Collected Poems Read online

And suck the soles of too thin feet

  Rats that eat your eyes like oysters

  Spread false trails over burrowed hills

  Swamp-rats wood-rats tree rats

  Plague-rats, pet-rats, army and police-rats

  Sadistic rats that will not kill

  Kind rats that drug you in the night

  Rats that let you crush them in the garden

  Run across your path

  Climb trees before you see them

  Eat corn that would give you the strength to kill them

  Rats that laugh, rats that fill the night with infants crying

  Rats that gloat, rats that bend your life before them

  Rats that move around you in the night

  Rats invisible that ring you during day

  Rats in books, on radios, in tins of food

  On television screens, rats behind

  A million miles of counters

  Wielding guide-books, tables, catalogues

  Slide-rules, stethoscopes, maps

  Election registers, passports, insurance stamps

  Death certificates, prison records

  Visas, references, forms to sign

  Case histories, birth certificates

  Statistics, interview reports

  Personality tests, loyalty rating

  And knives to cure

  The pyrotechnic paranoia of the anti-rats.

  7

  The city is seething with discontent

  For they all wonder where the deserters went:

  They took no beer and they took no bread

  And everyone says that they must be dead:

  Some speak with anger (a few speak with tears)

  But most out of vague speculatory fears

  That they still live among us, active and thin

  Or are out in the wilderness about to dig in

  And return to besiege us when winter has fled.

  The deserters are waiting without beer or bread

  Around ancient fires of obstinate coke,

  And they laugh in the city and wonder who spoke

  When the wind lifts a flame from wilderness fires

  (Caught in snowlight – quickly expires)

  They look up and listen from parlour debates

  Then resume their relinquished sensory states

  Within and without their crumbling walls,

  Like jungle tigers secure in their night

  When the forlorn bark of the jackal calls.

  8

  Behind the rat-horizons of the world

  Try to decipher what history has hurled

  Against the white range of your exposed spine;

  Sit in your isolated jungle and define

  (Among pine-needles and a flask of wine)

  Your lack of Revolutionary fire

  Love of safety (number one desire)

  Happily tied to the waterwheel

  For irrigation that will soon congeal

  Blood in brain and arms, will sit you still

  And quiet while the busy rats distil

  Sweet liquor as a chaser for each pill

  That saps away the flame of heart and will.

  You found it hard to struggle for house and bread

  To hone a sword and guide a plough

  Found the ache too much for your tread

  From one loaf to another, held your head

  Low because you killed the man who stood

  Before you for a faggot of dry wood.

  Sailing from one coast to another grew

  Wearying. You wanted women and a mild brew

  To dull what wits the day’s work left sound,

  To sleep your life out on dry ground

  Find a warm hut and a midnight glow,

  A woman clothed in black from head to toe.

  Sling, spear, plough, lathe and pen

  Made artificers of house and den

  Weighed power on scales and gave books of law

  To save you from the blight of fang and claw,

  Until this comfort to Utopia goes

  Beyond a golden mean and throws

  Us into progress where perfection flags:

  Scarecrows beneath banners of atomic rags.

  Like Zeno’s arrow the motion is but sure:

  From good to bad or bad to good:

  No ship stood in stillness pure

  Moved north or south in flood-

  Tide and wild wind, or smartly drove

  Its mainsail back to struggle and song

  After a doldrum residence wherein wove

  Sea-dolphins – opium to the eyes in long

  Performance. Either move,

  Or the sea swells into another form,

  Little choice between calm and storm.

  Each man wants to move the boat

  Clockwise with fashionable hands

  Reading history on how to float

  Upon the wash with watermusic bands.

  One calls the tune but others play the music

  And idle waves of Neptune make the crew sick.

  The rats devise solutions for each lake

  Each overture and song reduce to easy,

  Fix stabilizers firm from wind to wake:

  And still the crew persist in feeling queasy.

  Old antagonisms rage:

  Rat-machinations roped with force

  Imprison beauty in a cage,

  Encircle it with propaganda morse.

  ‘Corruption is corruption, sometimes sweet

  Is only dangerous when it stagnates:

  Corrupt before, corrupted ever

  Only keep it moving to be safe.’

  First Rat: Feed, house, educate and teach

  Place anti-seasick tablets in their reach.

  Second Rat: Dope, rope, spiflicate and preach

  Colour them by sunray lamps or bleach.

  Third Rat: Dazzle, flash, warp their speech

  Send them every Sunday to the beach.

  Fourth Rat: Deceive, demand, even beseech

  Cleverly, cleverly – they’ll never screech!

  9

  Retreat like Scythians, like men of hair

  Back into folding earth and lair:

  Burn and scorch black the rich fields that you leave,

  Once tilled with freedom and passion-verse.

  Prepare to destroy that for which you grieve:

  It is already ruined by the worse

  Rat venom. Do not wish for what was there

  Before Rats came but keep the cleansed air

  Uncloyed, devoid of devil-noses

  And perverted paper roses

  Who pander to each scheme that rat proposes.

  When on the rack-and-pinion of retreat

  Earn your wayside cigarettes and bread

  By giving lessons on the rats’ defeat

  Disguised in languages more live than dead:

  Tutor yourselves in map-reading and crime

  And devil’s courage for the bleak time

  When you alone will face the empty plain

  Armed only with a visionary brain

  That tried to understand how earth and sky

  Could meet beyond the reach of feet and eye.

  The would-be Rat-destroyers may feel this:

  Burdened with a glimpse of emptiness

  Night after night, with dreams that kiss

  Despair as a king’s seal, and nothingness:

  A dull light gleaming on continual fight

  In a retreat that leads beyond the end of night.

  10

  It was a rabbit skin, without meat

  That took me to the fleapit for a treat:

  The wasteland that seemed to Mr Eliot death

  Nurtured me with passion, life and breath

  To prolong for one more generation

  A wasteland satellite of veneration:

  A bottle-top, a piece of bone, a stone

  Marked on no posters or big banners

  To catapult again
st the rodent planners.

  … the rock stop and turbo-drill that goes

  Through granite like a knife through butter

  (Shall I follow Mr Eliot’s nose

  And clinch this verse by using ‘gutter’?)

  Rock-a-bye-baby, reach the tree top

  Sing as you reap the apple crop;

  Rob each garbled voice of Wednesday’s ash

  Ring out the mardi gras to grab and smash:

  Hook-up your ribbons to a new Maypole.

  The wasteland was a place where I best played

  As a snotty-nosed bottle-chasing raggèd-arsed kid:

  From a rusty frame and two cot-wheels I made

  A bike that took me on a roll and skid

  Between canal banks, tip and plain

  And junk shops advertising ‘Guns for Spain’.

  I read the tadpole angler quite complete

  What Katy did at her first Christmas treat

  Envied Monte Cristo’s endless riches

  But not Eliza’s shame at her dropped stitches,

  The splendid sack of Usher’s houses

  By philanthropists with ragged trousers.

  In wintertime were rabbit skins fair game

  For keeping warm the embers of such knowledge:

  The wasteland was my library and college.

  11

  What’s past is past, what still to come:

  King, queen and godhead of Time’s guide.

  Show your bottom-dogs and sparkling fangs

  In conspiratorial well-clawed gangs.

  Open Baedeker’s Handbook to the Jungle

  A thin-leaved blood-bound untried book to plan

  All expeditions on, and scan

  Its well-mapped footpaths (thornbush to the right):

  Mined offices avoid at any cost;

  Advice from all contributors is sound

  Gathered by ears pressed firmly to the ground.

  Ignore policemen if you’re lost

  By-pass the Customs, frontier weak at X

  Step on the skeletons of vanguard wrecks

  Hillslopes good for cover, summit wrong,

  Travellers had better go by night

  And eat ripe berries as they walk along.

  Landmarks described with economic prose:

  This cathedral has a mildewed nose

  From decades of unmedicated sores.

  Decay comes quicker when it flouts Time’s laws.

  See this castle? Rotten doors:

  King left owing bills for bread and cheese

  Queen stored perfumes in deepfreeze

  Was tricked for absolution with the whores.

  Take those statues by the wall

  Carved on a diet of olive-oil and gall:

  Unbribable stern servants of the realm

  Turned up their noses and let go the helm.

  12

  Watch the sky. Watch the warning

  Floating down of an autumn morning.

  Barricade your colleges and schools

  Sharpen slide-rules into fighting tools.

  Paper to a depth of thirty inches

  May stop a bullet and prove good defences,

  But fire will desolate consume and scorch

  That to begin needs but a single torch.

  A red sky at night will be their delight

  And red in the morning the Rats’ night dawning.

  Admitted, you gave them ale and telly

  But in return took each man’s name and age

  And locked his magic in a wicker cage

  Burning it in secret while they filled

  Unwittingly their bellies after hunger.

  You cannot read the writing on the wall:

  They were not given bread at all

  But food to make them strong (and sane)

  Enough to understand your orders.

  A meal of pure white bread is bad

  When given to a dog the dog goes mad.

  The bread of life is of a different grain

  It feeds the body wholemeal and the brain.

  13

  Slowly, slowly, Dungeness lighthouse

  Dim in the distance dipped its wick:

  Old Folkestone vowed to thee its country

  And Beachy Head was being sick;

  But stouter England stood and stouter

  From Berwick’s Tweed to Dover Castle

  Hugging the Downs beneath its arm

  Like an empty paper parcel;

  And slowly also big Cape Grey Nose

  Lays itself before the boat

  Sends its white birds up to catch my

  Soul while yet it stays afloat.

  14

  Retreat, dig in, retreat

  Withdraw your shadow from the crimson

  Gutters that run riot down the street.

  Retreat, dig in, arrange your coat

  As a protective covering

  A clever camouflage of antidote.

  Retreat still more, still more

  Remembering your images and words:

  Perfect the principles of fang-and-claw.

  The shadows of retreat are wide

  Town and desert equally bereft

  Of honest hieroglyph or guide.

  Release your territory and retreat

  Record preserve and memorize

  The journey where no drums can rouse nor beat:

  Defeat is not the question. Withdraw

  Into the hollows of the hills

  Until this winter passes into thaw.

  Dig in no more. Turn round and fight

  Forget the wicked and regret the lame

  And travel back the way you came,

  In front the darkness, and behind – THE LIGHT.

  from A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, 1964

  POEM LEFT BY A DEAD MAN

  Let no one say I was cleaning this gun:

  I killed myself because

  I wanted the sun

  But got the moon.

  Sanity came back too soon.

  I did not even clean the gun:

  Put in two bullets for the moon and sun

  Spun the chamber in a final game.

  The sun and moon were both the same.

  CAPE FINISTERRE

  Borrow got here, so did I

  Nothing in front but sea and sky.

  Blue, traditional, unplanned,

  Then white with envy at safe land:

  Were such cold acres ever seen

  Than vast and climbing for this rock?

  Big as the fish that got away,

  Bigger, but no one ever died from shock

  At so much water, such wide space:

  Vostok III and Vostok IV

  Slap proportion in the face.

  Rapier-thin horizons claw

  At blasé tissue of bland eye:

  While Man is climbing at the moon

  The sea foams white on every shore,

  Moonstruck where the start began

  Moonlit in the wake of Man

  Who turns his back on Finisterre.

  WOODS

  Woods are for observing from a distance

  On your father’s arms:

  Woods are for being frightened of –

  Bogie-men swing among those close-packed trees.

  Woods are then for making fires in

  Running before the wrath of cop or farmer:

  Smoke and the smell of dandelions

  In place of blood.

  Later for loving girls in:

  Untidy bushes lick damp hair,

  Secret, dark and out of sight

  With nothing now to replace blood.

  Some use woods for attacking and defending

  The black scream of unnatural possession,

  Tree roots linchpinned into earth

  By shudders and the soil of death.

  By summer shunned in fear of lightning

  The bitter roaming flash of snaked lightning;

  In winter shelter u
s from rain or snow:

  Tree-packs hold our fate like cards.

  Woods are then forgotten two-score years

  Power lapsing into midnight dreams,

  The core of body and soul

  Scooped by the knife of living.

  The wood became jungle, and you its shadow:

  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