Saying sweet wild things — ‘I was dead,
It was sad’ — and you gripped tight my hand
As you stared into infinite space.
I turned, trembling, to cover my tears,
While you in your fever continued
To talk and to call out my name:
Then, grief beyond grief, it was over.
I ought to have died in your place
As you stood there waving goodbye ...
And now there is no more to say,
But pardon, just God, my audacity.
WILFRED OWEN
Fragment: I saw his round mouths crimson ...
I saw his round mouths crimson deepen as it fell,
Like a Sun, in his last deep hour;
Watched the magnificent recession of farewell,
Clouding, half gleam, half glower,
And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek.
And in his eyes
The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak,
In different skies.
J. R. ACKERLEY
Missing
To F.H.
We never knew what became of him, that was so curious;
He embarked, it was late in November, and never returned;
No time for farewells and the journey so far and precarious;
A few letters reached us long after and came to an end.
The weeks lingered on into months and again to November;
We troubled the officials, of course, and they cabled about,
They were patient but busy, importunities without number;
Some told us one thing, some another, they never found out.
There’s a lot go like that, I suppose, with no explanation,
And death is death, after all, small comfort to know where and when;
But I keep thinking, now that we’ve dropped the investigation:
It was more like the death of an insect than that of a man.
This beetle, for instance; I lower my boot now to crush it,
And who’s to correct me, correct me? Who is to know?
I do not ask whether the other beetles will miss it,
Or God will say ‘Where is my beetle? Where did it go?’
The life and the tiny delight, the sublime fabrication
Of colour, mechanics and form, I care nothing about;
I a man with his mind, the master, the lord of creation;
This beetle impedes me, offends me, I lower my boot.
And that was the way that he went. Yes, I see the rejoinder:
He was one of us, bound with us, shod with the violence and pride
Of man in his militant madness, of man the contender ...
But he was my friend and that was the way that he died.
JOHN HEATH-STUBBS
In Memory
A scruffy beer drinkers’ club, a basement
In a side street off the Charing Cross Road —
No introductions, and no names exchanged.
And then my room, a cellar
Under the pavement, near Lancaster Gate.
He spoke of the outback, of Ned Kelly —
A wild colonial boy with do-it-yourself armour —
Reproached me for my self-indulgent guilt.
‘Nailed upon your private cross,’ he said.
And, after that — it was not satisfactory:
Neither of us exactly young — for him
Only the second time with another man, he told me.
But, later on, I recognized (I was in America) his photo
Upon the cover of a magazine.
Unmistakable the balding head,
The battered face, broad shouldered stocky body.
I wondered if we’d ever meet again,
And if we did by chance, would he remember,
Or take it as a threat? But that
Was three decades ago and some years more.
And now a voice upon the air-waves tells me
That he is gone. He’s dead and celebrated,
And then they played an interview
Recorded some years back. But residence
In England had quite sandpapered away
All the Australian vowels. But I am grieving —
Grieving for a little twig of love
That never blossomed — could not, should not blossom,
Among the debris of my journey’s sidewalk.
THOM GUNN
In the Post Office
Saw someone yesterday who looked like you did,
Being short with long blond hair, a sturdy kid
Ahead of me in line. I gazed and gazed
At his good back, feeling again, amazed,
That almost envious sexual tension which
Rubbing at made the greater, like an itch,
An itch to steal or otherwise possess
The brilliant restive charm, the boyishness
That half aware — and not aware enough —
Of what it did, eluded to hold off
The very push of interest it begot,
As if you’d been a tease, though you were not.
I hadn’t felt it roused, to tell the truth,
In several years, that old man’s greed for youth,
Like Pelias’s that boiled him to a soup,
Not since I’d had the sense to cover up
My own particular seething can of worms,
And settle for a friendship on your terms.
Meanwhile I had to look: his errand done,
Without a glance at me or anyone,
The kid unlocked his bicycle outside,
Shrugging a backpack on. I watched him ride
Down 18th Street, rising above the saddle
For the long plunge he made with every pedal,
Expending far more energy than needed.
If only I could do whatever he did,
With him or as part of him, if I
Could creep into his armpit like a fly,
Or like a crab cling to his golden crotch,
Instead of having to stand back and watch.
Oh complicated fantasy of intrusion
On that young sweaty body. My confusion
Led me at length to recollections of
Another’s envy and his confused love.
That Fall after you died I went again
To where I had visited you in your pain
But this time for your — friend, roommate, or wooer?
I seek a neutral term where I’m unsure.
He lay there now. Figuring she knew best,
I came by at his mother’s phoned request
To pick up one of your remembrances,
A piece of stained-glass you had made, now his,
I did not even remember, far less want.
To him I felt, likewise, indifferent.
‘You can come in now,’ said the friend-as-nurse.
I did, and found him altered for the worse.
But when he saw me sitting by his bed,
He would not speak, and turned away his head.
I had not known he hated me until
He hated me this much, hated me still.
I thought that we had shared you more or less,
As if we shared what no one might possess,
Since in a net we sought to hold the wind.
There he lay on the pillow, mortally thinned,
Weaker than water, yet his gesture proving
As steady as an undertow. Unmoving,
In the sustained though slight aversion, grim
In wordlessness. Nothing deflected him,
Nothing I did and nothing I could say.
And so I left. I heard he died next day.
I have imagined that he still could taste
That bitterness and anger to the last,
Against the roles he saw me in because
He had to: of victor, as he thought I was,
Of heir, as to the cherished property
His mother — who
knows why? — was giving me,
And of survivor, as I am indeed,
Recording, so that I may later read
Of what has happened, whether between sheets,
Or in post offices, or on the streets.
Post Script: The Panel
Reciprocation from the dead. Having finished the post-office poem, I think I will take a look at the stained-glass panel it refers to, which C made I would say two years before he died.
I fish it out from where I have kept it, between a filing cabinet and a small chest of drawers. It has acquired a cobweb, which I brush off before I look at it. In the lower foreground are a face with oriental features and an arm, as of someone lying on his stomach: a mysteriously tiered cone lies behind and above him. What I had forgotten is that the picture is surrounded on all four sides by the following inscription:
The needs of ghosts embarrass the living. A ghost must eat and shit, must pack his body someplace. Neither buyer nor bundle, a ghost has no tally, no readjusting value, no soul counted at a bank.
Is this an excerpt from some Chinese book of wisdom, or is it C himself speaking? When he made the panel, C may have already suspected he had aids, but the prescience of the first sentence astonishes me — as it does also that I remembered nothing of the inscription while writing the poem but looked it up immediately on finishing it.
Yes, the needs of him and his friend to ‘embarrass me after their deaths. The dead have no sense of tact, no manners, they enter doors without knocking, but I continue to deal with them, as proved by my writing the poem. They pack their bodies into my dreams, they eat my feelings, and shit in my mind. They are no good to me, of no value to me, but I cannot shake them and do not want to. Their story, being part of mine, refuses to reach an end. They present me with new problems, surprise me, contradict me, my dear, my everpresent dead.
NEIL POWELL
Hundred River
In memory of Adam Johnson 1965-93
We came to Hundred River through a slow October,
when earth is scented with everybody’s past;
when late scabbed blackberries harden into devil’s scars,
untasted apples rot to bitter toffee.
Across reed-beds a track of blackened railway-sleepers,
a plank-bridge lapped by barely-stirring water;
swans gargling silently in their fine indifference;
above, a sky of urgent discursive geese.
Now the year has turned again and I am alone here,
where willow-herb’s dry white whiskers drift over
the brick-red spikes of sorrel and the gossiping reeds;
and the river sullen, muddied after rain.
No movement in the woods but stealthy growth of fungus,
hesitant leaf-drop, distant scuttle of deer:
in one marbled, stained oak-leaf I sense gigantic change,
and in the drizzle feel the season fracture.
STEVE CRANFIELD
Give Me Back My Man
In memoriam Ricky Wilson
I have a secret love. My heart is burning.
But will he play the game? I know some tricks.
I’ll fall into his strong arms like a fix.
I’ll stir some unmet, deep, unconscious yearning
In his man’s breast. Passion will mount. Tides turning.
His swelling manhood pressed. To mine. Limbs mix.
He’ll see the light. (I’ve known since I was six.)
All parts rhyme. Yearning, burning and returning.
Surrendering the all I have to give.
I’ve got you under my skin. Now each day’s
Dawning will bring discoveries, new ways
To mesh us. Never split. Infinitive.
Vows, hearts exchanged. We’ll die of love. Clichés,
Like viruses, need our fresh blood to live.
ROBERT COCHRANE
A Private View
for Andrew Heard
It was a day like yesterday
we left the crowd behind,
a day of rare sun
and clean breezes
on the balcony above the river,
and I recall the rise below
of childrens voices.
It seemed private.
I’d sensed small clues,
odd details in mail,
our voices within wire,
and you were suddenly thinner.
Skirting the subject,
blaming overwrought concern
I mentioned a friends mother
almost died of pneumonia,
but you said blankly
‘Mine is a very special kind.’
The bomb and the penny fell.
I just hugged you.
Loss of hope at times
stalls the urge to cry
and in the face of your brave one,
mine said nothing.
You said things I’d read,
heard from interviews.
‘Not accepting it as terminal.
Fighting this.’
Desperate,
I conjured with
names of long survivors,
but you cut through
‘At what cost though?’
From all the words
in my world of them
I could muster none,
my mind reeling
at such savage progress.
Distant from the crowd,
these fragments of exchange
felt personal,
unseen,
but some months
since your funeral,
a friend met there
recalled our exit
from the gallery.
His asking who I was.
Her informative reply.
They watched us
in the distance
like some silent film,
and as I hugged you
she turned to say ‘I think he’s told him.’
JOEL LANE
Michel Foucault
Your illness was bad enough. The frantic rush to finish that last book
when the work could never be finished.
All your life, you’d wanted to be a chisel
and not a statue. You’d struck history
at an angle, exposing the fault lines;
always leaning, because the world
was tilted. Pleasure came late,
peace never at all. You were locked back
in your first prison, ‘the black stone
of the body’ — passive, inscribed
with the stigmata of someone else’s
knowledge. The chisels of loss
took your resistance — then chipped away
the shells, one skin at a time. Prayer
and sweat, a damaged being; the things
you went to California to escape.
Full circle. Just as you’d written it:
how the human clay was mass-formed
in factories, schools, prisons, hospitals;
in the confession box, on the couch.
Did you guess how you’d be reborn
as an Icarus on the point of falling —
a postmodern icon, made up of dots
on a screen, revelations on a glossy page?
All the private details: the handcuffs,
the molten wax? Hacks consigned you
to the prison of the flashbulb. A fuck
doesn’t merit death or facile celebrity.
But you always knew. There’s no place
called freedom. Only these words, these
movements; a level exchange of glances.
ADAM JOHNSON
The Playground Bell
Dead drunk by nine — this used to be enough.
In Manchester I went out every night;
Picked up and stayed wherever there was drink
With men whose names were last thing on my mind —
Including one who slung the Union Jack
&
nbsp; Over his bedside lamp for atmosphere
On the Last Night of the Proms in eighty-two;
My first ‘experience’: even the white socks
I’d been advised to wear were a success —
One foot displayed, half-casually, to mark
My absolute virginity. The final touch:
My mother fixed a blow-wave in my hair.
Always indulgent towards her only son
(Lucky for me my parents got divorced),
She must have sensed I wasn’t the same boy
Who’d walked for twenty miles or more a day
On gritstone tracks, over the backs of hills —
The Pennine wastes of Bleaklow, Kinder Scout.
The landscape of the city was more harsh:
Bleaker than any tract of mountain peat,
The bus ride down the Manchester Old Road.
In Sackville Street, between the Thomson’s Arms
And the Rembrandt Hotel, a universe
Peopled by drunks and rent boys — one a punk,
Who used to leave his girlfriend at the bar
On business. After barely half an hour,
He’d stroll back in and stand them both a drink.
I quickly learned the language and the code —
Had ‘sisters’ who were kind men twice my age,
Who paid for beers and thought I was mature;
Confided, gave advice and lent me fares.
On Saturday nights we’d drive to Liverpool
Or Stoke-on-Trent, as if there were a difference
Between one seedy night-spot and another —
Though local accents used to turn me on,
And that rare prize — a genuine foreigner
On holiday, was worth the taxi ride
To some remote hotel. Leaving in secret,
Before breakfast, pocketing an address
(In Paris!) I would never write to, a poignant act.
Gay Love Poetry Page 15