From Okhotsk shores:
Until frost-bitten both in one grey form
Ghost became brother to an Arctic storm
Beyond all laws.
A price was paid to wilderness and fire:
Flashbacks of his vision beamed
On bleak Siberian snows
Show recollection full of truth and liar:
What one remembers never is what seemed
But what some stranger throws
Up like a ghost before your eyes,
A picture that the ghost of you would see
Had it the power to span
The world from now to then and recognize
What memory discarded and set free
Before you turned and ran.
Each morning my brother asks himself what words
Remain to ply and weave, what dreams, what birds
By twilight to make
Warm nests behind the sockets of his eyes
Opened by gentian-blue barbarian skies
That stayed in his wake.
A youth spent uprooting deciduous nerves
Gave strength to the broad-winding river-curves
Of his soul;
Tenacious eyes sought leaf-mould for breath
Each footstep released what life lived in death
In that great coal-
Forest that froze and murdered yet gave him air
To create a miracle by silent prayer
In my too-undying heart;
My brother became me, memories welded with steel
United in fever and flame, but never to heal,
Only meeting to part.
ON A DEAD BLUEBOTTLE
Dog-fought to its death by folded paper:
An overloaded bluebottle
Crossed the window on a clumsy track
Like a Junkers 52 aimed for Crete.
Survivor of the rains,
With the temerity to try it on
Too long with autumn,
It never knew what happened –
Landed on a matchbox, dead but hardly damaged:
Convenient for what it carried.
One by one its passengers came out:
White-hooded monks debouching
From a still war-painted aircraft
At its dispersal point;
Wriggling over fuselage and wings
As if inspecting flaws after a crash-landing
Of skin and wing that covered
A maggot-cargo from the summer weather,
As if they had paid ticket, food and board
And wanted refund for a trip cut short,
Turned and drew back in lily-whiteness,
Upright with peevish nagging
At some travel agent robber.
Horror was what I felt at filth on filth
Too quickly feeding
To feed the many filthy mouths within,
Horror at the proof of life so powerful
Unsuicidable
Persistent in such ways too small to realize.
For those in need of comfort
That the human race will beat survival
To the end of time
This is it, I thought –
These little bleeders twisting out their time
Are Godsent guarantees
That you and I have season-tickets
For too long to contemplate:
For in the middle of the final maggot
One maggot will survive
To start it all again.
PICTURE OF LOOT
Certain dark underground eyes
Have been set upon
The vast emporiums of London.
Lids blink red
At glittering shops
Houses and museums
Shining at night
Chandeliers of historic establishments
Showing interiors to Tartar eyes.
Certain dark underground eyes
Bearing blood-red sack
The wineskins of centuries
Look hungrily at London:
How many women in London?
A thousand thousand houses
Filled with the world’s high living
And fabulous knick-knacks;
Each small glossy machine
By bedside or on table or in bathroom
Is the electrical soul of its owner
The finished heart responding
To needle or gentle current;
And still more houses, endlessly stacked
Asleep with people waiting
To be exploded
The world’s maidenhead supine for breaking
By corpuscle Tartars
To whom a toothbrush
Is a miracle;
What vast looting
What jewels of fires
What great cries
And long convoys
Of robbed and robbers
Leaving the sack
Of rich great London.
A CHILD’S DRAWING
A horse in a field drinking water:
A child’s drawing (with a tree)
Is how it looks to me
From a bed and through the window.
Village houses stacked behind
But horse made beautiful
Blown into shape
Back bent to water.
My view uncomplicated:
Your eager nostrils drinking
And unseen except by me
Who sees me watching you drinking
Even the slime and water
At the bottom of your pool.
Who – as well as making you –
Put you face to face
(Within the child’s drawing of a field
Looking clear into the pool
That children envy)
And me here?
No complaint,
For you have field and tree and water
And I my child’s drawing through the window.
OPPOSITES
Fire and water
Chemically meet
In mutual slaughter.
Fire would the other cook:
The evangelical conviction
Of a Six-day Book.
Water would the other kill:
Philanthropy to bring
High temperatures to nil.
Yet ask what solid flesh may stay
Fire with swamp
Water with baked clay;
Neither compound an utter loss:
One left with dregs
And one with dross.
EXCERPTS FROM ‘THE RATS’
1
How did they begin? What oracular sound
Reached us from platforms underground?
What muzzle moved against the humid clay?
What well-clawed feet scratched into ocular day?
They waited, sleek-bellied rats
Whose memories (kept dry in old tin hats)
Were parchment-read and spread, then lit
As torches to illuminate for these rats
The runnels and the tunnels of each pit.
Revenge was not the fashion: those who shoved
Were put no fatal question, a balanced glove
Ignored upon their shoulders, while in the mines
Unchallenged diggers sent out signs
Of geologic stairways built on bones:
A noise of rodents nosing through the stones.
Where are they now? With perfect guile
They breathe good air and walk such streets above
That glisten with fraternity and love;
In plastic surgery of grim disguise
They sport dark spectacles instead of eyes
Who might be you or me or that false smile
That gives out bread-and-butter in God’s name
And silently observes responses – like a game.
Where? No need to look around, my friend
Or in big books that open at the end
(Since legibility i
s no great tool).
Nowhere. Stand on your head and play the fool.
How? Put out your tongue and shut one eye:
Good. Stay like that until you die.
And then? The rats will still be underground
Snug in their galleries, unsought, unfound
Untried and tied to undermining tricks
Until your houses shiver and collapse like sticks:
They speak corruption, live among its flowers
Proliferate black seeds in April showers.
The heart stops breeding fields of verity
Becomes an eggtimer overworked and spun
By propaganda whose ignoble run
Of words begets not progress but obesity.
One day you’ll take your best friend’s hand
And feel his fingers turning into sand.
No one will lift the black patch from a warning
Who cannot see the night from too much morning.
So? You ask too many questions, son:
Take off those glasses, and pick up that gun.
2
Those continentals, the funny English say,
Until my brain rebels and with grey
Just logic substitutes for ‘English’ a word
Many might object to, a label too absurd
To comprehend, a double syllable
That to me will remain unkillable
Like gutter children or an Arab nomad:
Namely I rename an Angle ‘OGAD’.
This brain-somersault has made
It suddenly impossible to call
An oak a limetree or a spade a spade
After sixty months meandering
In warm Majorca and coniferous glade
Where many tongues in silent valleys mix
To push my English to the further banks of Styx.
The first grey sago-OGAD met by me
Was on the high grey waves of OGAD sea,
Stamping passports on the ferryboat
Before the mouth of Dover’s dismal throat.
Unprivileged aliens in their special queue
Etched their names for white-faced men in blue,
Unbribable stern servants of the realm
Whose rat-like ashen fingers grip the helm
Of OGADLAND, keep an inner circle speed
To guard an obsolescent greed
Of law and order firm behind seven veils
Of self-important mists – and Channel gales.
I lingered in this continental line
Idealizing Britain-of-the Brine
To my American wife with passport green,
Until a tall Sicilian wept and cried
That those grey OGAD cliffs so vaguely seen
Would ever bar his way to Paradise –
Because a leaden-weighted face of ice,
Bilious from its last attack of spleen,
Based his entry on a throw of dice.
Weeping so, he’d do no wrong
I say, but who am I when rubber stamps
And lines of ANGLE-OGAD faces vet
With blank dictatorship these so-called tramps?
Such rats will face the floodtide yet.
3
Many pink-faced OGADS of the north
I have met on Sundays leading forth
Pink-faced OGAD-dogs on lengths of leather
On typical wet days of OGAD weather.
The second month came musically sweet
And mild, blue skies glittering with birdsong
And silver jetplanes frolicking like fleet
Lambs not yet responsible. ‘What a
Beautiful raincloud over there!’
Black and grey, yet
Surely a silver-lining lurks somewhere?
How strangely like a mountain, round and jet;
Moving with speed, yet silently, no rain
Falling from its cabbage – no, cauliflower – head:
And suddenly a mushroom grows instead!
Such OGAD weather does not give clear vision
Hides all above the level of the eyes
Makes only power to see with fair precision
Certain orders posted by the wise
Of this dark OGAD world: ‘Keep off the grass’
And ‘Queue this side of sign’. ‘Thou shalt not pass
Unless your child or dog be on a lead’.
‘Keep to the left’. ‘Slow down’. ‘Reduce your speed’.
‘Don’t park your car upon this hallowed spot’.
‘Drop litter here’. (That animals begot?)
‘Step along there, room for two inside’.
And not one democrat looked up and sighed:
You need not lift your face towards the sky,
All orders are placed level with the eye.
These pithy messages must make good trade
For those who paint them. A poet’s blade
Can’t cut more ice, the brains
Of dull bespectacled sad OGAD folk
Are taught by television and a race for trains
Each morning not to test the laden yoke
By a gaze to heaven, when all earthy bread
Is planted firmly at their feet instead.
4
Revolution is the word of God
A firefly that lifts from soddened ground
For one second at the end of spring.
So go the workings of the unsound
Mind in its beginnings, a minor sting
That no rat notices, and turns no brown
Last winter’s leaf to face the sky.
In this live jungle must the mind leap down
To feed on pickings of dark soil, and shy
Its hawk-beak at the earth’s sweet guile:
Then rise full-caloried to kill in style.
These are the commandments of the rats:
You shall be born into the melting-vats
Without an eye to give or a tooth to lose
And never want for schooling, work or shoes.
Good: but each advertisement is a decree
A hanged man on the propaganda tree
(From ITV as well as BBC)
To make it shoot up high and thin:
A hundred thousand may begin
To march one damp October dawn:
Says Rat beneath his atom-cloud: the melting-vats
Demand obedience to no one but the rats.
You shall love the rats who take the hours
From your clumsy hands, who guide you over roads
And traffic islands, take heavy loads
From lighter brains, give paper flowers
Of happiness, and stand you in a line
For bus or train, transport you to a house
And television set and OGAD wine:
You too can be a rat divine
A living civil servant of a louse
Though first you must become a mouse.
O hear me, soulless OGADS of the mist
Older than the rocks on which you pissed
The winter snows away for idle summer;
Listen to the rawboned pitprop drummer
Who versifies rebellion from the ice
(In exile where he feeds on uncooked rice
That one day will explode his walnut fist)
Hear his warning over your contented mummer
And the mewings of devoted mice:
Catastrophe will be the last device.
5
So keep your whiskers weaving while you may
Beneath blue helmets, antennae of the law
Sensitively finding those who pray
For criminal success by some shop door.
The time to strike is now. Drop your club
Upon the head that holds ideas to boast
Your kill, who stands like an untamed cub
For buses on the wrong side of the post.
Keep your long rat-whiskers sleek
The man with garden shears may die next week
Next month, yet maybe come with fist and claw
With fuses primed in a Beethoven score
And dynamite ensconced in crated butter.
You do not even hear them mutter.
They watch you pace (from behind a shutter)
See you preen your whiskers as you walk
Twirl your truncheon, chew your rind of pork
Watch a drunk negotiate the street
(Correctly). You glance at the callbox of your power
Blind to their refusal of defeat
As they debate on when to name the hour.
King Rodent reigns on OGAD demock-rats
On water rats that watch each riverbank
And bridge for criminals who do not thank
King Rodent’s riddance of white leopard cats:
They wait until the shadow’s leap
Becomes an offer of a well-aired bed
That does not promise them a life of sleep.
King Happiness has waved his magic wand
Shown you a smooth reflection in the pond
Of television shows, recorded your own voice
In the self-selections of your choice,
Set up his directions on the street
Turned mechanic to your motorbikes
Poured patriot sauce upon your luncheon meat
Sent you out on Sunday-morning hikes:
Party-hatted happiness is here,
Each tenet brayed by a Royal Chanticleer.
6
Death is not preferable (had you
Considered it?) to this untrue-
To-life and that man’s sweated brow.
How could, an end called Death
End this as easily as that
Man thinks? Questions come
From artesian springs
Labyrinths of sea and soil
Making question marks
Out of eternal water
Demanding bloody answers
And a bloody year
Of cleansing. Slaughter?
Here comes the First Battalion
Television Light Infantry
With bayonets fixed –
Break them down!
Around the left flank come
The Porno Paper Cavalry Corps
Riding pink and yellow tanks –
Cut them off!
Under your feet spring
The Rat-State Sapper Brigade:
Dig them over like a garden
Do not let their forces overwhelm you
Rather go insane before they
Force you to their ranks
Or kill you.
The pyrotechnic paranoia of the anti-rats:
Clean against dark
Light opposing Death
Tearing slide-rule and scalpel, pen and typewriter,
Scales of rat-justice, rat-precision,
Libraries recording rat-right and rat-wrong
Rats that nip away each toe
And suck the soles of too thin feet