Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

  orange and crimson capsules, pretending

  harvest. I taste a blackberry.

  The soil here is coloured like brick-dust,

  like the warm sandstone. A fruitful county.

  We regard it uneasily.

  There is little left to say

  after all the talk we had last night

  instead of going to bed –

  fearful for our originality,

  avoiding the sweet obvious act

  as if it were the only kind of indulgence.

  Silly perhaps.

  We have our reward.

  We are languorous now, heavy

  with whatever we were conserving,

  carrying each a delicate burden

  of choices made or about to be made.

  Words whisper hopefully in our heads.

  Slithering down the track we hold hands

  to keep a necessary balance.

  The gargoyles extend their feral faces,

  rosy, less lined than ours.

  We are wearing out our identities.

  Feverish

  Only a slight fever:

  I was not quite out of my mind;

  enough to forget my name

  and the number and sex of my children

  (while clinging to their existence –

  three daughters, could it be?)

  but not to forget my language

  with Words for Music Perhaps,

  Crazy Jane and the bishop,

  galloping through my head.

  As for my body, not

  quite out of that either:

  curled in an S-bend somewhere,

  conscious of knees and skull

  pressing against a wall

  (if I was on my side)

  or against a heavy lid

  (if I was on my back);

  or I could have been face downward

  kneeling crouched on a raft,

  castaway animal, drifting;

  or shrivelled over a desk

  head down asleep on it

  like Harold, our wasted Orion,

  who slept on the bare sand

  all those nights in the desert

  lightly, head on his briefcase;

  who carried the new Peace

  to chief after chief, winning

  their difficult signatures

  by wit and a cool head

  under fire and public school charm;

  who has now forgotten his Arabic

  and the names of his brother’s children

  and what he did last week;

  dozes over an ashtray

  or shuffles through Who Was Who.

  Crazy Jane I can take –

  the withered breasts that she flaunted,

  her fierce remembering tongue;

  but spare me his forgetting.

  Age is a sad fever.

  Folie à Deux

  They call it pica,

  this ranging after alien tastes:

  acorns (a good fresh country food,

  better than I’d remembered)

  that morning in the wood,

  and moonlit roses –

  perfumed lettuce, rather unpleasant:

  we rinsed them from our teeth with wine.

  It seems a shared perversion,

  not just a kink of mine –

  you were the one

  who nibbled the chrysanthemums.

  All right: we are avoiding something.

  Tonight you are here early.

  We seem to lack nothing.

  We are alone,

  quiet, unhurried. The whisky has

  a smoky tang, like dark chocolate.

  You speak of ceremony, of

  something to celebrate.

  I hear the church bells

  and suddenly fear blasphemy,

  even name it. The word’s unusual

  between us. But you don’t laugh.

  We postpone our ritual

  and act another:

  sit face to face across a table,

  talk about places we have known

  and friends who are still alive

  and poems (not our own).

  It works. We are altered

  from that fey couple who talked out

  fountains of images, a spray

  of loves, deaths, dramas, jokes:

  their histories; who lay

  manic with words,

  fingers twined in each other’s hair

  (no closer) wasting nights and hours;

  who chewed, as dry placebos,

  those bitter seeds and flowers.

  It is the moment.

  We rise, and touch at last. And now

  without pretence or argument,

  fasting, and in our right minds,

  go to our sacrament.

  Acris Hiems

  A letter from that pale city

  I escaped from ten years ago

  and no good news.

  I carry it with me

  devising comfortable answers

  (the sickness, shall I say?

  is not peculiarly yours),

  as I walk along Beech Drive,

  Church Vale, Ringwood Avenue

  at eleven on a Tuesday morning

  going nowhere.

  A bony day, an invisible wind, the sky white as an ambulance,

  and no one in sight.

  Friend, I will say in my letter –

  since you call me a friend still,

  whatever I have been – forgive me.

  Rounding the next corner

  I see a van that crawls along

  beside the birch-trunks and pink pavements.

  A handbell rings from the driver’s window:

  he has paraffin for sale

  and ought to do good business

  now that we have power-cuts.

  But the painted doors do not open.

  The wind in the ornamental hedges

  rustles. Nobody comes.

  The bell rings. The houses listen.

  Bring out your dead.

  December Morning

  I raise the blind and sit by the window

  dry-mouthed, waiting for light.

  One needs a modest goal,

  something safely attainable.

  An hour before sunrise

  (due at seven fifty-three)

  I go out into the cold new morning

  for a proper view of that performance;

  walk greedily towards the heath

  gulping the blanched air

  and come in good time to Kenwood.

  They have just opened the gates.

  There is a kind of world here, too:

  on the grassy slopes above the lake

  in the white early Sunday

  I see with something like affection

  people I do not know

  walking their unlovable dogs.

  Showcase

  Looking through the glass showcase

  right into the glass of the shelf,

  your eye level with it, not

  swerving above it or below,

  you see neither the reflected image

  nor the object itself.

  There is only a swimming horizon,

  a watery prison for the sight,

  acres of shadowy green jelly,

  and no way yet to know

  what they support, what stands

  in the carefully-angled light.

  You take a breath, raise your head,

  and see whether the case reveals

  Dutch goblet, carved reliquary,

  the pope’s elaborately-petalled rose

  of gold-leaf, or the bronze Cretan

  balanced on his neat heels,

  and you look, drowning or perhaps

  rescued from drowning; and your eyes close.

  Over the Edge

  All my dead people

  seeping through the riverbank where they are buried

  colouring the stream pale br
own

  are why I swim in the river,

  feeling now rather closer to them

  than when the water was clear,

  when I could walk barefoot on the gravel

  seeing only the flicker of minnows

  possessing nothing but balance.

  The Net

  She keeps the memory-game

  as a charm against falling in love

  and each night she climbs out of the same window

  into the same garden with the arch for roses –

  no roses, though; and the white snake dead too;

  nothing but evergreen shrubs, and grass, and water,

  and the wire trellis that will trap her in the end.

  An Illustration to Dante

  Here are Paolo and Francesca

  whirled around in the circle of Hell

  clipped serenely together

  her dead face raised against his.

  I can feel the pressure of his arms

  like yours about me, locking.

  They float in a sea of whitish blobs –

  fire, is it? It could have been

  hail, said Ruskin, but Rossetti

  ‘didn’t know how to do hail’.

  Well, he could do tenderness.

  My spine trickles with little white flames.

  Tokens

  The sheets have been laundered clean

  of our joint essence – a compound,

  not a mixture; but here are still

  your forgotten pipe and tobacco,

  your books open on my table,

  your voice speaking in my poems.

  Naxal

  The concrete road from the palace to the cinema

  bruises the feet. At the Chinese Embassy

  I turn past high new walls on to padded mud.

  A road is intended – men with trowels and baskets

  work on it daily, dreamy Nepali girls

  tilt little pots of water on to cement –

  but it’s gentle walking now. It leads ‘inside’.

  The tall pine at the end – still notable

  though it lost its lingam top for winter firewood –

  begins the village: a couple of streets, a temple,

  an open space with the pond and the peepul tree,

  rows of brick houses, little businesses

  proceeding under their doll’s-house-level beams;

  rice being pounded, charcoal fires in pots,

  rickshaws for people like me who don’t want them.

  The children wave and call ‘Bye-bye! Paisa?’

  holding out their perfect hands for my coins.

  These houses may be eighteenth-century:

  I covet their fretted lattice window-frames

  and stare slightly too long into back rooms.

  There are no screens at the carved windows, no filters

  for the water they splash and drink at the common pump;

  and no mosquitoes now, in the early spring.

  But finally, stepping over the warm threshold

  of the temple courtyard, I feel a tentative itch;

  passing the scummy tank, a little sickness;

  touching an infant’s head, a little pain.

  Bodnath

  I have made my pilgrimage a day early:

  Ash Wednesday is tomorrow; this week is Losar.

  Pacing clockwise around the chaitya

  I twirl the prayerwheels, my foreign fingers

  polishing their bronze by a fraction more.

  The courtyard is crowded with Tibetans,

  incredibly jewelled and furred and hatted –

  colour-plates from the National Geographic.

  The beggar-woman with her monstrous leg

  and the snuffling children are genuine too.

  I toss them paisa; then go to spend

  thirty rupees on a turquoise-studded

  silver spoon for the Watkins’ baby.

  High on his whitewashed mound, Lord Buddha

  overlooks the blossom of kite-tails

  fluttering from his solid neck.

  Om Mani Padme Hum.

  His four painted square faces

  turn twelve coloured eyes on the globe.

  In the shrine below I see him again:

  dim bronze, made of curves and surfaces,

  shadowed, vulnerable, retiring.

  Filmy scarves of white muslin

  veil him; rice-grains lie at his feet;

  in copper bowls arranged before him

  smouldering incense crumbles to ash.

  External Service

  Already I know my way around the bazaar,

  can use half a dozen words of basic Nepali,

  and recognise several incarnations of Shiva.

  If I stay here much longer I shall learn to identify

  more trees besides those in our compound,

  other birds than the rock-dove and the crow.

  That plink-plink rhythm in the distance is a rice-mill.

  The cannon is fired at noon, or to mark a death –

  an echoing gesture. Now on the foreign news

  I hear that the serious thunder-makers from Ireland

  have crossed the channel. A pall of thick black smoke,

  says the tidy English voice, hangs over London.

  Here the sky is crystal. It is time to go.

  Flying Back

  They give us moistened BOAC towels

  and I scrub my forehead. Red powder

  for Holi: a trace of Delhi, an assault

  met there in the wild streets this morning.

  Without compunction I obliterate it –

  India’s not my country, let it go.

  But crumpling the vermilion-stained napkin

  (I shan’t read it: some priest may do that)

  I think of the stone foreheads in their hundreds:

  Ganesh and Hanuman, who made me smile,

  and Vishnu, and the four faces of Buddha,

  reddened with genuine devotions;

  and of the wooden cleft in a twisted tree

  which I saw a beggar-woman sign scarlet

  before she pressed her face down on to it;

  and here’s Nepal again. Sacred places

  don’t travel. The gods are stronger at home.

  But if my tentative western brow may wear

  this reluctant blush, these grains at the hair-roots,

  I claim the right also to an image

  as guardian; and choose winged Garuda.

  His bland archaic countenance beams out

  that serenity to which I journey.

  Near Creeslough

  I am in a foreign country.

  There are heron and cormorant on the lake.

  Young men in T-shirts against an Atlantic gale

  are wheeling gravel, renewing the paths

  in a stone shell chalked with their own history:

  something to fear and covet.

  We are the only visitors.

  Notices tell us in two old languages

  (one mine) that this is Caisleán na dTúath,

  Doe Castle. A castle for everyman.

  It has ramparts, towers, a dungeon –

  we step over gridded emptiness.

  The floors have rotted away in seventy years;

  the spiral stair endures, a little chipped,

  after four hundred. Here is my phobia.

  And for you, at the top of it,

  yours: a wind-racked vacancy,

  a savage drop, a view with no holds –

  to which you climb; and if you do, I do:

  going up, after all, is the lesser challenge.

  The high ledge receives us.

  We stand there half a minute longer

  than honour and simple vanity require;

  then I follow you down the stone gullet,

  feet on the splintering treads, eyes inward,

  and we step on springy grass

  once again; there have been n
o lapses.

  Now ravens ferrying food up to a nest

  make their easy ascents. Pleased with our own

  we stroll away to eat oranges in the car.

  Kilmacrenan

  The hailstorm was in my head.

  It drove us out into the blind lanes

  to stumble over gravel and bog,

  teeter on the skidding riverbank

  together, stare down and consider.

  But we drew back. When the real hail

  began its pounding upon us

  we were already half recovered.

  Walking under that pouring icefall

  hand in hand, towards lighted rooms,

  we became patchworks of cold and hot,

  glowing, streaming with water,

  dissolving whatever dared to touch us.

  Glenshane

  Abandoning all my principles

  I travel by car with you for days,

  eat meat from tins, drink pints of Guinness,

  smoke too much, and now on this pass

  higher than all our settled landscapes

  feed salted peanuts into your mouth

  as you drive at eighty miles an hour.

  THE INNER HARBOUR

  (1979)

  Beginnings

  Future Work

  ‘Please send future work.’

  – EDITOR’S NOTE ON A REJECTION SLIP

  It is going to be a splendid summer.

  The apple tree will be thick with golden russets

  expanding weightily in the soft air.

  I shall finish the brick wall beside the terrace

  and plant out all the geranium cuttings.

  Pinks and carnations will be everywhere.

  She will come out to me in the garden,

  her bare feet pale on the cut grass,

  bringing jasmine tea and strawberries on a tray.