by Fleur Adcock
I struggle weakly; and wake, of course.
Well, all right. It doesn’t matter.
Perhaps I didn’t get to the beach:
but I have been there – to all the beaches
(waking or dreaming) and all the cities.
Now it is very early morning
and from my window I see a leopard
tall as a horse, majestic and kindly,
padding over the fallen snow.
Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow
The room is full of clichés – ‘Throw me a crumb’
and ‘Now I see the writing on the wall’
and ‘Don’t take umbrage, dear’. I wish I could.
Instead I stand bedazzled by them all,
longing for shade. Belshazzar’s fiery script
glows there, between the prints of tropical birds,
in neon lighting, and the air is full
of crumbs that flash and click about me. Words
glitter in colours like those gaudy prints:
the speech of a computer, metal-based
but feathered like a cloud of darts. All right.
Your signal-system need not go to waste.
Mint me another batch of tokens: say
‘I am in your hands; I throw myself upon
your mercy, casting caution to the winds.’
Thank you; there is no need to go on.
Thus authorised by your mechanical
issue, I lift you like a bale of hay,
open the window wide, and toss you out;
and gales of laughter whirl you far away.
Hauntings
Three times I have slept in your house
and this is definitely the last.
I cannot endure the transformations:
nothing stays the same for an hour.
Last time there was a spiral staircase
winding across the high room.
People tramped up and down it all night,
carrying brief-cases, pails of milk, bombs,
pretending not to notice me
as I lay in a bed lousy with dreams.
Couldn’t you have kept them away?
After all, they were trespassing.
The time before it was all bathrooms,
full of naked, quarrelling girls –
and you claim to like solitude:
I do not understand your arrangements.
Now the glass doors to the garden
open on rows of stone columns;
beside them stands a golden jeep.
Where are we this time? On what planet?
Every night lasts for a week.
I toss and turn and wander about,
whirring from room to room like a moth,
ignored by those indifferent faces.
At last I think I have woken up.
I lift my head from the pillow, rejoicing.
The alarm-clock is playing Schubert:
I am still asleep. This is too much.
Well, I shall try again in a minute.
I shall wake into this real room
with its shadowy plants and patterned screens
(yes, I remember how it looks).
It will be cool, but I shan’t wait
to light the gas-fire. I shall dress
(I know where my clothes are) and slip out.
You needn’t think I am here to stay.
Advice to a Discarded Lover
Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,
not only dead, not only fallen,
but full of maggots: what do you feel –
more pity or more revulsion?
Pity is for the moment of death,
and the moments after. It changes
when decay comes, with the creeping stench
and the wriggling, munching scavengers.
Returning later, though, you will see
a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,
an inoffensive symbol of what
once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.
It is clear then. But perhaps you find
the analogy I have chosen
for our dead affair rather gruesome –
too unpleasant a comparison.
It is not accidental. In you
I see maggots close to the surface.
You are eaten up by self-pity,
crawling with unlovable pathos.
If I were to touch you I should feel
against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.
Do not ask me for charity now:
go away until your bones are clean.
The Water Below
This house is floored with water,
wall to wall, a deep green pit,
still and gleaming, edged with stone.
Over it are built stairways
and railed living-areas
in wrought iron. All rather
impractical; it will be
damp in winter, and we shall
surely drop small objects – keys,
teaspoons, or coins – through the chinks
in the ironwork, to splash
lost into the glimmering
depths (and do we know how deep?).
It will have to be rebuilt:
a solid floor of concrete
over this dark well (perhaps
already full of coins, like
the flooded crypt of that church
in Ravenna). You might say
it could be drained, made into
a useful cellar for coal.
But I am sure the water
would return; would never go.
Under my grandmother’s house
in Drury, when I was three,
I always believed there was
water: lift up the floorboards
and you would see it – a lake,
a subterranean sea.
True, I played under the house
and saw only hard-packed earth,
wooden piles, gardening tools,
a place to hunt for lizards.
That was different: below
I saw no water. Above,
I knew it must still be there,
waiting. (For why did we say
‘Forgive us our trespasses,
deliver us from evil’?)
Always beneath the safe house
lies the pool, the hidden sea
created before we were.
It is not easy to drain
the waters under the earth.
Think Before You Shoot
Look, children, the wood is full of tigers,
scorching the bluebells with their breath.
You reach for guns. Will you preserve the flowers
at such cost? Will you prefer the death
of prowling stripes to a mush of trampled stalks?
Through the eyes, then – do not spoil the head.
Tigers are easier to shoot than to like.
Sweet necrophiles, you only love them dead.
There now, you’ve got three – and with such fur, too,
golden and warm and salty. Very good.
Don’t expect them to forgive you, though.
There are plenty more of them. This is their wood
(and their bluebells, which you have now forgotten).
They’ve eaten all the squirrels. They want you,
and it’s no excuse to say you’re only children.
No one is on your side. What will you do?
The Pangolin
There have been all those tigers, of course,
and a leopard, and a six-legged giraffe,
and a young deer that ran up to my window
before it was killed, and once a blue horse,
and somewhere an impression of massive dogs.
Why do I dream of such large, hot-blooded beasts
covered with sweating fur and full of passions
when there could be dry lizards and cool frogs,
or slow, m
odest creatures, as a rest
from all those panting, people-sized animals?
Hedgehogs or perhaps tortoises would do,
but I think the pangolin would suit me best:
a vegetable animal, who goes
disguised as an artichoke or asparagus-tip
in a green coat of close-fitting leaves,
with his flat shovel-tail and his pencil-nose:
the scaly anteater. Yes, he would fit
more aptly into a dream than into his cage
in the Small Mammal House; so I invite him
to be dreamt about, if he would care for it.
HIGH TIDE IN THE GARDEN
(1971)
A Game
They are throwing the ball
to and fro between them,
in and out of the picture.
She is in the painting
hung on the wall
in a narrow gold frame.
He stands on the floor
catching and tossing
at the right distance.
She wears a white dress,
black boots and stockings,
and a flowered straw hat.
She moves in silence
but it seems from her face
that she must be laughing.
Behind her is sunlight
and a tree-filled garden;
you might think to hear
birds or running water,
but no, there is nothing.
Once or twice he has spoken
but does so no more,
for she cannot answer.
So he stands smiling,
playing her game
(she is almost a child),
not daring to go,
intent on the ball.
And she is the same.
For what would result
neither wishes to know
if it should fall.
Bogyman
Stepping down from the blackberry bushes
he stands in my path: Bogyman.
He is not as I had remembered him,
though he still wears the broad-brimmed hat,
the rubber-soled shoes and the woollen gloves.
No face; and that soft mooning voice
still spinning its endless distracting yarn.
But this is daylight, a misty autumn
Sunday, not unpopulated
by birds. I can see him in such colours
as he wears – fawn, grey, murky blue –
not all shadow-clothed, as he was that night
when I was ten; he seems less tall
(I have grown) and less muffled in silence.
I have no doubt at all, though, that he is
Bogyman. He is why children
do not sleep all night in their tree-houses.
He is why, when I had pleaded
to spend a night on the common, under
a cosy bush, and my mother
surprisingly said yes, she took no risk.
He was the risk I would not take; better
to make excuses, to lose face,
than to meet the really faceless, the one
whose name was too childish for us
to utter – ‘murderers’ we talked of, and
‘lunatics escaped from Earlswood’.
But I met him, of course, as we all do.
Well, that was then; I survived; and later
survived meetings with his other
forms, bold or pathetic or disguised – the
slummocking figure in a dark
alley, or the lover turned suddenly
icy-faced; fingers at my throat
and ludicrous violence in kitchens.
I am older now, and (I tell myself,
circling carefully around him
at the far edge of the path, pretending
I am not in fact confronted)
can deal with such things. But what, Bogyman,
shall I be at twice my age? (At
your age?) Shall I be grandmotherly, fond
suddenly of gardening, chatty with
neighbours? Or strained, not giving in,
writing for Ambit and hitch-hiking to
Turkey? Or sipping Guinness in
the Bald-Faced Stag, in wrinkled stockings? Or
(and now I look for the first time
straight at you) something like you, Bogyman?
Clarendon Whatmough
Clarendon Whatmough sits in his chair
telling me that I am hollow.
The walls of his study are dark and bare;
he has his back to the window.
Are you priest or psychiatrist, Clarendon Whatmough?
I do not have to believe you.
The priest in the pub kept patting my hand
more times than I thought needful.
I let him think me a Catholic, and
giggled, and felt quite sinful.
You were not present, Clarendon Whatmough:
I couldn’t have flirted with you.
Christopher is no longer a saint
but I still carry the medal
with his image on, which my mother sent
to protect me when I travel.
It pleases her – and me: two
unbelievers, Clarendon Whatmough.
But when a friend was likely to die
I wanted to pray, if I could
after so many years, and feeling shy
of churches walked in the wood.
A hypocritical thing to do,
would you say, Clarendon Whatmough?
Or a means of dispelling buried guilt,
a conventional way to ease
my fears? I tell you this: I felt
the sky over the trees
crack open like a nutshell. You
don’t believe me, Clarendon Whatmough:
or rather, you would explain that I
induced some kind of reaction
to justify the reversal of my
usual lack of conviction.
No comment from Clarendon Whatmough.
He tells me to continue.
Why lay such critical emphasis
on this other-worldly theme?
I could tell you my sexual fantasies
as revealed in my latest dream.
Do, if you wish, says Clarendon Whatmough:
it’s what I expect of you.
Clarendon Whatmough doesn’t sneer;
he favours a calm expression,
prefers to look lofty and austere
and let me display an emotion
then anatomise it. Clarendon Whatmough,
shall I analyse you?
No: that would afford me even less
amusement than I provide.
We may both very well be centreless,
but I will not look inside
your shadowy eyes; nor shall you
now, in my open ones, Clarendon Whatmough.
I leave you fixed in your formal chair,
your ambiguous face unseeing,
and go, thankful that I’m aware
at least of my own being.
Who is convinced, though, Clarendon Whatmough,
of your existence? Are you?
A Surprise in the Peninsula
When I came in that night I found
the skin of a dog stretched flat and
nailed upon my wall between the
two windows. It seemed freshly killed –
there was blood at the edges. Not
my dog: I have never owned one,
I rather dislike them. (Perhaps
whoever did it knew that.) It
was a light brown dog, with smooth hair;
no head, but the tail still remained.
On the flat surface of the pelt
was branded the outline of the
peninsula, singed in thick black
strokes into the fur: a coarse map.
The position of the town w
as
marked by a bullet-hole; it went
right through the wall. I placed my eye
to it, and could see the dark trees
outside the house, flecked with moonlight.
I locked the door then, and sat up
all night, drinking small cups of the
bitter local coffee. A dog
would have been useful, I thought, for
protection. But perhaps the one
I had been given performed that
function; for no one came that night,
nor for three more. On the fourth day
it was time to leave. The dog-skin
still hung on the wall, stiff and dry
by now, the flies and the smell gone.
Could it, I wondered, have been meant
not as a warning, but a gift?
And, scarcely shuddering, I drew
the nails out and took it with me.
Purple Shining Lilies
The events of the Aeneid were not enacted
on a porridge-coloured plain; although my
greyish pencilled-over Oxford text
is monochrome, tends to deny
the flaming pyre, that fearful tawny light,
the daily colour-productions in the sky
(dawn variously rosy); Charon’s boat
mussel-shell blue on the reedy mud
of Styx; the wolf-twins in a green cave;
huge Triton rising from the flood
to trumpet on his sky-coloured conch;
and everywhere the gleam of gold and blood.
Cybele’s priest rode glittering into battle
on a bronze-armoured horse: his great bow
of gold, his cloak saffron, he himself
splendid in ferrugine et ostro –
rust and shellfish. (We laugh, but Camilla
for this red and purple gear saw fit to go
to her death.) The names, indeed, are as foreign