by Thom Gunn
as if shielding it from wind.
Our eyes parleyed, then we touched
in the conversation of bodies.
Standing together on asphalt openly,
we gradually loosened into a shared laughter.
This was the year, the year of reconciliation
to whatever it was I had come from,
the prickly heat of adolescent emotion,
premature staleness and self-contempt.
In my hilarity, in my luck,
I forgave myself for having had a youth.
I started to heap up pardons
even in anticipation. On Hampstead Heath
I knew every sudden path from childhood,
the crooks of every climbable tree.
And now I engaged these at night,
and where I had played hide and seek
with neighbour children, played as an adult
with troops of men whose rounds intersected
at the Orgy Tree or in the wood
of birch trunks gleaming like mute watchers
or in tents of branch and bush
surrounded by the familiar smell
of young leaf – salty, explosive.
In a Forest of Arden, in a summer night’s dream
I forgave everybody his teens.
4
But I came back, after the last bus,
from Hampstead, Wimbledon, the pubs,
the railway arches of the East End,
I came back to Talbot Road,
to the brick, the cement Arthurian faces,
the area railings by coal holes,
the fat pillars of the entrances.
My balcony filled up with wet snow.
When it dried out Tony and I
would lunch there in the sunshine
on veal-and-ham pie, beer, and salad.
I told him about my adventures.
He wondered aloud if he would be happier
if he were queer like me.
How could he want, I wondered,
to be anything but himself?
Then he would have to be off,
off with his jaunty walk,
where, I didn’t ask or guess.
At the end of my year, before I left,
he held a great party for me
on a canal boat. The party slipped
through the watery network of London,
grid that had always been glimpsed
out of the corner of the eye
behind fences or from the tops of buses.
Now here we were, buoyant on it,
picnicking, gazing in mid-mouthful
at the backs of buildings, at smoke-black walls
coral in the light of the long evening,
at what we had suspected all along
when we crossed the bridges we now passed under,
gliding through the open secret.
5
That was fifteen years ago.
Tony is dead, the block where I lived
has been torn down. The mind
is an impermanent place, isn’t it,
but it looks to permanence.
The street has opened and opened up
into no character at all. Last night
I dreamt of it as it might have been,
the pavement by the church railings
was wet with spring rain,
it was night, the streetlamps’ light
rendered it into an exquisite etching.
Sentimental postcard of a dream,
of a moment between race-riots!
But I do clearly remember my last week,
when every detail brightened with meaning.
A boy was staying with (I would think)
his grandmother in the house opposite.
He was in his teens, from the country perhaps.
Every evening of that week
he sat in his white shirt at the window
– a Gothic arch of reduced proportion –
leaning on his arms, gazing down
as if intently making out characters
from a live language he was still learning,
not a smile cracking his pink cheeks.
Gazing down
at the human traffic, of all nations,
the just and the unjust, who
were they, where were they going,
that fine public flow at the edge of which
he waited, poised, detached in wonder
and in no hurry
before he got ready one day
to climb down into its live current.
Night Taxi
for Rod Taylor
wherever he is
Open city
uncluttered as a map.
I drive through empty streets
scoured by the winds
of midnight. My shift
is only beginning and I am fresh
and excitable, master of the taxi.
I relish my alert reflexes
where all else
is in hiding. I have
by default it seems
conquered me a city.
My first address: I
press the doorbell, I lean back
against the hood, my headlights
scalding a garage door, my engine
drumming in the driveway,
the only sound on the block.
There the fare finds me
like a date, jaunty,
shoes shined, I am
proud of myself, on my toes,
obliging but not subservient.
I take short cuts, picking up
speed, from time to time
I switch on the dispatcher’s
litany of addresses,
China Basin to Twin Peaks,
Harrison Street to the Ocean.
I am thinking tonight
my fares are like affairs
– no, more like tricks to turn:
quick, lively, ending up
with a cash payment.
I do not anticipate a holdup.
I can make friendly small talk.
I do not go on about Niggers,
women drivers or the Chinese.
It’s all on my terms but
I let them think it’s on theirs.
Do I pass through the city
or does it pass through me?
I know I have to be loose,
like my light embrace of the wheel,
loose but in control
– though hour by hour I tighten
minutely in the routine,
smoking my palate to ash,
till the last hour of all
will be drudgery, nothing else.
I zip down Masonic Avenue,
the taxi sings beneath the streetlights
a song to the bare city, it is
my instrument, I woo with it,
bridegroom and conqueror.
I jump out to open the door,
fixing the cap on my head
to, you know, firm up my role,
and on my knuckle
feel a sprinkle of wet.
Glancing upward I see
high above the lamppost
but touched by its farthest light
a curtain of rain already blowing
against black eucalyptus tops.
from
THE MAN WITH NIGHT SWEATS
(1992)
The Hug
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who’d showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.
I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex
, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
The Differences
Reciting Adrienne Rich on Cole and Haight,
Your blond hair bouncing like a corner boy’s,
You walked with sturdy almost swaggering gait,
The short man’s, looking upward with such poise,
Such bold yet friendly curiosity
I was convinced that clear defiant blue
Would have abashed a storm-trooper. To me
Conscience and courage stood fleshed out in you.
So when you gnawed my armpits, I gnawed yours
And learned to associate you with that smell
As if your exuberance sprang from your pores.
I tried to lose my self in you as well.
To lose my self … I did the opposite,
I turned into the boy with iron teeth
Who planned to eat the whole world bit by bit,
My love not flesh but in the mind beneath.
Love takes its shape within that part of me
(A poet says) where memories reside.
And just as light marks out the boundary
Of some glass outline men can see inside,
So love is formed by a dark ray’s invasion
From Mars, its dwelling in the mind to make.
Is a created thing, and has sensation,
A soul, and strength of will.
It is opaque.
Opaque, yet once I slept with you all night
Dreaming about you – though not quite embraced
Always in contact felt however slight.
We lay at ease, an arm loose round a waist,
Or side by side and touching at the hips,
As if we were two trees, bough grazing bough,
The twigs being the toes or fingertips.
I have not crossed your mind for three weeks now,
But think back on that night in January,
When casually distinct we shared the most
And lay upon a bed of clarity
In luminous half-sleep where the will was lost.
We woke at times and as the night got colder
Exchanged a word, or pulled the clothes again
To cover up the other’s exposed shoulder,
Falling asleep to the small talk of the rain.
Skateboard
Tow Head on his skateboard
threads through a crowd
of feet and faces delayed
to a slow stupidity.
Darts, doubles, twists.
You notice how nimbly
the body itself has learned
to assess the relation between
the board, pedestrians,
and immediate sidewalk.
Emblem. Emblem of fashion.
Wearing dirty white
in dishevelment as delicate
as the falling draperies
on a dandyish
Renaissance saint.
Chain round his waist.
One hand gloved.
Hair dyed to show it is dyed,
pale flame spiking from fuel.
Tow Head on Skateboard
perfecting himself:
emblem extraordinary
of the ordinary.
In the sexless face
eyes innocent of feeling
therefore suggest the spirit.
To Isherwood Dying
It could be, Christopher, from your leafed-in house
In Santa Monica where you lie and wait
You hear outside a sound resume
Fitful, anonymous,
Of Berlin fifty years ago
As autumn days got late –
The whistling to their girls from young men who
Stood in the deep dim street, below
Dingy façades which crumbled like a cliff,
Behind which in a rented room
You listened, wondering if
By chance one might be whistling up for you,
Adding unsentimentally
‘It could not possibly be.’
Now it’s a stricter vigil that you hold
And from the canyon’s palms and crumbled gold
It could be possibly
You hear a single whistle call
Come out
Come out into the cold.
Courting insistent and impersonal.
Christmas week, 1985
The Stealer
I lie and live
my body’s fear
something’s at large
and coming near
No deadbolt
can keep it back
A worm of fog
leaks through a crack
From the darkness
as before
it grows to body
in my door
Like a taker
scarved and gloved
it steals this way
like one I loved
Fear stiffens me
and a slow joy
at the approach
of the sheathed boy
Will he too do
what that one did
unlock me first
open the lid
and reach inside
with playful feel
all the better
thus to steal
Nasturtium
Born in a sour waste lot
You laboured up to light,
Bunching what strength you’d got
And running out of sight
Through a knot-hole at last,
To come forth into sun
As if without a past,
Done with it, re-begun.
Now street-side of the fence
You take a few green turns,
Nimble in nonchalance
Before your first flower burns.
From poverty and prison
And undernourishment
A prodigal has risen,
Self-spending, never spent.
Irregular yellow shell
And drooping spur behind …
Not rare but beautiful
– Street-handsome – as you wind
And leap, hold after hold,
A golden runaway
Still running, strewing gold
From side to side all day.
The Man with Night Sweats
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
Lament
Your dying was a difficult enterprise.
First, petty things took up your energies,
The small but clustering duties of the sick,
Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric.
Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray
Or test (
while you read novels two a day)
Already with a kind of clumsy stealth
Distanced you from the habits of your health.
In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin,
You tried to stay the man that you had been,
Treating each symptom as a mere mishap
Without import. But then the spinal tap.
It brought a hard headache, and when night came
I heard you wake up from the same bad dream
Every half-hour with the same short cry
Of mild outrage, before immediately
Slipping into the nightmare once again
Empty of content but the drip of pain.
No respite followed: though the nightmare ceased,
Your cough grew thick and rich, its strength increased.
Four nights, and on the fifth we drove you down
To the Emergency Room. That frown, that frown:
I’d never seen such rage in you before
As when they wheeled you through the swinging door.
For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from
Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom
The hedonistic body basks within
And takes for granted – summer on the skin,
Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea
In a dry mouth. You had gone on from me
As if your body sought out martyrdom
In the far Canada of a hospital room.
Once there, you entered fully the distress
And long pale rigours of the wilderness.
A gust of morphine hid you. Back in sight
You breathed through a segmented tube, fat, white,
Jammed down your throat so that you could not speak.
How thin the distance made you. In your cheek
One day, appeared the true shape of your bone
No longer padded. Still your mind, alone,
Explored this emptying intermediate
State for what holds and rests were hidden in it.
You wrote us messages on a pad, amused
At one time that you had your nurse confused
Who, seeing you reconciled after four years