by Thom Gunn
Needing me, needing me, ‘Quick!’
they would call: I came gladly.
Even as I served them sweets
I served myself a trencher
of human flesh in some dark
sour pantry, and munched from it.
My diet, now, is berries,
water, and the gristle of
rodents. I brought myself here,
widening the solitude
till it was absolute. But
at times I am ravenous.
X
All that snow pains my eyes, but I stare
on, stare on, lying in my shelter,
feverish, out at the emptiness.
A negative of matter, it is
a dead white surface at random crossed
by thin twigs and bird tracks on the crust
like fragments of black netting: hard, cold,
windswept. But now my mind loses hold
and, servant to an unhinged body,
becoming of it, sinks rapidly
beneath the stitched furs I’m swaddled in,
beneath the stink of my trembling skin,
till it enters the heart of fever,
as its captive, unable to stir.
I watch the cells swimming in concert
like nebulae, calm, without effort,
great clear globes, pink and white. – But look at
the intruder with blurred outline that
glides in among the shoals, colourless,
with tendrils like an anemone’s
drifting all around it like long fur,
gently, unintelligently. Where
it touches it holds, in an act of
enfolding, possessing, merging love.
There is coupling where no such should be.
Surely it is a devil, surely
it is life’s parody I see, which
enthrals a universe with its rich
heavy passion, leaving behind it
gorgeous mutations only, then night.
It ends. I open my eyes to snow.
I can sleep now; as I drowse I know
I must keep to the world’s bare surface,
I must perceive, and perceive what is:
for though the hold of perception must
harden but diminish, like the frost,
yet still there may be something retained
against the inevitable end.
XI
Epitaph for Anton Schmidt
The Schmidts obeyed, and marched on Poland.
And there an Anton Schmidt, Feldwebel,
Performed uncommon things, not safe,
Nor glamorous, nor profitable.
Was the expression on his face
‘Reposeful and humane good nature’?
Or did he look like any Schmidt,
Of slow and undisclosing feature?
I know he had unusual eyes,
Whose power no orders might determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.
For five months, till his execution,
Aware that action has its dangers,
He helped the Jews to get away
– Another race at that, and strangers.
He never did mistake for bondage
The military job, the chances,
The limits; he did not submit
To the blackmail of his circumstances.
I see him in the Polish snow,
His muddy wrappings small protection,
Breathing the cold air of his freedom
And treading a distinct direction.
Elegy on the Dust
XII
The upper slopes are busy with the cricket;
But downhill, hidden in the thicket,
Birds alternate with sudden piercing calls
The rustling from small animals
Retreating, venturing, as they hunt and breed
Interdependent in that shade.
Beneath it, glare and silence cow the brain
Where, troughed between the hill and plain,
The expanse of dust waits: acres calm and deep,
Swathes folded on themselves in sleep
Or waves that, as if frozen in mid-roll,
Hang in ridged rows. They cannot fall,
Yet imperceptibly they shift, at flood,
In quiet encroachment on the wood –
First touching stalk and leaf with silvery cast,
They block the pores to death at last
And drift in silky banks around the trunk,
Where dock and fern are fathoms sunk.
Yet farther from the hill the bowl of dust
Is open to the casual gust
That dives upon its silence, teasing it
Into a spasm of wild grit.
Here it lies unprotected from the plain,
And vexed with constant loss and gain,
It seems, of the world’s refuse and debris,
Turns to a vaguely heaving sea,
Where its own eddies, spouts, and calms appear.
But seas contain a graveyard: here
The graveyard is the sea, material things
– From stone to claw, scale, pelt, and wings –
Are all reduced to one form and one size.
And here the human race, too, lies.
An imperfection endlessly refined
By the imperfection of the mind.
They have all come who sought distinction hard
To this universal knacker’s yard,
Blood dried, flesh shrivelled, and bone decimated:
Motion of life is thus repeated,
A process ultimately without pain
As they are broken down again.
The remnants of their guilt mix as they must
And average out in grains of dust
Too light to act, too small to harm, too fine
To simper or betray or whine.
Each colourless hard grain is now distinct,
In no way to its neighbour linked,
Yet from wind’s unpremeditated labours
It drifts in concord with its neighbours,
Perfect community in its behaviour.
It yields to what it sought, a saviour:
Scattered and gathered, irregularly blown,
Now sheltered by a ridge or stone,
Now lifted on strong upper winds, and hurled
In endless hurry round the world.
The First Man
XIII
The present is a secure place to inhabit,
The past being fallen from the mind, the future
A repetition, only, with variations:
The same mouse on its haunches, nibbling, absorbed,
Another piece of root between the forefeet
Slender as wishbones; the woodlice, silvery balls;
The leaves still falling in vestiges of light.
Is he a man? If man is cogitation,
This is at most a rudimentary man,
An unreflecting organ of perception;
Slow as a bull, in moving; yet, in taking,
Quick as an adder. He does not dream at night.
Echo is in the past, the snow long past,
The year has recovered and put forth many times.
He is bent, looks smaller, and is furred, it seems.
Molelike he crouches over mounds of dirt,
Sifting. His eyes have sunk behind huge brows.
His nostrils twitch, distinguishing one by one
The smells of the unseen that blend to make
The black smell of the earth, smell of the Mother,
Smell of her food: pale tender smell of worms,
Tough sweet smell of her roots. He is a nose.
He picks through the turned earth, and eats. A mouth.
If he is man, he is the first man lurking
In a thicket of time. The mesh of green grows tighter.
There is yew, and
oak picked out with mistletoe.
Watch, he is darkening in the heavy shade
Of trunks that thicken in the ivy’s grip.
XIV
‘What is it? What?’
Mouth struggles with the words that mind forgot.
While from the high brown swell
He watches it, the smudge, he sees it grow
As it crawls closer, crawls unturnable
And unforeseen upon the plain below.
‘That must be men.’
Knowledge invades him, yet he shrinks again
And sickens to live still
Upon the green slopes of his isolation,
The ‘final man upon a final hill,’
As if he did a sort of expiation.
And now he dreams
Of a shadowed pool nearby fed by two streams:
If he washed there, he might,
Skin tautened from the chill, emerge above,
Inhuman as a star, as cold, as white,
Freed from all dust. And yet he does not move.
Could he assert
To men who climb up in their journey’s dirt
That clean was separate?
The dirt would dry back, hardening in the heat:
Perpetual that unease, that world of grit
Breathed in, and gathered on the hands and feet.
He is unaware
Of the change already taking place as there,
In the cold clear early light
He, lingering on the scorched grass wet with dew,
Still hunched but now a little more upright,
In picturing man almost becomes man too.
XV
Hidden behind a rock, he watches, grown
As stony as a lizard poised on stone.
Below, the indeterminate shape flows steady
From plain to wood, from wood to slope. Already
Sharp outlines break, in movement, from the edge.
Then in approach upon the final ridge
It is slowly lost to sight, but he can hear
The shingle move with feet. Then they appear,
Being forty men and women, twos and threes,
Over the rim. From where he is he sees
One of the last men stumble, separate,
Up to the rock, this rock, and lean on it.
You can hear him gulp for wind, he is so close,
You can hear his hand rasp on the shrivelled moss
Blotching the rock: by peering you can see
What a ribbed bony creature it must be,
Sweat streaking dirt at collarbones and spine,
Sores round the mouth disfiguring the line.
And on the thin chest two long parallel
Clear curving scratches are discernible.
Recent, for only now the drops within
Steal through the white torn edges of the skin
To mix with dirt. Round here, such cuts are common.
It is not hard to visualize the human,
Tired, walking upward on a wooded slant;
Keeping his eyes upon the ground in front,
He made his way round some dropped rotten limb,
And a hanging briar unnoticed swung at him.
And only later does it start to sting.
That wood has its own way of countering.
The watcher is disturbed, not knowing why.
He has with obstinate equanimity,
Unmoving and unmoved, watched all the rest,
But seeing the trivial scratches on the chest,
He frowns. And he performs an action next
So unconsidered that he is perplexed,
Even in performing it, by what it means –
He walks around to where the creature leans.
The creature sees him, jumps back, staggers, calls,
Then, losing balance on the pebbles, falls.
Now that he has moved toward, through, and beyond
The impulse he does not yet understand,
He must continue where he has begun,
Finding, as when a cloud slips from the sun,
He has entered, without stirring, on a field
The same and yet more green and more detailed,
Each act of growth discovered by his gaze;
Yet if the place is changed by what surveys,
He is surveyed and he himself is changed,
Bombarded by perceptions, rearranged –
Rays on the skin investing with a shape,
A clarity he cannot well escape.
He stops, bewildered by his force, and then
Lifts up the other to his feet again.
XVI
Others approach, and I grip
his arm. For it seems to me
they file past my mind, my mind
perched on this bare rock, watching.
They turn and look at me full,
and as they pass they name me.
What is the name Adam speaks
after the schedule of beasts?
Though I grip his arm, the man,
the scratched man, seems among them,
and as he pauses the old
bitter dizziness hits me:
I almost fall. The stale stench!
the hangdog eyes, the pursed mouth!
no hero or saint, that one.
It is a bare world, and lacks
history; I am neither
his lord nor his servant.
By an act of memory,
I make the recognition:
I stretch out the word to him
from which conversations start,
naming him, also, by name.
XVII
Others approach. Well, this one may show trust
Around whose arm his fingers fit.
The touched arm feels of dust, mixing with dust
On the hand that touches it.
And yet a path is dust, or it is none,
– Merely unstable mud, or weeds,
Or a stream that quietly slips on and on
Through the undergrowth it feeds.
His own flesh, which he hardly feels, feels dust
Raised by the war both partly caused
And partly fought, and yet survived. You must,
If you can, pause; and, paused,
Turn out toward others, meeting their look at full,
Until you have completely stared
On all there is to see. Immeasurable,
The dust yet to be shared.
Pierce Street
Nobody home. Long threads of sunlight slant
Past curtains, blind, and slat, through the warm room.
The beams are dazzling, but, random and scant,
Pierce where they end
small areas of the gloom
On curve of chairleg or a green stalk’s bend.
I start exploring. Beds and canvases
Are shapes in each room off the corridor,
Their colours muted, square thick presences
Rising between
the ceiling and the floor,
A furniture inferred much more than seen.
Here in the seventh room my search is done.
A bluefly circles, irregular and faint.
And round the wall above me friezes run:
Fixed figures drawn
in charcoal or in paint.
Out of night now the flesh-tint starts to dawn.
Some stand there as if muffled from the cold,
Some naked in it, the wind around a roof.
But armed, their holsters as if tipped with gold.
And twice life-size –
in line, in groups, aloof,
They all stare down with large abstracted eyes.
A silent garrison, and always there,
They are the soldiers of the imagination
Produced by it to guard it everywhere.
Bodied within
the limits of their station
As, also, I am bodied in m
y skin,
They vigilantly preserve as they prevent
And are the thing they guard, having some time stood
Where the painter reached to make them permanent.
The f loorboards creak.
The house smells of its wood.
Those who are transitory can move and speak.
from
MOLY
(1971)
Rites of Passage
Something is taking place.
Horns bud bright in my hair.
My feet are turning hoof.
And Father, see my face
– Skin that was damp and fair
Is barklike and, feel, rough.
See Greytop how I shine.
I rear, break loose, I neigh
Snuffing the air, and harden
Toward a completion, mine.
And next I make my way
Adventuring through your garden.
My play is earnest now.
I canter to and fro.
My blood, it is like light.
Behind an almond bough,
Horns gaudy with its snow,
I wait live, out of sight.
All planned before my birth
For you, Old Man, no other,
Whom your groin’s trembling warns.
I stamp upon the earth
A message to my mother.
And then I lower my horns.
Moly
Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.
I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?
Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,
Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,
Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,
Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat: