New and Selected Poems (17 page)

This is the maneater’s skull.

These brows were the Arc de Triomphe

To the gullet.

The deaf adder of appetite

Coiled under. It spied through these nacelles

Ignorant of death.

And the whole assemblage flowed hungering through the long ways.

Its cry

Quieted the valleys.

It was looking for me.

I was looking for you.

You were looking for me.

I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.

Nuptials among prehistoric insects

The tremulous convulsion

The inching hydra strength

Among frilled lizards

Dropping twigs, and acorns, and leaves.

The oak is in bliss

Its roots

Lift arms that are a supplication

Crippled with stigmata

Like the sea-carved cliffs earth lifts

Loaded with dumb, uttering effigies

The oak seems to die and to be dead

In its love-act.

As I lie under it

In a brown leaf nostalgia

An acorn stupor.

A primrose petal’s edge

Cuts the vision like laser. 

And the eye of a hare

Strips the interrogator naked

Of all but some skin of terror –

A starry frost.

Who is this?

She reveals herself, and is veiled.

Somebody

Something grips by the nape

And bangs the brow, as against a wall

Against the untouchable veils

Of the hole which is bottomless

Till blood drips from the mouth.

Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,

Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed

It happened

You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase.

It was the third time. And it smashed.

I turned

I bowed

In the morgue I kissed

Your temple’s refrigerated glazed

As rained-on graveyard marble, my

Lips queasy, heart non-existent

And straightened

Into sun-darkness

Like a pillar over Athens

Defunct

In the blinding metropolis of cameras.

The swallow – rebuilding –

Collects the lot

From the sow’s wallow.

But what I did only shifted the dust about.

And what crossed my mind

Crossed into outer space.

And for all rumours of me read obituary

What there truly remains of me

Is that very thing – my absence.

So how will you gather me?

I saw my keeper

Sitting in the sun –

If you can catch that, you are the falcon of falcons.

The grass-blade is not without

The loyalty that never was beheld.

And the blackbird

Sleeking from common anything and worm-dirt

Balances a precarious banner

Gold on black, terror and exultation.

The grim badger with armorial mask

Biting spade-steel, teeth and jaw-strake shattered,

Draws that final shuddering battle cry

Out of its backbone.

Me too,

Let me be one of your warriors.

Let your home

Be my home. Your people

My people.

I know well

You are not infallible

I know how your huge your unmanageable

Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist

As thin as a silk scarf, on your skull,

And how your pony’s eye darkened larger

Holding too lucidly the deep glimpse

After the humane killer

And I had to lift your hand for you

While your chin sank to your chest

With the sheer weariness

Of taking away from everybody

Your envied beauty, your much-desired beauty

Your hardly-used beauty

Of lifting away yourself

From yourself

And weeping with the ache of the effort

Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,

Like the flushed gossip

With the tale that kills

Sometimes it strengthens very slowly

What is already here –

A tree darkening the house. 

The saviour

From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache

Like the sun

Which is itself cloudless and leafless

Was always here, is always as she was.

Calves harshly parted from their mamas

Stumble through all the hedges in the country

Hither thither crying day and night

Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.

After some days, a stupor sadness

Collects them again in their field.

They will never stray any more.

From now on, they only want each other.

So much for calves.

As for the tiger

He lies still

Like left luggage.

He is roaming the earth light, unseen.

He is safe.

Heaven and hell have both adopted him.

A bang – a burning –

I opened my eyes

In a vale crumbling with echoes.

A solitary dove

Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.

From this centre

It wearies the compass.

Am I killed?

Or am I searching?

Is this the rainbow silking my body?

Which wings are these?

At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.

Or ‘Terrible as an army with banners’.

If I wait, I am a castle

Built with blocks of pain.

If I set out

A kayak stitched with pain

Your tree – your oak

A glare

Of black upward lightning, a wriggling grab

Momentary

Under the crumbling of stars.

A guard, a dancer

At the pure well of leaf.

Agony in the garden. Annunciation

Of clay, water and the sunlight.

They thunder under its roof.

Its agony is its temple.

Waist-deep, the black oak is dancing

And my eyes pause

On the centuries of its instant

As gnats

Try to winter in its wrinkles.

              The seas are thirsting

              Towards the oak.

              The oak is flying

              Astride the earth.

Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill

Men in bunting colours

Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.

The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men

Spouted like water to head it.

The ball blew away downwind –

The rubbery men bounced after it.

The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind

Over a gulf of treetops.

Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.

Winds from fiery holes in heaven

Piled the hills darkening around them

To awe them. The glare light

Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.

Then the rain lowered a steel press.

Hair plastered, they all just trod water

To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up

Coming fine and thin, washed and happy

While the humped world sank foundering

And the valleys blued unthinkable

Under depth of Atlantic depression –

But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air

And the goalie flew horizontal

And once again a golden holocaust

Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.

In Hardcastle Crags, that echoey museum,

Where she dug leaf mould for her handfuls of garden

And taught you to walk, others are making poems, 

Between
finger
and
thumb
roll
a
pine-needle.

Feel
the
chamfer,
feel
how
they
threaded

The
sewing
machines.
 

                                    And

Billy
Holt
invented
a
new
shuttle

As
like
an
ant’s
egg,
with
its
folded
worker,

As
every
other.

You
might
see
an
ant
carrying
one.

                                                        And

The
cordite
conscripts
tramped
away.
But
the
cenotaphs

Of
all
the
shells
that
got
their
heads
blown
off

And
their
insides
blown
out

Are
these
beech-bole
stalwarts.

                                                  And oak, birch,

Holly, sycamore, pine.

                                                        The lightest air-stir

Released their love-whispers when she walked

The needles weeping, singing, dedicating

Your spectre-double, still in her womb,

To this temple of her
Missa
Solemnis.
 

White-faced, brain-washed by her nostalgias,

You were her step-up transformer.

She grieved for her girlhood and the fallen.

You mourned for Paradise and its fable.

Giving you the kiss of life

She hung round your neck her whole valley

Like David’s harp.

Now, whenever you touch it, God listens

Only for her voice.

Leaf mould. Blood-warm. Fibres crumbled alive

Between thumb and finger.

Feel
again

The
clogs
twanging
your
footsoles,
on
the
street’s
steepness,

As
you
escaped.