That wriggle before the new damp
Jungle world of hoofprints, spoor
Half-chewed herbivore and worse –
Beaten after twilight years by her stout arms,
And an evolutionary smile.
STARS
Stars, seen through midnight windows
Of earth-grained eyes
Are fullstops ending invisible sentences,
Aphorisms, quips, mottoes of the gods
Indicate what might have been made clear
Had words stayed plain before them.
Criss-crossed endlessly for those who read,
Each light-year sentence testifies how far
Life spreads, and how those full stops
Go on living after necks cease aching.
In observing them, the bones relax:
Eyes close when we are dead
And they have stared all poets out.
Full stops are beautiful as stars,
Each glowing with the light of people vanished
From the continually red-burned earth
Fuelled by those whose outward eye drinks fever
And inward eye harnesses their shadows
To read what never had been written
Until, drunk with Charioteers, Animals and Goddesses,
Conjurers, Club-men, Fish and Magic Boxes
Full stops are joined with words shaped into poems
Ending with full stops as meaningful as stars.
YES
Yes – definitively to some wrongful deed
And ending like a quick knife to a knot,
Is a serpent-lover singing to be freed
From no and negative and nothing gained.
Hard to fix decisions as to yea and nay
While needing the when and how: near-questions
Aimed to draw that final sibilant and vow
To upright-positive and all to win.
Success for lovers and conspirators
Unlocks the sins that grace a thousand lips;
Dogs bark, and babies cry at meeting air:
(Whether yes or no is hardly to be known)
But if affirmative, are guessings at the guess
That darkness is nothing but a final yes.
DEAD MAN’S GRAVE
Three sons in silence by their father’s grave
Think of the live man
Not yet split in three by blackness –
Cannot cross the limbo zone,
Reach him who went a year ago through.
Mute before grass bending:
Headstones grey and white proliferate,
Stumps in a shell-shocked forest
Making question and exclamation mark;
They talk about flowers from a visit
When water in the vase was ice
On this plateau exposed to collieries
And winds bailing out Death’s
Deepest coffers it was so cold;
Of how frost to prove the dead not dead
Turned the water iron-white,
Swollen muscle garrotting the flowers
Till the vase exploded,
By trying its own strength out on itself –
Scattered petals to a dozen graves.
Three brothers stand in silence,
Feel the strength the father lost.
THE DROWNED SHROPSHIRE WOMAN
Narrow in the back
She played all day with fishes
Watched them go like arrows
Through aerated water
Between her legs and dodge
The fantail spread of fingers.
She was crossed in love:
Water hurtling loinwards and into heart
Found another hiding-place and pool
Where sharper arrows
Played upon her sorrow,
And sunlight on her stooping
Made more voracious fishes breed.
She was narrow in the back
And played all night at fishes,
Wading for the biggest of them all
By moon and guile
Out from the reedy bank,
Until by unlit dawn
A fisherman in silence
Drew his silent catchnet down.
Green fishes fled through lightgreen water
Flint heads with moulded eyes
Chipping at infiltrating light,
And switching to the
White legs of the Shropshire woman,
Played tag in the blue beams
Of her impenetrable eyes,
Between the whitening flesh
Of open fingers.
CAR FIGHTS CAT
In a London crescent curving vast
A cat sat –
Between two rows of molar houses,
Birdsky in each grinning gap.
Cat small – coal and snow
Four-wheeled speedboats cutting a dash
For it
From time to time.
King Cat stalked warily midstream
As if silence were no warning on this empty road
Where even a man would certainly have crossed
With hands in pockets and been whistling.
Cat heard, but royalty and indolence
Weighed its paws to hobnailed boots
Held it from the dragon’s-teeth of safety first and last,
Until a Daimler scurrying from work
Caused cat to stop and wonder where it came from –
Instead of zig-zag scattering to hide itself.
Maybe a deaf malevolence descended
And cat thought car would pass in front,
So spun and walked all fur and confidence
Into the dreadful tyre-treads …
A wheel caught hold of it and
FEARSOME THUDS
Sounded from the night-time of black axles in
UNEQUAL FIGHT
That stopped the heart to hear it.
But cat shot out with limbs still solid,
Bolted, spitting fire and gravel
At unjust God who built such massive
Catproof motorcars in his graven image,
Its mind made up to lose and therefore learn,
By winging towards
The wisdom toothgaps of the canyon houses
LEGS AND BRAIN INTACT.
FROG IN TANGIER
A frog jumped
Feebly along the pool edge
Away from the trapnet of my feet.
I picked it up.
A pink wound shone
Between belly and that phosphorous
Faint zig-zag down its back,
Pain the colour of pomegranate
And orange agony,
Umbilical string hanging
A catchline towards water
Yet dragging like an anchor
That weighed the entire world
When it tried to jump.
Had it been pierced by a snake?
Clipped by a wind-thrown tree
Cut by scorpion, bird or pruning hook?
Or was it a festering frog-cancer
That gathered and burst after a life
Of statue-cunning,
Too much patience before
Each silent nerve-leap
Onto a dreamy insect?
I hoped the magic water
Would seal its wound
Stitch back outflowing life.
It swam deep under,
Air bubbles snapping
Like fleas abandoning a mouse,
Messages from its stopped body
Breaking at trees and sky.
It was a leaf suspended
Four legs and green spade-head,
Flayed rushblades clear
Above the indeterminate green
Basin of the pool;
Calmed between earth and air
Dying in its native water
From my allowing a leap
Into the safety of its death
When it wanted peace
And a long quiet end
Lasting a lifetime.
It hung in the float-still water,
Next day gone:
Mud-guns exploded
By assaulting minnow-snouts.
From nightcaves underwater
Daylight filters like a ghost
To scare marauding goldfish
Chewing mosquito eggs –
And to illuminate
A hundred minnows savaging my spit.
FRIEND DIED
Tears stop, and suffering
Goes the next level down,
Deeper when tears won’t start.
Pain outlives, the hollow soul burns
Till cured by nothing less
Than the same death for me.
You are world-finished
Blacked out, sea-driven
Beyond soil and nowhere,
Empty caves filled
By your heavy death-weighing:
The sea and moon fought
And their vicious clamour killed
The survivor who is empty
And the winner who is dead.
GUIDE TO THE TIFLIS RAILWAY
The witnessed scenery changes
To sunbaked cliffs and spun dry trees:
Parched and monotonous hill country.
No one has the will to stop the train,
Though all can now observe what’s to be seen:
A priest embalming a dissected brain.
Hardly visible from the railway
A deep ravine throws out its endless bile.
We cross the river, and notice to the left
Various vertical caves in Gothic style
Which afforded refuge to the Christians,
Sparse and lean (a rouble to the guide)
Against the Mongols and the Persians
Who swam the Caspian like cats against no tide;
Who one time sent three gifts from Samarkand
Of frugal sunlight to an ancient feast:
Now reaping a reward with scarlet swords
From the full belly of the fecund East.
Our train proceeds, unfolds an arrowmark of bones,
The valley widens, easy to foretell
That crossing the military road we soon
Reach the city and look up the best hotel.
from Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems and Storm and Other Poems, 1968 and 1974
BABY
A small man formed
One hour after forging into light,
Body-brain wrapped and blue eyes
Open to noise of rook and cuckoo
To stalk a rabbit in the meadow
Read a book, nothing less than
Blank before sudden turns
To evergreen or glint of water.
Hirsute and stern on bleak arrival
He lay down after a toiler’s day
Face to say: All right.
You gave me life, but death also.
Forehead creased on future worry
When hacking obstacles,
Indenting map-hair on moving palm
To say it doesn’t matter, go to sleep.
Struck a lifeline horoscope
Of luck, speedkid, handy with women –
Which years will balance
In give, take or ruination,
Seeing all but never everything.
Sleep beyond the iced bite of the moon,
Being what you are this moment
Free with innocence but lacking milk
Soon to become all you do not feel,
Advancing against
The normal hazarding inroads
That spin life into havoc:
Power to dissect visions
Like the yolk and mucus of an egg,
And build up certain freedoms from the moon.
TREE
A broad and solid oak exploded
Split by mystery and shock
Broken like bread
Like a flower shaken.
Acorn guts dropped out:
A dead gorilla unlocked from breeding trees,
Acorns with death in their baby eyes.
A hang-armed scarecrow in the wind:
What hit it? Got into it? Struck
So quietly between dawn and daylight?
With a dying grin and wooden wink
A lost interior cell relinquished its ghost:
In full spleen and abundant acorn
A horn of lightning gored it to the quick.
Trees move on Fenland
Uprooting men and houses on a march
To reach their enemy the sea.
Silent at the smell of watersalt
Treelines advance. The sea lies low,
Snake-noise riding on unruffled surf
While all trees wither and retreat.
Out of farm range or cottage eyes trees make war
Green heads, close as if to kiss
Roots to rip at quickening wood of tree-hearts
And tree-lungs, sap-running wood-flesh
Hurled at the moon, breaking oak
Like the dismemberment of ships,
At the truce of dawn wind trumpeting.
Sedate, dispassionate and beautiful
They know about panic and life and patience
Grow by guile into night’s
Companions and day’s evil
Setting landmarks and boundaries
That fight the worms.
Trees love, love love, love Death
Love a windscorched earth and copper sky
Love the burns of ice and fire
When lightning as a last hope is called in.
Boats on land they loathe the sea
And wait with all arms spread to catch the moon:
Pull back my skin and there is bark
Peel off my bark and there is skin:
I am a tree whose roots destroy me.
DITCHLING BEACON
End of life and before death
Feathers dipping towards oaken frost
A bird heard that shot:
The ink sky burst,
Stone colliding with the sun
Echo stunned its wing
String hauled it down.
Gamekeeper or poacher
Cut its free flight to the sea.
Vice had tongue, veins, teeth
Dogs in panoply, pressure
To ring a sunspot fitting neat
The blacked-out circle of a gun.
LIZARD
Fiddle-tongue and spite
Hang as if asleep
Safe on his tipped world,
But lizard-shoulders hunch
Pulsate at a fly on slanting wall.
Belly smooth, feet stuck firm
A thousand volts of paralyzing tongue
Rifle out and kill;
Weapons in one stomach pit.
Death is quick when looked on,
Sweet as food when the lamps of paradise
Blacken a brain that one day
Hoped to know.
Sparking tongue ignites
A common wink and into oblivion:
The lizard unaware of upside down
Eats as it runs.
EMPTY QUARTER
He meditates on the Empty Quarter:
Mosque of sand dissolving through eggtimer’s
Neck. Looks on camel-loads
Starting for Oman or Muscat
By invisible Mercator’s thread
That burns the hoof and shrivels
All humps of water. Empty Quarter lures,
He travels with his heaped caravan
Earth-tracks marked as lines
Of unstable land, golden sandgrit
Lifting up grey dunes near vulcan-
Trees and foul magnesium wells
That asps and camels drink from.
He throws off bells, beads, silk, guns
Knive
s and slippers, scattering all
No longer needed – camel meat
For scavengers, everything
But his own dishrags of flesh.
Naked and demented he hugs
A tree rooted in the widest waste
Catching dew from God at dawn
And dates dropping through rottenness,
Tastes the lone tree’s shade
No one can chop or whip him from,
Till one day ravelled in his own white flame
He abandons the Empty Quarter
And trudges back to terrify the world.
FIRST POEM
Burned out, burned out
Water of rivers hold me
On a course towards the sea.
Burned out was like a tree
Cut down and hollowed
No branches left
Seasoned by fire into a boat:
Burned out through love’s
Wilful spending
Yet sure it will float
Kindle a fresh blaze
Burn out again
On a stranger shore –
Unless pyromaniac emotions
Scorch me in midstream
And the sun turns black.
LOVE’S MANSION
To keep them healthily in thrall
They build a little fire in the hall –
And burn their opulent home to ash.
A ruin is better than no love at all.
Dark and ageing timbers crash
Cats surround it at full moon.
Did they abandon love too soon
Full of happiness to see it fall?
Let it fall, in sight of all
It kept them long enough in thrall
As cupboards burn and timbers fall.
They’re still inside, nowhere to run
No windows through which they can crawl;
Only the trapped and burning see it fall.
It kept them like a snake in thrall.
A ruin is better than no love at all.
They smile unhappily to see it fall.
TO BURN OUT LOVE
To burn out love is to burn a star from the sky
But can touch reach so far,
Feel the fire increase
Careful the heart but not the star will burn?
Star that pulsates like a fish:
My heart meets you in dark or light
To taste the waters of the star which says:
Trust once gone can never be restored –
Such love can surely be put out,
The power to break its fire with my fist.
SEATALK
Talking on the beach:
Love has broken its heart