Who’s looking?
did a fish jump?
– and then a heron goes up
from its place by the willow.
With ballooning flight
it picks up the sky
and makes off, loaded.
I wasn’t looking,
I heard the noise of its wings
and I turned,
I thought of a friend,
a cool one with binoculars,
here’s rarity
with big wing-flaps, suiting itself.
One yellow chicken
One yellow chicken
she picks up expertly and not untenderly
from the conveyor of chickens.
Its soft beak gobbles feverishly
at a clear liquid which might be
a dose of sugar-drenched serum –
the beak’s flexible membrane
seems to engulf the chicken
as it tries to fix on the dropper’s glass tip.
Clear yellow juice gulps through a tube
and a few drops, suddenly colourless,
swill round a gape wide as the brim of a glass
but the chicken doesn’t seem afraid –
or only this much, only for this long
until the lab assistant flicks it back on
to the slowly moving conveyor of chickens
and it tumbles, catches itself,
then buoyed up by the rest
reels out of sight, cheeping.
Sailing to Cuba
I’d climbed the crab-apple in the wind
that wild season of Cuba,
I leaned out on the twigs
to where clouds heeled over like sails
on the house-bounded horizon,
but even from here I felt the radio throb
like someone who was there when the accident happened
‘not two yards from where I was standing’,
then Big Band music cha-cha’d from room to room
to fill in time between news.
At school we learned ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh
from distant Ophir…’ The ships nudged closer.
The wind roared to itself like applause.
Off the West Pier
Dropped yolks of shore-lamp quiver on tarmac –
the night’s disturbed and the sea itself
sidles about after its storm, buttery,
melting along the groynes.
The sea’s a martinet with itself,
will come this far and no farther
like a Prussian governess
corrupted by white sugar –
Oh but the stealth
with which it twitches aside mortar
and licks, and licks
moist grains off the shore.
By day it simply keeps marching
beat after beat like waves of soldiers
timed to the first push. In step with the music
it swells greenness and greyness, spills foam
onto a fly-swarming tide-line –
beertabs and dropped King Cones,
flotsam of inopportune partners
sticky with what came after.
A man lies on his back
settled along the swell, his knees
glimmering, catching a lick of moonlight,
lazy as a seagull on Christmas morning –
He should have greased himself with whale-blubber
like a twelve-year-old Goddess-chested
cross-Channel swimmer.
His sadness stripes through him like ink
leaving no space or him.
He paws slow arm sweeps and rolls
where the sea shoulders him.
Up there an aeroplane falters,
its red landing-lights on
scouting the coast home.
The pilot smokes a cigarette.
Its tip winks with each breath.
Winter 1955
We’re strung out on the plain’s upthrust,
bubbles against the sill of the horizon.
Already the dark folds each figure to itself
like a mother putting on her child’s overcoat,
or a paid attendant, who quickly and deftly
slots goose-pimpled arms into their stoles.
My own mother is attending to her daughters
in the Christmas gloom of our long garden
before the others are born.
A stream’s tongue takes its first courses:
in siren suits and our cheek-hugging bonnets
we put one foot each in that water.
Now standstill clumps sink and disappear
over the plate-edge of the world.
The trees hold up fingers like candelabra,
blue and unsure as the word ‘distant’.
Casually heeled there, we circle
the New Look skirts of our mother.
The attendant’s hands skim on a breast
fused into party-going ramparts of taffeta,
but he takes up his gaze into the hall
as if there’s nothing to be sorry or glad for,
and nothing in the snowy eternity
that feathers his keyhole.
Rinsing
In the corded hollows of the wood
leaves fall.
How light it is.
The trees are rinsing themselves of leaves
like Degas laundresses, their forearms
cold with the jelly-smooth
blue of starch-water.
The laundresses lean back and yawn
with their arms still in the water
like beech-boughs, pliant
on leavings of air.
In the corded hollows of the wood
how light it is.
How my excitement
burns in the chamber.
To Betty, swimming
You’re breast-up in the bubbling spaces you make for yourself,
your head in the air, pointy, demure,
ridiculous in its petalled swim-cap.
You chug slowly across the pool.
Your legs trail. Your arms won’t sweep
more than a third of the full stroke,
yet when you look up you’re curling with smiles,
complicit as if splashed
with mile-deep dives from the cliff’s height.
In Berber’s Ice Cream Parlour
A fat young man in BERBER’S ICE CREAM PARLOUR
under a tiled ceiling the colour of farm butter
with a mirror at 45o to his jaw.
His moist jowls, lucent and young
as the tuck where a baby’s buttock and thigh join,
quiver a little, preparing
to meet the order he’s given.
A tall glass skims the waitress’s breasts.
He holds on, spoon poised
to see if the syrup’ll trickle right
past the mound of chopped nuts to the ice-
white luscious vanilla sheltering
under its blanket of cream.
The yellow skin weakens and melts.
He devotes himself,
purses his lips to wrinkling-point,
digs down with the long spoon
past jelly and fruit
to the depths, with the cool
inching of an expert.
Beside him there’s a landscape in drained pink
and blue suggesting the sea
with an audacious cartoon economy.
They’ve even put in one white triangle
to make the horizon. A sail.
Large creamy girls mark the banana splits
with curls and squiggles,
pour sauce on peach melbas,
thumb in real strawberries.
Their bodies sail behind the counters,
balloons tight at the ropes, held down
by a customer’s need for more clotted cream
topping on his three-tier chocolate sundae.
Th
ey have eight tables to serve.
With their left hands they slap out the change
and comets smelling of nickel
for kids’ take-away treats,
and over on the bar counter there’s room
for adult, luxurious absorption
of dark mocha ice cream.
Flowing, damp-curled, the waitresses
pass with their trays
doubled by mirrors, bumping like clouds.
On drinking lime juice in September
(for Patrick Charnley)
How the sick body calms itself
and knows it is blissful to live.
The lime juice of long voyages
fans through each tissue.
Ultramarine stands at the masts,
the long wake purls, barbarous sailors
wait round the canvas, heads bowed.
The captain, your ancestor,
fell from the grace of his life one voyage
west from Australia. They made him
his shroud of sailcloth with quick stitches.
They stole his book of the burial service
out of his pocket: now it was theirs
to read through slowly, becalmed,
in its long, sea-remembering cadences.
They launched his vessel of flesh
where it would dive, darken,
cast up its sewn air,
its gene code with a hundred answers.
Not going to the forest
If you had said the words ‘to the forest’
at once I would have gone there
leaving my garden of broccoli and potato-plants.
I would not have struggled
to see the last ribbons of daylight
and windy sky tear over the crowns
of the oaks which stand here,
heavy draught animals
bearing, continually bearing.
I would have rubbed the velvety forest
against my cheek like the pincushion
I sewed with invisible stitches.
No. But you said nothing
and I have a child to think of
and a garden of parsnips and raspberries.
It’s not that I’m afraid,
but that I’m still gathering
the echoes of my five senses –
how far they’ve come with me, how far
they want to go on.
So the whale-back of the forest
shows for an instant, then dives.
I think it has oxygen within it
Lutherans
Whichever way I turned on the radio
there was Sibelius
or an exceptionally long weather forecast.
Good practice: I’d purse up my lips
to the brief gulp of each phrase.
Sometimes I struck a chord with the World Service’s
sense-fuzz, like the smell of gardenia
perfume in Woolworth’s: instantly cloying,
the kind that doesn’t bloom on your skin,
or, in the two P.M. gloom of the town square,
I’d catch the pale flap of a poster
for the Helsingin Sanomat: POMPIDOU KUOLLUT.
I’d buy one, but never wrestle beyond the headline.
When pupils asked what I thought of ‘this three-day week’
I’d mention the candle-blaze
nightly in my room during the power-cuts,
and the bronchitis I had,
but I’d balance the fact that I smoked too much
against the marsh-chill when the heating went off.
I’d always stop on the railway bridge
even at one in the morning. The city was shapeless, squeezed in
by hills bristling with Sitka spruce.
The drunks had their fires lit
but they were slow, vulnerable, frozen
while flaming on a half-litre from the State Alcohol Shop.
If their luck held they’d bunch on the Sports Hall heating-grates
rather than be chipped free from a snow heap
in the first light of ten in the morning,
among a confusion of fur-hatted burghers
going to have coffee and cakes.
Work started at eight, there was never enough time.
They’d stop, chagrined, and murmur ‘It’s shocking’.
They were slowly learning not to buy the full-cream milk
of their farming childhoods; there was a government campaign
with leaflets on heart disease and exercise
and a broadsheet on the energy crisis
with diagrams suggesting the angles
beyond which windows should never be opened.
Their young might be trim, but they kept
a pious weakness for sinning on cake
and for those cloudy, strokeable hats
that frame Lutheran pallor.
After an evening visit to gym, they’d roll
the green cocoon of their ski-suited baby
onto the pupils’ table. Steadied with one hand
it lay prone and was never unpacked.
FROM
The Raw Garden
(1988)
To Mike Levine and David Stewart
Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden
The Raw Garden is a collection of closely related poems, which are intended to speak to, through, and even over each other. The poems draw their full effect from their setting; they feed from each other, even when the link is as mild as an echo of phrasing or cadence.
It is now possible to insert new genes into a chromosomal pattern. It is possible to feed in new genetic material, or to remove what is seen as faulty or damaged material. The basic genetic code is contained in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and its molecular structure is the famous double helix, so called because it consists of two complementary spirals which match each other like the halves of a zip. Naturally occurring enzymes can be used to split the double strand, and to insert new material. The separate strands are then recombined to form the complete DNA helix. By this process of gene-splicing a new piece of genetic information can be inserted into a living organism, and can be transmitted to the descendants of the organism.
It seems to me that there is an echo of this new and revolutionary scientific process in the way each poet feeds from the material drawn together in a long poetic tradition, “breaks” it with his or her individual creative voice, and re-combines it through new poems.
One thing I have tried to do in these poems is to explore the effect which these new possibilities of genetic manipulation may have on our concept of what is natural and what is unnatural. If we can not follow Romantic poets in their assumption of a massive, unmalleable landscape which moulds the human creatures living upon it and provides them with a constant, stable frame of reference, then how do we look at landscape and at the “natural”? We are used to living in a profoundly human-made landscape. As I grew up I realised that even such apparently wild places as moors and commons were the product of human decisions and work: people had cut down trees, grazed animals, acquired legal rights. But still this knowledge did not interfere with my sense that these places were natural.
The question might be, what does it take to disturb the sense of naturalness held by the human being in his or her, landscape? Is there a threshold beyond which a person revolts at a feeling that changedness has gone too far? Many of these poems focus on highly manipulated landscapes and outcrops of “nature”, and on the harmonies and revulsions formed between them and the people living among them.
Perhaps the Garden of Eden embodies some yearning to print down an idea of the static and the predictable over our knowledge that we have to accept perpetual changeability. The code of the Garden of Eden has been broken open an infinite number of times. Now we are faced with a still greater potential for change, since we have acquired knowledge of the double helix structure of DNA. If t
he Garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light off roadside snow. This Garden of Eden propagates itself in strange ways, some of which find parallels in far-fetched horticultural techniques such as air layering, or growing potatoes in a mulch of rotted seaweed on white sand. I hope that these poems do not seem to hanker back to a prelapsarian state of grace. If I want to celebrate anything, it is resilience, adaptability, and the power of improvisation.
Seal run
The potatoes come out of the earth bright
as if waxed, shucking their compost,
and bob against the palm of my hand
like the blunt muzzles of seals swimming.
Slippy and pale in the washing-up bowl
they bask, playful, grown plump
in banks of seaweed on white sand,
seaweed hauled from brown circles
set in transparent waters off Easdale
all through the sun-fanned West Highland midnights
when the little potatoes are seeding there
to make necklaces under the mulch,