Those eyes in their helmet
Still wired direct
To the nuclear core – they alone
Laser the lark-shaped hole
In the lark’s song.
You find the fallen spurs, among soft ashes.
And maybe you find him
Materialised by twilight and dew
Still as a listener –
The warrior
Blue shoulder-cloak wrapped about him
Leaning, hunched,
Among the oaks of the harp.
Wolfwatching
Woolly-bear white, the old wolf
Is listening to London. His eyes, withered in
Under the white wool, black peepers,
While he makes nudging, sniffing offers
At the horizon of noise, the blue-cold April
Invitation of airs. The lump of meat
Is his confinement. He has probably had all his life
Behind wires, fraying his eye-efforts
On the criss-cross embargo. He yawns
Peevishly like an old man and the yawn goes
Right back into Kensington and there stops
Floored with glaze. Eyes
Have worn him away. Children’s gazings
Have tattered him to a lumpish
Comfort of woolly play-wolf. He’s weary.
He curls on the cooling stone
That gets heavier. Then again the burden
Of a new curiosity, a new testing
Of new noises, new people with new colours
Are coming in at the gate. He lifts
The useless weight and lets it sink back,
Stirring and settling in a ball of unease.
All his power is a tangle of old ends,
A jumble of leftover scraps and bits of energy
And bitten-off impulses and dismantled intuitions.
He can’t settle. He’s ruffling
And re-organizing his position all day
Like a sleepless half-sleep of growing agonies
In a freezing car. The day won’t pass.
The night will be worse. He’s waiting
For the anaesthetic to work
That has already taken his strength, his beauty
And his life.
He levers his stiffness erect
And angles a few tottering steps
Into his habits. He goes down to water
And drinks. Age is thirsty. Water
Just might help and ease. What else
Is there to do? He tries to find again
That warm position he had. He cowers
His hind legs to curl under him. Subsides
In a trembling of wolf-pelt he no longer
Knows how to live up to.
And here
Is a young wolf, still intact.
He knows how to lie, with his head,
The Asiatic eyes, the gunsights
Aligned effortless in the beam of his power.
He closes his pale eyes and is easy,
Bored easy. His big limbs
Are full of easy time. He’s waiting
For the chance to live, then he’ll be off.
Meanwhile the fence, and the shadow-flutter
Of moving people, and the roller-coaster
Roar of London surrounding, are temporary,
And cost him nothing, and he can afford
To prick his ears to all that and find nothing
As to forest. He still has the starlings
To amuse him. The scorched ancestries,
Grizzled into his back, are his royalty.
The rufous ears and neck are always ready.
He flops his heavy running paws, resplays them
On pebbles, and rests the huge engine
Of his purring head. A wolf
Dropped perfect on pebbles. For eyes
To put on a pedestal. A product
Without a market.
But all the time
The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,
The incredibly rich will, torn up
In neurotic boredom and eaten,
Now indigestible. All that restlessness
And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming
Of nose, is like a trembling
Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.
Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening
To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered
By the hour-glass panic of lemmings
Dwindling out of reach? He’s run a long way
Now to find nothing and be patient.
Patience is suffocating in all those folds
Of deep fur. The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him
And go back into pebbles. His eyes
Keep telling him all this is real
And that he’s a wolf – of all things
To be in the middle of London, of all
Futile, hopeless things. Do Arctics
Whisper on their wave-lengths – fantasy-draughts
Of escape and freedom? His feet,
The power-tools, lie in front of him –
He doesn’t know how to use them. Sudden
Dramatic lift and re-alignment
Of his purposeful body –
the Keeper
Has come to freshen the water.
And the prodigious journeys
Are thrown down again in his
Loose heaps of rope.
The future’s snapped and coiled back
Into a tangled lump, a whacking blow
That’s damaged his brain. Quiet,
Amiable in his dogginess,
Disillusioned – all that preparation
Souring in his skin. His every yawn
Is another dose of poison. His every frolic
Releases a whole flood
Of new hopelessness which he then
Has to burn up in sleep. A million miles
Knotted in his paws. Ten million years
Broken between his teeth. A world
Stinking on the bone, pecked by sparrows.
He’s hanging
Upside down on the wire
Of non-participation.
He’s a tarot-card, and he knows it.
He can howl all night
And dawn will pick up the same card
And see him painted on it, with eyes
Like doorframes in a desert
Between nothing and nothing.
from Arachne
Minerva tore from the loom
That gallery of divine indiscretions
And ripped it to rags.
Then, all her power gone
Into exasperation, struck Arachne
With her boxwood shuttle
One blow between the eyes, then another,
Then a third, and a fourth. Arachne
Staggered away groaning with indignation.
She refused to live
With the injustice. Making a noose
And fitting it round her neck
She jumped into air, jerked at the rope’s end,
And dangled, and spun.
Pity touched Minerva.
She caught the swinging girl: ‘You have been wicked
Enough to dangle there for ever
And so you shall. But alive,
And your whole tribe the same through all time
Populating the earth.’
The goddess
Squeezed onto the dangling Arachne
Venom from Hecate’s deadliest leaf.
Under that styptic drop
The poor girl’s head shrank to a poppy seed
And her hair fell out.
Her eyes, her ears, her nostrils
Diminished beyond being. Her body
Became a tiny ball.
And now she is all belly
With a dot of head. She retains
Only her slender skilful fingers
For legs. And so for ever
She hangs from the thread that she spins
Out of her belly.
Or ceaselessly weaves it
Into patterned webs
On a loom of leaves and grasses –
Her touches
Deft and swift and light as when they were human.
The Owl
I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children’s eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artefacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a hypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river. Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water. You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.
The Chipmunk
A rippling, bobbing wood-elf, the chipmunk came
Under the Cape Cod conifers, over roots,
A first scout of the continent’s wild game,
Midget aboriginal American. Flowing
On electrical accurate feet
Through its circuitry. That was the first real native –
Dodging from flashlit listening still
To staring flashlit still. It studied me
Sitting at a book – a strange prisoner,
Pacing my priceless years away, eyes lowered,
To and fro, to and fro,
Across my page. It snapped a tail-gesture at me –
Roused me, peremptory, to this friendship
It would be sharing with me
Only a few more seconds.
Its eyes
Popping with inky joy,
Globed me in a new vision, woke me,
And I recognised it.
You stayed
Alien to me as a window model,
American, airport-hopping superproduct,
Through all our intimate weeks up to the moment,
In a flash-still, retorting to my something,
You made a chipmunk face. I thought
An eight-year-old child was suddenly a chipmunk.
Pursed mouth, puffed cheeks. And suddenly,
Just in that flash – as I laughed
And got my snapshot for life,
And shouted: ‘That’s my first ever real chipmunk!’ –
A ghost, dim, a woodland spirit, swore me
To take his orphan.
Epiphany
London. The grimy lilac softness
Of an April evening. Me
Walking over Chalk Farm Bridge
On my way to the tube station.
A new father – slightly light-headed
With the lack of sleep and the novelty.
Next, this young fellow coming towards me.
I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him
Because I noticed (I couldn’t believe it)
What I’d been ignoring.
Not the bulge of a small animal
Buttoned into the top of his jacket
The way colliers used to wear their whippets –
But its actual face. Eyes reaching out
Trying to catch my eyes – so familiar!
The huge ears, the pinched, urchin expression –
The wild confronting stare, pushed through fear,
Between the jacket lapels.
‘It’s a fox-cub!’
I heard my own surprise as I stopped.
He stopped. ‘Where did you get it? What
Are you going to do with it?’
A fox-cub
On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!
‘You can have him for a pound.’ ‘But
Where did you find it? What will you do with it?’
‘Oh, somebody’ll buy him. Cheap enough
At a pound.’ And a grin.
What I was thinking
Was – what would you think? How would we fit it
Into our crate of space? With the baby?
What would you make of its old smell
And its mannerless energy?
And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
The long-mouthed, flashing temperament?
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?
The little fox peered past me at other folks,
At this one and at that one, then at me.
Good luck was all it needed.
Already past the kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life’s happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
My thoughts felt like big, ignorant hounds
Circling and sniffing around him.
Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox –
If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.
from The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets
Come back, my own son, come back
for I am no longer as I was,
I am a used-up shadow from the inner visions
that flare through the thickening organs
like an old cock’s crowing, on winter dawns,
from a fence of shirts hanging board-frozen.
I am calling, your own mother,
come back, my own son, come back,
force new order onto the anarchic things,
discipline the savage objects, tame the knife and domesticate the comb,
because now I am only two gritty green eyes
glassy and weightless, like the dragonfly,
whose winged nape and mouth, that you know so well, so delicately clasp
two crystal apples in the green-illumined skull,
I am two staring eyes without a face,
seeing all, and one with the unearthly beings.
Come back, my own son, come back into place,
with your fresh breath bring everything again to
order.
In the remote forest the boy heard.
He jerked up his head in an instant,
his spread nostrils testing the air,
his soft dewlap throbbing, the
veined ears pointing
tautly to that lamenting music
as to the still tread of the hunter,
as to hot wisps fronding from the cradle
of a forest fire, when the skyline trees
smoke and begin to whimper bluely.
He turned his head to the old voice,
and now an agony fastens on him,
and he sees the shag hair over his buttocks,
and he sees, on his bony legs,
the cleft hooves that deal his track,
sees, where lilies look up in pools,
low-slung hair-pursed buck-balls.
He forces his way towards the lake,
crashing the brittle willow thickets,
haunches plastered with foam that spatters
to the earth at his every bound,
his four black hooves rip him a path
through a slaughter of wild flowers,
sock a lizard into the mud,
throat ballooned and tail sheared,
till he reaches the lake at last,
and looks in at its lit window
that holds the moon, moving beech-boughs,
and a stag staring at him.
For the first time he sees the bristling pelt
covering all his lean body,
hair over knees and thighs, the transverse
tasselled lips of his male purse,
his long skull treed with antlers,
bone boughs bursting to bone leaves,
his face closely furred to the chin,
his nostrils slit and slanted in.
The great antlers knock against trees,
roped veins lump on his neck,
he strains fiercely, stamping he tries
to put out an answering cry, but in vain,
it is only a stag’s voice belling
in the throat of this mother’s son,
and he scatters a son’s tears, trampling the shallows
to drive out that lake-horror, scare it
down into the whirlpool gullet
of the water-dark, where glittering
little fishes flicker their laces,
miniature bubble-eyed jewellery.
The ripples smooth off into the gloom,
but still a stag stands in the foam of the moon.
after the Hungarian by FERENC JUHÁSZ
The Prophet
Crazed by my soul’s thirst
Through a dark land I staggered.
And a six-winged seraph
Halted me at a crossroads.
With fingers of dream
He touched my eye-pupils.
My eyes, prophetic, recoiled
Like a startled eaglet’s.
He touched my ears
And a thunderous clangour filled them,
The shudderings of heaven,
The huge wingbeat of angels,
The submarine migration of sea-reptiles
And the burgeoning of the earth’s vine.