Collected Poems Read online

  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

  While all trees wither and retreat.

  Out of farm range or cottage eyes trees make war

  Green heads, close as if to kiss

  Roots to rip at quickening wood of tree-hearts

  And tree-lungs, sap-running wood-flesh

  Hurled at the moon, breaking oak

  Like the dismemberment of ships,

  At the truce of dawn wind trumpeting.

  Sedate, dispassionate and beautiful

  They know about panic and life and patience

  Grow by guile into night’s

  Companions and day’s evil

  Setting landmarks and boundaries

  That fight the worms.

  Trees love, love love, love Death

  Love a windscorched earth and copper sky

  Love the burns of ice and fire

  When lightning as a last hope is called in.

  Boats on land they loathe the sea

  And wait with all arms spread to catch the moon:

  Pull back my skin and there is bark

  Peel off my bark and there is skin:

  I am a tree whose roots destroy me.

  DITCHLING BEACON

  End of life and before death

  Feathers dipping towards oaken frost

  A bird heard that shot:

  The ink sky burst,

  Stone colliding with the sun

  Echo stunned its wing

  String hauled it down.

  Gamekeeper or poacher

  Cut its free flight to the sea.

  Vice had tongue, veins, teeth

  Dogs in panoply, pressure

  To ring a sunspot fitting neat

  The blacked-out circle of a gun.

  LIZARD

  Fiddle-tongue and spite

  Hang as if asleep

  Safe on his tipped world,

  But lizard-shoulders hunch

  Pulsate at a fly on slanting wall.

  Belly smooth, feet stuck firm

  A thousand volts of paralyzing tongue

  Rifle out and kill;

  Weapons in one stomach pit.

  Death is quick when looked on,

  Sweet as food when the lamps of paradise

  Blacken a brain that one day

  Hoped to know.

  Sparking tongue ignites

  A common wink and into oblivion:

  The lizard unaware of upside down

  Eats as it runs.

  EMPTY QUARTER

  He meditates on the Empty Quarter:

  Mosque of sand dissolving through eggtimer’s

  Neck. Looks on camel-loads

  Starting for Oman or Muscat

  By invisible Mercator’s thread

  That burns the hoof and shrivels

  All humps of water. Empty Quarter lures,

  He travels with his heaped caravan

  Earth-tracks marked as lines

  Of unstable land, golden sandgrit

  Lifting up grey dunes near vulcan-

  Trees and foul magnesium wells

  That asps and camels drink from.

  He throws off bells, beads, silk, guns

  Knive
s and slippers, scattering all

  No longer needed – camel meat

  For scavengers, everything

  But his own dishrags of flesh.

  Naked and demented he hugs

  A tree rooted in the widest waste

  Catching dew from God at dawn

  And dates dropping through rottenness,

  Tastes the lone tree’s shade

  No one can chop or whip him from,

  Till one day ravelled in his own white flame

  He abandons the Empty Quarter

  And trudges back to terrify the world.

  FIRST POEM

  Burned out, burned out

  Water of rivers hold me

  On a course towards the sea.

  Burned out was like a tree

  Cut down and hollowed

  No branches left

  Seasoned by fire into a boat:

  Burned out through love’s

  Wilful spending

  Yet sure it will float

  Kindle a fresh blaze

  Burn out again

  On a stranger shore –

  Unless pyromaniac emotions

  Scorch me in midstream

  And the sun turns black.

  LOVE’S MANSION

  To keep them healthily in thrall

  They build a little fire in the hall –

  And burn their opulent home to ash.

  A ruin is better than no love at all.

  Dark and ageing timbers crash

  Cats surround it at full moon.

  Did they abandon love too soon

  Full of happiness to see it fall?

  Let it fall, in sight of all

  It kept them long enough in thrall

  As cupboards burn and timbers fall.

  They’re still inside, nowhere to run

  No windows through which they can crawl;

  Only the trapped and burning see it fall.

  It kept them like a snake in thrall.

  A ruin is better than no love at all.

  They smile unhappily to see it fall.

  TO BURN OUT LOVE

  To burn out love is to burn a star from the sky

  But can touch reach so far,

  Feel the fire increase

  Careful the heart but not the star will burn?

  Star that pulsates like a fish:

  My heart meets you in dark or light

  To taste the waters of the star which says:

  Trust once gone can never be restored –

  Such love can surely be put out,

  The power to break its fire with my fist.

  SEATALK

  Talking on the beach:

  Love has broken its heart