Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

they’d shiver and shut their eyes and cry,

  and you’d have to guide them down again, backwards,

  wishing they hadn’t climbed so high.

  So it wasn’t a social tree. It was perfect

  for someone solitary and shy

  who liked gazing out over miles of history,

  watching it happen, like a spy,

  and was casual about heights, but didn’t fancy

  coming down again to defy

  the powers below. Odd that they didn’t notice

  all this climbing on the sly,

  and odder still, if they knew, that they didn’t ban it.

  Knowing them now, you’d wonder why.

  Telling Tales

  Drowning

  ‘Si qua mulier maritum suum, cui legitime est iuncta, dimiserit, necetur in luto.’ [If any woman has killed her lawfully married husband let her be drowned in mud.]

  LEX BURGUND., 34, I.

  Death by drowning drowns the soul:

  bubbles cannot carry it;

  frail pops of air, farts

  loosed in water are no vessels

  for the immortal part of us.

  And in a pit of mud, what bubbles?

  There she lies, her last breath with her,

  her soul rotting in her breast.

  *

  Is the sea better, then?

  Will the salty brine preserve

  pickled souls for the Day of Judgement?

  Are we herrings to be trawled

  in long nets by Saint Peter?

  Ocean is a heavy load:

  My soul flies up to thee, O God –

  but not through mud, not through water.

  And so, Bishop Synesius,

  how can you wonder that we stand

  with drawn swords on this bucking deck,

  choosing to fall on friendly steel

  and squirt our souls into the heavens

  rather than choke them fathoms deep?

  One more lash of the storm and it’s done:

  self-murder, but not soul-murder.

  Then let the fishes feast on us

  and slurp our blood after we’re finished:

  they’ll find no souls to suck from us.

  Yours, perhaps, has a safe-conduct:

  you’re a bishop, and subtle, and Greek.

  Well, sir, pray and ponder. But our

  language has no word for dilemma.

  Drowning’s the strongest word for death.

  ‘Personal Poem’

  It’s the old story of the personal;

  or of the Person – ‘Al’, we could call him –

  with his oneness, his centrality,

  fingers tapping to the band music,

  and his eyes glowing like that

  as if he had invented the guitar;

  or coming around the corner on his tractor

  calling out some comment you just missed.

  The radios begin at 6 a.m.

  It is really a very crowded city.

  You’re lucky to find two rooms, one for sleeping,

  and a patch of allotment for potatoes.

  Here we are on the hills, and it’s no better.

  Of course the birds are singing, but they would.

  All you get is contempt, didn’t they say so?

  All right, contemn us.

  We asked for nothing but a few gestures –

  that kiss inside his open collar,

  between the neck and shoulder, shockingly

  personal to watch.

  It’s Al again, laughing in his teeth,

  telling us about his Jamaican childhood

  and the time his friend had crabs

  from making love to the teacher’s maid.

  ‘It gave me a funny feeling,’ he says

  ‘to see them crawling there, little animals.

  I hadn’t even grown hair on mine.

  In a way I was jealous –

  imagine!’ We imagine.

  All these people running about in tracksuits

  for nothing. And one standing at the gate

  with a paper bag of bananas. ‘Hi,’ he says,

  ‘How are you?’ Nobody answers.

  So at the May Day rally there they are.

  Surely that’s his jacket she’s wearing?

  And the face under the hair is his,

  the way she wrinkles her nose.

  How people give themselves away!

  Yet all we have is hearsay.

  Too late to take a boat out;

  and anyway, the lake’s crowded,

  kids and oars together, and all their voices.

  But really no one in particular,

  unless you say so. Unless we say so.

  An Epitaph

  I wish to apologise for being mangled.

  It was the romantic temperament

  that did for me. I could stand rejection –

  so grand, ‘the stone the builders rejected…’ –

  but not acceptance. ‘Alas,’ I said

  (a word I use), ‘alas, I am taken

  up, or in, or out of myself :

  shall I never be solitary?’

  Acceptance fell on me like a sandbag.

  My bones crack. It squelches out of them.

  Ah, acceptance! Leave me under this stone.

  Being Taken from the Place

  Less like an aircraft than a kettle,

  this van, the way the floor buzzes

  tinnily over its boiling wheels,

  rolling me south.

  Sounds flick backwards

  in a travelling cauldron of noise. I lie

  on the metal floor, hearing their voices

  whirring like mechanical flies

  over the seething burr of the engine.

  They won’t hear if I talk to myself;

  whatever I say they can’t hear me.

  I say ‘Illness is a kind of failure.’

  I say ‘Northumbrian rose quartz.’

  Accidents

  The accidents are never happening :

  they are too imaginable to be true.

  The driver knows his car is still on the road,

  heading for Durham in the rain.

  The mother knows her baby is just asleep,

  curled up with his cuddly blanket, waiting

  to be lifted and fed: there’s no such thing as cot-death.

  The rescue party digging all night in the dunes

  can’t believe the tunnel has really collapsed:

  the children have somehow gone to their Auntie’s house;

  she has lent them their cousins’ pyjamas, they are sitting

  giggling together in the big spare room,

  pretending to try and spill each other’s cocoa.

  On the Land

  I’m still too young to remember how

  I learned to mind a team of horses,

  to plough and harrow: not a knack

  you’d lose easily, once you had it.

  It was in the Great War, that much

  remembered age. I was a landgirl

  in my puttees and boots and breeches

  and a round hat like a felt halo.

  We didn’t mind the lads laughing:

  let them while they could, we thought,

  they hadn’t long. But it seemed long –

  hay-making, and apple-picking,

  and storing all those scented things

  in sneezy dimness in the barn.

  Then Jack turned seventeen and went,

  and I knew Ted would go soon.

  He went the week of Candlemas.

  After that it was all weather:

  frosts and rains and spring and summer,

  and the long days growing longer.

  It rained for the potato harvest.

  The front of my smock hung heavy

  with claggy mud, from kneeling in it

  mining for strays. Round segments

  chopped clean off by the blade
r />   flashed white as severed kneecaps.

  I grubbed for whole ones, baby skulls

  to fill my sack again and again.

  When the pain came, it wouldn’t

  stop. I couldn’t stand. I dropped

  the sack and sank into a trench.

  Ethel found me doubled up.

  Mr Gregson took me home,

  jolting on the back of the wagon.

  I tossed and writhed on my hard bed,

  my head hunched into the bolster,

  dreaming of how if just for once,

  for half an hour, the knobbly mattress

  could turn into a billow of clouds

  I might be able to get to sleep.

  Icon

  In the interests of economy

  I am not going to tell you

  what happened between the time

  when they checked into the hotel

  with its acres of tiled bathrooms

  (but the bidet in theirs was cracked)

  and the morning two days later

  when he awoke to find her gone.

  After he had read her note

  and done the brief things he could do

  he found himself crossing the square

  to the Orthodox Cathedral.

  The dark icon by the door

  was patched with lumpy silver islands

  nailed to the Virgin’s robes; they looked

  like flattened-out Monopoly tokens,

  he thought: a boot, and something like

  a heart, and a pair of wings, and something

  oblong. They were hard to see

  in the brown light, but he peered at them

  for several minutes, leaning over

  the scarved head of an old woman

  on her knees there, blocking his view;

  who prayed and prayed and wouldn’t move.

  Drawings

  The ones not in the catalogue:

  little sketches, done in her garden – this

  head of a child (the same child

  we saw in the picnic scene, remember?)

  And trees, of course, and grasses,

  and a study of hawthorn berries.

  Doodles, unfinished drafts: look

  at this chestnut leaf, abandoned in mid-

  stroke – a telephone-call, perhaps;

  a visitor; some interruption.

  She may have been happier,

  or happy longer, or at least more often…

  but that’s presumption. Let’s move on:

  grasses again; a group of stones

  from her rockery, done in charcoal; and this

  not quite completed pencil sketch of

  a tiger lily, the springy crown

  of petals curved back on itself

  right to the stem, the long electric

  stamens almost still vibrating.

  The Telephone Call

  They asked me ‘Are you sitting down?

  Right? This is Universal Lotteries,’

  they said. ‘You’ve won the top prize,

  the Ultra-super Global Special.

  What would you do with a million pounds?

  Or, actually, with more than a million –

  not that it makes a lot of difference

  once you’re a millionaire.’ And they laughed.

  ‘Are you OK?’ they asked – ‘Still there?

  Come on, now, tell us, how does it feel?’

  I said ‘I just…I can’t believe it! ’

  They said ‘That’s what they all say.

  What else? Go on, tell us about it.’

  I said ‘I feel the top of my head

  has floated off, out through the window,

  revolving like a flying saucer.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ they said. ‘Go on.’

  I said ‘I’m finding it hard to talk.

  My throat’s gone dry, my nose is tingling.

  I think I’m going to sneeze – or cry.’

  ‘That’s right,’ they said, ‘don’t be ashamed

  of giving way to your emotions.

  It isn’t every day you hear

  you’re going to get a million pounds.

  Relax, now, have a little cry;

  we’ll give you a moment…’ ‘Hang on!’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t bought a lottery ticket

  for years and years. And what did you say

  the company’s called?’ They laughed again.

  ‘Not to worry about a ticket.

  We’re Universal. We operate

  a Retrospective Chances Module.

  Nearly everyone’s bought a ticket

  in some lottery or another,

  once at least. We buy up the files,

  feed the names into our computer,

  and see who the lucky person is.’

  ‘Well, that’s incredible,’ I said.

  ‘It’s marvellous. I still can’t quite…

  I’ll believe it when I see the cheque.’

  ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there’s no cheque.’

  ‘But the money?’ ‘We don’t deal in money.

  Experiences are what we deal in.

  You’ve had a great experience, right?

  Exciting? Something you’ll remember?

  That’s your prize. So congratulations

  from all of us at Universal.

  Have a nice day!’ And the line went dead.

  Incidentals

  Excavations

  Here is a hole full of men shouting

  ‘I don’t love you. I loved you once

  but I don’t now. I went off you,

  or I was frightened, or my wife was pregnant,

  or I found I preferred men instead.’

  What can I say to that kind of talk?

  ‘Thank you for being honest, you

  who were so shifty when it happened,

  pretending you were suddenly busy

  with your new job or your new conscience.’

  I chuck them a shovelful of earth

  to make them blink for a bit, to smirch

  their green eyes and their long lashes

  or their brown eyes…Pretty bastards:

  the rain will wash their bawling faces

  and I bear them little enough ill will.

  Now on to the next hole,

  covered and fairly well stamped down,

  full of the men whom I stopped loving

  and didn’t always tell at the time –

  being, I found, rather busy

  with my new man or my new freedom.

  These are quiet and unaccusing,

  cuddled up with their subsequent ladies,

  hardly unsettling the bumpy ground.

  Pastoral

  Eat their own hair, sheep do,

  nibbling away under the snow, under their bellies –

  calling it wool makes it no more palatable.

  What else is there to do in the big drifts,

  forced against a wall of wet stone?

  But let me have your hair to nibble

  before we are in winter; and the thong

  of dark seeds you wear at your neck;

  and for my tongue the salt on your skin to gobble.

  Kissing

  The young are walking on the riverbank,

  arms around each other’s waists and shoulders,

  pretending to be looking at the waterlilies

  and what might be a nest of some kind, over

  there, which two who are clamped together

  mouth to mouth have forgotten about.

  The others, making courteous detours

  around them, talk, stop talking, kiss.

  They can see no one older than themselves.

  It’s their river. They’ve got all day.

  Seeing’s not everything. At this very

  moment the middle-aged are kissing

  in the backs of taxis, on the way

  to airports and stations. Their mouths and tongue
s

  are soft and powerful and as moist as ever.

  Their hands are not inside each other’s clothes

  (because of the driver) but locked so tightly

  together that it hurts: it may leave marks

  on their not of course youthful skin, which they won’t

  notice. They too may have futures.

  Double-take

  You see your nextdoor neighbour from above,

  from an upstairs window, and he reminds you

  of your ex-lover, who is bald on top,

  which you had forgotten. At ground level

  there is no resemblance. Next time you chat

  with your nextdoor neighbour, you are relieved

  to find that you don’t fancy him.

  A week later you meet your ex-lover

  at a party, after more than a year.

  He reminds you (although only slightly)

  of your nextdoor neighbour. He has a paunch

  like your neighbour’s before he went on that diet.

  You remember how much you despise him.

  He behaves as if he’s pleased to see you.

  When you leave (a little earlier

  than you’d intended, to get away)

  he gives you a kiss which is more than neighbourly

  and says he’ll ring you. He seems to mean it.

  How odd! But you are quite relieved

  to find that you don’t fancy him.

  Unless you do? Or why that sudden

  something, once you get outside

  in the air? Why are your legs prancing

  so cheerfully along the pavement?

  And what exactly have you just remembered?