Collected Poems (7 page)

Wood dies, and is born again.

IRKUTSK

In Irkutsk a swastika was scrawled

On a wall so I took my handkerchief

And spat and rubbed

But it was tough chalk

Wondering why those Red pedestrians

Didn't grind it off.

I'd done the same in London

Walking to the Tube

And missing the train quite often,

But here it was ineradicable Russian chalk

Though I chafed it to the barest shadow,

No one taking notice on their walk

Down Karl Marx Street. I strolled

Away to let them keep it.

Apart from scraping out a concave mark

The crippled cross would stay forever,

And anyway why should I get arrested

For damaging The People's Property?

BAIKAL LAKE-DUSK

Black ice breaking without sound or reason:

Water below moves its shoulders

Like a giant craving to see snow.

Ninety-degree cold preserves mosquito eggs

As the fist of winter

Pulls into the sun's mittens.

The domed sun touches the horizon,

A totem in the lake sinking

Till its feet touch bottom and reach fire.

SHAMAN AT LISTVYANKA

Stopped his cart

Refused food

Shook tin brass skulls copper

Turned to the sun

And pressed a horseshoe to his eyes

Spun a waterspout of words

Grave toes patterning the soil

Under a tree clothed all in green,

Chews beansprouts from his crown

Spins to pipe dance

Head between land and sky

Hand five candle-fingers

Fuelled by the gutters of his stomach.

Spins to music

Stick legs strut

In wide skin trousers:

Shouting melts and planctifies

Fisherboats and floating logs:

Recites alone and long

On Baikal fish and stork in one:

Sea that threatens fire-spiders

Copperbacks and claws –

Creep from the rimline lake

Feet to feel and lips to taste,

Have no heart but swarm

To eat from him and die of it –

As brass-hooved breakers

Break and draw them back

And he weaving

Over sand to green land

Melting and metalling

In blacksmith power.

Horses birds and torches flee

From tundra magic keening,

Flesh of man flying

Skinflags unfurling

In a merciless slipstream to the sun.

Drop, hear drums

Rend on the flight,

He so far within

Sly, taciturn and a bully when normal

Knowing he must keep that self out

Or power goes,

Be an old man forever

Carved in rock by the fire

After the last telling.

TOASTING

Drink, blackout, gutter-bout

Kick back nine swills of vodka

That put an iron band around

Thorned skullcap and fire

Of words toasting Life

Peace, Town or Cousin.

Bottles, heaped grub, dead towers in tabletown:

Wine descends in light and colour

As if the Devil had a straw stuck there

Greedily drawing liquid in

As consciousness draws out.

RAILWAY STATION

Death is the apotheosis of the Bourgeois Ethic.

Tolstoy when he felt it coming on

Left his family and set out for Jerusalem.

Death shared its railway station:

He in a coma heard trains banging

Where Anna violated life.

The fourth bell drowned his final wrath.

The Bolsheviks renamed the station after him

Instead of Bourgeois Death.

RIDE IT OUT

Ride it out, ride it,

Ride out this mare of sleeplessness

Galloping above the traffic roar

Of Gorki Street,

Weaving between Red stars

And the grind of cleaning wagons.

Today all Moscow was in mourning

Because there's no queue at Lenin's tomb.

I told them but they wouldn't believe me.

Ride out this beast who won't let me sleep,

Drags me up great Gorki Street

And into Pushkin Square,

Leningrad a rose on the horizon

Ringed by blood and water –

Pull up the blankets

And be small for a few hours of the night.

THE POET

The poet sings his poems on a bridge

A bridge open to horizontal rain

And the steely nudge of lightning,

Or icy moths that bring slow death

Croon him to sleep by snow-wings touching his eyes.

Through this he sings

No people coming close to watch when the snow

Melts and elemental water forces smash

Between cliff and rock under his swaying bridge.

When the water thins, his sweat-drops burst

On scorching rocks like sparks from a flower pod;

Through all this he sits and sings his poems

To those vague crowds on either bank

He cannot make out or consider

With such short sight, for after the first applauded

Poem he let his glasses smash into the rocks below.

The bridge belongs to him, his only property,

Grows no food, supports no houses –

Cheap to buy with the first mediocre poems.

It spans a river that divides two territories –

He knew it and made no mistake:

Today he faces one and tomorrow the other

But from blurred eyes they look the same to him:

Green fields and red-roofed houses

Rising to mountains where wars can be fought

Without a bitter end being reached –

The same on either side.

He does not write a poem every day

But each pet territory takes its turn

To hear his words in one set language burn

And drive them back from each other.

In any rash attack they cannot cross his bridge

But broach the river and ravine

Down at the estuary or far upstream.

He listens to the stunning bloodrush of their arms

And shakes his head, never grows older

As he bends to his paper which one side or the other

Contrives to set, with food, by his hands' reach.

Sometimes sly messengers approach at night

Suggesting he writes and then recites

Upon some momentary theme

To suit one side and damn the other,

At which he nods, tells jokes and riddles

Agrees to everything and promises

That for them he'll tear the world apart

With his great reading.

He stays young, ignoring all requests and prophecies,

But his bridge grows old, the beams and ropes brittle,

And some night alien figures

In a half-circle at each dim bridgehead

Brandish knives and axes. Lanterns flash,

Blades and points spark like spinning moons

Gathering as he puts away pens and parchment,

Closes his eyes, and does not wake for a week,

Knowing he will once more dream

The familiar childhood dream

Of falling down the sheer side of the world

And never wake up.

But he owns and dominates his bridge.

It is his bread and soul and only song –

And if the people do not like it, they can cut him free.

LEFT AS A DESERT

Left as a desert:

Deserted by one great experience

That pulled its teeth and shackles out

And left me as a desert

Under which bones are buried

Over which the sand drifts.

Seven years gone like laden camels:

The gravel and the wind

Is piling this vast desert up

To one sky and one colour

And sky reflecting desert shapes.

The solitary heart lurks on the off-chance

That rain clouds will come and fertilize

The great experience that made this desert.

LOVE IN THE ENVIRONS OF VORONEZH

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