Among the grown beasts. I am appalled
At the scratching of hungry fingers at the door,
Already. Two handfuls of years, no more,
And what of this heartbreak changeling will be left?
‘BERYL IS THE DAUGHTERLY DAUGHTER’
Beryl is the daughterly daughter:
The rankest filial piety oozes
From the flesh that she washes in greasy water
And the pallid pie that the cat refuses.
Mother and womb must come to dust;
The gone, what else can compensate?
In sheer devotion then she must
Inherit the entire estate.
EPIGRAPH ON A PRINTER
He, who did not originate the Word,
Yet brought the Word to man when man was ripe
To read the Word. But that ill-bound, absurd
Book of his body’s gone. A mess of type
That death broke up reads greater nonsense now.
Now God re-writes him, prints him, binds him, never
To fail or be forgotten: God knows how
To make one copy that is read for ever.
THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
I have raised and poised a fiddle
Which, will you lend it ears,
Will utter music’s model:
The music of the spheres.
By God, I think not Purcell
Nor Arne could match my airs.
Perfect beyond rehearsal
My music of the spheres.
Not that its virtue’s vastness –
The terror of drift of stars
For subtlety and softness
My music of the spheres.
The spheres that feed its working
Their melody swells and soars
On thinking of your marking
My music of the spheres.
This music and this fear’s
Work of your maiden years.
Why shut longer your ears?
Look how the live earth flowers!
The land speaks my intent:
Bear me accompaniment.
‘NOT, OF COURSE, THAT EITHER OF US THOUGHT’
Not, of course, that either of us thought
We were too good for this world. No such thought
Had ever entered heads lacking in thought.
But shall I say there was a sort of hopelessness, a sort of
Sickness which further living could not cure,
Aggravate rather. We started off with those certain loves
Of desires for love which men have, such as,
Being English, a desire to love England.
But we saw England delivered over to the hands of
The sneerers and sniggerers, the thugs and grinners,
England become a feeble-lighted
Moon of America, our very language defiled
And become slick and gum-chewing.
Oh, and the great unearthed and their heads
Kicked about for footballs. We saw nastiness
Proclaimed as though it were rich natural
Cream and the fourth-rater exalted
So long as her tits were big enough. Alas
For England. England is not an England
We would wish to stand and see defiled further –
We’ve all betrayed our past, we’ve killed the dream
Our fathers held. Look at us now, look at us:
Shuddering waiting for the bomb to burst,
The ultimate, but not with dignity, oh no.
Grinning like apes in pointed shoes and grinning
National Health teeth, clicking our off-beat fingers
To juke-box clichés, waiting
For death to overtake us, rejecting choice
Because choice seems no longer there. But to two at least
Choice shone, a sun, a gleam of Stoic death.
Better out of it steak and kidney
Steak meets kidney and asks to dance
KNOCK KNOCK
The band strikes up with one-er two-er three
It might as well be steak and kidney pie I can always
Boil some potatoes no need for a second
Vegetable
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK
‘IN THIS SPINNING ROOM, REDUCED TO A COMMON NOUN’
In this spinning room, reduced to a common noun,
Swallowed by the giant stomach of Eve,
The pentecostal sperm came hissing down.
I was nowhere, for I was anyone –
The grace and music easy to receive:
The patient engine of a stranger son.
His laughter was fermenting in the cell,
The fish, the worm were chuckling to achieve
The rose of the disguise he wears so well.
And though, by dispensation of the dove,
My flesh is pardoned of its flesh, they leave
The rankling of a wrong and useless love.
‘PERHAPS I AM NOT WANTED’
‘Perhaps I am not wanted then’, he said
‘Perhaps I’d better go’,
He said. Motionless her eyes, her head,
Saying not yes, not no.
‘I will go then, and aim my gun of grief
At any man’s or country’s enemies.’
He said. ‘Slaughter will wreak a red relief.’
She said not no, not yes.
And so he went to marry mud and toil
Swallow in general hell his private hell.
His salts have long drained into alien soil,
And she says nothing still.
‘TOMORROW THERE WILL BE LOVE FOR THE LOVELESS, AND FOR THE LOVER LOVE’
Tomorrow will be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.
The day of the primal marriage, the copulation
Of the irreducible particles; the day when Venus
Sprang fully armed from the wedding blossoms of spray
And the green dance of the surge, while the flying horses
Neighed and whinnied about her, the monstrous conchs
Blasted their intolerable joy.
Tomorrow will be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.
The swans, with garrulous throats, crash through the pools
In a blare of brass; the girl that Tereus
Forced to his will complains endlessly
Among the poplars, desperately forcing
The heartbreak message through, but only forcing
More and more ironic sweetness till
The ear faints with excess of sweetness.
Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.
The scrubbing and dusting, the worry about what to eat,
The stretched elastic of wages and housekeeping money
Ready to snap, the vertigo vista of debt
Shall no longer seem important; the housewife’s fingers
Shall love their creases of grime; the husband’s hair,
Receding, will give him a look of Shakespeare. Honey
Will flow from the lips that meet in perfunctory greeting;
The goodnight kiss will suddenly open a door,
And sleep then will be a bouquet with lights and music.
Tomorrow shall be luck for the luckless, and for the lucky luck
The luckless punter will have unbelievable luck
And the bookmaker doubt his vocation. Houses will echo
With a fabulous smell of frying onions, steaks
Will be feather beds of salivating thickness.
Beer will bite like a lover and prolong its caress
Like cool arms in a hot bed. And clocks
Shall, in the headlong minute before closing time,
Not swoop to the kill, but hover indefinitely,
Like beneficent hawks.
Tomorrow shall be love for the loveless, and for the lover love.
The bed will be no monster’s labyrinth,
But spirals winding to a blin
ding apex,
Sharp as a needle, where the last shred of self
Is peeled off painlessly, and space and time are bullied
Into carrying their own burdens. Tomorrow
Shall be love for the loveless
And for the lover love.
The map of love, spread on our knees, disclosing
The miraculous journey, shall not terrify
With lack of compass points, with monstrous patches
Of terra incognita. Every sea-lane
Leads us home to each other, and always home
Is a new continent, of inconceivable richness.
‘TO ENDYMION’
The moon awaits your sleeping: fear to be kissed.
Tepid her light unblenching, but will twist
Your features to strange shapes; though blind, those
Beams
Get in the mind’s slime monsters for dreams.
‘THE STOAT’S CRY’
The stoat’s cry tears long slivers of the night,
And, luminous, the owl in the rustling fruit
Draws up the sweating lovers by the root;
They warm in water-blankets worlds of fright –
‘AND HIS HOOVES HAMMER ME BACK INTO THE GROUND’ ’
And his hooves hammer me back into the ground,
The four gospel hammers, till, in that corn death,
I am promised to be queen of the bellied wheat.
I pray a last thanks in my killing breath,
Glad to be ripped, torn of the panting hollow,
While his one eye glows, the angels carry away
The suffocating forge to become the sun,
Who throbs in waves to suck the fainting day.
‘PIGS SNORT FROM THE YARD’
Pigs snort from the yard.
Above, gulls mew and heckle.
Memory’s shadows speckle
The blind, with its swinging chord.
‘GASPING IN THE DUNNY IN THE DEAD OF DARK’
Gasping in the dunny in the dead of dark,
I dream of my boola-bush, sunning in the south,
And the scriking of the ballbird and Mitcham’s lark,
And bags of the sugarwasp, sweet in my mouth.
For here in the city is the dalth of coves,
Their stuff and their slart and the fall of sin,
The beerlout’s spew where the nightmort roves
And the festered craw of the filth within.
God’s own grass for the porrow in my tail,
Surrawa’s lake for this puke and niff,
Prettytit’s chirp for the plonky’s nipper’s wail,
And the rawgreen growler under Bellarey’s Cliff.
‘DRAGGED FROM HIS DOINGS’
Dragged from his doings in the roar of youth,
Snipped like the stem of a caldicot flower
Snarled time’s up ere he’d quaffed his hour,
Tossed to the tearing of the dour dog’s tooth.
Bye, my brad, let the bright booze pour
That is suds of stars in the Milky Way,
And its door swing open all the joylit day
And the heavenlord landlord cry you time no more.
‘ARCHANGELS BLASTING FROM INNER SPACE’
Archangels blasting from inner space,
Pertofan, Tryptizol, Majeptil,
Parstelin and Librium.
And a serenace for all his tangled strings.
‘BELLS BROKE IN THE LONG SUNDAY’
Bells broke in the long Sunday, a dressing-gown day.
The childless couple basked in the central heat.
The papers came on time, the enormous meat
Sang in the oven. On the thick carpets lay
Thin panther kittens locked in clawless play –
Bodies were firm, their tongues clean and their feet
Uncalloused. All their wine was new and sweet.
Recorders, unaccompanied, crooned away –
Coiled on the rooftree, bored, inspired, their snake
Crowed Monday in. A collar kissed the throat,
Clothes braced the body, a benignant ache
Lit up a tooth. The papers had a note:
‘His death may mean an empire is at stake’;
Sunday and this were equally remote.
‘USELESS TO HOPE TO HOLD OFF’
Useless to hope to hold off
The unavoidable happening
With that frail barricade
Of week, day or hour
Which melts as it is made,
For time himself will bring
You in his high-powered car,
Rushing on to it,
Whether you will or not.
So, shaking hands with the grim
Satisfactory argument,
The consolation of bone
Resigned to the event,
Making a friend of him,
He, in an access of love,
Renders his bare acres
Golden and wide enough.
And this last margin of leaving
Is sheltered from the rude
Indiscreet tugging of winds.
For parting, a point in time,
Cannot have magnitude
And cannot cast shadows about
The final kiss and final
Tight pressure of hands.
CURTAL SONNET
And so the car plunged in the singing green
Of sycamore and riot-running chestnut and oak
That squandered flame, cut a thousand arteries and bled
Flood after summer flood, spawned an obscene
Unquenched unstanchable green world sea, to choke
The fainting air, drown sun in its skywise tread.
But the thin tuning-fork of one of the needs of men,
The squat village letter-box, approached, awoke,
In a giant shudder, the monstrous organ then
Took shape and spoke.
‘SHREWSBURY, SHREWSBURY, ROUNDED BY RIVER’
Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, rounded by river
The envious Severn like a sleeping dog
That wakes at whiles to snarl and slaver
Or growls in its dream its snores of fog.
Lover-haunted in the casual summer:
A monstrous aphrodisiac,
The sun excites in the noonday shimmer,
When Jack is sweating, Joan on her back.
Sick and sinless in the anaemic winter:
The nymphs have danced off the summer rout,
The boats jog on the fraying painter,
The School is hacking its statesmen out.
The pubs dispense their weak solution
The unfructified waitresses bring their bills,
While Darwin broods on evolution,
Under the pall of a night that chills –
– But smooths out the acne of adolescence
As the god appears in the fourteenth glass
And the urgent promptings of tumescence
Lead to the tumbled patch of grass.
Time and the town go round like the river,
But Darwin thinks in a line that is straight.
A sort of selection goes on for ever,
But no new species originate.
‘I SOUGHT SCENT’
I sought scent, and found it in your hair;
Looked for light, and it lodged in your eyes;
So for sound: it held your breath dear;
And I met movement in your ways.
‘THE URGENT TEMPER OF THE LAWS’
The urgent temper of the laws,
That clips proliferation’s claws,
Shines from the eye that sees
A growth is a disease.
Only the infant will admire
The vulgar opulence of fire
To tyrannize the dumb
Patient continuum.
And, while the buds burst, hug and hold
&nb
sp; A cancer that must be controlled
And moulded till it fit
These forms not made for it.
FROM ‘THE CIRCULAR PAVANE’
They thought they’d see it as parenthesis –
Only the naked statement to remember,
Cleaving no logic in their sentences,
Putting no feelers out to the waking dreamer –
So they might reassume untaken seats,
Finish their coffee and their arguments,
From the familiar hooks redeem their hats
And leave, with the complacency of friends.
But strand is locked with strand, like the weave of bread,
And this is part of them and part of time –
‘AT THE END OF THE DARK HALL’
At the end of the dark hall he found his love
Who, flushed and gay,
Pounded with walking hand and flying fingers
The grinning stained teeth for a wassail of singers
That drooped around, while on the lid above
The dog unnoticed, waiting, lolling lay.
He noticed, cried, dragged her away from laughter.
Lifts on the frantic road
From loaded lorries helpful to seek safe south
Slyly sidestreeted north. Each driver’s mouth,
Answering her silly jokes, he gasped at after
The cabin-door slammed shut: the dogteeth showed.
At last, weary, out of the hot noon’s humming,
Mounting his own stair
It was no surprise to find a mother and daughter,
The daughter she. Hospitable, she gave him water.
Windless, the shutters shook.
A quiet voice said: ‘I’m coming.’
‘Oh God God it’s the dog’, screamed the daughter,
But he, up the miles or leaden water,
Frantically beat for air.
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Anciently the man who showed
Hate to his father with the sword
Was bundled in a dark sack
With a screaming ape to claw his back
And the screaming talk of a parrot to mock