His flesh bled gravel
In the sleepless cool of the night,
Gypsum and alabaster glowed at the moon:
Although I fell
Although you threw me to the heathens
Although you scattered me among
The far stars of the universe;
Moulded me in ice, let heat dissolve me,
Melted me in fire, let ice find me,
My day is at hand, and the effect of every vision.
Say to me where my sanctuary is,
Scatter me back up the galactic chimney of the Fall.
Lucifer walked between crimson cliffs
Found garnets in the soil that matched
The stone embedded in his forehead
Scooped them to the foldings of his cloak
And walked another forty days.
Granite islands glistened in vast seas of sand.
The mountains of Arabia were blue:
The effect of every vision was at hand.
The Sinaitic wind beyond Ophir
Cleaned shattered tanks and guns.
Lucifer pressed the metal that his fire had holed and melted,
A camel rooted thorns between the wheels.
When dark drew on to Egypt
The effect of every vision was at hand.
LUCIFER IN SINAI – 4
Lucifer was the mirror of God’s pride
Until his vanity
Created
Infamous
Fractures
Ending his reign yet marking his
Return to God.
Infamy
Stems
From believing pride to be
One’s possession, which sets you to
Retaliate against the weals of fate.
God has no pride. Lucifer’s mistake
In thinking so was responsible for the
Vanquishing of
Entire
Nations.
THE LAST
When God said
Let there be Man
He also said
Let there be Lucifer.
Lucifer became
And in becoming
Was the only threat to God.
Lucifer is part of God
And part of Man:
Unity is limitless
Small and indivisible.
Lucifer thought
God ruled through Lucifer
But God rules alone.
Man rules, if and when,
Through Lucifer.
Lucifer walks in circles,
With God forever present
And forever silent.
GOODBYE LUCIFER
Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye:
I say goodbye to everything;
When the end arrives and knocks its time
My body won’t dictate the tune
Nor my soul sing dead.
Goodbye, Utopia
Whose minute never came.
Goodbye –
In case I cannot say it then
Or death’s too slow for me to care.
Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye
People music language maps
Goodbye to love
And rivers alluvially curving.
Goodbye the sky.
Goodbye, Lucifer and all reflections,
Farewell to bodies and machinery
Goodbye the spirit of the universe
Goodbye.
from Sun Before Departure, 1974–1982
HORSE ON WENLOCK EDGE
A tired horse treads
The moonpocked face
Of a ploughed field
Cuts furrows blindly
Through drifting rain
On chestnut trees, soaked hedges
Energy sucked out with evening;
Seven nails in each steel shoe
Are empty scars of twenty-eight nights
When the white horse dreams
Of galloping through star-clouds,
A moon of nails flying from its path.
NOTTINGHAM CASTLE
Clouds play with their water
Distort shekels between grass
Enriched by the city that flattens
Surrounding land with rubbish;
Binoculars ring the distance like a gun:
From a sea of shining slate
Churches lift and chimneys lurch,
Modern blocks block visions,
The Robin Hood Rifles drilled in fours
Practised azimuths on far-off points,
Eyes watering at southern hills
A half-day’s march away:
‘They’ll have to swim the Trent, thou knows,
God-damn their goldfish eyes!’
Musket balls rush, break glass,
Make rammel. The Nottingham Lambs
Smashed more than a foreign army,
Came through twitchells to spark the rafters
Paint pillars with the soot of anarchy.
The Trent flowed in its scarlet coat
Too far off to deal with fire:
The council got our Castle in the end
Protected by Captain Albert Ball VC
Who thrust into a cloud-heap above Loos
Hoping for his forty-second kill.
In school they said: ‘You’re born
For Captain Albert Ball
To be remembered. Otherwise he’d die!’
A private soldier, he became Icarus:
‘Dearest Folks, I’m back again
In my old hut. My garden’s fine.
This morning I went up, attacked five Huns
Above the Line. Got one, and forced two down
But had to run, my ammunition gone.
Came back OK. Two hits on my machine.’
Fate mixed him to a concrete man
An angel overlooking
On the lawn of Nottingham’s squat fort.
My memory on the terrace
Remembers barges on the Leen
Each sail a slice of paper, writing
Packed in script of tunic-red.
For eighteen years I blocked the view
No push to send me flying.
Another brain shot down in sleep:
Rich Master Robin Hood outside the walls
Where he belongs robs me of time
And does not give it to the poor.
The whimsical statue stood
With hat and Sherwood weapons
Till a Nottingham Lamb removed the arrow
Someone later nicked the bow
Then they stole the man himself
And rolled his statue down the hill
One football Saturday
And splashed it in the Trent:
If you see it moving, take it:
If it doesn’t move, steal it bit by bit
But do not let it rest till Death’s sonic boom
Blows the sun through every Castle room.
OXNEY
Smoke all evening, too thin to move
Stubble aflame
Up a hillside when I drove
Across the flat half-mile between
Iden and the Isle of Oxney. A line
Of white, lipped in red set a corner
Of the battlefield on fire,
And cloud like a grey cloak was pulled along
By some heart-broken mourner going home.
NORTH STAR ROCKET
At the North Pole everywhere is south.
Turn where you will
Polaris in eternal zenith
Studs the world’s roof.
Under that ceiling
A grey rocket crosses
A continent of ice,
Evading Earth by flirting with it.
Who will know what planet he escaped from?
A cone of cosmic ash pursued its course
On automatic pilot set to earth
Bringing Death – or a new direction
To be fed into my brain
Before collision.
FIFTH AVENUE
A man plays bagpipes on Fifth Avenue.
Gaelic-wail stabbing at passersby
Who wish its pliant beckoning
Would draw them through their fence of discontent
To a field of freedom they can die in.
They stand, and then walk on.
A man with thick grey beard
Goes wild between traffic,
Arms wagging semaphore;
Raves warnings clear and loud
To those ignoring him.
A blind man rattles a money-can,
Dog flat between his legs
Listens to the demanding
Tin that has so little in
Both ears register
Each bit that falls.
An ambulance on a corner:
They put a man on a stretcher
Who wants air. A woman says:
‘Is it a heart-attack?
Is the poor guy dead?’
She worries for him:
Dying is important when it comes.
‘I suppose it is,’ I guess,
‘I hope it’s not too late’ –
She had one last year:
‘Fell in the street, just like that.’
Her lips move with fear.
The man is slid into the van.
Just like that.
Hard to come and harder go
For the bagpipe player in the snow
The wild man with his traffic sport
The old man with his dog
And the young who hurry:
Dying, a lot of it goes on.
THE LADY OF BAPAUME
There was a lady of Bapaume
Whose eyes were colourless and dead –
Until the falling sun turned red;
Her lovers from across the foam
Walked at dawn towards her bed:
Fell in fields and sunken lanes
Died in chalk-dust far from home.
A rash of scattered poppy-stains:
Nowadays they pass her wide –
That mistress of chevaux-de-frise
Is still alive and can’t conceal
Her mournful and erotic zeal:
The lady of Bapaume had charms –
Bosom large, but minus arms.
No soldiers rise these days and go
Towards the bloodshot indigo.
Motorways veer by the place
On which, with neither love nor grace,
They drive to holidays in Spain.
There was a lady of Bapaume
Whose lovers ate the wind and rain.
STONES IN PICARDY
Names fade,
Suave air of Picardy erodes
The regimental badge
Or cross
Or David’s Star
Of gunner this and private that.
The chosen captains and their bombardiers
And those known but as nothing unto God
Who brought them out of slime and clay
Are taken back again.
God knew each before they knew themselves
If ever they did
Before mothers lips sang
Brothers showed
Sisters taught
Fathers put them out to school or work.
But only God may know them when the stones are gone
If any can –
If God remembers what God once had done.
AUGUST
Birth, the first attack, begins at dawn.
It’s also the last, whistle at sky-fall,
Illogical, unsynchronized, inept.
Children, pushed over the top
And kettledrummed across churned furrows
Kitted out with dreams and instinct,
Hope to learn before reaching the horizon.
Those in front call back advice:
‘Going to advance, send reinforcements.’
But who trust the old, when they as young
Spurned cautionary wisdom
That never harmonized with youth?
‘Going to a dance, send three-and-fourpence.’
Some fall quietly under each rabid burst of shell
Love of life unnoticed
In willingness to give it
Or the feckless letting-go.
Leaves drop in the zero-hour of spring
Young heat mangled by car or motorbike.
Broken sight looks in, no view beyond
Though terror rocks the heart to sleep
The signal-sky gives bad advice:
Get up, look outside, day again.
Insight warped by energy, blinded by ignorance.
The battlefield too wide,
Bullets rage at friends and parents
Strangers stunned in the lime-pits of oblivion.
Who blame for this sublime attack?
Did Brigadier-General God in his safe bunker plan?
He horsebacks by, devoted cheers.
Choleric face knows too much to tell –
It’s dangerous for any smile to show.
Whoever is cursed must be believed in
For Baal is dead. Get up. Push on.
Want to live forever?
Go through. No psychic wound can split
Or leg be lost at that onrushing slope.
Halfway, more craven, sometimes too clever,
Old campaigners want a hole to flatten in
Before rot of the brain encircles
Or Death’s concealed artillery
Plucks fingers from the final parapet.
Silence kills as quickly, you can bet.
Live on. Death pulls others in
Not you, or me, or us (not yet).
Earth underfoot is kind but waiting,
Green sea flows on the right flank,
Black rain foils the leftward sun,
Poppy clouds and mustard fields
Tricked out with dead ground, full woods,
Lateral valleys flecked with cornflowers.
Time falls away. Battle deceptively recedes,
Peace lulls to the final killing ground,
Familiar voices coming up behind.
TERRORIST
The protest against Death
Is a raised fist, the face
Of corruption bewails its declining
Gift of life. I go when chosen for taking.
The sky bruises the aching fist. Air mellows
The corroded face. You did not choose me.
I parted myself long ago when I sat
On a branch overlooking boathouse
And bulrushes, and the lake water
On which nothing moved
Except the breath of words
Saying no seven times all told.
I didn’t stay to hear the answer
Turned blind in Death’s donkey-circle
Till the rag around my fist
Was bloodsoaked from hitting the trees.
RABBIT
A busy rabbit young and small
Cornered our vegetable plot,
Chewing green treasure,
Tail upright from line to line
In rabbit-fashion,
An all-providing God set out
Row on row of grub,
Scarpered back to thistles
Till heavy-treading vengeance went away.
The fur-lined malefactor fed a fortnight
On lettuce carrots peas,
Slyly keeping news from friends below.
Laden gun half-aimed, I stalked:
That gorging salad-engine’s tender paws
Which sensed the weight of lead shot in my pocket,
And soft-footed off before I reached the hedge.
My shadow half-close,
Approaching blackout had low odds
On lead-slug hitting his well-padded neck.
It never did
Though if that produce had been all
Between us and hu
nger
The senses would have sharpened
And my gun been God Almighty.
MOTH
Drawn by the white glitter of a lamp
A slick-winged moth got in
My midnight room and ran quick
Around the switches of a radio.
Antennae searched the compact powerpacks
And built-in aerials, feet on metal paused
At METER-SELECT, MINIMUM-MAX
TUNER, VOLUME, TONE
Licked up shortwave stations onto neat
Click-buttons with precision feet.
Unable to forego the next examination
My own small private moth seemed all
Transistor-drunk on fellow-feeling,
A voluptuous discovery pulled
From some far bigger life.
A thin and minuscule antenna
Felt memory backtuning as it crawled
Familiar mechanism, remembering an instrument
Once cherished,
Forgotten but loved for old times’ sake.
I switched the wireless on, and the moth
To prove its better senses
Mocked me with open wings and circled the light,
Making its own theatre, which outran all music.
FISHES
Fishes never change their habits:
A million years seem like a day
As far as fishes’ habits go.
Beware of those who change them half as fast
Like people every year or so
So fast you cannot find
A firm limb or settled eye.
The constancy of fishes is unique.
They multiply but keep their habits
In deep and solitary state;
Feel unique and all alone
Not being touched and hardly touching
Even to keep the species spreading –
Unique is never-changing habits.
Fishes are flexible and fit the water,
And though continually moving
Never change their habits.
THISTLES
Thistles grow in spite of flowers,
Brittle taproots drawing succour till the autumn.
Seeds flop from the hedge
And at puberty suck their fill by beans and carrots.
Entrenching blade hacks soil,
And fingers under thistle-spikes grip,
And easily out it’s tossed to the sun’s bake.
A dry and useless thistle pricks –
Fingers gather and inflate with pus:
For weeks the memory of pain.
RELEASE
Flowers wilt, leaves feloniously snatched,
Birds sucked away – autumn happens.