Collected Poems (2 page)

The earliest poems in
The Rats
volume came while I was working on
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, but all the other poems were written during the progress of various novels. The sentiments deployed in
The Rats
bled into the views of the hero of my first novel, but from that point on, poetry and fiction came out of totally different territories. A later volume,
Tides and Stone Walls
, was written to a series of remarkable photographs by Victor Bowley, and the poems chosen from that book are those which in my view rely on the photographs least, though even then they were directly inspired by them. Twenty-one more recent poems at the end of the present book are ‘new' in that they have not been previously collected.

The Rats and Other Poems
was written by an exile returning to England who, having spent a total of eight years out of the country before the age of thirty, expected to go away again to write in an isolation which he had found congenial. It did not happen, but it has always seemed to me that a poet and writer, wherever he lives, even if on home territory, suffers exile for life. Geography notwithstanding, such displacement is a kind of mental stand-off from the rest of society, giving the detachment to see the surroundings with a calculating eye – not an emotionally cold eye, but one which uses language and observation from a standpoint entirely personal.

A
LAN
S
ILLITOE

from
The Rats and Other Poems, 1960

SHADOW

When on a familiar but deserted beach

You meet a gentleman you recognize

As your own death, know who he is and teach

Yourself he comes with flower-blue eyes

To wipe the salt-spray from all new intentions,

And kiss you on each sunken cheek to ease

Into your blood the strength to leave this life:

(A minor transmutation of disease)

To watch the mechanism of each arm

Inside your arms of flesh and fingernail,

To despise the ancient wild alarm

Behind each eye. Shaking your hand so frail

Your own death breathes possessive fire

(A familiar voice that no one understands)

Striding quickly, sporting elegant attire,

Coming towards you on these once deserted sands.

POEM WRITTEN IN MAJORCA

Death has no power in these clear skies

Where olives in December shed their milk:

Too temperate to strike

At orange-terraces and archaic moon:

But Death is strong where hemlock stones

Stand at the foot of cold Druidic hills;

There I was born when snow lay

Under naked willows, and frost

Boomed along grey ponds at afternoon,

Frightening birds that

Though hardened for long winters,

Fled from the nerve-filled ground,

Beat their soundless wings away

From Death's first inflicted wound.

RUTH'S FIRST SWIM IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, 1952

The water that touches your thighs

Swallowed the
STRUMA
.

Water that folded the wings of Icarus

Climbs your limbs, sharp with salt

That stiffened the beard of Odysseus.

Tragedy, comedy, legend and history –

Invisible wakes through centuries

Of exiles seeking home:

You turn and look as if at

The wandering Ark of the Hebrews,

Then cleave the waters of your Inland Sea.

OUR DREAM LAST NIGHT

You had a dream last night:

Deep in my primeval sleep

A match was made between my heart and yours

And I moved into love with you

And found your body willing.

Maybe it began with you

When deep in your primeval sleep

A wielding of desire for some

Fulfilling (too matter of fact

And clumsy in afternoon or evening)

Drew me out of some too private dream

And held us plough to furrow.

No judgement made, for neither side

Can settle on the cause,

And no more thought is here but this:

What if a birth should come

Out of our midnight dreams?

TO RUTH

If I throw out my arms and strike

The night that comes, open my heart

To whoever guards survivors, favours struggles

Carries sunshine garlanded about

Her waist, will my fight fail?

Will I unbuckle my resistance

In the darkness? Let ice melt

Fear kill, suffer death to take me?

Though passion is not greatness

Nor greatness passion

When measured by such fluid odds

As sunlight and death,

Passion augments

The alchemy of returning life

Stands the blood high in its demand,

Becomes supremely knowing,

And draws me back

Into the living battle of our love.

OUT OF MY THOUSAND VOICES

Out of my thousand voices

I speak with one

To the waves and flying saltfoam,

Flinging the dovetailed words

Of a single voice

At the knife-edged prow

Of the ship unbreakable

That carries her away.

I throw the one remaining voice

Of all my thousand out to sea

And watch it curving

Into the black-paunched water

Like a falling star,

A single word of love

That drops into the grave,

A thousand echoes falling by her ship.

ISLANDS

One great problem poses:

What is that island we're passing?

Green hills, white houses,

Grey peak, a blue sky,

Ship sailing smooth.

These problems arise

On islands that pass,

White houses lived in

And mountains climbed,

Clouds moving like ships

And ships like clouds.

We on deck open baskets for lunch

To feed the problem of each white island

Of how steep such contours

And shallow those bays,

And who keens that song

In pinewoods by the shore.

‘How beautiful it is' –

And how remote, waiting for other islands

We shall pass, puzzled that the birds

Can dip their wings at many.

What is that island we're passing

Heartshaped and hemlocked

Watered by a winding stream?

A monument to us and we a monument to it –

A great problem posed

Till each unanswering island

Left in darkness grows a separate light:

Solutions beyond reach:

Cobalt funereal in the deep sea.

ICARUS

The ocean was timeless, blue

When your unwaxed wings wheeled towards heaven.

Wind was recalled, emptiness new

And smooth as Thermopylae's lagoon given

To the Heroes' barge held in repose. Nothing stirred:

The gods watched and held their breath

Forgot to stake each others' wives, heard

Wings feather the air, dip and climb. Death

Did not come to Daedalus. The sun

Heliographed his escaper, watched his prison cloak

Colouring the sea, shadowing his one

Track channelled to Italy, whose mirror spoke

For his safety. Icarus found entirety

In a gleam from the sun. Was it a lotus-land

He climbed to? A mission of piety

Foretelling a lesser doom written upon sand

For older men? Or pure myth? His wings aileroned

The windless air and carried him in a curve

Measured by a rainbow's greatness above the honed

Earth: lifted him through a mauve

Loophole of sky. No ships sleeved

The water and filled a farewell in their sails

Or circled the fallen wings, or grieved,

And Daedalus, onward flying, knew no warning fairytales.

CARTHAGE

Scorpions lurk under loose stones

Marked on Leipzig maps, and electric tramways

Ride shallow loops over thrown-up bones;

Eternal dust guides shadowed gangways

To Punic necropolia tombed-out

In timeless tangents, watched by upstart towers

Of a young cathedral, basilicas combed-out

By Time's long competition and the hours

Of each's ruin. The shadows of Jesus

And Hamilcar and the later dead

Back up the ancient argument that whims are diced

Out by the timelessness of heaven. The bled

Lips of this crumbling village, with the cry

Of begging children, prove that stone and scorpion lie.

AUTUMN IN MAJORCA.

Autumn again: how many more?

The quiet land broods

In the peace of hope taken away,

Like a birth in silence

Or slipping unnoticed towards Death.

In the dusk and softness of earth's evening

Black figs fall and burst:

Pig food, earth food

Tears from the tree's broad face.

The familiar wind makes passions tolerable:

A woman does not know for whom she sings;

A prophecy of rain when clouds collect

And the earth in its achievement turns

But will not breathe.

ON A TWIN BROTHER'S RELEASE FROM A SIBERIAN PRISON CAMP

Out of the snow my brother came

Ghost within ghost like a child's game

Of case into case;

Cloud reflections smashed with wattled feet,

A coniferous stick wielded to meet

Face with face.

Moss-warmed, waist-coated with leaves

His memory survived to shake my hand,

Soil-laden fingers

Reaching from my brother who craves

Impossibly for the enormous land

Where no man lingers.

A surrogate ghost my brother found a road

Across blue ridges, by marks of axe and woad

From Okhotsk shores:

Until frost-bitten both in one grey form

Ghost became brother to an Arctic storm

Beyond all laws.

A price was paid to wilderness and fire:

Flashbacks of his vision beamed

On bleak Siberian snows

Show recollection full of truth and liar:

What one remembers never is what seemed

But what some stranger throws

Up like a ghost before your eyes,

A picture that the ghost of you would see

Had it the power to span

The world from now to then and recognize

What memory discarded and set free

Before you turned and ran.

Each morning my brother asks himself what words

Remain to ply and weave, what dreams, what birds

By twilight to make

Warm nests behind the sockets of his eyes

Opened by gentian-blue barbarian skies

That stayed in his wake.

A youth spent uprooting deciduous nerves

Gave strength to the broad-winding river-curves

Of his soul;

Tenacious eyes sought leaf-mould for breath

Each footstep released what life lived in death

In that great coal-

Forest that froze and murdered yet gave him air

To create a miracle by silent prayer

In my too-undying heart;

My brother became me, memories welded with steel

United in fever and flame, but never to heal,

Only meeting to part.

ON A DEAD BLUEBOTTLE

Dog-fought to its death by folded paper:

An overloaded bluebottle

Crossed the window on a clumsy track

Like a Junkers 52 aimed for Crete.

Survivor of the rains,

With the temerity to try it on

Too long with autumn,

It never knew what happened –

Landed on a matchbox, dead but hardly damaged:

Convenient for what it carried.

One by one its passengers came out:

White-hooded monks debouching

From a still war-painted aircraft

At its dispersal point;

Wriggling over fuselage and wings

As if inspecting flaws after a crash-landing

Of skin and wing that covered

A maggot-cargo from the summer weather,

As if they had paid ticket, food and board

And wanted refund for a trip cut short,

Turned and drew back in lily-whiteness,

Upright with peevish nagging

At some travel agent robber.

Horror was what I felt at filth on filth

Too quickly feeding

To feed the many filthy mouths within,

Horror at the proof of life so powerful

Unsuicidable

Persistent in such ways too small to realize.

For those in need of comfort

That the human race will beat survival

To the end of time

This is it, I thought –

These little bleeders twisting out their time

Are Godsent guarantees

That you and I have season-tickets

For too long to contemplate:

For in the middle of the final maggot

One maggot will survive

To start it all again.

PICTURE OF LOOT

Certain dark underground eyes

Have been set upon

The vast emporiums of London.

Lids blink red

At glittering shops

Houses and museums

Shining at night

Chandeliers of historic establishments

Showing interiors to Tartar eyes.

Certain dark underground eyes

Bearing blood-red sack

The wineskins of centuries

Look hungrily at London:

How many women in London?

A thousand thousand houses

Filled with the world's high living

And fabulous knick-knacks;

Each small glossy machine

By bedside or on table or in bathroom

Is the electrical soul of its owner

The finished heart responding

To needle or gentle current;

And still more houses, endlessly stacked

Asleep with people waiting

To be exploded