New and Selected Poems (15 page)

Till they seemed to trip and trap

Her legs in a single tangle

His arms lifted things, felt through dark rooms, at last with their hands

Caught her arms

And lay down enwoven at last at last

His chest pushed until it came against

Her breasts at the end of everything

His navel fitted over her navel as closely as possible

Like a mirror face down flat on a mirror

And so when every part

Like a bull pressing towards its cows, not to be stayed

Like a calf seeking its mama

Like a desert staggerer, among his hallucinations

Finding the hoof-churned hole

Finally got what it needed, and grew still, and closed its eyes

Then such truth and greatness descended

As over a new grave, when the mourners have gone

And the stars come out

And the earth, bristling and raw, tiny and lost

Resumes its search

Rushing through the vast astonishment.

She gives him his eyes, she found them

Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin

He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her

She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment 

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists

They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully

And sets them in perfect order

A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired

She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing, incredulous

Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them

So that his whole body lights up

And he has fashioned her new hips

With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled

He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily

To test each new thing at each new step

And now she smooths over him the plates of his skull

So that the joints are invisible

And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach

With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying their roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep-cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment

Like two gods of mud

Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care

They bring each other to perfection.

He stands, filling the doorway

In the shell of earth.

He lifts wings, he leaves the remains of something,

A mess of offal, muddled as an afterbirth.

His each wingbeat – a convict’s release.

What he carries will be plenty.

He slips behind the world’s brow

As music escapes its skull, its clock and its skyline.

Under his sudden shadow, flames cry out among thickets.

When he soars, his shape

Is a cross, eaten by light,

On the Creator’s face.

He shifts world weirdly as sunspots

Emerge as earthquakes.

A burning unconsumed,

A whirling tree –

Where he alights

A skin sloughs from a leafless apocalypse.

On his lens

Each atom engraves with a diamond.

In the wind-fondled crucible of his splendour

The dirt becomes God.

But when will he land

On a man’s wrist. 

Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites

Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,

A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,

Standing in dunged straw

Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,

Half of him legs,

Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more

But that mother’s milk come back often.

Everything else is in order, just as it is.

Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.

This is just as he wants it.

A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.

Too much and too sudden is too frightening –

When I block the light, a bulk from space,

To let him in to his mother for a suck,

He bolts a yard or two, then freezes,

Staring from every hair in all directions,

Ready for the worst, shut up in his hopeful religion,

A little syllogism

With a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God’s thumb.

You see all his hopes bustling

As he reaches between the worn rails towards

The topheavy oven of his mother.

He trembles to grow, stretching his curl-tip tongue –

What did cattle ever find here

To make this dear little fellow

So eager to prepare himself?

He is already in the race, and quivering to win –

His new purpled eyeball swivel-jerks

In the elbowing push of his plans.

Hungry people are getting hungrier,

Butchers developing expertise and markets, 

But he just wobbles his tail – and glistens

Within his dapper profile

Unaware of how his whole lineage

Has been tied up.

He shivers for feel of the world licking his side.

He is like an ember – one glow

Of lighting himself up

With the fuel of himself, breathing and brightening.

Soon he’ll plunge out, to scatter his seething joy,

To be present at the grass,

To be free on the surface of such a wideness,

To find himself himself. To stand. To moo.

Now the river is rich, but her voice is low.

It is her Mighty Majesty the sea

Travelling among the villages incognito.

Now the river is poor. No song, just a thin mad whisper.

The winter floods have ruined her.

She squats between draggled banks, fingering her rags and rubbish.

And now the river is rich. A deep choir.

It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven,

Going on their holiday to the sea.

The river is poor again. All her bones are showing.

Through a dry wig of bleached flotsam she peers up ashamed

From her slum of sticks.

Now the river is rich, collecting shawls and minerals.

Rain brought fatness, but she takes ninety-nine percent

Leaving the fields just one percent to survive on.

And now she is poor. Now she is East wind sick.

She huddles in holes and corners. The brassy sun gives her a headache.

She has lost all her fish. And she shivers.

But now once more she is rich. She is viewing her lands.

A hoard of king-cups spills from her folds, it blazes, it cannot be hidden.

A salmon, a sow of solid silver,

Bulges to glimpse it.

After the fiesta, the beauty-contests, the drunken wrestling

Of the blossom

Come some small ugly swellings, the dwarfish truths

Of the prizes.

After blushing and confetti, the breeze-blown bridesmaids, the shadowed snapshots

Of the trees in bloom

Come the gruelling knuckles, and the cracked housemaid’s hands,

The workworn morning plainness of apples. 

Unearthly was the hope, the wet star melting the gland,

Staggering the offer –

But pawky the real returns, not easy to see,

Dull and leaf-green, hidden, still-bitter, and hard.

The orchard flared wings, a new heaven, a dawn-lipped apocalypse

Kissing the sleeper –

The apples emerge, in the sun’s black shade, among stricken trees,

A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing. 

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts

Materialize at the tip of a long scream

Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone

On a steep

Controlled scream of skid

Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.

Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,

Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing

Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they

Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,

Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.

                               They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come –

                              And here they are, here they are again

Erupting across yard stones

Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,

Speedway goggles, international mobsters –

A bolas of three or four wire screams

Jockeying across each other

On their switchback wheel of death.

They swat past, hard-fletched,

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,

And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,

Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy

And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue –

                                      Not ours any more.

Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.

Round luckier houses now

They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,

Head-height, clipping the doorway

With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,

Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly-flying

Misfit flopped in our yard,

Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.

He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly

Till I tossed him up – then suddenly he flowed away under

His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,

Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,

And crashed among the raspberries.

Then followed fiery hospital hours

In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank

Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.

Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.

The inevitable balsa death.

                                                 Finally burial 

For the husk

Of my little Apollo –

The charred scream

Folded in its huge power.

The sheep has stopped crying.

All morning in her wire-mesh compound

On the lawn, she has been crying

For her vanished lamb. Yesterday they came.

Then her lamb could stand, in a fashion,

And make some tiptoe cringing steps.

Now he has disappeared.

He was only half the proper size,

And his cry was wrong. It was not

A dry little hard bleat, a baby-cry

Over a flat tongue, it was human,

It was a despairing human smooth Oh!

Like no lamb I ever heard. Its hindlegs

Cowered in under its lumped spine,

Its feeble hips leaned towards

Its shoulders for support. Its stubby

White wool pyramid head, on a tottery neck,

Had sad and defeated eyes, pinched, pathetic,

Too small, and it cried all the time

Oh! Oh! staggering towards

Its alert, baffled, stamping, storming mother

Who feared our intentions. He was too weak

To find her teats, or to nuzzle up in under,

He hadn’t the gumption. He was fully

Occupied just standing, then shuffling

Towards where she’d removed to. She knew

He wasn’t right, she couldn’t

Make him out. Then his rough-curl legs,

So stoutly built, and hooved

With real quality tips,

Just got in the way, like a loose bundle

Of firewood he was cursed to manage,

Too heavy for him, lending sometimes

Some support, but no strength, no real help.

When we sat his mother on her tail, he mouthed her teat,

Slobbered a little, but after a minute

Lost aim and interest, his muzzle wandered,

He was managing a difficulty

Much more urgent and important. By evening

He could not stand. It was not

That he could not thrive, he was born

With everything but the will –

That can be deformed, just like a limb.

Death was more interesting to him.

Life could not get his attention.

So he died, with the yellow birth-mucus

Still in his cardigan.

He did not survive a warm summer night.

Now his mother has started crying again.

The wind is oceanic in the elms

And the blossom is all set.

What is it this time the dark barn again

Where men jerk me off my feet

And shout over me with murder voices

And do something painful to somewhere on my body

Why am I grabbed by the leg and dragged from my friends

Where I was hidden safe though it was hot

Why am I dragged into the light and whirled onto my back

Why am I sat up on my rear end with my legs splayed

A man grips me helpless his knees grip me helpless

What is that buzzer what is it coming

Buzzing like a big fierce insect on a long tangling of snake

What is the man doing to me with his buzzing thing

That I cannot see he is pressing it into me

I surrender I let my legs kick I let myself be killed 

I let him hoist me about he twists me flat

In a leverage of arms and legs my neck pinned under his ankle

While he does something dreadful down the whole length of my belly

My little teats stand helpless and terrified as he buzzes around them

Poor old ewe! She peers around from her ridiculous position.

Cool intelligent eyes, of grey-banded agate and amber,

Eyes deep and clear with feeling and understanding

While her monster hooves dangle helpless

And a groan like no bleat vibrates in her squashed windpipe

And the cutter buzzes at her groin and her fleece piles away

Now it buzzes at her throat and she emerges whitely

More and more grotesquely female and nude

Paunchy and skinny, while her old rug, with its foul tassels

Heaps from her as a foam-stiff, foam-soft, yoke-yellow robe

Numbed all over she suddenly feels much lighter

She feels herself free, her legs are her own and she scrambles up

Waiting for that grapple of hands to fling her down again

She stands in the opened arch of his knees she is facing a bright doorway

With a real bleat to comfort the lamb in herself

She trots across the threshold and makes one high clearing bound

To break from the cramp of her fright

And surprised by her new lightness and delighted

She trots away, noble-nosed, her pride unsmirched.

Her greasy winter-weight stays coiled on the foul floor, for somebody else to bother about.

She has a beautiful wet green brand on her bobbing brand-new backside,

She baas, she has come off best.

The mothers have come back

From the shearing, and behind the hedge

The woe of sheep is like a battlefield

In the evening, when the fighting is over,

And the cold begins, and the dew falls,

And bowed women move with water.

Mother mother mother the lambs

Are crying, and the mothers are crying.

Nothing can resist that probe, that cry

Of a lamb for its mother, or an ewe’s crying

For its lamb. The lambs cannot find

Their mothers among those shorn strangers.

A half-hour they have lamented,

Shaking their voices in desperation.

Bald brutal-voiced mothers braying out,

Flat-tongued lambs chopping off hopelessness.

Their hearts are in panic, their bodies

Are a mess of woe, woe they cry,

They mingle their trouble, a music

Of worse and worse distress, a worse entangling,

They hurry out little notes

With all their strength, cries searching this way and that.

The mothers force out sudden despair, blaaa!

On restless feet, with wild heads.

Their anguish goes on and on, in the June heat.

Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,

As they fit themselves to what has happened.