Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy
Page 4
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
DEREK MAHON
Unwittingly
I’ve visited the place
where thought begins:
pear trees suspended in sunlight, narrow shops,
alleys to nothing
but nettles
and broken wars;
and though it might look different
to you:
a seaside town, with steep roofs
the colour of oysters,
the corner of some junkyard with its glint
of coming rain,
though someone else again would recognise
the warm barn, the smell of milk,
the wintered cattle
shifting in the dark,
it’s always the same lit space,
the one good measure:
Sometimes you’ll wake in a chair
as the light is fading,
or stop on the way to work
as a current of starlings
turns on itself
and settles above the green,
and because what we learn in the dark
remains all our lives,
a noise like the sea, displacing the day’s
pale knowledge,
you’ll come to yourself
in a glimmer of rainfall or frost,
the burnt smell of autumn,
a meeting of parallel lines,
and know you were someone else
for the longest time,
pretending you knew where you were, like a diffident tourist,
lost on the one main square, and afraid to enquire.
JOHN BURNSIDE
The Girl
One day life stands
gently smiling like a girl
suddenly on the far side of the stream
and asks
(in her annoying way),
But how did you end up there?
LARS GUSTAFSSON
translated from the Swedish by John Irons
Being the third song of Urias
Lives ago, years past generations
perhaps nowhere I dreamed it:
the foggy ploughland of wind
and hoofprints, my father
off in the mist topping beets.
Where I was eight, I knew nothing,
the world a cold winter light
on half a dozen fields, then
all the winking blether of stars.
Before like a fool I began
explaining the key in its lost locked box
adding words to the words to the sum
that never works out.
Where I was
distracted again by the lapwing,
the damp morning air of my father’s
gregarious plainchant cursing
all that his masters deserved
and had paid for.
Sure I was
then for the world’s mere being
in the white rime on weeds
among the wet hawthorn berries
at the field’s edge darkened by frost,
and none of these damned words to say it.
I began trailing out there in voices,
friends, women, my children,
my father’s tetherless anger, some
like him who are dead who are
part of the rain now.
KEN SMITH
Starlight
My father stands in the warm evening
on the porch of my first house.
I am four years old and growing tired.
I see his head among the stars,
the glow of his cigarette, redder
than the summer moon riding
low over the old neighborhood. We
are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.
‘Are you happy?’ I cannot answer.
I do not really understand the word,
and the voice, my father’s voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since. He bends and passes
a thumb beneath each of my eyes.
The cigarette is gone, but I can smell
the tiredness that hangs on his breath.
He has found nothing, and he smiles
and holds my head with both his hands.
Then he lifts me to his shoulder,
and now I too am there among the stars
as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.
He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!
And in that new voice he says nothing
holding my head tight against his head,
his eyes closed up against the starlight,
as though those tiny blinking eyes
of light might find a tall, gaunt child
holding his child against the promises
of autumn, until the boy slept
never to waken in that world again.
PHILIP LEVINE
from Clearances
(in memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984)
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives –
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Poem for a Daughter
‘I think I’m going to have it,’
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
‘Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.’
A judgement years proved true.
Certainly I’ve never had you
as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart’s needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom’s end. Yet nothing’s more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.
A woman’s life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.
ANNE STEVENSON
Love
I hadn’t met his kind before.
His misericord face – really
like a joke on his father – blurred
as if from years of polish;
his hands like curled dry leaves;
the profligate heat he gave
out, gave out, his shallow,
careful breaths: I thought
his filaments would blow,
I thought he was an emperor,
dying on silk cushions.
I didn’t know how to keep
him wrapped, I didn’t know
how to give him suck, I had
no idea about him. At night
I tried to remember the feel
of his head on my neck, the skull
small as a cat’s, the soft spot
hot as a smelted coin,
and the hair, the down, fine
as the innermost, vellum layer
of some rare snowcreature’s
aureole of fur, if you could meet
such a beast, if you could
get so near. I started there.
KATE CLANCHY
The Victory
I thought you were my victory
though you cut me like a knife
when I brought you out of my body
into your life.
Tiny antagonist, gory,
blue as a bruise. The stains
of your cloud of glory
bled from my veins.
How can you dare, blind thing,
blank insect eyes?
You barb the air. You sting
with bladed cries.
Snail. Scary knot of desires.
Hungry snarl. Small son.
Why do I have to love you?
How have you won?
ANNE STEVENSON
She Leaves Me
She betrays me, she leaves me.
She pushes me out of herself, and leaves me.
She offers herself to feed on, and leaves me.
She rocks me and she leaves me.
Wipes my bottom, combs my hair,
caresses the soles of my feet, but leaves me.
My nose drinks in her fragrance, how she hugs me:
she says, ‘I’ll never leave you!’ And she leaves me.
She tricks me: smiling, whispers ‘Don’t be scared!’
I am scared, and I’m cold, and yet she leaves me.
She lies down on the bed with me at evening,
but soon enough she slips away and leaves me.
She is so big, so warm, alive, a nest,
she kisses me, and hums to me, and leaves me.
She presses sweets into my open palms
and ‘There you are, eat now,’ she says, and leaves me.
I cry and howl and press her frame to mine;
I can hold her, hit her too; and yet she leaves me.
She shuts the door, does not look back at all,
I’m nothing when she leaves me.
I wait for her return, a cringing cur:
she then arrives and strokes me, and she leaves me.
I need her – it is death to live without her –
she picks me up to warm me, and she leaves me.
Her arms make up a cage, her lap’s a house;
I’d love to go back in there, but she leaves me.
I come to one conclusion: I’m not her:
a stranger, she’s a stranger, and she leaves me.
Out there’s the world, where someone will be waiting!
For you, there will be someone there to leave.
Don’t look back. Shut the door. You know
how easy it is to wait, how hard to go.
Some you’ll grieve, others will deceive you,
some will wait, others fear your lack,
and some there’ll always be who don’t come back:
they give you life, but then they die and leave you.
ANNA T. SZABÓ
translated from the Hungarian by Clive Wilmer & George Gömöri
A Little Tooth
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s all
over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,
your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
THOMAS LUX
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run – as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears – in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on –
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body –
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
GALWAY KINNELL
Great Things Have Happened
We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, ‘Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time.’ But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn’t mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I’m sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.
‘Is that all?’ I hear somebody ask.
Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you’ve never visited
before, when the bread doesn’t taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.
ALDEN NOWLAN
This Hour
We could never really say what it is like,
this hour of drinking wine together
on a hot summer night, in the living-room
with the windows open, in our underwear,
my pants with pale-gold gibbon monkeys on them
gleaming in the heat. We talk about our son disappearing
between the pine boughs,
we could not tell what was chrysalis or
bough and what was him. The wine
is powerful
, each mouthful holds
for a moment its amber agate shape,
I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s
forehead the hour before his death. We talk about
those last days – that I was waiting for him to die.
You are lying on the couch, your underpants
a luminous white, your hand resting
relaxed, alongside your penis,
we talk about your father’s illness,
your nipple like a pure circle of
something risen to the surface of your chest.
Even if we wanted to,
we could not describe it,
the end of the second glass when I sometimes
weep and you start to get sleepy – I love
to drink and cry with you, and end up
sobbing to a sleeping man, your
long body filling the couch and
draped slightly over the ends, the
untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.
Yes, we know we will make love, but we’re
not getting ready to make love,
nor are we getting over making love,
love is simply our element,
it is the summer night, we are in it.
SHARON OLDS
Snow Melting
Snow melting when I left you, and I took
This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow
Before I left, exposed beside a brook
Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know,
Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day.
Though at the time her wild human hand
Had gestured inexplicably, I say
Her meaning now is more than I can stand.