MENOPAUSA
The change of life in her
Was like the escape of an animal,
Escape of a lizard maybe, like a fast
Comma escaping the sentence and jumbling it;
Like buildings where the main beam snaps,
The broken floors and the rubble descending
In their clouds of pepper. I will build
A new hall of statement, she said; I am tired
Of all this blood. It was the lizard
Which had wounded her, and lodged,
That now departed. She pointed
To the Moon rising, and the man in it
And said: there he is, my lizard,
Sailing away.
Or was it the woman had escaped
And offered her shadow to the dark gods?
Shadow or lizard, both slipped quickly
Like silk over the ground,
Would swerve and misdirect and disappear;
And often it seemed
As if she herself had gone
And the lizard remained,
The dry sand of the lizard
Pouring. For she
Could sit long minutes not stirring,
The eyes blinking
Seldom; then she would reach out
For an apple with an arm so graceful
It seemed a tongue; and a film
Wiped across her eyes as if to cleanse them,
A second eyelid, and then the film departed
And the eyes sparkled like gems in dry sand;
If it were a lizard, it was a seer,
Like a sphinx; after these reveries,
Munching apples, she would write long poems
To her friends, each one enclosing a letter.
ENTRY FEE
When I stroke her arms
There is a smell of bread;
Her legs, of lilies.
There are fragrant marshes in her skin
And there is a pulse in the ground of it.
The Mine called ‘Isyours’ is open today
On payment of a small compliment.
This is really
Very extraordinary value;
The lights are blazing underground,
Gemstones stud the walls and floors;
I walk there amazed for hours, it seems.
At the very bottom of the shaft
There is a dark pool with a white swan floating
It rouses its wings
It beats over the water
Pleating it to its depths
Raising a new odour charged
With the deep and with the extreme
Cry of the bird as it ladders across the pool.
AT HOME
I
The spider combs her beard.
One gave me cobweb-pills for the shakes.
There is a black Rasputin-fly that can’t be killed,
There is a dustbin boiling with its worms;
My mother scrapes more porridge into the faces.
The flies buzz with swollen lips,
In a Russian, in the translating sunshine.
Dew scuttles down the panes
Like the shaky ghosts of crippled spiders.
I try to rub the glass free and clear
But they are running their races
On the further surfaces. The dry spider
Will raise the wet flies and drink out of them,
Like Bellarmine jugs, like horny flasks
That have wings and faces. Convolvulus
That smells of nice blancmange
Twirls about the dustbin lattice.
My father rushes through the kitchen
Flapping a tea-towel, ushering a ghost of flies
Out of the kitchen into the cool green lane.
There are still flies that circle stolidly
Keeping the pattern just below the ceiling.
They pass through my father’s cloth, evidently,
Like spirits of the pattern. He returns.
II
He returns wiping his brow spiderous with dew
And breathing heavily. He shakes his fist
At the immovable fly-pattern round and round the lamp;
My father hefts a shuddering pail of water
And turns it into milk with disinfectant.
He pours it in the choiring bin of maggots.
Their smell of coconut and pus
Fades behind the blanket of hospital pine.
The maggots skip in their stringy boiling.
My mother folds her arms and nods her head.
We settle once more round the breakfast-table,
There is a baby brother hoisted in a high-chair.
The silent changeling grasps the shaggy rusk.
He was born in a smell of pine-needles and maggots.
I was not allowed inside the curtained room.
Its shadows were odorous, and deeper than a cave.
The doctor brisked the taps to scrub his paws.
He smelled of her, and the nurse smelled;
Pine and maggots. In the cave of bedroom shade
Where she has gone, her voice deepens like a man’s
Then shatters, and another voice
Lifts in something which is not a song,
And she returns,
Gripping a maggoty bundle, not the same.
III
This terrible head suited her as well,
Distilling tears and wax and drool,
Lying across the pillow stained like brown paper,
Stamped and water-marked with sweat,
Just unwrapped, this parcel, on a fresh head,
The ginger hair in feeble ringlets,
The mauve lipstick, the broken veins in the cheeks,
Severed at the seamy sheet. It
Begins tossing, lets out an accustomed cry;
I start back, and clamber under the bed.
Here there are long lattices of dust
Rolled up against the wainscot from the blankets,
Fibres minutely ground through the springs
That coil above me, the mill
Of nightmare sickness and copulation,
The flour of germs and fibres rubbed
From bar and dance-hall all loafed together
In long limbless clooties which drift at me,
Shift very slightly in the mattress-wind
That puffs as she turns over in her sleep
Of the medicine alcohols that net her dreams
Blackening in the broken veins
Exhaling tinctures into the fresh window air
That begins again to smell of pine and coconut
And taint her appeaseless, helpless ghost.
It is in the boards and bricks.
The room and house will always smell of it.
JOY GORDON
The death of my mother, it
Doesn’t mean she’s gone for ever,
It means she has crossed over;
I cry because I have tears, and there seems to be
A joy in the air (she liked
To call herself Joy, it was her
Dancing name, Joy Gordon, thus,
When she danced she was my Father’s Joy;
His name was Gordon.)
What are ghosts? The medium said
Whenever you think of her,
Greet that image kindly, say
‘I’m glad to see you’ it will give
The spirit Joy; to be fluxile
Like air, but
Constant as metal,
Not keeping to the one world,
Seeking unity with the living:
I see her now, she dances,
I am very glad to see you dancing,
Joy.
I see spirits, and try
To greet them kindly; and there is never
A company of the living
Without its spirits mingling:
There they were
Doing their Tai Chi
U
nder the dawn trees, the living
In their loose linen jackets and white ghost-trousers
A ballet of clowns moving as the trees move
To the dawn wind and the dawn chorus,
And among them, spirits,
Like air coiling, as though
Certain enhancing lenses had swept
In front of trees
Or between the dancers;
Under the dawn trees collecting
All the natural forces that do us good,
Gathering the metals of the trees
In manual alchemy, in sequent poses
Adopting the shapes of the vessels
Of human distillation, the hushed
Receptacles, and without, within,
The condensation of a magical dew;
To gather Joy.
The fair-haired one in the long skirt
A portion of the gnosis
Dancing slowly under the dawn trees,
She was the first one there, she was dancing
When I arrived, slowly under the dawn trees
To catch their bright metal, the distillation vessel
Itself dancing.
Just so might my daughter
Call herself Zoe Peters
For dancing or other joys
And signify ‘Peter’s Life’:
I went to fetch her
From a friend’s birthday party
In the long upper room of the Church Hall;
Some eleven-year-old lingerers were murdering
‘Happy Birthday’ on the old piano by the little platform;
There was a memento of iced cake in a twist of polythene
To take home, and there had been dancing;
There was still dancing,
The room was full of dancing, no girls were dancing,
There was dancing up to the ceiling, the air still paced
With Joy and I looked up and greeted them kindly.
XVIII
DRESSED AS FOR A TAROT PACK
(1990)
GEODIC POET
Since the flamen dialis was not supposed
To spend a single night away from his bed, and since
The poet likes to keep tradition, he arrives at the site
Wrapped in his surrogate bedsheet like a toga’ed Roman
Or a brisk ghost in its crackling aura. One book
Opens another, one grotto leads to another, he has made
Fast friends with the speleologists who are
Retired miners, and astronomers in reverse; they will open
New grottoes for him, the baby; on this miraculous day
They have opened five, one after the other,
With picks gently through the walls of each, the poet
Quivering in his sheet, his hair electrical, holding up
His lantern, the miners taciturn, hacking
At the quartz-back of the just-discovered cavern, then standing back,
The poet creeping through the ragged crystal hole and calling
‘It is another grotto!’ as a shining smell
Diffuses out, all smile, surrounded by scintillae. It was like
Excavating a gigantic bunch of frozen grapes
Whose juice had crystallised, chamber upon chamber
Packed with millennial crystals, and with an odour
Of chalk and alcohol which had distilled
And lain there undisturbed a billion years;
The poet should take first breath, in case of poison.
SIXTY STAGS
The serpent was more naked than any beast,
The biblical serpent rustling through the tree,
Who walked upright like a sheen or glory,
A light and turbulence spinning round the temples;
It slipped its skin off enamelled wax
With a snake-smell of naked blessedness,
Sleeping by its cast skin, its decanted sin,
Its magical companion, its killed self.
There was no curse.
The curse was fear, fear cursed them,
This is the self-renewing poison –
Which when reversed
Is like the boy
Who said to his father there were
Sixty stags in the forest, and when the man
Told him he lied, asked
‘What, then, was all the rustling in the woods?’
MARMALADE
I shift my shape into a shirt, and that
Adjusts my skin, which before was shapeless
Having sprawled all through the shapeless night;
Once I had an orgasm at my elbows because of that
Focussing device called sleeves. I read that
Brazilian Giant Otters trample riverside
Vegetation to a quag where they urinate,
Defecate, deposit anal sac jelly and generally
Squirm about in the marmalade. That’s what I call
Family life. Marmalade
Is the distillation of mud through
The tree’s alembic, the great pure drop
With its glass-lizard skin swelling in the boughs,
That ripening alchemy. They come down again
To breakfast and find me staring still
Into the marmalade jar as into an aquarium
Of orange peel, the nights passed
In a flash of black, and now again
The sun shines through this jar. Right, I say,
Some toast; I spread the luminous plasm
And my anal sac quivers, I start to think
Of a woman running naked who needs
Body-painting, I put coins
Over her eyes to protect them, and leave
A small unpainted patch on her back
Through which she can breathe, and in orange
I paint marmalade everywhere but there,
Over her soft peel. My elder brother
Sits down, discharging hot cross smells
From his armpits, he is thinking: ‘This innocent
Is gleeful because he doesn’t know he can
Be destroyed, and therefore escapes destruction;
Because he believes marmalade is
For ever and ever and creates itself besides.’
WAVE-BIRTH
The young spiritualist giving birth
In the spirit of a seance full of sheets,
Drapes and milky plasms,
Such plasms as will appear, the birth-water
Moving of itself, the uncanny
And erotic slime, and attended
By serious Sunday-school men
Whose mannerly rituals she is accustomed to,
The mysteries of the seance being
So womby, the atmosphere that seems
To transduce questions into forms
And suggestions into shapes
Who know more than they might; but the shape
Of this emission cannot be questioned,
It is a tiny child putting off its veils,
A child manifesting covered in wax
With an almond birth-place of her own
Clean as a mushroom. The mother-made
Smell of flesh is supreme,
Out of the collision of forces that meet
In the tidal chamber of this woman;
(For the manlike waves
Pound below the seance-chamber
Which is the accouchement-room
In the house on its sea-poles
Of the old docks; where better
To guide the spirit-ships in
With their fresh intelligence?) And I walked
Up her drive in a heavy sea
Where the blowhole spume like a plume
Of steam from a horse’s nostril,
Immense spirit-steed,
Rose about me on the path,
In which huge light hung split
Like banners of rainbow,
Or an enormous rainbow bending down to drink,
The he-waves holl
owing into their she-waves,
The carriages of foam that shake
The resonant foundation-chamber,
And the seance-room tuning all those waves
Piled to the horizon of our intelligence,
Our mortal state;
The tongue of brine sounding the bell of rock;
And we replying to them in their own tongue
So far as we can, in labour-cries and hymns.
She speaks of ‘My seance-room
Now occupied by my baby’s high fragrance;
I adjust the resonance of her chamber in me
With my holy yells to guide her,
When the tuning is just right I hear her cry out,
And here she comes all gurgling
Smiling and playing with the spiritual slime
And she looks straight into me
Her iris pleated like the coloured
Wave-pictures stacked in every direction
Straight to the celestial heights, in vox humana.’
XIX
UNDER THE RESERVOIR
(1992)
THE SMALL EARTHQUAKE
The birds can’t soar because all the breath
That carries them has been withdrawn
Into this great hush, the sea and sky
Calm as two mirrors endlessly reflecting.
Then the stars flicker like candles where a door
Is opened, and closed, and the ground
Bumps slowly, like a ferry as it is steered
Into the quay, bumps on its rope fenders;
And afterwards you cannot believe
The ground shifted; except, high up in the corner
Near the ceiling the white has cracked like a web
Until you try to smear it away: the spider
Under the earth spun it and threw it
Into the house; and I recollect a certain
Tang passed through the air, like
A champagne elixir passing from the abyss, creating
A freshet that soaked the grass, a web-crack,
And a jammed window in Zoe’s room upstairs.
THE SECRET EXAMINATION
The wooden desks, the wooden stools
Inscribed with their flow. The examinees
Inscribe their flow. The invigilator
Has a special smell, kindly snapper;
The examinees smell of a good wash
And clean ironing with no black marks;
There is a lean smell of cream and treacle,
Or, as the Bible says, of milk and honey,
For the examination is going well
Collected Poems Page 31