Poems 1960-2000

by Fleur Adcock

  or surely we’d have gone for a different lot,

  while they, confronted with us, might well have decided

  that since it was up to them they’d rather not.

  But something keeps us hooked, now we’re together,

  a link we’re not so daft as to disparage –

  nearly as strong as blood-relationship

  and far more permanent, thank God, than marriage.

  Smokers for Celibacy

  Some of us are a little tired of hearing that cigarettes kill.

  We’d like to warn you about another way of making yourself ill:

  we suggest that in view of AIDS, herpes, chlamydia, cystitis and NSU,

  not to mention genital warts and cervical cancer and the proven connection between the two,

  if you want to avoid turning into physical wrecks

  what you should give up is not smoking but sex.

  We’re sorry if you’re upset,

  but think of the grisly things you might otherwise get.

  We can’t see much point in avoiding emphysema at sixty-five

  if that’s an age at which you have conspicuously failed to arrive;

  and as for cancer, it is a depressing fact

  that at least for women this disease is more likely to occur in the reproductive tract.

  We could name friends of ours who died that way, if you insist,

  but we feel sure you can each provide your own list.

  You’ll notice we didn’t mention syphilis and gonorrhoea;

  well, we have now, so don’t get the idea

  that just because of antibiotics quaint old clap and pox

  are not still being generously spread around by men’s cocks.

  Some of us aren’t too keen on the thought of micro-organisms travelling up into our brain

  and giving us General Paralysis of the Insane.

  We’re opting out of one-night stands;

  we’d rather have a cigarette in our hands.

  If it’s a choice between two objects of cylindrical shape

  we go for the one that is seldom if ever guilty of rape.

  Cigarettes just lie there quietly in their packs

  waiting until you call on one of them to help you relax.

  They aren’t moody; they don’t go in for sexual harassment and threats,

  or worry about their performance as compared with that of other cigarettes,

  nor do they keep you awake all night telling you the story of their life,

  beginning with their mother and going on until morning about their first wife.

  Above all, the residues they leave in your system are thoroughly sterilised and clean,

  which is more than can be said for the products of the human machine.

  Altogether, we’ve come to the conclusion that sex is a drag.

  Just give us a fag.

  Mrs Fraser’s Frenzy

  Songs for Music

  1

  My name is Eliza Fraser.

  I belong to some savages.

  My job is to feed the baby

  they have hung on my shoulder.

  Its mother is lying sick

  with no milk in her breasts,

  and my own baby died:

  it was born after the shipwreck.

  It was born under water

  in the ship’s leaky longboat.

  Three days I helped to bail,

  then gave birth in the scuppers.

  My poor James, the captain,

  was crippled with thirst and sickness.

  The men were all useless,

  and no woman to call on.

  I believe the First Mate,

  Mr Brown, treated me kindly;

  he consigned my dead infant

  to its watery fate.

  But now I have been given

  a black child to suckle.

  I have been made a wet-nurse,

  a slave to savage women.

  They taunt me and beat me.

  They make me grub for lily-roots

  and climb trees for honey.

  They poke burning sticks at me.

  They have rubbed me all over

  with charcoal and lizard-grease

  to protect me from sunburn.

  It is my only cover.

  I am as black as they are

  and almost as naked,

  with stringy vines for a loincloth

  and feathers stuck in my hair.

  They are trying to change me

  into one of themselves.

  My name is Eliza Fraser.

  I pray God to save me.

  Their men took my husband –

  they dragged him into the forest –

  but I still have my wedding-ring

  concealed in my waistband.

  My name is Eliza Fraser.

  My home is in Stromness.

  I have left my three children

  in the care of the minister.

  I am a strong woman.

  My language is English.

  My name is Eliza Fraser

  and my age thirty-seven.

  2

  The ghosts came from the sea, the white ghosts.

  One of them was a she-ghost, a white woman.

  We took her to the camp, the white she-ghost.

  She was white all over, white like the ancestors,

  white like the bodies of dead people

  when you scorch them in the fire and strip off the skin.

  She was a ghost, but we don’t know whose.

  We asked her ‘Whose ghost are you?

  Which ancestor has come back to us?’

  She wouldn’t say. She had forgotten our language.

  She talked in a babble like the babble of birds,

  that ghost from the sea, that white she-ghost.

  She was covered with woven skins, but we stripped her;

  she had hairs on her body, but we plucked them out;

  we tried to make her look like a person.

  She was stupid, though. She wouldn’t learn.

  We talked to her and she didn’t listen.

  We told her to go out and collect food, to dig for roots.

  We told her to climb trees, to look for honey.

  She couldn’t, not even when we beat her.

  She seems to have forgotten everything,

  that ghost from the sea, that white woman.

  We send her out for food every day

  and she brings back a few bits, not enough for a child.

  We have to throw her scraps, or she would starve.

  All she is fit for is to suckle a baby,

  that ancestor woman, that white ghost.

  We have put her among the children until she learns.

  3

  I am a poor widow.

  I do not own a farthing –

  bereft in a shipwreck

  of all but my wedding-ring.

  You are a liar, Mrs Fraser.

  You own two trunks of finery

  and £400 subscribed

  by the citizens of Sydney.

  I am a poor widow.

  My fatherless children

  are alone up in Orkney

  while I beg for money.

  The Lord Mayor of Liverpool,

  the Lord Mayor of London,

  the Colonial Secretary:

  they will none of them help me.

  You are a liar, Mrs Fraser.

  You are not even Mrs Fraser.

  You have another husband now –

  you married Captain Greene in Sydney.

  I am a poor widow,

  the victim of cannibals.

  They killed my dear husband

  on the shores of New Holland.

  They skinned him and baked him;

  they cut up his body

  and gorged on his flesh

  in their villainous gluttony.

  Their hair is bright blue,

  those abominable monsters;

 
it grows in blue tufts

  on the tips of their shoulders…

  You are a liar, Mrs Fraser.

  Your sad ordeals have quite unhinged you.

  You were a decent woman once,

  prickly with virtue. What has changed you?

  Tell us the truth, the truth, the truth!

  What really happened that deranged you?

  4

  Not easy to love Mrs Fraser.

  Captain Fraser managed it, in his time –

  hobbling on her arm, clutching his ulcer,

  falling back to relieve his griping bowels;

  and hauling timber, a slave to black masters:

  ‘Eliza, wilt thou help me with this tree? –

  Because thou art now stronger than me.’

  But they speared him, and she fainted, just that once.

  Her children had to love her from a distance –

  from Orkney to the far Antipodes,

  or wherever she’d sailed off to with their father,

  cosseting him with jellies for his gut:

  ‘I have received a letter from dear Mamma.

  I am looking for her daily at Stromness.’

  Daily they had no sight of Mrs Fraser –

  who had secretly turned into Mrs Greene.

  And Captain Greene? Did he contrive to love her?

  He never saw her as her rescuers did:

  ‘Perfectly black, and crippled from her sufferings,

  a mere skeleton, legs a mass of sores.’

  He saw a widow, famous, with some money.

  He saw the chance of more. He saw, perhaps,

  a strangeness in her, gone beyond the strangeness

  of anything he’d met on the seven seas.

  5

  I am not mad. I sit in my booth

  on show for sixpence: ‘Only survivor’

  (which is a lie) ‘of the Stirling Castle

  wrecked off New Holland’ (which is the truth),

  embroidering facts. There is no need

  to exaggerate (but I do), to sit

  showing my scars to gawping London.

  I do it for money. This is not greed:

  I am not greedy. I am not mad.

  I have a husband. I am cared for.

  But I wake in the nights howling, naked,

  alone, and starving. All that I had

  I lost once – all the silken stuff

  of civilisation: clothes, possessions,

  decency, liberty, my name;

  and now I can never get enough

  to replace it. There can never be

  enough of anything in the world,

  money or goods, to keep me warm

  and fed and clothed and safe and free.

  Meeting the Comet

  BEFORE

  1

  She’ll never be able to play the piano –

  well, not properly. She’ll never be able

  to play the recorder, even, at school,

  when she goes: it has so many little holes…

  We’ll have her taught the violin.

  Lucky her left hand’s the one with four

  fingers, one for each string. A thumb

  and a fleshy fork are enough to hold a bow.

  2

  Before the calculator – the electronic one –

  there were beads to count on; there was the abacus

  to tell a tally or compute a score;

  or there were your fingers, if you had enough.

  The base was decimal: there had to be

  a total of ten digits, in two sets –

  a bunch of five, another bunch of five.

  If they didn’t match, your computations went haywire.

  3

  On the left hand, four and a thumb.

  On the right, a thumb and just two.

  Proper fingers, true, fitted out

  in the standard way; but not four.

  Baby-plump, the wrist on the left.

  On the right, the arm narrows down

  to a slender stem and a palm

  like a little tube of soft bones.

  4

  Leafy lanes and rus in urbe were the thing

  for a sheltered childhood (not that it was for long,

  but parents try): the elm trees lingering

  behind the coach factory; the tense monotonous song

  of collared doves; the acres of bare floor

  for learning to gallop on in the first size

  of Start-Rite shoes; the peacock glass in the front door;

  and the swift refocusing lurch of the new baby-sitter’s eyes.

  5

  The Duke of Edinburgh stance: how cute

  in a five-year-old! She doesn’t do it much

  when you’re behind her; then it’s hands in armpits

  or pockets. School, of course, would like to teach

  that well-adjusted children don’t need pockets

  except for their normal purposes, to hold

  hankies or bus-tickets. She’ll not quite learn

  what she’s not quite specifically taught.

  6

  Perhaps I don’t exist. Perhaps I didn’t exist till I thought that;

  then God invented me and made me

  the age I am now (nearly eight);

  perhaps I was someone else before,

  and he suddenly swapped us round, and said

  ‘You can be the girl with two fingers

  and she can be you for a change, instead.’

  7

  ‘Give us your hand – it’s a bit muddy here,

  you’ll slip.’ But he’s on her wrong side: her right’s

  wrong. She tries to circumnavigate him

  (‘Watch it!’ he says), to offer him her left –

  and slips. It comes out. ‘There!’ she says. ‘You see!’

  ‘Is that all? Fucking hell,’ he says, ‘that’s nothing;

  don’t worry about it, love. My Auntie May

  lost a whole arm in a crash. Is it hereditary?’

  8

  ‘Some tiny bud that should have split into four

  didn’t, we don’t know why’ was all they could offer.

  Research, as usual, lags. But suddenly, this:

  ‘A long-term study has found a positive link

  between birth defects and exposure to pesticides

  in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy…the baby’s

  neural crest…mothers who had been present when

  aerosol insecticides…’ Now they tell us.

  TRAVELLING

  9 So Far

  She has not got multiple sclerosis.

  She has not got motorneuron disease,

  or muscular dystrophy, or Down’s Syndrome,

  or a cleft palate, or a hole in the heart.

  Her sight and hearing seem to be sound.

  She has not been damaged by malnutrition,

  or tuberculosis, or diabetes.

  She has not got (probably not got) cancer.

  10 Passport

  Date of birth and all that stuff: straightforward;

  likewise, now that she’s stopped growing, height.

  But ah, ‘Distinguishing marks’: how can she smuggle

  so glaring a distinction out of sight?

  The Passport Office proves, in one of its human

  incarnations, capable of tact:

  a form of words emerges that fades down

  her rare statistic to a lustreless fact.

  11 Stars

  She’s seeing stars – Orion steady on her left

  like a lit-up kite (she has a window-seat),

  and her whole small frame of sky strung out

  with Christmas-tree lights. But what’s all that

  behind them? Spilt sugar? Spangled faults

  in the plane’s window? A dust of glittering points

  like the sparkle-stuff her mother wouldn’t let her

  wear on her eyes to the third-form party.

&nb
sp; 12 Halfway

  Does less mean more? She’s felt more nearly naked

  in duffel-coat and boots and scarf

  with nothing showing but a face and her bare

  fingers (except, of course, for the times

  in fur gloves – mittens – look, no hands!)

  than here on a beach in a bikini:

  flesh all over. Look at my legs, my

  back, my front. Shall I take off my top?

  13 At the Airport

  Shoulders like horses’ bums; an upper arm

  dressed in a wobbling watermelon of flesh

  and a frilly muu-muu sleeve; red puckered necks

  above the bougainvillaea and sunsets

  and straining buttons of Hawaiian shirts;

  bellies, bald heads, a wilting grey moustache

  beneath a hat proclaiming ‘One Old Poop’.

  The tour guide rounds them up: his travelling freak-show.

  14 Comet

  ‘There will be twenty telescopes in the crater

  of Mount Albert.’ White-coated figures man them,

  marshalling queues in darkness: not the Klan

  but the Lions raising funds for charity.

  $2 a look. No lights – not even torches;