Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

  for what he can get, quarters to

  buy sweet things, one after another,

  he goes from store to store, from

  candy store to ice cream store to

  bakery to produce market, unending

  quest for the palate’s pleasure. Then

  out to panhandle again,

  more quarters, more sweet things.

  My errands are toothpaste,

  vitamin pills and a book of stamps.

  No self-indulgence there.

  But who’s this coming up? It’s

  John, no Chuck, how

  could his name have slipped my mind.

  Chuck gives a one-sided smile, he stands

  as if fresh from a laundromat,

  a scrubbed cowboy, Tom Sawyer

  grown up, yet stylish, perhaps

  even careful, his dark hair

  slicked back in the latest manner.

  When he shakes my hand I feel

  a dry finger playfully bending inward

  and touching my palm in secret.

  ‘It’s a long time

  since we got together,’ says John.

  Chuck, that is. The warm teasing

  tickle in the cave of our handshake

  took my mind off toothpaste,

  snatched it off, indeed.

  How handsome he is in

  his lust and energy, in his

  fine display of impulse.

  Boldly ‘How about now?’ I say

  knowing the answer. My boy

  I could eat you whole. In the long pause

  I gaze at him up and down and

  from his blue sneakers back to the redawning

  one-sided smile. We know our charm.

  We know delay makes pleasure great.

  In our eyes, on our tongues,

  we savour the approaching delight

  of things we know yet are fresh always.

  Sweet things. Sweet things.

  June

  In these two separate rooms we sit,

  I at my work, you at yours.

  I am at once buried in it

  And sensible of all outdoors.

  The month is cool, as if on guard,

  High fog holds back the sky for days,

  But in their sullen patch of yard

  The Oriental Poppies blaze.

  Separate in the same weather

  The parcelled buds crack pink and red,

  And rise from different plants together

  To shed their bud-sheaths on the bed,

  And stretch their crumpled petals free,

  That nurse the box of hardening seed,

  In the same hour, as if to agree

  On what could not have been agreed.

  San Francisco Streets

  I’ve had my eye on you

  For some time now.

  You’re getting by it seems,

  Not quite sure how.

  But as you go along

  You’re finding out

  What different city streets

  Are all about.

  Peach country was your home.

  When you went picking

  You ended every day

  With peach fuzz sticking

  All over face and arms,

  Intimate, gross,

  Itching like family,

  And far too close.

  But when you came to town

  And when you first

  Hung out on Market Street

  That was the worst:

  Tough little group of boys

  Outside Flagg’s Shoes.

  You learned to keep your cash.

  You got tattoos.

  Then by degrees you rose

  Like country cream –

  Hustler to towel boy,

  Bath house and steam;

  Tried being kept a while –

  But felt confined,

  One brass bed driving you

  Out of your mind.

  Later on Castro Street

  You got new work

  Selling chic jewelry.

  And as sales clerk

  You have at last attained

  To middle class.

  (No one on Castro Street

  Peddles his ass.)

  You gaze out from the store.

  Watching you watch

  All the men strolling by

  I think I catch

  Half-veiled uncertainty

  In your expression.

  Good looks and great physiques

  Pass in procession.

  You’ve risen up this high –

  How, you’re not sure.

  Better remember what

  Makes you secure.

  Fuzz is still on the peach,

  Peach on the stem.

  Your looks looked after you.

  Look after them.

  Transients and Residents

  a sequence interrupted

  ‘Albert Hotel,

  Transients and Residents’

  – NEW YORK, 1970

  ‘Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy,

  And shuts up all the Passages of Joy.’

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES’

  Falstaff

  I always hope to find you circling here

  Round the bar’s table, playing your old game,

  In one hand pool cue, in the other beer.

  Vast in your foul burnoose, you’d be the same:

  Bullying your little entourage of boys

  – Goodlooking but untrustworthy – and later

  Ordering them home where, turning up the noise,

  You’d party through the night. Neighbourhood satyr,

  Old friend, for years you bullied all of us

  And did so, you were sure, for our own good.

  You took no notice if we made a fuss

  Or didn’t enjoy ourselves the way we should.

  I think of one place you were living at

  And all the parties that you used to throw

  (That must be when you wore a feathered hat,

  Several burnooses, so to speak, ago);

  You cooked each evening for some twenty heads,

  Not just for streetboys then, for everyone

  Who came in want of food or drugs or beds.

  The bonus was your boisterous sense of fun.

  And though as years have passed your bullying love

  Became more desperate (sometimes indeed

  Stripped by a ruthlessness you weren’t above

  It showed itself more nakedly as need);

  And though the parties that you gave took place

  In other people’s houses now, until

  They kicked you out for taking all the space;

  And though the drugs themselves got questionable –

  Too many evenings in the bar have passed

  Full of mere chatter and the pumping sound

  Of disco on the juke box since you last

  Roared down it for next player or next round.

  If you are sick – that’s what they say in here

  Almost as if by way of an excuse –

  The cancer must have rendered you, my dear.

  Damnably thin beneath the foul burnoose.

  Crystal

  He arrives, and makes deliveries, after 3:00,

  Then strolls to a ramp that leads up from the dance,

  And sits apart, quiet, hands clasped round a knee,

  Smelling the fresh-sawed planks, no doubt. Not tense –

  Fixed, merely. While he watches us, his face

  Is almost readable, his recessed shape

  Gleams like a friendly visitor’s from space.

  As in a sense it is, now. To escape

  The sheer impurity of the other lives,

  He has always been extreme, he puts his soul

  Into each role in turn, where he survives

  Till it is incarnation more than role.

  Now it is Dealer. 5
2, tall, scarred,

  His looks get nobler every year, I find,

  Almost heroic.

  I once saw in the yard

  A half-grown foxglove that he brings to mind

  Here, so magnificently self-enwrapped.

  Its outer leaves were toothed and all alike.

  With a rough symmetry they overlapped

  Circling around the budded central spike,

  Still green. Dense with its destiny, it waited

  Till it might fling itself up into flower.

  Now he sits similarly concentrated,

  And edged, and similarly charged with power,

  Certain of that potential, which his mood

  Fairly feeds on, but which is still contained.

  The foxglove flowers in its damp solitude

  Before its energy fades, and in the end

  The chemical in the man will fade as well.

  Meanwhile he watches how the dancing feet

  Move to the rhythms of the fresh wood-smell;

  Inside the crowded night he feels complete.

  Crosswords

  Your cup of instant coffee by the bed

  Cold as the Sixties … and you chat with me.

  For days your excellent strict mind has fed

  Only on crossword puzzles and TV.

  Though the least self-indulgent man I know

  You lie propped up here like an invalid

  Pursuing your recuperation, slow,

  Relentless, from the world you used to need.

  You have seen reason to remove your ground

  Far from the great circle where you toiled,

  Where they still call their wares and mill around

  Body to body, unpausing and unspoiled.

  You smell of last week. You do not move much.

  You lay your things beside you on the bed

  In a precarious pile one sudden touch

  Would bring down on you: letters read and reread,

  Pens, opera programmes, cigarettes and books.

  I think you disturb nothing but the mind.

  There: I catch one of those familiar looks

  Of thinking through. You reach, you almost find.

  Beneath a half-frown your eyes concentrate,

  Focused on what you saw or dreamt you saw,

  Alight with their attentiveness, and wait.

  Yes, you are active still, you can’t withdraw.

  Now we take up again the much-discussed

  The never-settled topics, (a) change, (b)

  Limits of judgment, and of course (c) trust.

  We talk, explore, agree and disagree.

  … I think that you just put me in the wrong.

  You want to win, old jesuit. So do I.

  You never liked it easy for too long.

  I once found that this bed on which you lie

  Is just a blanket-covered length of board.

  For you, hardness authenticates, and when

  Things get too easy, well you make them hard.

  … We compromise. Then off we go again,

  On our renewed cross-country walking tour,

  Off with a swinging stride uphill. Stop, though,

  Before there’s time to disagree once more.

  I want to tell you what you no doubt know:

  How glad I am to be back at your school

  Where it’s through contradictions that I learn.

  Obsessive and detached, ardent and cool,

  You make me think of rock thrown free to turn

  At the globe’s side, both with and not with us,

  Keeping yourself in a companionable

  Chilled orbit by the simultaneous

  Repulsion and attraction to it all.

  Interruption

  Though ready in my chair I do not write.

  The desk lamp crook’d above me where I lean

  Describes a circle round me with its light

  – Singling me out; the room falls back unseen.

  So, my own island. I can hear the rain

  Coming on stealthily, and the rustle grows

  Into a thin taptapping on the pane

  I stare against, where my reflection glows.

  Beyond by day shows that damp square of earth

  On which I act out my experiments

  – Sowing a seed and watching for the birth:

  A tiny pair of leaves, pale rudiments

  That might in time grow stronger to assume

  A species’ characteristics, till I see

  Each fresh division soaring into bloom,

  Beauty untouched by personality.

  My mind shifts inward from such images.

  What am I after – and what makes me think

  The group of poems I have entered is

  Interconnected by a closer link

  Than any snapshot album’s?

  I can try

  At least to get my snapshots accurate.

  (The thought that I take others’ pictures, I,

  Far too conceited to find adequate

  Pictures they take of me!) Starting outside,

  You save yourself some time while working in:

  Thus by the seen the unseen is implied.

  I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men.

  You may from this conclude I like the things

  That help me if not lose then leave behind,

  What else, the self.

  I trust the seedling wings,

  Yet taking off on them I leave to find.

  I find what? In the letters that I send

  I imitate unconsciously the style

  Of the recipients: mimicking each friend,

  I answer expectations, and meanwhile

  Can analyse, or drawl a page of wit,

  And range, depending on the friend addressed,

  From literary to barely literate.

  I manage my mere voice on postcards best.

  My garden is the plants that I have got

  By luck, skill, purchase, robbery, or gift.

  From foxglove, lily, pink, and bergamot

  I raise leafed unity, a blossoming drift

  Where I once found weed waiting out a drought.

  But this side of the glass, dry as at noon,

  I see the features that my lamp picks out –

  Colourless, unjoined, like a damaged moon.

  Talbot Road

  (where I lived in London 1964–5)

  in memory of Tony White

  1

  Between the pastel boutiques

  of Notting Hill and the less defined

  windier reaches of the Harrow Road,

  all blackened brick, was the street

  built for burghers, another Belgravia,

  but eventually fallen

  to labourers (‘No Coloured or Irish

  Need Apply’) and then like the veins

  of the true-born Englishman

  filling with a promiscuous mix:

  Pole, Italian, Irish, Jamaican,

  rich jostling flow. A Yugoslav restaurant

  framed photographs of exiled princes,

  but the children chattered with a London accent.

  I lived on Talbot Road

  for a year. The excellent room

  where I slept, ate, read, and wrote,

  had a high ceiling, on the borders

  stucco roses were painted blue.

  You could step through the window

  to a heavy balcony and even

  (unless the drain was blocked)

  sup there on hot evenings.

  That’s what I call complete access –

  to air, to street, to friendship:

  for, from it, I could see, blocks away,

  the window where Tony, my old friend,

  toiled at translation. I too tried

  to render obscure passages into clear English,

  as I try now.

  2

  Glamorous and difficult friend,

  he
lper and ally. As students

  enwrapt by our own romanticism,

  innocent poet and actor we had posed

  we had played out parts to each other

  I have sometimes thought

  like studs in a whorehouse.

  – But he had to deal

  with the best looks of his year.

  If ‘the rich are different from us’,

  so are the handsome. What

  did he really want? Ah that question …

  Two romances going on in London,

  one in Northampton, one in Ireland,

  probably others. Friends and lovers

  all had their own versions of him.

  Fantastical duke of dark corners,

  he never needed to lie:

  you had learned not to ask questions.

  The fire of his good looks.

  But almost concealed by the fringe of fire,

  behind the mighty giving of self,

  at the centre of the jollity, there was

  something withheld, slow, something –

  what? what? A damp smoulder of discontent.

  He would speculate about ‘human relations’

  which we were supposed to view

  – vide Forster, passim, etc. –

  as an end, a good in themselves.

  He did not find them so.

  Finally it came to this,

  the poses had come undone so far:

  he loved you more for your faults

  than for anything you could give him.

  When once in a pub I lost my temper,

  I shouldered my way back from the urinal

  and snapped, ‘I was too angry to piss.’

  The next day he exclaimed with delight,

  ‘Do you know that was the first time

  you have ever been angry with me?’

  As some people wait for a sign of love,

  he had waited how many years

  for a sign of anger,

  for a sign of other than love.

  3

  A London returned to after twelve years.

  On a long passage between two streets

  I met my past self lingering there

  or so he seemed

  a youth of about nineteen glaring at me

  from a turn of desire. He held his look