Collected Poems (5 page)

Woods a purple rage of wakened dogs,

To be kept out of, snubbed

Hemmed into night, not known.

Woods returned, tamed, not for

Making love or fires in.

Familiar; suspicious of their shelter

You stay at home in rain or snow –

The woods are seen but not remembered

A far-off shadow, cloud or dream;

Your power vanishes with their's –

No more to be defended, or attacked.

STORM

Safe from horizontal rain

And gale-blown boxing-gloves thumping the walls

The wireless plays a drama

Of a poet stricken at a priest's house

Reached only by footpath,

A poet descending Jacob's ladder made of sand

Washed by mountain torrents,

Spouting rhetoric of fire as he fell –

While kilocycles off frequency

Morse code mewed by strophe and antistrophe

Behind the stark undoing of the poet

Lost in narrow seams of God and Sin and Death,

Corroded by the opposite of what he would be.

The code comes in again, a querulous demand

Plucked by a far-off guitar with one string left

That chance may hear,

And through the poet's white despair

The rhythmic images cry distraction,

Till I read their symbols

That beyond my bosom-comfort

A ship by chance of time committed

To elemental wrath in asking for anchorage

From blind and twisting waves:

Five score sailors on the sea

Never to be compared to a suffering poet in his anguish.

HOUSEWIFE

A housewife sweeps her doorstep

Pavement yard and walls

Each leaf of wilting privet

Polishes the window

To do away with dust and bloodmarks

In case one speck shows sin.

Kills all trace by art and elbow as if dirt

Smears the dark side of her mirror face –

As proof of jungle ape and missing link

That drags back to when we hopped

From the saltpan slime of Lake Bacteria,

That first jelly-blob deviously edging

Towards moondust and the feat of sleep,

Sunstroke, blight of spoiled nerves,

Weapons and a new flint-hack for food –

And then the bright machinegun.

She sweeps to lovingly dispose

Of bigstar jellyfish and show-off crabs

That wriggle before the new damp

Jungle world of hoofprints, spoor

Half-chewed herbivore and worse –

Beaten after twilight years by her stout arms,

And an evolutionary smile.

STARS

Stars, seen through midnight windows

Of earth-grained eyes

Are fullstops ending invisible sentences,

Aphorisms, quips, mottoes of the gods

Indicate what might have been made clear

Had words stayed plain before them.

Criss-crossed endlessly for those who read,

Each light-year sentence testifies how far

Life spreads, and how those full stops

Go on living after necks cease aching.

In observing them, the bones relax:

Eyes close when we are dead

And they have stared all poets out.

Full stops are beautiful as stars,

Each glowing with the light of people vanished

From the continually red-burned earth

Fuelled by those whose outward eye drinks fever

And inward eye harnesses their shadows

To read what never had been written

Until, drunk with Charioteers, Animals and Goddesses,

Conjurers, Club-men, Fish and Magic Boxes

Full stops are joined with words shaped into poems

Ending with full stops as meaningful as stars.

YES

Yes – definitively to some wrongful deed

And ending like a quick knife to a knot,

Is a serpent-lover singing to be freed

From no and negative and nothing gained.

Hard to fix decisions as to yea and nay

While needing the when and how: near-questions

Aimed to draw that final sibilant and vow

To upright-positive and all to win.

Success for lovers and conspirators

Unlocks the sins that grace a thousand lips;

Dogs bark, and babies cry at meeting air:

(Whether yes or no is hardly to be known)

But if affirmative, are guessings at the guess

That darkness is nothing but a final yes.

DEAD MAN'S GRAVE

Three sons in silence by their father's grave

Think of the live man

Not yet split in three by blackness –

Cannot cross the limbo zone,

Reach him who went a year ago through.

Mute before grass bending:

Headstones grey and white proliferate,

Stumps in a shell-shocked forest

Making question and exclamation mark;

They talk about flowers from a visit

When water in the vase was ice

On this plateau exposed to collieries

And winds bailing out Death's

Deepest coffers it was so cold;

Of how frost to prove the dead not dead

Turned the water iron-white,

Swollen muscle garrotting the flowers

Till the vase exploded,

By trying its own strength out on itself –

Scattered petals to a dozen graves.

Three brothers stand in silence,

Feel the strength the father lost.

THE DROWNED SHROPSHIRE WOMAN

Narrow in the back

She played all day with fishes

Watched them go like arrows

Through aerated water

Between her legs and dodge

The fantail spread of fingers.

She was crossed in love:

Water hurtling loinwards and into heart

Found another hiding-place and pool

Where sharper arrows

Played upon her sorrow,

And sunlight on her stooping

Made more voracious fishes breed.

She was narrow in the back

And played all night at fishes,

Wading for the biggest of them all

By moon and guile

Out from the reedy bank,

Until by unlit dawn

A fisherman in silence

Drew his silent catchnet down.

Green fishes fled through lightgreen water

Flint heads with moulded eyes

Chipping at infiltrating light,

And switching to the

White legs of the Shropshire woman,

Played tag in the blue beams

Of her impenetrable eyes,

Between the whitening flesh

Of open fingers.

CAR FIGHTS CAT

In a London crescent curving vast

A cat sat –

Between two rows of molar houses,

Birdsky in each grinning gap.

Cat small – coal and snow

Road wide – a zone of tar set hard and fast:

Four-wheeled speedboats cutting a dash

For it

From time to time.

King Cat stalked warily midstream

As if silence were no warning on this empty road

Where even a man would certainly have crossed

With hands in pockets and been whistling.

Cat heard, but royalty and indolence

Weighed its paws to hobnailed boots

Held it from the dragon's-teeth of safety first and last,

Until a Daimler scurrying from work

Caused cat to stop and wonder where it came from –

Instead of zig-zag scattering to hide itself.

Maybe a deaf malevolence descended

And cat thought car would pass in front,

So spun and walked all fur and confidence

Into the dreadful tyre-treads …

A wheel caught hold of it and

FEARSOME THUDS

Sounded from the night-time of black axles in

UNEQUAL FIGHT

That stopped the heart to hear it.

But cat shot out with limbs still solid,

Bolted, spitting fire and gravel

At unjust God who built such massive

Catproof motorcars in his graven image,

Its mind made up to lose and therefore learn,

By winging towards

The wisdom toothgaps of the canyon houses

LEGS AND BRAIN INTACT
.

FROG IN TANGIER

A frog jumped

Feebly along the pool edge

Away from the trapnet of my feet.

I picked it up.

A pink wound shone

Between belly and that phosphorous

Faint zig-zag down its back,

Pain the colour of pomegranate

And orange agony,

Umbilical string hanging

A catchline towards water

Yet dragging like an anchor

That weighed the entire world

When it tried to jump.

Had it been pierced by a snake?

Clipped by a wind-thrown tree

Cut by scorpion, bird or pruning hook?

Or was it a festering frog-cancer

That gathered and burst after a life

Of statue-cunning,

Too much patience before

Each silent nerve-leap

Onto a dreamy insect?

I hoped the magic water

Would seal its wound

Stitch back outflowing life.

It swam deep under,

Air bubbles snapping

Like fleas abandoning a mouse,

Messages from its stopped body

Breaking at trees and sky.

It was a leaf suspended

Four legs and green spade-head,

Flayed rushblades clear

Above the indeterminate green

Basin of the pool;

Calmed between earth and air

Dying in its native water

From my allowing a leap

Into the safety of its death

When it wanted peace

And a long quiet end

Lasting a lifetime.

It hung in the float-still water,

Next day gone:

Mud-guns exploded

By assaulting minnow-snouts.

From nightcaves underwater

Daylight filters like a ghost

To scare marauding goldfish

Chewing mosquito eggs –

And to illuminate

A hundred minnows savaging my spit.

FRIEND DIED

Tears stop, and suffering

Goes the next level down,

Deeper when tears won't start.

Pain outlives, the hollow soul burns

Till cured by nothing less

Than the same death for me.

You are world-finished

Blacked out, sea-driven

Beyond soil and nowhere,

Empty caves filled

By your heavy death-weighing:

The sea and moon fought

And their vicious clamour killed

The survivor who is empty

And the winner who is dead.

GUIDE TO THE TIFLIS RAILWAY

The witnessed scenery changes

To sunbaked cliffs and spun dry trees:

Parched and monotonous hill country.

No one has the will to stop the train,

Though all can now observe what's to be seen:

A priest embalming a dissected brain.

Hardly visible from the railway

A deep ravine throws out its endless bile.

We cross the river, and notice to the left

Various vertical caves in Gothic style

Which afforded refuge to the Christians,

Sparse and lean (a rouble to the guide)

Against the Mongols and the Persians

Who swam the Caspian like cats against no tide;

Who one time sent three gifts from Samarkand

Of frugal sunlight to an ancient feast:

Now reaping a reward with scarlet swords

From the full belly of the fecund East.

Our train proceeds, unfolds an arrowmark of bones,

The valley widens, easy to foretell

That crossing the military road we soon

Reach the city and look up the best hotel.

from
Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems
and
Storm and Other Poems, 1968 and 1974

BABY

A small man formed

One hour after forging into light,

Body-brain wrapped and blue eyes

Open to noise of rook and cuckoo

To stalk a rabbit in the meadow

Read a book, nothing less than

Blank before sudden turns

To evergreen or glint of water.

Hirsute and stern on bleak arrival

He lay down after a toiler's day

Face to say: All right.

You gave me life, but death also.

Forehead creased on future worry

When hacking obstacles,

Indenting map-hair on moving palm

To say it doesn't matter, go to sleep.

Struck a lifeline horoscope

Of luck, speedkid, handy with women –

Which years will balance

In give, take or ruination,

Seeing all but never everything.

Sleep beyond the iced bite of the moon,

Being what you are this moment

Free with innocence but lacking milk

Soon to become all you do not feel,

Advancing against

The normal hazarding inroads

That spin life into havoc:

Power to dissect visions

Like the yolk and mucus of an egg,

And build up certain freedoms from the moon.

TREE

A broad and solid oak exploded

Split by mystery and shock

Broken like bread

Like a flower shaken.

Acorn guts dropped out:

A dead gorilla unlocked from breeding trees,

Acorns with death in their baby eyes.

A hang-armed scarecrow in the wind:

What hit it? Got into it? Struck

So quietly between dawn and daylight?

With a dying grin and wooden wink

A lost interior cell relinquished its ghost:

In full spleen and abundant acorn

A horn of lightning gored it to the quick.

Trees move on Fenland

Uprooting men and houses on a march

To reach their enemy the sea.

Silent at the smell of watersalt

Treelines advance. The sea lies low,

Snake-noise riding on unruffled surf