by Thom Gunn
Such richness can make you drunk. Sometimes
on fogless days by the Pacific,
there is a cold hard light without break
that reveals merely what is – no more
and no less. That limiting candour,
that accuracy of the beaches,
is part of the ultimate richness.
Considering the Snail
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.
The Feel of Hands
The hands explore tentatively,
two small live entities whose shapes
I have to guess at. They touch me
all, with the light of fingertips
testing each surface of each thing
found, timid as kittens with it.
I connect them with amusing
hands I have shaken by daylight.
There is a sudden transition:
they plunge together in a full
formed single fury; they are grown
to cats, hunting without scruple;
they are expert but desperate.
I am in the dark. I wonder
when they grew up. It strikes me that
I do not know whose hands they are.
My Sad Captains
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all
the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.
True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.
UNCOLLECTED
(1960s)
From an Asian Tent
Alexander thinks of his father
Father, I scarcely could believe you dead.
The pelts, fur trophies, and hacked skulls that you
Drunkenly hooked up while the bone still bled
I pulled down, and I hung the place instead
With emblems of an airy Hellene blue.
You held me once before the army’s eyes;
During their endless shout, I tired and slid
Down past your forearms to the cold surprise
Your plated shoulder made between my thighs.
This happened. Or perhaps I wish it did.
Remembering that you never reached the East,
I have made it mine to the obscurest temple;
Yet each year look more like the man I least
Choose to resemble, bully, drunk, and beast.
Are you a warning, Father, or an example?
from
POSITIVES
(1965)
The Old Woman
Something approaches, about
which she has heard a good deal.
Her deaf ears have caught it, like
a silence in the wainscot
by her head. Her flesh has felt
a chill in her feet, a draught
in her groin. She has watched it
like moonlight on the frayed wood
stealing toward her
floorboard by floorboard. Will it hurt?
Let it come, it is
the terror of full repose,
and so no terror.
from
TOUCH
(1967)
The Goddess
When eyeless fish meet her on
her way upward, they gently
turn together in the dark
brooks. But naked and searching
as a wind, she will allow
no hindrance, none, and bursts up
through potholes and narrow flues
seeking an outlet. Unslowed
by fire, rock, water or clay,
she after a time reaches
the soft abundant soil, which
still does not dissipate her
force – for look! sinewy thyme
reeking in the sunlight; rats
breeding, breeding, in their nests;
and the soldier by a park
bench with his greatcoat collar
up, waiting all evening for
a woman, any woman
her dress tight across her ass
as bark in moonlight. Goddess,
Proserpina: it is we,
vulnerable, quivering,
who stay you to abundance.
Touch
You are already
asleep. I lower
myself in next to
you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits, the patina of
self, the black frost
of outsideness, so that even
unclothed it is
a resilient chilly
hardness, a superficially
malleable, dead
rubbery texture.
You are a mound
of bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.
Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.
You turn and
hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being to
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.
What I, now loosened,
sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you, yet
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
Misanthropos
to Tony Tanner and Don Doody
The Last Man
I
He avoids the momentous rhythm
of the sea, one hill suffices him
who has the entire world to choose from.
He melts through the brown and green silence
inspecting his traps, is lost in dense
thicket, or appears among great stones.
He builds no watch tower. He lives like
the birds, self-contained they hop and peck;
he could conceal himself for a week;
and he learns like them to keep movement
on the undipped wing of the present.
; But sometimes when he wakes, with the print
of stone in his side, a relentless
memory of monstrous battle is
keener than counsel of the senses.
He opens, then, a disused channel
to the onset of hatred, until
the final man walks the final hill
without thought or feeling, as before.
If he preserves himself in nature,
it is as a lived caricature
of the race he happens to survive.
He is clothed in dirt. He lacks motive.
He is wholly representative.
II
At last my shout is answered! Are you near,
Man whom I cannot see but can hear?
Here.
The canyon hides you well, which well defended.
Sir, tell me, is the long war ended?
Ended.
I passed no human on my trip, a slow one.
Is it your luck, down there, to know one?
No one.
What have I left, who stood among mankind,
When the firm base is undermined?
A mind.
Yet, with a vacant landscape as its mirror,
What can it choose, to ease the terror?
Error
Is there no feeling, then, that I can trust,
In spite of what we have discussed?
Disgust.
III
Earlier, travelling on the roads where grass
Softened the gutters for the marsh bird’s nest,
He walked barefoot already, and already
His uniform was peeling from his back.
And coming to this hill across the plain,
He sloughed it bit by bit. Now that, alone,
He cannot seek himself as messenger,
Or bear dispatches between elm and oak,
It is a clumsy frock he starts to fashion
From skins of mole and rabbit; he considers
That one who wears it is without a role.
But the curled darling who survives the war
Has merely lost the admirers of those curls
That always lavished most warmth on his neck;
Though no one sees him, though it is the wind
Utters ambiguous orders from the plain,
Though nodding foxgloves are his only girls,
His poverty is a sort of uniform.
With a bone needle he pursues himself,
Stitching the patchwork spread across his lap,
A courier after identity, and sees
A pattern grow among the disarray.
IV
The moon appears, distinct where all is dim,
And steady in the orbit it must go.
He lies in shadow, then light reaches him.
While, there! the Milky Way follows below,
A luminous field that swings across the sky.
The ancient rhythm almost comforts, slow
Bright mild recurrence that he might move by,
Obedient in the act of breath, and lit,
Mere life, by matter travelling sure and high.
But this is envy for the inanimate,
The youth of things. On the dead globe he sees
Markings as one might on the earth from it,
Where relics of emergent matter freeze.
Down here, two more births followed on the first:
Life, consciousness, like linked catastrophes.
Their sequence in him cannot be reversed
Except in death, thus, when the features set.
Meanwhile, he must live, as he looks, immersed
In consciousness that plots its own end yet;
And since the plotter through success would lose
Knowledge of it, he must without regret
Accept the inheritance he did not choose,
As he accepted drafting for that war
That was not of his choosing. He must use
The heaviness, the flaw, he always bore.
The imperfect moon swims forward on its course;
Yet, bathed by shade now, he imagines more –
The clearest light in the whole universe.
V
Green overtaking green, it’s
endless; squat grasses creep up,
briars cross, heavily weighed
branches overhang, thickets
crowd in on the brown earth gap
in green which is the path made
by his repeated tread, which,
enacting the wish to move,
is defined by avoidance
of loose ground, of rock and ditch,
of thorn-brimmed hollows, and of
poisoned beds. The ground hardens.
Bare within limits. The trick
is to stay free within them.
The path branches, branches still,
returning to itself, like
a discovering system,
or process made visible.
It rains. He climbs up the hill.
Drops are isolate on leaves,
big and clear. It is cool, and
he breathes the barbarous smell
of the wet earth. Nothing moves
at the edges of the mind.
Memoirs of the World
VI
It has turned cold. I have been gathering wood,
Numb-fingered, hardly feeling what I touched,
Turning crisp leaves to pick up where I could
The damp sticks from beneath them. I have crouched
Piling them up to dry, all afternoon,
And have heard all afternoon, over and over,
Two falling notes – a sweet disconsolate tune,
As if the bird called, from its twiggy cover,
Nót now, nót now, nót now.
I dislodge sticks for kindling, one by one,
From brambles. Struck by shade, I stand and see,
Half blinding me, the cold red setting sun
Through the meshed branches of a leafless tree.
It calls old sunsets to my mind, one most
Which coloured, similarly, the white-grey, blackened
Iron and slabbed concrete of a sentry post
With its cold orange. Let me live, one second,
Nót now, nót now, nót now.
Most poignant and most weakening, that recall.
Although I lived from day to day, too, there.
Yet the comparison makes me sensible
Of the diminishing warmth and light, which were,
Or seem to have been, diminished less than now.
The bird stops. Hardening in the single present,
I know, hearing wind rattle in a bough,
I have always harked thus after an incessant
Nót now, nót now, nót now.
VII
Who was it in dark glasses?
Nobody in the street could
see if my eyes were open.
I took them off for movies
and sleep. I waited, I stood
an armed angel among men.
Between the dart of colours
I wore a darkening and
perceived an exact structure,
a chart of the world. The coarse
menace of line was deepened,
and light was slightly impure.
Yet as I lingered there was,
I noticed, continual
and faint, an indecision,
a hunger in the senses.
I would devour the thin wail
of foghorns, or abandon
my whole self time after time
to the chipped glossy surface
of some doorjamb, for instance,
cramming my nail with its grime,
stroking humps where colourless
paint had filled faults to substance.
I was presence without full
being: from the streetcorner,
in the mere fact of movement,
w
as I entering the role
of spy or spied on, master
or the world’s abject servant?
VIII
Dryads, reposing in the bark’s hard silence,
Circled about the edges of my fire,
Exact in being, absolute in balance,
Instruct me how to find here my desire:
To separate the matter from its burning,
Where, in the flux that your composures lack,
Each into other constantly is turning.
In the glowing fall of ash – rose, grey, and black,
I search for meaning, studying to remember
What the world was, and meant. Therefore I try
To reconstruct it in a dying ember,
And wonder, does fire make it live or die?
And evil everywhere or nowhere, stealing
Out of my reach, on air, shows like a spark.
I think I grasp it. The momentary feeling
Is merely pain, evil’s external mark.
The neighbouring cinders redden now together,
Like earlier worlds to search, where I am shown
Only myself, although I seek another,
A man who burnt from sympathy alone.
IX
A serving man. Curled my hair,
wore gloves in my cap. I served
all degrees and both sexes.
But I gave readily from
the largess of high spirits,
a sturdy body and strong
fingers. Nor was I servile.
No passer-by could resist
the fragrant impulse nodding
upon my smile. I laboured
to become a god of charm,
an untirable giver.