Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

  in their resonances as the battle-rite:

  luteus with its vaguely medical air;

  grim ater ; or the two versions of white:

  albus thick and eggy; candidus

  clear as a candle-flame’s transparent light.

  It dazzled me, that white, when I was young;

  that and purpureus – poppy-red,

  scarlet, we were firmly taught, not purple

  in the given context; but inside my head

  the word was both something more than visual

  and also exactly what it said.

  Poppies and lilies mixed (the mystical

  and the moral?) was what I came upon.

  My eyes leaping across the juxtaposed

  adjectives, I saw them both as one,

  and brooded secretly upon the image:

  purple shining lilies, bright in the sun.

  Afterwards

  We weave haunted circles about each other,

  advance and retreat in turn, like witch-doctors

  before a fetish. Yes, you are right to fear

  me now, and I you. But love, this ritual

  will exhaust us. Come closer. Listen. Be brave.

  I am going to talk to you quietly

  as sometimes, in the long past (you remember?),

  we made love. Let us be intent, and still. Still.

  There are ways of approaching it. This is one:

  this gentle talk, with no pause for suspicion,

  no hesitation, because you do not know

  the thing is upon you, until it has come –

  now, and you did not even hear it.

  Silence

  is what I am trying to achieve for us.

  A nothingness, a non-relatedness, this

  unknowing into which we are sliding now

  together: this will have to be our kingdom.

  Rain is falling. Listen to the gentle rain.

  Happy Ending

  After they had not made love

  she pulled the sheet up over her eyes

  until he was buttoning his shirt:

  not shyness for their bodies – those

  they had willingly displayed – but a frail

  endeavour to apologise.

  Later, though, drawn together by

  a distaste for such ‘untidy ends’

  they agreed to meet again; whereupon

  they giggled, reminisced, held hands

  as though what they had made was love –

  and not that happier outcome, friends.

  Being Blind

  (for Meg Sheffield)

  Listen to that:

  it is the sea rushing across the garden

  swamping the apple tree, beating against the house,

  carrying white petals; the sea from France

  coming to us.

  It is the April wind

  I tell myself, but cannot rise to look.

  You were talking about your blind friend –

  how you had to share a room with her once

  on holiday, and in the night you woke:

  she was staring at you. Was she really blind?

  You leaned over her bed for a long time,

  watching her, trying to understand,

  suppressing unworthy, unendurable

  speculations (if she could see

  what kind of creature was she?) until

  her eyes went swivelling in a dream

  as ours do, closed. Yes: blind.

  Then I came to bed and, thinking of her

  for whom eyelids have no particular purpose,

  closed mine. And now there is this sound

  of a savage tide rushing towards me.

  Do you, in the front of the house, hear it?

  I cannot look out. I am blind now.

  If I walk downstairs, hand on the banister

  (as she did once – admiring, she told us,

  our Christmas lights), if I open the door

  it will swish and swill over my feet:

  the sea. Listen.

  Grandma

  It was the midnight train; I was tired and edgy.

  The advertisement portrayed – I wrote it down – a

  ‘Skull-like young female, licking lips’ and I added

  ‘Prefer Grandma, even dead’ as she newly was.

  I walked home singing one of her Irish ballads.

  Death is one thing, necrophilia another.

  So I climbed up that ladder in the frescoed barn –

  a soft ladder, swaying and collapsing under

  my feet (my hands alone hauled me into the loft) –

  and found, without surprise, a decomposed lady

  who drew me down to her breast, with her disengaged

  armbones, saying ‘Come, my dearie, don’t be afraid,

  come to me’ into a mess of sweetish decay.

  It was a dream. I screamed and woke, put on the light,

  dozed, woke again. For half a day I carried that

  carcass in my own failing arms. Then remembered:

  even the dead want to be loved for their own sake.

  She was indeed my grandmother. She did not choose

  to be dead and rotten. My blood too (Group A,

  Rhesus negative, derived exactly from hers)

  will suffer that deterioration; my much

  modified version of her nose will fall away,

  my longer bones collapse like hers. So let me now

  apologise to my sons and their possible

  children for the gruesomeness: we do not mean it.

  Ngauranga Gorge Hill

  The bee in the foxglove, the mouth on the nipple,

  the hand between the thighs.

  Forgive me

  these procreative images.

  Do you remember

  that great hill outside Wellington, which we

  had to climb, before they built the motorway,

  to go north? The engine used to boil

  in the old Chev. Straight up the road went

  and tipped us over into Johnsonville.

  Nothing on the way but rock and gorse, gravel-

  pits, and foxgloves; and a tunnel hacked deep,

  somewhere, into a cliff. Ah, my burgeoning new

  country, I said (being fourteen). Yes, a steep

  road to climb. But coming back was better;

  a matter for some caution in a car,

  but glorious and terrible on a bicycle.

  Heart in my pedals, down I would roar

  towards the sea; I’d go straight into it

  if I didn’t brake. No time then to stare

  self-consciously at New Zealand vegetation,

  at the awkward landscape. I needed all my care

  for making the right turn towards the city

  at the hill’s base, where the paint-hoarding stood

  between me and the harbour.

  For ten years

  that city possessed me. In time it bred

  two sons for me (little pink mouths tucked

  like foxglove-bells over my nipples). Yes,

  in this matter Wellington and I have no

  quarrel. But I think it was a barren place.

  Stewart Island

  ‘But look at all this beauty,’

  said the hotel manager’s wife

  when asked how she could bear to

  live there. True: there was a fine bay,

  all hills and atmosphere; white

  sand, and bush down to the sea’s edge;

  oyster-boats, too, and Maori

  fishermen with Scottish names (she

  ran off with one that autumn).

  As for me, I walked on the beach;

  it was too cold to swim. My

  seven-year-old collected shells

  and was bitten by sandflies;

  my four-year-old paddled, until

  a mad seagull jetted down

  to jab its claws and beak into

  his head. I
had already

  decided to leave the country.

  On a Son Returned to New Zealand

  He is my green branch growing in a far plantation.

  He is my first invention.

  No one can be in two places at once.

  So we left Athens on the same morning.

  I was in a hot railway carriage, crammed

  between Serbian soldiers and peasant

  women, on sticky seats, with nothing to

  drink but warm mineral water.

  He was

  in a cabin with square windows, sailing

  across the Mediterranean, fast,

  to Suez.

  Then I was back in London

  in the tarnished summer, remembering,

  as I folded his bed up, and sent the

  television set away. Letters came

  from Aden and Singapore, late.

  He was

  already in his father’s house, on the

  cliff-top, where the winter storms roll across

  from Kapiti Island, and the flax bends

  before the wind. He could go no further.

  He is my bright sea-bird on a rocky beach.

  Saturday

  I am sitting on the step

  drinking coffee and

  smoking, listening to jazz.

  The smoke separates

  two scents: fresh paint in the house

  behind me; in front,

  buddleia.

  The neighbours cut

  back our lilac tree –

  it shaded their neat garden.

  The buddleia will

  be next, no doubt; but bees and

  all those butterflies

  approve of our shaggy trees.

  *

  I am painting the front door

  with such thick juicy

  paint I could almost eat it.

  People going past

  with their shopping stare at my

  bare legs and old shirt.

  The door will be sea-green.

  Our

  black cat walked across

  the painted step and left a

  delicate paw-trail.

  I swore at her and frightened

  two little girls – this

  street is given to children.

  The other cat is younger,

  white and tabby, fat,

  with a hoarse voice. In summer

  she sleeps all day long

  in the rosebay willow-herb,

  too lazy to walk

  on paint.

  Andrew is upstairs;

  having discovered

  quick-drying non-drip gloss, he

  is old enough now

  to paint all his furniture

  tangerine and the

  woodwork green; he is singing.

  *

  I am lying in the sun,

  in the garden. Bees

  dive on white clover beside

  my ears. The sky is

  Greek blue, with a vapour-trail

  chalked right across it.

  My transistor radio

  talks about the moon.

  *

  I am floating in the sky.

  Below me the house

  crouches among its trees like

  a cat in long grass.

  I want to stroke its roof-ridge

  but I think I can

  already hear it purring.

  Trees

  Elm, laburnum, hawthorn, oak:

  all the incredible leaves expand

  on their dusty branches, like

  Japanese paper flowers in water,

  like anything one hardly believes

  will really work this time; and

  I am a stupefied spectator

  as usual. What are they all, these

  multiverdant, variously-made

  soft sudden things, these leaves?

  So I walk solemnly in the park

  with a copy of Let’s Look at Trees

  from the children’s library,

  identifying leaf-shapes and bark

  while behind my back, at home,

  my own garden is turning into a wood.

  Before my house the pink may tree

  lolls its heavy heads over mine

  to grapple my hair as I come

  in; at the back door I walk out

  under lilac. The two elders

  (I let them grow for the wine)

  hang vastly over the fence, no doubt

  infuriating my tidy neighbours.

  In the centre the apple tree

  needs pruning. And everywhere,

  soaring over the garden shed,

  camouflaged by roses, or snaking

  up through the grass like vertical worms,

  grows every size of sycamore.

  Last year we attacked them; I saw

  my son, so tender to ants, so sad

  over dead caterpillars, hacking

  at living roots as thick as his arms,

  drenching the stumps with creosote.

  No use: they continue to grow.

  Under the grass, the ground

  must be peppered with winged seeds,

  meshed with a tough stringy net

  of roots; and the house itself undermined

  by wandering wood. Shall we see

  the floorboards lifted one morning

  by these indomitable weeds,

  or find in the airing-cupboard

  a rather pale sapling?

  And if we do, will it be

  worse than cracked pipes or dry rot?

  Trees I can tolerate; they are why

  I chose this house – for the apple tree,

  elder, buddleia, lilac, may;

  and outside my bedroom window, higher

  every week, its leaves unfurling

  pink at the twig-tips (composite

  in form) the tallest sycamore.

  Country Station

  First she made a little garden

  of sorrel stalks wedged among

  some yellowy-brown moss-cushions

  and fenced it with ice-lolly sticks

  (there were just enough); then she

  set out biscuit-crumbs on a brick

  for the ants; now she sits on a

  deserted luggage-trolley

  to watch them come for their dinner.

  It’s nice here – cloudy but quite warm.

  Five trains have swooshed through, and one

  stopped, but at the other platform.

  Later, when no one is looking,

  she may climb the roof of that

  low shed. Her mother is making

  another telephone call (she

  isn’t crying any more).

  Perhaps they will stay here all day.

  The Three-toed Sloth

  The three-toed sloth is the slowest creature we know

  for its size. It spends its life hanging upside-down

  from a branch, its baby nestling on its breast.

  It never cleans itself, but lets fungus grow

  on its fur. The grin it wears, like an idiot clown,

  proclaims the joys of a life which is one long rest.

  The three-toed sloth is content. It doesn’t care.

  It moves imperceptibly, like the laziest snail

  you ever saw blown up to the size of a sheep.

  Disguised as a grey-green bough it dangles there

  in the steamy Amazon jungle. That long-drawn wail

  is its slow-motion sneeze. Then it falls asleep.

  One cannot but envy such torpor. Its top speed,

  when rushing to save its young, is a dramatic

  fourteen feet per minute, in a race with fate.

  The puzzle is this, though: how did nature breed

  a race so determinedly unenergetic?

  What passion ever inspired a sloth to mate?

  Against Coupling

  I write in praise of the solitary act:
/>   of not feeling a trespassing tongue

  forced into one’s mouth, one’s breath

  smothered, nipples crushed against the

  ribcage, and that metallic tingling

  in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:

  unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help –

  such eyes as a young girl draws life from,

  listening to the vegetal

  rustle within her, as his gaze

  stirs polypal fronds in the obscure

  sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.

  There is much to be said for abandoning

  this no longer novel exercise –

  for not ‘participating in

  a total experience’ – when

  one feels like the lady in Leeds who

  had seen The Sound of Music eighty-six times;

  or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress

  producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream

  for the seventh year running, with

  yet another cast from 5B.

  Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but

  the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.

  I advise you, then, to embrace it without

  encumbrance. No need to set the scene,

  dress up (or undress), make speeches.

  Five minutes of solitude are

  enough – in the bath, or to fill

  that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

  Mornings After

  The surface dreams are easily remembered:

  I wake most often with a comforting sense

  of having seen a pleasantly odd film –

  nothing too outlandish or too intense;

  of having, perhaps, befriended animals,

  made love, swum the Channel, flown in the air

  without wings, visited Tibet or Chile:

  simple childish stuff. Or else the rare