Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

With your grey father, both of you in tears,

  Asked if this was at last your ‘special friend’

  (The one you waited for until the end).

  ‘She sings,’ you wrote, ‘a Philippine folk song

  To wake me in the morning … It is long

  And very pretty.’ Grabbing at detail

  To furnish this bare ledge toured by the gale,

  On which you lay, bed restful as a knife,

  You tried, tried hard, to make of it a life

  Thick with the complicating circumstance

  Your thoughts might fasten on. It had been chance

  Always till now that had filled up the moment

  With live specifics your hilarious comment

  Discovered as it went along; and fed,

  Laconic, quick, wherever it was led.

  You improvised upon your own delight.

  I think back to the scented summer night

  We talked between our sleeping bags, below

  A molten field of stars five years ago:

  I was so tickled by your mind’s light touch

  I couldn’t sleep, you made me laugh too much,

  Though I was tired and begged you to leave off.

  Now you were tired, and yet not tired enough

  – Still hungry for the great world you were losing

  Steadily in no season of your choosing –

  And when at last the whole death was assured,

  Drugs having failed, and when you had endured

  Two weeks of an abominable constraint,

  You faced it equably, without complaint,

  Unwhimpering, but not at peace with it.

  You’d lived as if your time was infinite:

  You were not ready and not reconciled,

  Feeling as uncompleted as a child

  Till you had shown the world what you could do

  In some ambitious role to be worked through,

  A role your need for it had half-defined,

  But never wholly, even in your mind.

  You lacked the necessary ruthlessness,

  The soaring meanness that pinpoints success.

  We loved that lack of self-love, and your smile,

  Rueful, at your own silliness.

  Meanwhile,

  Your lungs collapsed, and the machine, unstrained,

  Did all your breathing now. Nothing remained

  But death by drowning on an inland sea

  Of your own fluids, which it seemed could be

  Kindly forestalled by drugs. Both could and would:

  Nothing was said, everything understood,

  At least by us. Your own concerns were not

  Long-term, precisely, when they gave the shot

  – You made local arrangements to the bed

  And pulled a pillow round beside your head.

  And so you slept, and died, your skin gone grey,

  Achieving your completeness, in a way.

  Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense

  Of being ejected with some violence

  From vigil in a white and distant spot

  Where I was numb, into this garden plot

  Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

  I was delivered into time again

  – The variations that I live among

  Where your long body too used to belong

  And where the still bush is minutely active.

  You never thought your body was attractive,

  Though others did, and yet you trusted it

  And must have loved its fickleness a bit

  Since it was yours and gave you what it could,

  Till near the end it let you down for good,

  Its blood hospitable to those guests who

  Took over by betraying it into

  The greatest of its inconsistencies

  This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.

  Terminal

  The eight years difference in age seems now

  Disparity so wide between the two

  That when I see the man who armoured stood

  Resistant to all help however good

  Now helped through day itself, eased into chairs,

  Or else led step by step down the long stairs

  With firm and gentle guidance by his friend,

  Who loves him, through each effort to descend,

  Each wavering, each attempt made to complete

  An arc of movement and bring down the feet

  As if with that spare strength he used to enjoy,

  I think of Oedipus, old, led by a boy.

  Her Pet

  I walk the floor, read, watch a cop-show, drink,

  Hear buses heave uphill through drizzling fog,

  Then turn back to the pictured book to think

  Of Valentine Balbiani and her dog:

  She is reclining, reading, on her tomb;

  But pounced, it tries to intercept her look,

  Its front paws on her lap, as in this room

  The cat attempts to nose beneath my book.

  Her curls tight, breasts held by her bodice high,

  Ruff crisp, mouth calm, hands long and delicate,

  All in the pause of marble signify

  A strength so lavish she can limit it.

  She will not let her pet dog catch her eye

  For dignity, and for a touch of wit.

  Below, from the same tomb, is reproduced

  A side-relief, in which she reappears

  Without her dog, and everything is loosed –

  Her hair down from the secret of her ears,

  Her big ears, and her creased face genderless

  Craning from sinewy throat. Death is so plain!

  Her breasts are low knobs through the unbound dress.

  In the worked features I can read the pain

  She went through to get here, to shake it all,

  Thinking at first that her full nimble strength

  Hid like a little dog within recall,

  Till to think so, she knew, was to pretend

  And, hope dismissed, she sought out pain at length

  And laboured with it to bring on its end.

  The J Car

  Last year I used to ride the j church Line,

  Climbing between small yards recessed with vine

  – Their ordered privacy, their plots of flowers

  Like blameless lives we might imagine ours.

  Most trees were cut back, but some brushed the car

  Before it swung round to the street once more

  On which I rolled out almost to the end,

  To 29th Street, calling for my friend.

  He’d be there at the door, smiling but gaunt,

  To set out for the German restaurant.

  There, since his sight was tattered now, I would

  First read the menu out. He liked the food

  In which a sourness and dark richness meet

  For conflict without taste of a defeat,

  As in the Sauerbraten. What he ate

  I hoped would help him to put on some weight,

  But though the crusted pancakes might attract

  They did so more as concept than in fact,

  And I’d eat his dessert before we both

  Rose from the neat arrangement of the cloth,

  Where the connection between life and food

  Had briefly seemed so obvious if so crude.

  Our conversation circumspectly cheerful,

  We had sat here like children good but fearful

  Who think if they behave everything might

  Still against likelihood come out all right.

  But it would not, and we could not stay here:

  Finishing up the Optimator beer

  I walked him home through the suburban cool

  By dimming shape of church and Catholic school,

  Only a few, white, teenagers about.

  After the four blocks he would be tired out.

 
I’d leave him to the feverish sleep ahead,

  Myself to ride through darkened yards instead

  Back to my health. Of course I simplify.

  Of course. It tears me still that he should die

  As only an apprentice to his trade,

  The ultimate engagements not yet made.

  His gifts had been withdrawing one by one

  Even before their usefulness was done:

  This optic nerve would never be relit;

  The other flickered, soon to be with it.

  Unready, disappointed, unachieved,

  He knew he would not write the much-conceived

  Much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create

  A love he might in full reciprocate.

  The Missing

  Now as I watch the progress of the plague,

  The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin,

  And drop away. Bared, is my shape less vague

  – Sharply exposed and with a sculpted skin?

  I do not like the statue’s chill contour,

  Not nowadays. The warmth investing me

  Led outward through mind, limb, feeling, and more

  In an involved increasing family.

  Contact of friend led to another friend,

  Supple entwinement through the living mass

  Which for all that I knew might have no end,

  Image of an unlimited embrace.

  I did not just feel ease, though comfortable:

  Aggressive as in some ideal of sport,

  With ceaseless movement thrilling through the whole,

  Their push kept me as firm as their support.

  But death – Their deaths have left me less defined:

  It was their pulsing presence made me clear.

  I borrowed from it, I was unconfined,

  Who tonight balance unsupported here,

  Eyes glaring from raw marble, in a pose

  Languorously part-buried in the block,

  Shins perfect and no calves, as if I froze

  Between potential and a finished work.

  – Abandoned incomplete, shape of a shape,

  In which exact detail shows the more strange,

  Trapped in unwholeness, I find no escape

  Back to the play of constant give and change.

  August 1987

  from

  BOSS CUPID

  (2000)

  Duncan

  1

  When in his twenties a poetry’s full strength

  Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,

  He let the divine prompting (come at length)

  Rushingly bear him any way it would

  And went on writing while the Ferry turned

  From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,

  And back again, and back again. He learned

  You add to, you don’t cancel what you do.

  Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled,

  His own lines carrying him in a new mode

  To ports in which past purposes unravelled.

  So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode,

  Whatever his first plans that night had been,

  The energy that rose from their confusion

  Became the changing passage lived within

  While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion.

  2

  Forty years later, and both kidneys gone;

  Every eight hours, home dialysis;

  The habit of his restlessness stayed on

  Exhausting him with his responsiveness.

  After the circulations of one day

  In which he taught a three-hour seminar

  Then gave a reading clear across the Bay,

  And while returning from it to the car

  With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady

  Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell

  – Fell he said later, as if I stood ready,

  ‘Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn.’

  Well well,

  The image comic, as I might have known,

  And generous, but it turned things round to myth:

  He fell across the white steps there alone,

  Though it was me indeed that he was with.

  I hadn’t caught him, hadn’t seen in time,

  And picked him up where he had softly dropped,

  A pillow full of feathers. Was it a rime

  He later sought, in which he might adopt

  The role of H.D., broken-hipped and old,

  Who, as she moved off from the reading-stand,

  Had stumbled on the platform but was held

  And steadied by another poet’s hand?

  He was now a posthumous poet, I have said

  (For since his illness he had not composed),

  In sight of a conclusion, whose great dread

  Was closure,

  his life soon to be enclosed

  Like the sparrow’s flight above the feasting friends,

  Briefly revealed where its breast caught their light,

  Beneath the long roof, between open ends,

  Themselves the margins of unchanging night.

  My Mother’s Pride

  She dramatized herself

  Without thought of the dangers.

  But ‘Never pay attention,’ she said,

  ‘To the opinions of strangers.’

  And when I stole from a counter,

  ‘You wouldn’t accept a present

  From a tradesman.’ But I think I might have:

  I had the greed of a peasant.

  She was proud of her ruthless wit

  And the smallest ears in London.

  ‘Only conceited children are shy.’

  I am made by her, and undone.

  The Gas-poker

  Forty-eight years ago

  – Can it be forty-eight

  Since then? – they forced the door

  Which she had barricaded

  With a full bureau’s weight

  Lest anyone find, as they did,

  What she had blocked it for.

  She had blocked the doorway so,

  To keep the children out.

  In her red dressing-gown

  She wrote notes, all night busy

  Pushing the things about,

  Thinking till she was dizzy,

  Before she had lain down.

  The children went to and fro

  On the harsh winter lawn

  Repeating their lament,

  A burden, to each other

  In the December dawn,

  Elder and younger brother,

  Till they knew what it meant.

  Knew all there was to know.

  Coming back off the grass

  To the room of her release,

  They who had been her treasures

  Knew to turn off the gas,

  Take the appropriate measures,

  Telephone the police.

  One image from the flow

  Sticks in the stubborn mind:

  A sort of backwards flute.

  The poker that she held up

  Breathed from the holes aligned

  Into her mouth till, filled up

  By its music, she was mute.

  To Donald Davie in Heaven

  I was reading Auden – But I thought

  you didn’t like Auden, I said.

  Well, I’ve been reading him again,

  and I like him better now, you said.

  That was what I admired about you

  your ability to regroup

  without cynicism, your love of poetry

  greater

  than your love of consistency.

  As in an unruffled fish-pond

  the fish draw to whatever comes

  thinking it something to feed on

  there was always something to feed on

  your appetite unslaked

  for the fortifying and tasty

  events of reading.

&nb
sp; I try to think of you now

  nestling in your own light,

  as in Dante, singing to God

  the poet and literary critic.

  As you enter among them,

  the other thousand surfaced glories

  – those who sought honour

  by bestowing it –

  sing at your approach

  Lo, one who shall increase our loves.

  But maybe less druggy,

  a bit plainer,

  more Protestant.

  The Artist as an Old Man

  Vulnerable because

  naked because

  his own model.

  Muscled and veined, not

  a bad old body

  for an old man.

  The face vulnerable too,

  its loosened folds

  huddled against

  the earlier outline: beneath

  the assertion of nose

  still riding the ruins

  you observe the downturned

  mouth: and

  above it,

  the assessing glare

  which might be read as

  I’ve got the goods on you

  asshole and I’ll expose you.

  The flat palette knife

  in his right hand, and

  the square palette itself

  held low in the other

  like a shield,

  he faces off

  the only appearance

  reality has and makes it

  doubly his. He

  looks into

  his own eyes

  or it might be yours

  and his attack on the goods

  repeats the riddle

  or it might be

  answers it:

  Out of the eater

  came forth meat

  and out of the strong

  came forth sweetness.

  A Wood near Athens

  1

  The traveler struggles through a wood. He is lost.

  The traveler is at home. He never left.

  He seeks his way on the conflicting trails,

  Scribbled with light.