Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

  combing the misty fringes of the forest

  (as he would have had to learn not to call it)

  at dawn, and again after school, for stragglers;

  cursing them; bailing them up; it was no childhood.

  A talent-spotting teacher saved him.

  The small neat smiling boy (I’m guessing)

  evolved into a small neat professor.

  He could have spent his life wreathed in cow-breath,

  a slave to endlessly refilling udders,

  companion of heifers, midwife at their calvings,

  judicious pronouncer on milk-yields and mastitis,

  survivor of the bull he bipped on the nose

  (‘Tell us again, Daddy!’) as it charged him.

  All his cattle: I drive them back

  into the mist, into the dawn haze

  where they can look romantic; where they must

  have wandered now for sixty or seventy years.

  Off they go, then, tripping over the tree-roots,

  pulling up short to lip at a tasty twig,

  bumping into each other, stumbling off again

  into the bush. He never much liked them.

  He’ll never need to rustle them back again.

  Toads

  Let’s be clear about this: I love toads.

  So when I found our old one dying,

  washed into the drain by flood-water

  in the night and then – if I can bring myself

  to say it – scalded by soapy lather

  I myself had let out of the sink,

  we suffered it through together.

  It was the summer of my father’s death.

  I saw his spirit in every visiting creature,

  in every small thing at risk of harm:

  bird, moth, butterfly, beetle,

  the black rabbit lolloping along concrete,

  lost in suburbia; and our toad.

  If we’d seen it once a year that was often,

  but the honour of being chosen by it

  puffed us up: a toad of our own

  trusting us not to hurt it

  when we had to lift it out of its den

  to let the plumber get at the water-main.

  And now this desperate damage: the squat

  compactness unhinged, made powerless.

  Dark, straight, its legs extended,

  flippers paralysed, it lay lengthwise

  flabby-skinned across my palm,

  cold and stiff as the Devil’s penis.

  I laid it on soil; the shoulders managed

  a few slow twitches, pulled it an inch forward.

  But the blowflies knew: they called it dead

  and stippled its back with rays of pearly stitching.

  Into the leaves with it then, poor toad,

  somewhere cool, where I can’t watch it.

  Perhaps it was very old? Perhaps it was ready?

  Small comfort, through ten guilt-ridden days.

  And then, one moist midnight, out in the country,

  a little shadow shaped like a brown leaf

  hopped out of greener leaves and came to me.

  Twice I had to lift it from my doorway:

  a gently throbbing handful – calm, comely,

  its feet tickling my palm like soft bees.

  Under the Lawn

  It’s hard to stay angry with a buttercup

  threading through the turf (less and less a lawn

  with each jagging rip of the fork or scoop

  of the trowel) but a dandelion can

  inspire righteous fury: that taproot

  drilling down to where it’s impossible

  ever quite to reach (although if it’s cut

  through that’s merely a minor check) until

  clunk: what’s this? And it’s spade-time. Several hours

  later, eleven slabs of paving-stone

  (submerged so long ago that the neighbours

  who’ve been on the watch since 1941

  ‘never remember seeing a path there’) with, lying marooned singly on three of them,

  an octagonal threepence, a George the Fifth

  penny and, vaguely missed from their last home

  for fifteen years or so and rusted solid,

  Grandpa’s scissors, the ones for hairdressing

  from his barbering days: plain steel, not plated;

  still elegant; the tip of one blade still missing.

  Wren Song

  How can I prove to you

  that we’ve got wrens in the garden?

  A quick flick of a tail

  in or out of the ivy hedge

  is all you’ll ever see of them;

  and anyway, I’m asleep.

  Not dreaming, though: I can hear him,

  the boss-wren, out there in the summer dawn –

  his bubbling sequences,

  an octave higher than a blackbird’s,

  trickling silver seeds into my ears.

  I’ll get the tape-recorder.

  But no, it’s in another room,

  and I’ve no blank tapes for it;

  and anyway, I’m asleep.

  Hard to wake up, after a sultry night

  of restless dozing, even for the wren.

  I’ve tracked his piccolo solo

  in the light evenings, from hedge to apple tree

  to elder, sprints of zippy flight in between.

  I’ve looked him up: ‘A rapid

  succession of penetrating and jubilant

  trills, very loud for so small a bird.’

  I’ll get the tape-recorder.

  I’ll find an old cassette to record over.

  I’m getting up to fetch it now –

  but no, I’m still asleep;

  it was a dream, the getting up.

  But the wren’s no dream. It is a wren.

  Next Door

  You could have called it the year of their persecution:

  some villain robbed her window-boxes of half

  her petunias and pansies. She wrote a notice:

  ‘To the person who took my plants. I am disabled;

  they cost me much labour to raise from seed.’

  Next week, the rest went. Then his number-plates.

  (Not the car itself. Who’d want the car? It stank.)

  A gale blew in a pane of their front window –

  crack: just like that. Why theirs? Why not, for example,

  mine? Same gale; same row of elderly houses.

  And through it all the cats multiplied fatly –

  fatly but scruffily (his weak heart, her illness:

  ‘They need grooming, I know, but they’re fat as butter’) –

  and the fleas hopped, and the smell came through the walls.

  How many cats? Two dozen? Forty? Fifty?

  We could count the ones outside in the cages (twelve),

  but inside? Always a different furry face

  at a window; and the kittens – think of the kittens

  pullulating like maggots over the chairs!

  Someone reported them to the authorities.

  Who could have done it? Surely not a neighbour!

  ‘No, not a neighbour! Someone in the Fancy’ –

  she was certain. ‘They’ve always envied my success.

  The neighbours wouldn’t…’ A sunny afternoon.

  I aimed my camera at them over the fence,

  at their garden table, under the striped umbrella:

  ‘Smile!’ And they grinned: his gnome-hat, her witch-hair

  in the sun – well out of earshot of the door-bell

  and of the Environmental Health Inspector.

  You could call it a bad year. But the next was worse.

  Heliopsis Scabra

  This is the time of year when people die:

  August, and these daisy-faced things

  blare like small suns on their swaying hedge

  of leaves, yellow as terror. Goodbye,

  they
shout to the summer, and goodbye

  to Jim, whose turn it was this morning:

  while in another hospital his wife

  lies paralysed, with nothing to do but lie

  wondering what’s being kept from her, and cry –

  she can still do that. August in hospital

  sweats and is humid. In the garden

  grey airs blow moist, but the mean sky

  holds on to its water. The earth’s coke-dry;

  the yellow daisies goggle, but other plants

  less greedily rooted are at risk.

  The sky surges and sulks. It will let them die.

  House-martins

  Mud in their beaks, the house-martins are happy…

  That’s anthropomorphism. Start again:

  mud being plentiful because last night

  it rained, after a month of drought,

  the house-martins are able to build their nests.

  They flitter under the eaves, white flashes

  on their backs telling what they are:

  house-martins. Not necessarily happy.

  Below in the mock-Tudor cul-de-sac

  two kids on skateboards and a smaller girl

  with a tricycle are sketching their own circles –

  being themselves, being children:

  vaguely aware, perhaps, of the house-martins,

  and another bird singing, and a scent of hedge.

  Anthropomorphism tiptoes away:

  of human children it’s permissible

  to say they’re happy – if indeed they are.

  It’s no use asking them; they wouldn’t know.

  They may be bored, or in a sulk,

  or worried (it doesn’t show; and they look healthy).

  Ask them in fifty years or so,

  if they’re still somewhere. Arrange to present them with

  (assuming all these things can still be assembled)

  a blackbird’s song, the honeyed reek of privet,

  and a flock of house-martins, wheeling and scrambling

  about a group of fake-half-timbered semis.

  Call it a Theme Park, if you like:

  ‘Suburban childhood, late 1980s’

  (or 70s, or 50s – it’s hardly changed).

  Ask them ‘Were you happy in Shakespeare Close?’

  and watch them gulp, sick with nostalgia for it.

  Wildlife

  A wall of snuffling snouts in close-up,

  ten coloured, two in black and white,

  each in its frame; all magnified,

  some more than others. Voles, are they?

  Shrews? Water-rats? Whiskers waggling,

  they peep from under twelve tree-roots

  and vanish. Next, a dozen barn-owls,

  pale masks, almost filling the dark screens.

  Cut; and now two dozen hedgehogs

  come trotting forward in headlong pairs:

  they’ll fall right out on the floor among the

  cookers and vacuum-cleaners unless

  the camera – just in time – draws back.

  Here they come again, in their various

  sizes, on their various grass:

  olive, emerald, acid, bluish,

  dun-tinged, or monochrome. The tones

  are best, perhaps, on the 22-inch

  ITT Squareline: more natural

  than the Philips – unless you find them too

  muted, in which case the Sony

  might do. Now here are the owls again.

  Meanwhile at the Conference Centre

  three fire-engines have screamed up. Not,

  for once, a student smoking in a bedroom:

  this time a cloud of thunderflies

  has chosen to swarm on the pearly-pink

  just-warm globe of a smoke-detector.

  Turnip-heads

  Here are the ploughed fields of Middle England;

  and here are the scarecrows, flapping polythene arms

  over what still, for the moment, looks like England:

  bare trees, earth-colours, even a hedge or two.

  The scarecrows’ coats are fertiliser bags;

  their heads (it’s hard to see from the swift windows

  of the Intercity) are probably 5-litre

  containers for some chemical or other.

  And what are the scarecrows guarding? Fields of rape?

  Plenty of that in Middle England; also

  pillage, and certain other medieval

  institutions – some things haven’t changed,

  now that the men of straw are men of plastic.

  They wave their rags in fitful semaphore,

  in the March wind; our train blurs past them.

  Whatever their message was, we seem to have missed it.

  The Batterer

  What can I have done to earn

  the Batterer striding here beside me,

  checking up with his blue-china

  sidelong eyes that I’ve not been bad –

  not glanced across the street, forgetting

  to concentrate on what he’s saying;

  not looked happy without permission,

  or used the wrong form of his name?

  How did he get here, out of the past,

  with his bulging veins and stringy tendons,

  fists clenched, jaw gritted,

  about to burst with babble and rage?

  Did I elect him? Did I fall

  asleep and vote him in again?

  Yes, that’ll be what he is: a nightmare;

  but someone else’s now, not mine.

  Roles

  Emily Brontë’s cleaning the car:

  water sloshes over her old trainers

  as she scrubs frail blood-shapes from the windscreen

  and swirls the hose-jet across the roof.

  When it’s done she’ll go to the supermarket;

  then, if she has to, face her desk.

  I’m striding on the moor in my hard shoes,

  a shawl over my worsted bodice,

  the hem of my skirt scooping dew from the grass

  as I pant up towards the breathless heights.

  I’ll sit on a rock I know and write a poem.

  It may not come out as I intend.

  Happiness

  Too jellied, viscous, floating a condition

  to inspire more action than a sigh –

  like being supported on warm porridge

  gazing at this: may-blossom, bluebells, robin,

  the tennis-players through the trees,

  the trotting magpie (not good news, but handsome)

  asking the tree-stump next to where I’m sitting

  ‘Were you a rowan last time? No?

  That’s what the seedling wedged in your roots is planning.’

  Coupling

  On the wall above the bedside lamp

  a large crane-fly is jump-starting

  a smaller crane-fly – or vice versa.

  They do it tail to tail, like Volkswagens:

  their engines must be in their rears.

  It looks easy enough. Let’s try it.

  The Greenhouse Effect

  As if the week had begun anew –

  and certainly something has:

  this fizzing light on the harbour, these

  radiant bars and beams and planes

  slashed through flaps and swags of sunny vapour.

  Aerial water, submarine light:

  Wellington’s gone Wordsworthian again.

  He’d have admired it –

  admired but not approved, if he’d heard

  about fossil fuels, and aerosols,

  and what we’ve done to the ozone layer,

  or read in last night’s Evening Post

  that ‘November ended the warmest spring

  since meteorological records began’.

  Not that it wasn’t wet:

  moisture’s a part of it.

  As for this morning (Friday),

&
nbsp; men in shorts raking the beach

  have constructed little cairns of evidence:

  driftwood, paper, plastic cups.

  A seagull’s gutting a bin.

  The rain was more recent than I thought:

  I’m sitting on a wet bench.

  Just for now, I can live with it.

  The Last Moa

  Somewhere in the bush, the last moa

  is not still lingering in some hidden valley.

  She is not stretching her swanlike neck

  (but longer, more massive than any swan’s)

  for a high cluster of miro berries,

  or grubbing up fern roots with her beak.

  Alice McKenzie didn’t see her

  among the sandhills at Martin’s Bay

  in 1880 – a large blue bird

  as tall as herself, which turned and chased her.

  Moas were taller than seven-year-old

  pioneer children; moas weren’t blue.

  Twenty or thirty distinct species –

  all of them, even the small bush moa,

  taller than Alice – and none of their bones

  carbon-dated to less than five centuries.

  The sad, affronted mummified head

  in the museum is as old as a Pharoah.

  Not the last moa, that; but neither

  was Alice’s harshly grunting pursuer.

  Possibly Alice met a takahe,

  the extinct bird that rose from extinction

  in 1948, near Te Anau.

  No late reprieve, though, for the moa.