Poems 1960-2000 Read online

  I struggle weakly; and wake, of course.

  Well, all right. It doesn’t matter.

  Perhaps I didn’t get to the beach:

  but I have been there – to all the beaches

  (waking or dreaming) and all the cities.

  Now it is very early morning

  and from my window I see a leopard

  tall as a horse, majestic and kindly,

  padding over the fallen snow.

  Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

  The room is full of clichés – ‘Throw me a crumb’

  and ‘Now I see the writing on the wall’

  and ‘Don’t take umbrage, dear’. I wish I could.

  Instead I stand bedazzled by them all,

  longing for shade. Belshazzar’s fiery script

  glows there, between the prints of tropical birds,

  in neon lighting, and the air is full

  of crumbs that flash and click about me. Words

  glitter in colours like those gaudy prints:

  the speech of a computer, metal-based

  but feathered like a cloud of darts. All right.

  Your signal-system need not go to waste.

  Mint me another batch of tokens: say

  ‘I am in your hands; I throw myself upon

  your mercy, casting caution to the winds.’

  Thank you; there is no need to go on.

  Thus authorised by your mechanical

  issue, I lift you like a bale of hay,

  open the window wide, and toss you out;

  and gales of laughter whirl you far away.

  Hauntings

  Three times I have slept in your house

  and this is definitely the last.

  I cannot endure the transformations:

  nothing stays the same for an hour.

  Last time there was a spiral staircase

  winding across the high room.

  People tramped up and down it all night,

  carrying brief-cases, pails of milk, bombs,

  pretending not to notice me

  as I lay in a bed lousy with dreams.

  Couldn’t you have kept them away?

  After all, they were trespassing.

  The time before it was all bathrooms,

  full of naked, quarrelling girls –

  and you claim to like solitude:

  I do not understand your arrangements.

  Now the glass doors to the garden

  open on rows of stone columns;

  beside them stands a golden jeep.

  Where are we this time? On what planet?

  Every night lasts for a week.

  I toss and turn and wander about,

  whirring from room to room like a moth,

  ignored by those indifferent faces.

  At last I think I have woken up.

  I lift my head from the pillow, rejoicing.

  The alarm-clock is playing Schubert:

  I am still asleep. This is too much.

  Well, I shall try again in a minute.

  I shall wake into this real room

  with its shadowy plants and patterned screens

  (yes, I remember how it looks).

  It will be cool, but I shan’t wait

  to light the gas-fire. I shall dress

  (I know where my clothes are) and slip out.

  You needn’t think I am here to stay.

  Advice to a Discarded Lover

  Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,

  not only dead, not only fallen,

  but full of maggots: what do you feel –

  more pity or more revulsion?

  Pity is for the moment of death,

  and the moments after. It changes

  when decay comes, with the creeping stench

  and the wriggling, munching scavengers.

  Returning later, though, you will see

  a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,

  an inoffensive symbol of what

  once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.

  It is clear then. But perhaps you find

  the analogy I have chosen

  for our dead affair rather gruesome –

  too unpleasant a comparison.

  It is not accidental. In you

  I see maggots close to the surface.

  You are eaten up by self-pity,

  crawling with unlovable pathos.

  If I were to touch you I should feel

  against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.

  Do not ask me for charity now:

  go away until your bones are clean.

  The Water Below

  This house is floored with water,

  wall to wall, a deep green pit,

  still and gleaming, edged with stone.

  Over it are built stairways

  and railed living-areas

  in wrought iron. All rather

  impractical; it will be

  damp in winter, and we shall

  surely drop small objects – keys,

  teaspoons, or coins – through the chinks

  in the ironwork, to splash

  lost into the glimmering

  depths (and do we know how deep?).

  It will have to be rebuilt:

  a solid floor of concrete

  over this dark well (perhaps

  already full of coins, like

  the flooded crypt of that church

  in Ravenna). You might say

  it could be drained, made into

  a useful cellar for coal.

  But I am sure the water

  would return; would never go.

  Under my grandmother’s house

  in Drury, when I was three,

  I always believed there was

  water: lift up the floorboards

  and you would see it – a lake,

  a subterranean sea.

  True, I played under the house

  and saw only hard-packed earth,

  wooden piles, gardening tools,

  a place to hunt for lizards.

  That was different: below

  I saw no water. Above,

  I knew it must still be there,

  waiting. (For why did we say

  ‘Forgive us our trespasses,

  deliver us from evil’?)

  Always beneath the safe house

  lies the pool, the hidden sea

  created before we were.

  It is not easy to drain

  the waters under the earth.

  Think Before You Shoot

  Look, children, the wood is full of tigers,

  scorching the bluebells with their breath.

  You reach for guns. Will you preserve the flowers

  at such cost? Will you prefer the death

  of prowling stripes to a mush of trampled stalks?

  Through the eyes, then – do not spoil the head.

  Tigers are easier to shoot than to like.

  Sweet necrophiles, you only love them dead.

  There now, you’ve got three – and with such fur, too,

  golden and warm and salty. Very good.

  Don’t expect them to forgive you, though.

  There are plenty more of them. This is their wood

  (and their bluebells, which you have now forgotten).

  They’ve eaten all the squirrels. They want you,

  and it’s no excuse to say you’re only children.

  No one is on your side. What will you do?

  The Pangolin

  There have been all those tigers, of course,

  and a leopard, and a six-legged giraffe,

  and a young deer that ran up to my window

  before it was killed, and once a blue horse,

  and somewhere an impression of massive dogs.

  Why do I dream of such large, hot-blooded beasts

  covered with sweating fur and full of passions

  when there could be dry lizards and cool frogs,

  or slow, m
odest creatures, as a rest

  from all those panting, people-sized animals?

  Hedgehogs or perhaps tortoises would do,

  but I think the pangolin would suit me best:

  a vegetable animal, who goes

  disguised as an artichoke or asparagus-tip

  in a green coat of close-fitting leaves,

  with his flat shovel-tail and his pencil-nose:

  the scaly anteater. Yes, he would fit

  more aptly into a dream than into his cage

  in the Small Mammal House; so I invite him

  to be dreamt about, if he would care for it.

  HIGH TIDE IN THE GARDEN

  (1971)

  A Game

  They are throwing the ball

  to and fro between them,

  in and out of the picture.

  She is in the painting

  hung on the wall

  in a narrow gold frame.

  He stands on the floor

  catching and tossing

  at the right distance.

  She wears a white dress,

  black boots and stockings,

  and a flowered straw hat.

  She moves in silence

  but it seems from her face

  that she must be laughing.

  Behind her is sunlight

  and a tree-filled garden;

  you might think to hear

  birds or running water,

  but no, there is nothing.

  Once or twice he has spoken

  but does so no more,

  for she cannot answer.

  So he stands smiling,

  playing her game

  (she is almost a child),

  not daring to go,

  intent on the ball.

  And she is the same.

  For what would result

  neither wishes to know

  if it should fall.

  Bogyman

  Stepping down from the blackberry bushes

  he stands in my path: Bogyman.

  He is not as I had remembered him,

  though he still wears the broad-brimmed hat,

  the rubber-soled shoes and the woollen gloves.

  No face; and that soft mooning voice

  still spinning its endless distracting yarn.

  But this is daylight, a misty autumn

  Sunday, not unpopulated

  by birds. I can see him in such colours

  as he wears – fawn, grey, murky blue –

  not all shadow-clothed, as he was that night

  when I was ten; he seems less tall

  (I have grown) and less muffled in silence.

  I have no doubt at all, though, that he is

  Bogyman. He is why children

  do not sleep all night in their tree-houses.

  He is why, when I had pleaded

  to spend a night on the common, under

  a cosy bush, and my mother

  surprisingly said yes, she took no risk.

  He was the risk I would not take; better

  to make excuses, to lose face,

  than to meet the really faceless, the one

  whose name was too childish for us

  to utter – ‘murderers’ we talked of, and

  ‘lunatics escaped from Earlswood’.

  But I met him, of course, as we all do.

  Well, that was then; I survived; and later

  survived meetings with his other

  forms, bold or pathetic or disguised – the

  slummocking figure in a dark

  alley, or the lover turned suddenly

  icy-faced; fingers at my throat

  and ludicrous violence in kitchens.

  I am older now, and (I tell myself,

  circling carefully around him

  at the far edge of the path, pretending

  I am not in fact confronted)

  can deal with such things. But what, Bogyman,

  shall I be at twice my age? (At

  your age?) Shall I be grandmotherly, fond

  suddenly of gardening, chatty with

  neighbours? Or strained, not giving in,

  writing for Ambit and hitch-hiking to

  Turkey? Or sipping Guinness in

  the Bald-Faced Stag, in wrinkled stockings? Or

  (and now I look for the first time

  straight at you) something like you, Bogyman?

  Clarendon Whatmough

  Clarendon Whatmough sits in his chair

  telling me that I am hollow.

  The walls of his study are dark and bare;

  he has his back to the window.

  Are you priest or psychiatrist, Clarendon Whatmough?

  I do not have to believe you.

  The priest in the pub kept patting my hand

  more times than I thought needful.

  I let him think me a Catholic, and

  giggled, and felt quite sinful.

  You were not present, Clarendon Whatmough:

  I couldn’t have flirted with you.

  Christopher is no longer a saint

  but I still carry the medal

  with his image on, which my mother sent

  to protect me when I travel.

  It pleases her – and me: two

  unbelievers, Clarendon Whatmough.

  But when a friend was likely to die

  I wanted to pray, if I could

  after so many years, and feeling shy

  of churches walked in the wood.

  A hypocritical thing to do,

  would you say, Clarendon Whatmough?

  Or a means of dispelling buried guilt,

  a conventional way to ease

  my fears? I tell you this: I felt

  the sky over the trees

  crack open like a nutshell. You

  don’t believe me, Clarendon Whatmough:

  or rather, you would explain that I

  induced some kind of reaction

  to justify the reversal of my

  usual lack of conviction.

  No comment from Clarendon Whatmough.

  He tells me to continue.

  Why lay such critical emphasis

  on this other-worldly theme?

  I could tell you my sexual fantasies

  as revealed in my latest dream.

  Do, if you wish, says Clarendon Whatmough:

  it’s what I expect of you.

  Clarendon Whatmough doesn’t sneer;

  he favours a calm expression,

  prefers to look lofty and austere

  and let me display an emotion

  then anatomise it. Clarendon Whatmough,

  shall I analyse you?

  No: that would afford me even less

  amusement than I provide.

  We may both very well be centreless,

  but I will not look inside

  your shadowy eyes; nor shall you

  now, in my open ones, Clarendon Whatmough.

  I leave you fixed in your formal chair,

  your ambiguous face unseeing,

  and go, thankful that I’m aware

  at least of my own being.

  Who is convinced, though, Clarendon Whatmough,

  of your existence? Are you?

  A Surprise in the Peninsula

  When I came in that night I found

  the skin of a dog stretched flat and

  nailed upon my wall between the

  two windows. It seemed freshly killed –

  there was blood at the edges. Not

  my dog: I have never owned one,

  I rather dislike them. (Perhaps

  whoever did it knew that.) It

  was a light brown dog, with smooth hair;

  no head, but the tail still remained.

  On the flat surface of the pelt

  was branded the outline of the

  peninsula, singed in thick black

  strokes into the fur: a coarse map.

  The position of the town w
as

  marked by a bullet-hole; it went

  right through the wall. I placed my eye

  to it, and could see the dark trees

  outside the house, flecked with moonlight.

  I locked the door then, and sat up

  all night, drinking small cups of the

  bitter local coffee. A dog

  would have been useful, I thought, for

  protection. But perhaps the one

  I had been given performed that

  function; for no one came that night,

  nor for three more. On the fourth day

  it was time to leave. The dog-skin

  still hung on the wall, stiff and dry

  by now, the flies and the smell gone.

  Could it, I wondered, have been meant

  not as a warning, but a gift?

  And, scarcely shuddering, I drew

  the nails out and took it with me.

  Purple Shining Lilies

  The events of the Aeneid were not enacted

  on a porridge-coloured plain; although my

  greyish pencilled-over Oxford text

  is monochrome, tends to deny

  the flaming pyre, that fearful tawny light,

  the daily colour-productions in the sky

  (dawn variously rosy); Charon’s boat

  mussel-shell blue on the reedy mud

  of Styx; the wolf-twins in a green cave;

  huge Triton rising from the flood

  to trumpet on his sky-coloured conch;

  and everywhere the gleam of gold and blood.

  Cybele’s priest rode glittering into battle

  on a bronze-armoured horse: his great bow

  of gold, his cloak saffron, he himself

  splendid in ferrugine et ostro –

  rust and shellfish. (We laugh, but Camilla

  for this red and purple gear saw fit to go

  to her death.) The names, indeed, are as foreign