Dreamed I was the lover
Of a beautiful thief
But when I woke up
I was a shipwreck on a reef.
Dreamed that I was happy
Or so it seemed to seem.
My lover smiled
Like a clown in a dream.
A clown in a dream
A clown in a dream
I had a dream
We were clowns in a dream.
Dreamed I was a husband
Dreamed I was a wife
But when I woke up
I wanted vengeance with a knife.
Dreamed I was the knife
And blood began to stream
But when I woke up
I was a clown in a dream.
A clown in a dream
Failing upside down
And when I woke up
I was a dream in a clown.
(from Calderon’s Life’s a Dream)
The Knife-thrower’s Slender Daughter
The Knife-thrower’s slender daughter
Sent me a letter one day
Meet me just above the forest
Daddy’s going to be away
All day
Daddy’s going to be away
I climbed up the path to the forest
And – sitting astride a log –
I saw the Knife-thrower feeding
Egg and bacon to his one-eyed dog
I did
Egg and bacon to his one-eyed dog
The first three knives he threw at me
I dodged his every shot
Then his one-eyed dog ran past me
And retrieved the bloody lot
He did
Retrieved the bloody lot
Well I started throwing bits of brick and stone
Cos the blades fell around me like rain
But they bounced off the Knife-thrower’s helmet
And he started in to throw again
Damn him
And the dog retrieved the knives again
I seemed to see him in close-up
Intense and stony-eyed
And the rocks I chucked didn’t reach him
He was further up the mountainside
With the dog
Further up the mountain side
Well the Knife-thrower’s slender daughter
Looked down to the valley road
And she saw a blue and white cop car
Sitting there like a toad
So she took a little hatchet from her hip
She gave it a swing
And she gave it a flip
And the hatchet flew like a meteorite
And smashed into the cop car’s revolving light
The cops switched on their siren
And I heard their engine roar
And zooming up from the valley
Came the forces of the Law
With pistols
Came the forces of the Law
They locked up the Knife-thrower
For six months and a day
With his daughter and his one-eyed dog
I made my getaway
You know
And here’s all I want to say
Now I don’t blame the Knife-thrower or his dog
For protecting his daughter from me
And if you saw Knife-thrower’s slender daughter
You sureashell wouldn’t blame me
Oh no
You sureashell wouldn’t blame me.
Philosophical Agriculture
The Cow of Friedrich Nietzsche
was a recalcitrant creature
who kicked Rainer Maria Rilke
whenever he tried to milk her
ON BOARD THE FRIENDSHIP
For Dick and Dixie Peaslee
my friends and I
are trees in a wood
we glory in autumn’s
goldenhood
on our branches sing
the owl and the lark
and the small deer trot
through the mist for our bark
and the river below
runs silvery-grey
with barges to carry
the timber away
and that voyage to the ocean
seems happy and good
to me and my friends
as we dance in our wood
How William Blake Dies a Good Death
(for John McGrath)
It was a summer evening.
The window was wide open.
I was sixty-nine
And I’d been ill for months.
I was sitting propped up in our bed and drawing.
I said: Stay Kate, keep just as you are,
I will draw you
For you have ever been an angel to me.
I drew her lovely face.
Then I put down my pencil and said:
Kate, I am a changing man.
At night I often rose and wrote down my thoughts,
Whether it rained or snowed or shone,
And you arose and sat beside me
And held my left hand as I wrote my poems.
This can be no longer.
And then I made up a song
And sang it, quietly, into Kate’s ear.
And then another song
And then another.
And Kate said: I like your songs.
So I said: They are not mine,
My beloved, they are not mine.
I took one last breath of the summer air
And let it go
And my life flew out of the window
And upwards, singing joyfully.
For Miranda and Tom
(two babies who did not live long)
a handful of days
a handful of daisies
floating down a piano-playing river
o life is so little
far too little
but love flies on for ever
A Song for Maeve
I love to watch rivers
and the way they go
young rivers tumble
old rivers flow
I love to watch friends
when they’re letting go –
the tumbling laughter
and the story flow
and the words sweet Maeve uses
with such gaiety
go tumbling and flowing
to join the great sea
Seventy More Years
(for Gordon Snell on his birthday)
I was fifteen, and shaking.
I’d been asked to write the House Play
And I’d said yes and now I was terrified.
I couldn’t do it alone, so I sought you out
Because I’d heard you’d written a dozen plays
For your own puppet theatre.
You were fifteen too.
As I spoke to you for the first time
You looked at me as if I were
An intriguing painting, by Breughel maybe,
Listened to my invitation
And smiled Yes.
What had I taken on?
In the gym and at rugby you were agile as an ape,
But I could tolerate some sportiness.
The prefects had you down as Trouble,
With a deadly line in Dumb Insolence
And a reputation as the eloquent School Atheist.
Well, that was fine with me,
Speaking as a close friend of the School Communist
And a loose troupe of jazz fanatics.
We walked and talked and sat down and laughed
As we plotted our blockbuster for the Drama Competition.
Half an hour long said the rules, and we knew that
To impress our toffee-tough audience of teenage boys
The play better have a lot about Death.
And so we wrote A Friend of Ours –
In which Death himself, an old man in a wheelchair
Wearing Matron’s black and scarlet cloak,
> Invites a job-lot of odd guests to his country house.
A Sailor, a Scientist, a Poet (me) and –
You as Miss Marguerite Hyde – described as a Traveller.
Death accuses Miss Hyde of nameless crimes
And she replies with this interior monologue:
‘I’ve met the danger of death before,
But it’s always been a danger I could fight –
In the East one can fight the terrors of the jungle but this…
I never reckoned with having to fight Death ‘in person’.
To think that old man has the power to end anyone’s life,
Anyone’s at all – to end mine.
To think HE is Death – It almost seems absurd –
But it’s not funny.
How can I fight Death?…
Did we win the play competitions
By ten lengths and a carrot!
We always won.
You and I took turns to win the Poetry Competition
And the best parts in the School Shakespeare production.
When I played justice Shallow, you were Doll Tearsheet.
When you played a dazzling Hamlet,
I was your grumpy Uncle Claudius.
Only once failure seemed to loom. Instead of a tragedy
We entered a farce for the Play Competition –
The Third Ham – a parody of the Harry Lime movie
With my Trevor Howard, your Orson Welles.
But the censorship committee banned our entry
For blasphemy and obscenity.
We glared at them and exited,
Sat down and wrote another tragedy – Dead End.
Its first stage direction reads:
‘David Hayes is seated, alone and rather dishevelled.’
(No wonder, he has been shot at by the police
And is dying of his wounds in a warehouse).
His opening blank verse monologue was spoken by me,
But written, I would claim, mainly by Gordon.
‘Cobwebs cast stealthy shadows in the soft dust
The weary bales loom dark against the warehouse wall
The black rain caresses the blank indifferent bricks…
I cannot see the steps that led to this dead end
I do not understand.
Bewildered, bewildered, there are mists about my eyes,
And I am dying without knowing the reason.
This bullet in my stomach is my life’s result,
The culmination of the sequence of my acts,
A sequence I must try to follow…
How did it all begin?…
How did it all begin?…’
Did we win the Competition?
Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Pausing only to re-cycle The Third Ham
As a cowboy epic called Cow-Cow Bogey
In which we played the Front and Back halves
Of the mooing, Charleston–dancing heroine,
We founded the Symbolic Society
Which improvised weird and subversive plays
On the verandah of the cricket pavilion
To an audience of moonlit grass.
And together we sat in the great secret attic
Up above the Farmer Hall,
Discussing Love and War and Thurber and Duke Ellington
Seated in enormous wooden Shakespeare thrones
Puffing at our Park Drives
And laughing ourselves into a kind of
Heaven of understanding.
Together we cycled across Wiltshire
To a weekend school on the poetry of John Donne
Whom we’d never heard of
Then J.B. Leishmann burst into the lecture room
With a bicycle and Mickey Mouse hair
And began to read aloud to us
But after two lines threw down the book
And carried on by heart:
‘Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are
Or who cleft the devil’s foot.
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.’
And we glanced at each other,
Realising that Donne was of our gang,
And, cycling back to school,
Chanted the words of Donne,
Laughing with love
For his daft and dangerous language.
Called up to do National Stupidity in the RAF
We squarebashed side by side
Trying to keep each other sane
In that insane little world of blanco, bootpolish
And being broke and bullied –
Always you were my ideal friend.
When you were promoted to be an Acting Corporal –
It seemed, at first, a betrayal –
Had Snell joined the Establishment?
But no, within weeks you had been shorn of your chevrons,
Demoted back to my humble level
For bureaucratic sabotage.
On leave, tramping over Lakeland
We rewrote its literary history
In a musical movie called The Road to Keswick
Starring Bing Crosby as Wordsworth,
Bob Hope as Coleridge,
Dorothy Lamour as Dorothy Wordsworth
And Louis Armstrong as the Leech Gatherer
And endless fantasy melodramas
Most of them building to a Rabelaisian climax
Involving all the Windsor-Mountbattens.
You went to Balliol, I went to Christ Church.
At Oxford, our adventure playground.
Every night we were walking on the rooftops
Or using your room as a basketball court
For a balloon version of the game
Played with a beer in one hand.
We acted, we wrote poems and stories,
We founded the Universal Monster Club
Which turned up at movies like
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
To cheer the monster and hiss the awful actors…
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Gordon…
But you actually worked and won a good degree
And landed up in the BBC
And there were Bush House sessions
And Twite and Dromgoole
And Moira and Annie
And Bruce and O’Toole
And high above the streets of Earls Court
The laughter circus of your flat in Hogarth Road.
We found ourselves the only inhabitants
Of a caravan site on the Gower Peninsula
In the depths of a Bible-black winter
Trying to write a sitcom about
A troupe of nutty actors in a theatre on a pier
But continually breaking away from work
For trips to the cliffside pub
Or our own madly competitive
Two–man Olympic Games
With events like Sand Dune Jumping Downwards,
Tossing the Boulder and
The Walking Backwards Into the Sea Race.
After each event we stood on the caravan steps,
The loser on the lower step,
For the presentation of gold and silver medals
Fashioned from Barley Wine bottle top wrappers,
To sing the winner’s National Anthem…
And it was all very wild and wonderful
But there was something the matter with the weather
Something the matter with the light –
The work was fine
And the fun and the friendship were fine
But love arrived and threw her arms around you sometimes,
Stayed awhile,
Then, painfully, left.
That’s not enough love for a man
When the grea
test among his many talents
Is a huge gift for loving others.
Love is tough stuff, and it was tough of love to be so mean
To the most generous man in the world.
But the world turned
And the weather changed to summertime
And the monochrome streets
Were suddenly bright
With all the colours sunshine paints on London,
With all the music sunshine plays on Dublin.
And you sailed away, for a year and a day,
In a beautiful pea-green sieve
And magic-carpeted round the globe –
What a runcible way to live!
And you sat in a tree-top side by side
By the light of the Chablis sun,
Writing green and blossoming poems
And stories for everyone.
Maeve and Gordon,
Gordon and Maeve,
Two names which sit together
Like two loving cats in an armchair.
Beauty meeting beauty,
It was so clear, so happy,
So unconditionally
For ever.
Maeve and Gordon
Gordon and Maeve,
Your deep joy shines
All around you
Warming the hearts
Of your numberless friends,
Warming us all
With your deep joy.
For ever
For ever
Flowing like a river –
Your love and your deep joy.
SEVENTY MORE YEARS!
to all our friends
August
blue seas for ever
a spicy breeze
bears us towards an ancient island
the harbour opens its arms to us
in an embrace
of boats with clinking masts
brown children leaping over ropes
donkeys fishermen dogs
women with baby bundles
shadow cats
and the sun
Come on Everybody Page 32