbed wire; I am entangled.

  It pulls my hair, dragging me downwards;

  I am suddenly older than seventeen,

  tired, powerless, pessimistic.