Poems 1960-2000
Page 9
with some obscure seven-year-old’s motive,
seeing as once, I must believe, I saw:
sharply; concentrating as once I did.
Glad to be there again I relaxed the focus
(eyes still shut); let the whole scene open out
to the pump and separator under the porch,
the strolling chickens, the pear trees next to the yard,
the barn full of white cats, the loaded haycart,
the spinney…I saw it rolling on and on.
As it couldn’t, of course. That I had faced
when I made my compulsive return visit
after more than twenty years. ‘Your aunt’s not well,’
said Uncle George – little and gnarled himself –
‘You’ll find she doesn’t talk.’ They’d sold the farm,
retired to Melton Mowbray with their daughter.
‘Premature senility,’ she whispered.
But we all went out together in the car
to see the old place, Auntie sitting
straight-backed, dignified, mute,
perhaps a little puzzled as we churned
through splattering clay lanes, between wet hedges
to Grange Farm again: to a square house,
small, bleak, and surrounded by mud;
to be greeted, shown to the parlour, given tea,
with Auntie’s affliction gently signalled –
‘Her mouth hurts.’ Not my real aunt,
nor my real uncle. Both dead now.
I find it easiest to imagine dying
as like the gradual running down of a film,
the brain still flickering when the heart and blood
have halted, and the last few frames
lingering. Then where the projector jams
is where we go, or are, or are no longer.
If that comes anywhere near it, then I hope
that for those two an after-image glowed
in death of something better than mud and silence
or than my minute study of a patch of ground;
unless, like that for me, it spread before them
sunny ploughland, pastures, the scented orchard.
Letter from Highgate Wood
Your ‘wedge of stubborn particles’:
that silver birch, thin as a bent flagpole,
drives up through elm and oak and hornbeam
to sky-level, catching the late sunlight.
There’s woodsmoke, a stack of cut billets
from some thick trunk they’ve had to hack;
and of course a replacement programme under way –
saplings fenced off against marauders.
‘We have seasons’ your poem says;
and your letter tells me the black invader
has moved into the lymph; is not defeated.
‘He’s lucky to be still around,’ said your friend –
himself still around, still travelling
after a near-axing as severe,
it yet may prove, as yours at present.
I have come here to think, not for comfort;
to confront these matters, to imagine
the proliferating ungentle cells.
But the place won’t let me be fearful;
the green things work their usual trick –
‘Choose life’ – and I remember instead
our own most verdant season.
My dear, after more than a dozen years
light sings in the leaves of it still.
Poem Ended by a Death
They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you
and my tearstains – I was more inclined to weep
in those wild-garlicky days – and our happier stains,
thin scales of papery silk…Fuck that for a cheap
opener; and false too – any such traces
you pumiced away yourself, those years ago
when you sent my letters back, in the week I married
that anecdotal ape. So start again. So:
They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings
which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true,
wash you; and they will put you into a box.
After which whatever else they may do
won’t matter. This is my laconic style.
You praised it, as I praised your intricate pearled
embroideries; these links laced us together,
plain and purl across the ribs of the world…
Having No Mind for the Same Poem
Nor for the same conversation again and again.
But the power of meditation to cure an allergy,
that I will discuss
cross-legged on the lawn at evening
midges flittering, a tree beside us
none of us can name;
and rocks; a scent of syringa;
certain Japanese questions; the journey…
Nor for parody.
Nor, if we come to it, for the same letter:
‘hard to believe…I remember best his laugh…
such a vigorous man…please tell…’
and running, almost running to stuff coins
into the box for cancer research.
The others.
Nor for the same hopeless prayer.
Syringa
The syringa’s out. That’s nice for me:
all along Charing Cross Embankment
the sweet dragging scent reinventing
one of my childhood gardens.
Nice for the drunks and drop-outs too,
if they like it. I’m walking to work:
they’ll be here all day under the blossom
with their cider and their British sherry
and their carrier-bags of secrets.
There’s been a change in the population:
the ones I had names for – Fat Billy,
the Happy Couple, the Lady with the Dog –
have moved on or been moved off.
But it doesn’t do to wonder:
staring hurts in two directions. Once
a tall man chased me here, and I ran
for no good reason: afraid, perhaps,
of turning into Mrs Toothless
with her ankle-socks and her pony-tailed skull
whose eyes avoided mine so many mornings.
And she’s gone too. The place has been,
as whatever office will have termed it,
cleaned up. Except that it’s not clean
and not really a place: a hesitation
between the traffic fumes and a fragrance,
where this evening I shall walk again.
The Thing Itself
Dry Spell
It is not one thing, but more one thing than others:
the carved spoon broken in its case, a slate split on the roof,
dead leaves falling upon dead grass littered
with feathers, and the berries ripe too soon.
All of a piece and all in pieces, the dry mouth failing
to say it. I am sick with symbols.
Here is the thing itself: it is a drought.
I must learn it and live it drably through.
Visited
This truth-telling is well enough
looking into the slaty eyes of the visitants
acknowledging the messages they bring
but they plod past so familiarly
mouldy faces droning about acceptance
that one almost looks for a real monster
spiny and gaping as the fine mad fish
in the corner of that old shipwreck painting
rearing its red gullet out of the foam.
The Soho Hospital for Women
1
Strange room, from this angle:
white door open before me,
strange bed, mechanical hum, white lights.
There will be stranger rooms to come.
As I almost slept I saw the
deep flower opening
and leaned over into it, gratefully.
It swimmingly closed in my face. I was not ready.
It was not death, it was acceptance.
*
Our thin patient cat died purring,
her small triangular head tilted back,
the nurse’s fingers caressing her throat,
my hand on her shrunken spine; the quick needle.
That was the second death by cancer.
The first is not for me to speak of.
It was telephone calls and brave letters
and a friend’s hand bleeding under the coffin.
*
Doctor, I am not afraid of a word.
But neither do I wish to embrace that visitor,
to engulf it as Hine-Nui-te-Po
engulfed Maui; that would be the way of it.
And she was the winner there: her womb crushed him.
Goddesses can do these things.
But I have admitted the gloved hands and the speculum
and must part my ordinary legs to the surgeon’s knife.
2
Nellie has only one breast
ample enough to make several.
Her quilted dressing-gown softens
to semi-doubtful this imbalance
and there’s no starched vanity
in our abundant ward-mother:
her silvery hair’s in braids, her slippers
loll, her weathered smile holds true.
When she dresses up in her black
with her glittering marcasite brooch on
to go for the weekly radium treatment
she’s the bright star of the taxi-party –
whatever may be growing under her ribs.
*
Doris hardly smokes in the ward –
and hardly eats more than a dreamy spoonful –
but the corridors and bathrooms
reek of her Players Number 10,
and the drug-trolley pauses
for long minutes by her bed.
Each week for the taxi-outing
she puts on her skirt again
and has to pin the slack waistband
more tightly over her scarlet sweater.
Her face, a white shadow through smoked glass,
lets Soho display itself unregarded.
*
Third in the car is Mrs Golding
who never smiles. And why should she?
3
The senior consultant on his rounds
murmurs in so subdued a voice
to the students marshalled behind
that they gather in, forming a cell,
a cluster, a rosette around him
as he stands at the foot of my bed
going through my notes with them,
half-audibly instructive, grave.
The slight ache as I strain forward
to listen still seems imagined.
Then he turns his practised smile on me: ‘How are you this morning?’ ‘Fine,
very well, thank you.’ I smile too.
And possibly all that murmurs within me
is the slow dissolving of stitches.
4
I am out in the supermarket choosing –
this very afternoon, this day –
picking up tomatoes, cheese, bread,
things I want and shall be using
to make myself a meal, while they
eat their stodgy suppers in bed:
Janet with her big freckled breasts,
her prim Scots voice, her one friend,
and never in hospital before,
who came in to have a few tests
and now can’t see where they’ll end;
and Coral in the bed by the door
who whimpered and gasped behind a screen
with nurses to and fro all night
and far too much of the day;
pallid, bewildered, nineteen.
And Mary, who will be all right
but gradually. And Alice, who may.
Whereas I stand almost intact,
giddy with freedom, not with pain.
I lift my light basket, observing
how little I needed in fact;
and move to the checkout, to the rain,
to the lights and the long street curving.
Variations on a Theme of Horace
Clear is the man and of a cold life
who needn’t fear the slings and arrows;
cold is the man, and perhaps the moorish bows
will avoid him and the wolf turn tail.
*
Sitting in the crypt under bare arches
at a quite ordinary table with a neat cloth,
a glass of wine before him, ‘I’m never sure,’
he said, ‘that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning.’
Upstairs musicians were stretching their bows
for a late quartet which would also save us from nothing.
This ex-church was bombed to rubble,
rebuilt. It is not of that he was thinking.
And policemen decorate the underground stations
to protect us from the impure of heart;
the traveller must learn to suspect his neighbour,
each man his own watchdog. Nor of that.
Of a certain high felicity, perhaps,
imagining its absence; of the chances.
(If echoes fall into the likeness of music
that, like symmetry, may be accidental.)
‘Avoid archaism for its own sake –
viols, rebecks: what is important
is simply that the instruments should be able
to play the notes.’ A hard-learnt compromise.
But using what we have while we have it
seems, at times, enough or more than enough.
And here were old and newer things for our pleasure –
the sweet curves of the arches; music to come.
Which this one set before him with his own death –
far from probably imminent, not soon likely –
ticking contrapuntally like a pace-maker
inside him. Were we, then, lighter, colder?
Had we ignored a central insistent theme?
Possibly even the birds aren’t happy:
it may be that they twitter from rage or fear.
So many tones; one can’t be sure of one’s reading.
Just as one can’t quite despise Horace
on whom the dreaded tree never did quite fall;
timid enjoyer that he was, he died
in due course of something or other. And meanwhile
sang of his Lalage in public measures,
enjoyed his farm and his dinners rather more,
had as much, no doubt, as any of us to lose.
And the black cypress stalks after us all.
A Walk in the Snow
Neighbours lent her a tall feathery dog
to make her expedition seem natural.
She couldn’t really fancy a walk alone,
drawn though she was to the shawled whiteness,
the flung drifts of wool. She was not a walker.
Her winter pleasures were in firelit rooms –
entertaining friends with inventive dishes
or with sherry, conversation, palm-reading:
‘You’ve suffered,’ she’d say. ‘Of course, life is suffering…’
holding a wrist with her little puffy hand
older than her face. She was writing a novel.
But today there was the common smothered in snow,
blanked-out, white as meringue, the paths gone:
a few mounds of bracken spikily veiled
and the rest smooth succulence. They pocked it,
she and the dog; they wrote on it with their feet –
her suede boots, his bright flurrying paws.
It was their snow, and they took it.
That evening
and conjuror with ashtrays, was absent.
The house lay mute. She hesitated a moment
at bedtime before the Valium bottle;
then, to be on the safe side, took her usual;
and swam into a deep snowy sleep
where a lodge (was it?) and men in fur hats,
and the galloping…and something about…
A Day in October
1.30 p.m.
Outside the National Gallery
a man checks bags for bombs or weapons –
not thoroughly enough: he’d have missed
a tiny hand-grenade in my make-up purse,
a cigarette packet of gelignite.
I walk in gently to Room III
not to disturb them: Piero’s angels,
serene and cheerful, whom surely nothing could frighten,
and St Michael in his red boots
armed against all comers.
Brave images. But under my heart
an explosive bubble of tenderness gathers
and I shiver before the chalky Christ:
what must we do to save
the white limbs, pale tree, trusting verticals?
Playing the old bargaining game
I juggle with prices, offer a finger
for this or that painting, a hand or an eye
for the room’s contents. What for the whole building?
And shouldn’t I jump aside if the bomb flew,
cowardly as instinct makes us?
‘Goodbye’ I tell the angels, just in case.