Poems 1960-2000
Page 8
I shall be correcting the proofs of my novel
(third in a trilogy – simultaneous publication
in four continents); and my latest play
will be in production at the Aldwych
starring Glenda Jackson and Paul Scofield
with Olivier brilliant in a minor part.
I shall probably have finished my translations
of Persian creation myths and the Pre-Socratics
(drawing new parallels) and be ready to start
on Lucretius. But first I’ll take a break
at the chess championships in Manila –
on present form, I’m fairly likely to win.
And poems? Yes, there will certainly be poems:
they sing in my head, they tingle along my nerves.
It is all magnificently about to begin.
Our Trip to the Federation
We went to Malaya for an afternoon,
driving over the long dull roads
in Bill’s Toyota, the two boys in the back.
It was rubber plantations mostly
and villages like all Asian villages,
brown with dust and wood, bright with marketing.
Before we had to turn back we stopped
at a Chinese roadside cemetery
and visited among the long grass
the complicated coloured graves,
patchwork semi-circles of painted stone:
one mustn’t set a foot on the wrong bit.
Across the road were rubber trees again
and a kampong behind: we looked in
at thatched houses, flowering shrubs, melons,
unusual speckled poultry, and the usual
beautiful children. We observed
how the bark was slashed for rubber-tapping.
Does it sound like a geography lesson
or a dream? Rubber-seeds are mottled,
smooth, like nuts. I picked up three
and have smuggled them absent-mindedly
in and out of several countries.
Shall I plant them and see what grows?
Mr Morrison
Goslings dive in the lake,
leaves dazzle on the trees;
on the warm grass two ducks are parked neatly
together like a pair of shoes.
A coot plays beaks with its chick;
children laugh and exclaim.
Mr Morrison saunters past, smiling at them,
humming a Sunday-school hymn.
He wonders about his mood,
irredeemably content:
he should worry more about poverty, oppression,
injustice; but he can’t, he can’t.
He is not too callous to care
but is satisfied in his work,
well-fed, well-housed, tolerably married,
and enjoying a walk in the park.
Then the sun sticks in the sky,
the tune sticks in his throat,
a burning hand with razors for fingernails
reaches inside his coat
and hotly claws at his heart.
He stands very quiet and still,
seeing if he dares to breathe just a fraction;
sweating; afraid he’ll fall.
With stiff little wooden steps
he edges his way to a bench
and lowers his body with its secret fiery
tenant down, inch by inch.
He orders himself to be calm:
no doubt it will soon pass.
He resolves to smoke less, watch his cholesterol,
walk more, use the car less.
And it passes: he is released,
the stabbing fingers depart.
Tentatively at first, then easily,
he fills his lungs without hurt.
He is safe; and he is absolved:
it was not just pain, after all;
it enrolled him among the sufferers, allotted him
a stake in the world’s ill.
Doors open inside his head;
once again he begins to hum:
he’s been granted one small occasion for worry
and the promise of more to come.
Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
A Way Out
The other option’s to become a bird.
That’s kindly done, to guess from how they sing,
decently independent of the word
as we are not; and how they use the air
to sail as we might soaring on a swing
higher and higher; but the rope’s not there,
it’s free fall upward, out into the sky;
or if the arc veer downward, then it’s planned:
a bird can loiter, skimming just as high
as lets him supervise the hazel copse,
the turnip field, the orchard, and then land
on just the twig he’s chosen. Down he drops
to feed, if so it be: a pretty killer,
a keen-eyed stomach weighted like a dart.
He feels no pity for the caterpillar,
that moistly munching hoop of innocent green.
It is such tender lapses twist the heart.
A bird’s heart is a tight little red bean,
untwistable. His beak is made of bone,
his feet apparently of stainless wire;
his coat’s impermeable; his nest’s his own.
The clogging multiplicity of things
amongst which other creatures, battling, tire
can be evaded by a pair of wings.
The point is, most of it occurs below,
earthed at the levels of the grovelling wood
and gritty buildings. Up’s the way to go.
If it’s escapist, if it’s like a dream
the dream’s prolonged until it ends for good.
I see no disadvantage in the scheme.
Prelude
Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic,
waving about us with hair-fine fronds of straw,
with feathery flourishes of seed, inviting us
to cling together, fall, roll into it
blind and gasping, smothered by stalks and hair,
pollen and each other’s tongues on our hot faces?
Then imagine if the summer rain were to come,
heavy drops hissing through the warm air,
a sluice on our wet bodies, plastering us
with strands of delicious grass; a hum in our ears.
We walk a yard apart, talking
of literature and of botany.
We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.
Accidental
We awakened facing each other
across the white counterpane.
I prefer to be alone in the mornings.
The waiter offered us
melon, papaya, orange juice or fresh raspberries.
We did not discuss it.
All those years of looking but not touching:
at most a kiss in a taxi.
And now this accident,
this blind unstoppable robot walk
into a conspiracy of our bodies.
Had we ruined the whole thing?
The waiter waited:
it was his business to appear composed.
Perhaps we should make it ours also?
We moved an inch or two closer together.
Our toes touched. We looked. We had decided.
Papaya then; and coffee and rolls. Of course.
A Message
Discreet, not cryptic. I write to you from the gar
den
in tawny, provoking August; summer is just
on the turn. The lawn is hayseeds and grassy dust.
There are brilliant yellow daisies, though, and fuchsia
(you’ll know why) and that mauve and silvery-grey
creeper under the apple tree where we lay.
There have been storms. The apples are few, but heavy,
heavy. And where blossom was, the tree
surges with bright pink flowers – the sweet pea
has taken it over again. Things operate
oddly here. Remember how I found
the buddleia dead, and cut it back to the ground?
That was in April. Now it’s ten feet high:
thick straight branches – they’ve never been so strong –
leaves like a new species, half a yard long,
and spikes of flowers, airily late for their season
but gigantic. A mutation, is it? Well,
summers to come will test it. Let time tell.
Gardens are rife with sermon-fodder. I delve
among blossoming accidents for their designs
but make no statement. Read between these lines.
Proposal for a Survey
Another poem about a Norfolk church,
a neolithic circle, Hadrian’s Wall?
Histories and prehistories: indexes
and bibliographies can’t list them all.
A map of Poets’ England from the air
could show not only who and when but where.
Aerial photogrammetry’s the thing,
using some form of infra-red technique.
Stones that have been so fervently described
surely retain some heat. They needn’t speak:
the cunning camera ranging in its flight
will chart their higher temperatures as light.
We’ll see the favoured regions all lit up –
the Thames a fiery vein, Cornwall a glow,
Tintagel like an incandescent stud,
most of East Anglia sparkling like Heathrow;
and Shropshire luminous among the best,
with Offa’s Dyke in diamonds to the west.
The Lake District will be itself a lake
of patchy brilliance poured along the vales,
with somewhat lesser splashes to the east
across Northumbria and the Yorkshire dales.
Cities and churches, villages and lanes,
will gleam in sparks and streaks and radiant stains.
The lens, of course, will not discriminate
between the venerable and the new;
Stonehenge and Avebury may catch the eye
but Liverpool will have its aura too.
As well as Canterbury there’ll be Leeds
and Hull criss-crossed with nets of glittering beads.
Nor will the cool machine be influenced
by literary fashion to reject
any on grounds of quality or taste:
intensity is all it will detect,
mapping in light, for better or for worse,
whatever has been written of in verse.
The dreariness of eighteenth-century odes
will not disqualify a crag, a park,
a country residence; nor will the rant
of satirists leave London in the dark.
All will shine forth. But limits there must be:
borders will not be crossed, nor will the sea.
Let Scotland, Wales and Ireland chart themselves,
as they’d prefer. For us, there’s just one doubt:
that medieval England may be dimmed
by age, and all that’s earlier blotted out.
X-rays might help. But surely ardent rhyme
will, as it’s always claimed, outshine mere time?
By its own power the influence will rise
from sites and settlements deep underground
of those who sang about them while they stood.
Pale phosphorescent glimmers will be found
of epics chanted to pre-Roman tunes
and poems in, instead of about, runes.
Fairy-tale
This is a story. Dear Clive
(a name unmet among my acquaintance)
you landed on my island: Mauritius
I’ll call it – it was not unlike.
The Governor came to meet your plane.
I stood on the grass by the summerhouse.
It was dark, I think. And next morning
we walked in the ripples of the sea
watching the green and purple creatures
flashing in and out of the waves
about our ankles. Seabirds, were they?
Or air-fishes, a flying shoal
of sea-parrots, finned and feathered?
Even they were less of a marvel,
pretty things, than that you’d returned
after a year and such distraction
to walk with me on the splashy strand.
At the Creative Writing Course
Slightly frightened of the bullocks
as we walk into their mud towards them
she arms herself by naming them for me:
‘Friesian, Aberdeen, Devon, South Devon…’
A mixed herd. I was nervous too,
but no longer. ‘Devon, Friesian, Aberdeen…’
the light young voice chants at them
faster as the long heavy heads
lift and lurch towards us. And pause,
turn away to let us pass. I am learning
to show confidence before large cattle.
She is learning to be a poet.
Endings
The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers
They serve revolving saucer eyes,
dishes of stars; they wait upon
huge lenses hung aloft to frame
the slow procession of the skies.
They calculate, adjust, record,
watch transits, measure distances.
They carry pocket telescopes
to spy through when they walk abroad.
Spectra possess their eyes; they face
upwards, alert for meteorites,
cherishing little glassy worlds:
receptacles for outer space.
But she, exile, expelled, ex-queen,
swishes among the men of science
waiting for cloudy skies, for nights
when constellations can’t be seen.
She wears the rings he let her keep;
she walks as she was taught to walk
for his approval, years ago.
His bitter features taunt her sleep.
And so when these have laid aside
their telescopes, when lids are closed
between machine and sky, she seeks
terrestrial bodies to bestride.
She plucks this one or that among
the astronomers, and is become
his canopy, his occultation;
she sucks at earlobe, penis, tongue
mouthing the tubes of flesh; her hair
crackles, her eyes are comet-sparks.
She brings the distant briefly close
above his dreamy abstract stare
Off the Track
Our busy springtime has corrupted
into a green indolence of summer,
static, swollen, invisibly devoured.
Too many leaves have grown between us.
Almost without choosing I have turned
from wherever we were towards this thicket
It is not the refuge I had hoped for.
Walking away from you I walk
into a trailing mist of caterpillars:
they swing at my face, tinily suspended,
half-blinding; and my hands are smudged
with a syrup of crushed aphids.
You must be miles away by now
in open country, climbing steadily,
head down, looking
for larks’ eggs.
Beaux Yeux
Arranging for my due ration of terror
involves me in such lunacies
as recently demanding to be shown
the broad blue ovals of your eyes.
Yes: quite as alarming as you’d promised,
those lapidary iris discs
level in your dark small face.
Still, for an hour or two I held them
until you laughed, replaced your tinted glasses,
switched accents once again
and went away, looking faintly uncertain
in the sunlight (but in charge, no doubt of it)
and leaving me this round baby sparrow
modelled in feather-coloured clay,
a small snug handful; hardly apt
unless in being cooler than a pebble.
Send-off
Half an hour before my flight was called
he walked across the airport bar towards me
carrying what was left of our future
together: two drinks on a tray.
In Focus
Inside my closed eyelids, printed out
from some dying braincell as I awakened,
was this close-up of granular earthy dust,
fragments of chaff and grit, a triangular
splinter of glass, a rusty metal washer
on rough concrete under a wooden step.
Not a memory. But the caption told me
I was at Grange Farm, seven years old,
in the back yard, kneeling outside the shed