Love in the environs of Voronezh
It’s far away, a handsome town
But what has it to do with love?
Guns and bombers smashed it down.
Yet love rebuilt it street by street
The dead would hardly know it now
And those who lived forgot retreat.
There’s no returning to the heart:
The dead to the environs go
Away from resurrected stone.
Reducible to soil and snow
They hem the town in hard as bone:
The outer zones of Voronezh.
GOODBYE KURSK
The thin moon sliced the heart out as it fell,
Then effortlessly made its way
To the earth’s true middle:
The only cure is to fall in love.
The moon gives back what it takes away.
Blocks of flats blot out the moon.
People live with happiness and work;
I left my love too soon, too soon,
So wait for me, it won’t seem long.
She put sugar in my coffee
Lit my cigarette
Fed my eyes with the glow of lost desire
Wept when I walked away.
Write to me: it won’t seem long.
Hull down: tanks are waiting.
I hear them coming through the dust.
FEBRUARY POEMS
Forests have turned into desert
Powdering the soul to ash,
But sand sends out new blossoms
Till flowers and trees grow strong again.
In the desert that was once a forest
Where eyes see only dust and fire,
Tears dry even as one drinks
On water freely flowing.
Sandgrains fly up nostrils
Turn cool in their protecting flesh,
Salting blood to make a forest
Before the soul can perish.
A brittle seed feeds on the deepest sandgrain
Where the sweated liquid of despair
Makes a forest from the driest desert.
***
Through a gap in snowlace curtains
Winter turns to fire and sun:
Heat makes the earth a board to spread on
Dust drummed solid by a white sun descending.
Needle-tips tattoo cat-scars on the sky,
Drum-beating letters burn: no escape
From the flat white iron of the sun,
No fauna living but serpent skeletons
Bleached so clean the weakest breath
Can blow such bones as dust.
The white-hot circle blacks out life:
Lie flat and stroke the earth
Before rain comes and rivers overflow.
***
Hope, a longing for something new,
Crushes the beetle of the past.
When hope takes hold its ruthlessness
Feeds on the purest fuel of injustice,
And sharpens the spike for action.
***
Whatever you want – bites the fingers.
Be careful what you want:
Wait for the chill river to separate the limits of desire,
For icy banks to break the watercourse
And sweep all venom clean.
***
Let go, feet tear ladder-rungs
Losing views of pepper dunes
Beyond ampersand trees
In the withered arm of the horizon.
Between the toll of heartsick
Into hole and hiding
The eye of winter’s snake-sun
Needles into the heart
Paralyzing both hands to let go.
***
Life begins when love’s game is ended.
Live, and death starts biting:
The game robs you of life.
A week of rain, and the house is an island,
A mudtrack after months of drought
Leads to the paved road.
A smell of spring freshens the brain,
And water slops at the bank as I wade through.
No black sky can finish off the never-ending game,
Or engines drown the memory of peace.
***
February forty times has arrowed towards spring,
None left behind,
Swirling fish that never vanish,
Colourless or rainbow
Twisting after strange journeys,
Paralyzing vast aquariums.
February is the tunnel’s end
A zodiac into soaking loam
When I watch the stars
To say a loud goodbye of welcome to.
Mimosa’s dead stench follows like a shadow
Never consumed by the sun
Or swilled by rain,
Rots like memories that went with it.
***
Be free, and endure happiness –
Summer like a dream from the grave
Rebuilds the heart.
Winter will bring an elegiac falling of the snow
And nurse the purest blossoms –
And green-eyed August
Spread the odour of a wheatfield’s death.
Choices bite however the performance.
Scattered seed can bring up crops and flowers
To rub out happiness or suffering.
***
Midnight comes at any hour.
Eagles out of sunlight bring it,
Shadows on the fields.
The sun throws broken eagles
Back against the stars.
The moon eats and grows fat.
The curtain opens to an empty sky.
LOVERS SLEEP
Flesh to flesh: there are two hearts between us
Mine on one side, yours on the other
Through which all thoughts must pass
Mine intercepting those from you
Yours beating strongly (I feel it doing so)
Taking my thoughts into the labyrinth of yours
From sleep of me to sleep of you
Till flesh and heart join in the deepest cave.
THE WEIGHT OF SUMMER
Summer’s iron is on the trees
A new weight to bear
Leap-year sap rising through lead
Forcing flower to give fruit
Green flame shifting up iron trunks
To poke out buds.
Leaves hang all summer
Shaken by rain and wind
Shrived by a little heat:
Such yearly swing must wear them
To a death so flat by autumn
That blood draws back
And lets the leaves go.
Trees suffer in frost and snow:
Force-fed by soil, drained by age
They brood and bide their time.
How many summers can they take such weight?
How long is life, how rich the earth,
How weak the heart?
ROSE
A rose about to open
Thinks air and sun
Can turn it into
Something it is not already.
The pink slit of life shows
Between tight green blades –
Hasn’t it seen enough
Without wanting everything?
Behind its packed unopened petals
Are roses still to flower
And blossoms not yet dropped;
Outside, those same are tempting it,
Scorched and shrivelled on the grass.
Rose about to open, why do you do it?
What force pushes
So subtly that it does not feel?
What beckoning power beyond
Draws it with perfume sweeter than
The one that will be made?
They promise nothing but the last decay:
The will to come or stay is not their own.
CREATION
God di
d not write.
He spoke.
He made.
His jackknife had a superblade –
He sliced the earth
And carved the water,
Made man and woman
By an act of slaughter.
He scattered polished diamonds
In the sky like dust
And gave the world a push to set it spinning.
What super-Deity got him beginning
Whispered in his ear on how to do it
Gave hints on what was to be done?
Don’t ask.
In his mouth he felt the sun
Spat it out because it burned;
From between his toes – the moon –
He could not walk so kicked it free.
His work was finished.
He put a river round his neck,
And vanished.
SIGNAL BOX
Level-crossing signal box
With three and a half hours between trains.
Bells stopped, gates shut and blocking the line:
Levers taller than himself palisade the moon,
He on the safer side.
Elbows space aside and tunnels
The last green spitter of sparks
Up the stars and soaking turf towards London,
Whispers along, snarling, a retreating song,
Signals on gauges like slicked hair downarrowed:
Line clear for the next open crossing.
Guard in waistcoat and jacket
(Good to children who just want to see)
Iron dragons slip through his fingers a hundred times a day
Responsibility too great to feel power,
Warning others down the line of its approach,
He sits by teaflask and prepares a book,
Needs an opium-portion to become
Captain of a rusting steamer
Crawling the coastal buffs of Patagonia,
Or Nemo in his flying boat
Lording at the Pole or South Sea hideout.
A good tale every night is better
That the telly or a homely bed.
Trains growl on steel snakes
Straight and sleeping close,
Locomotive kings of the dawn
Behind signals from another cured of sleep:
Wide gates open for the first black arrow
A circle in its packed and moving forehead,
As he closes his book
And lets the day pour through.
BARBARIANS
Walls he sat by had fallen long ago:
The city smoked after capture and rapine,
No brick left upon another.
These barbarians – this boy
Sitting on the littered scrub –
Belonged to a Scythian family
Who found the city as if following
A far-back shutter-flash,
Crazed with hope after a famished trudge
Over steppe whose herbs
Scorched by the haze of the sun
Pulled horses’ ribs so far in
They were almost dead.
By tale and memory this Scythian offshoot
Saw a glittering metropolis,
People and laden horses queueing to get out.
No brick upon another. While the boy’s
Mother scraped at rubbish
He played at tapping stone with stone
Cracked lips moving at the sky
Waiting for her to find food,
And idly placing one brick on another.
SOMME
A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:
Doesn’t matter where it came from
Has a dead fly stuck
At the lefthand corner
By a place called Longueval,
Rusty from blood sucked
Out of British or German soldiers
Long since gone over the top
Where many went to in those olden days.
Whoever it was sat on an upturned
Tin and smoked a pipe.
Summer was finished beyond the parapet
And winter not yet willing
To let him through the mist
Of that long valley he was told to cross,
While the earth shook from gnat-bites of gunfire
As if to shrug all men from its shoulders.
A fly dropped on the opened map
Feet of fur and bloated with soot
Crawled over villages he hoped to see.
Bemused he followed it
Curious to know at which point it would stop
And finally take off from,
For that might be
Where death would fall on him.
Scorning the gamble
He squashed the stolid fly
Whose blood now decorates the map
Pinned on my wall after fifty years gone by.
Night came, he counted men into the trench
And crouching on the last day of June
In the earthen slit that stank
Of soil and Woodbines, cordite and shit
Held the wick close to his exhausted eyes,
Shut the dim glow into its case
And ceased to think.
ALCHEMIST
Lead melts. If I saw lead, I melted it
Poured it into sand and made shapes.
I melted all my soldiers,
Watched that rifle wilt
In an old tin can on a gas flame
Like a straw going down
From an invisible spark of summer.
He stood to attention in the tin
Rim gripped by fanatic pliers
From the old man’s toolkit,
Looked on by beady scientific eyes
That vandalize a dapper grenadier.
The head sagged, sweating under a greater
Heat than Waterloo or Alma.
He leaned against the side
And lost an arm where no black grapeshot came.
His tired feet gave way,
A spreading pool to once proud groin,
Waist and busby falling in, as sentry-go
At such an India became too hard,
And he lay without pillow or blanket
Never to get up and see home again.
Another one, two more, I threw them in:
These went quicker, an elegant patrol
Dissolved in that infernal pit.
Eyes watering from fumes of painted
Soldiers melting under their own smoke,
The fire with me, hands hard at the plier grip
At soldiers rendered to peaceful lead
At the bottom of a tin.
Swords into ploughshares:
With the gas turned off I wondered
What to do with so much marvellous dead lead
That hardened like the surface of a pond.
VIEW FROM MISK HILL NEAR NOTTINGHAM
Armies have already met and gone.
When the best has happened
The worst is on its way.
Beware of its return in summer.
When fields are grey and should be green
Rub scars with ash and sulphur.
Full moon clears the land for its own view,
Whose fangs would bereave this field
Of hayrick and sheep.
In the quiet evening birds fly
Where armies are not fighting yet.
He looks a long way on at where he’ll walk:
A cratered highway with all hedges gone.
Green land dips and smells of fire.
Topography is wide down there.
The moon waxes and then emaciates.
Birds fatten on fields before migration:
Smoke in summer hangs between earth and sky,
On ground where armies have not fought
But lay their ambush to dispute his passing.
from Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979
LUCIFER’S ASTRONOMY LE
SSON
When Lucifer confessed his pride
His plans and turbulence
It was explained to him: the sun
Is fixed in its relation to the stars.
The stars are placed in their position
To each other. The planets with no heat or light
Get sufficient dazzle from the sun.
Satellites enlace the planets.
The earth, with its one moon
Revolves and in so doing
Takes a year to go lefthanded
In a lone ellipse around the fire of Heaven.
And now, a few celestial definitions:
The words came fast, like nadir
Zenith, equinox and solstice,
But when threatened with meridian
And (especially) declination
Lucifer shouted: Stop!
I’ve known this text from birth.
The Guardian of Sidereal Time
Is tired of the Party Line.
Navigators get their fix on me –
And so did God.
Right through my heart
The recognition-vectors
Set to split-infinities of Time
Came all too plain yet none too simple,
Each emotion a position-line
Pegged like witch-pins in the victim’s spleen.
Sextant-eye and timepiece heart
The brain set out in astronomic tables
Plot the way to harbour mouths
Where all life but Lucifer’s is understood.
His geologic heart reversed
By extra-galactic longing
Was sensed by God.
Rays leapt from Lucifer’s missiled sight:
A magnetic four-way flow
Confused the inner constant,
And mysterious refractions
Made him violent and obstinate,
Shifty and uncouth.
Habits lovable yet also vile
Were ludicrous in minor deities,
Holding mirrors to their chaos.
Handsome though he was, God kicked him out.
Lucifer keened in misery
But in the kernel of his fall
A final sentence frayed his lips:
‘God wills everyone to love like him.
In his own image must we love,
Or be stripped bare of everything but space.’
LUCIFER: THE OFFICIAL VERSION OF HIS FALL
Lucifer once ruled the nations
Till, raddled with perverted notions
He thought to ask God’s circling stars
To form a flight of gentle stairs
By which he’d scale the heavenly throne,
Defile it with the rebel stain.
He’d dominate the Mount of Meeting