New and Selected Poems (7 page)
Mother, the eel in the well is eating the moon!
If I stop my heart and hold my breath
The needle will thread itself.
Daring the no-man quiet of my no-being
A mouse buds at the washboarding. A nose
Of ginger spider weaves its hairs toward me.
Claws trickle onto my palm.
An ounce pins itself there,
Nose wavering to investigate me.
Am I a mouse’s remembrance?
I start, and it bounces past its shadow
Into my mother’s shoe
Which twists out.
I fly up flustered
Into the winter of a near elm.
Tutorial
Like a propped skull,
His humour is mediaeval.
What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards
Pressing the drying remains of men.
He brings some out, we stew them up to a dark amber and sit sipping.
He is fat, this burst bearskin, but his mind is an electric mantis
Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.
I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk, I go round and
round numbly under the ice of the North Pole.
This scholar dribbling tea
Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle
Through the wharf-weed that ennobles
The mask of enquiry, advancing into the depths like a harbour,
Like a sphinx cliff,
Like the papery skull of a fish
Lodged in dune sand, with a few straws,
Rifled by dry cold.
His words
Twitch and rustle, twitch
And rustle.
The scarred world looks through their gaps.
I listen
With bleak eyeholes.
Trees
I whispered to the holly …
There was a rustle of answer – dark,
Dark, dark, a gleamer recoiling tensely backward
Into a closing nest of shattered weapons,
Like a squid into clouds of protection.
I plucked a spiny leaf. Nothing protested.
Glints twitched, watched me.
I whispered to the birch …
My breath crept up into a world of shudderings.
Was she veiled?
Herself her own fountain
She pretended to be absent from it, or to be becoming air
Filtering herself from her fingertips,
Till her bole paled, like a reflection on water,
And I felt the touch of my own ghostliness –
I moved on, looking neither way,
Trying to hear
The outcry that must go with all
Those upflung maidenly gestures, that arrested
humpback rout
Stumbling in blackberries and bracken –
Silence.
Trees, it is your own strangeness, in the dank wood,
Makes me so horrifying
I dare not hear my own footfall.
The
Lake
Better disguised than the leaf-insect,
A sort of subtler armadillo,
The lake turns with me as I walk.
Snuffles at my feet for what I might drop or kick up,
Sucks and slobbers the stones, snorts through its lips
Into broken glass, smacks its chops.
It has eaten several my size
Without developing a preference –
Prompt, with a splash, to whatever I offer.
It ruffles in its wallow, or lies sunning,
Digesting old senseless bicycles
And a few shoes. The fish down there
Do not know they have been swallowed
Any more than the girl out there, who over the stern of a rowboat
Tests its depth with her reflection.
Yet how the outlet fears it!
– dragging it out,
Black and yellow, a maniac eel,
Battering it to death with sticks and stones.
A
Match
Spluttering near out, before it touches the moors,
You start, threatened by your own tears.
But not your skin, not doors, not borders
Will be proof against your foraging
Through everything unhuman or human
To savour and own the dimensions of woman
As water does those of water.
But the river
Is a prayer to its own waters
Where the circulation of our world is pouring
In stillness –
Everyone’s peace, no less your own peace.
No movement but rooted willows.
Out of bedrock your blood’s operation
Carves your eyes clear not so quickly
As your mouth dips deeper
Into the massed darkness.
Small
Events
The old man’s blood had spoken the word: ‘Enough.’
Now nobody had the heart to see him go on.
His photographs were a cold mercy, there on the mantel.
So his mouth became a buttonhole and his limbs became wrapped iron.
Towards dying his eyes looked just above the things he looked at.
They were the poor rearguard on the beach
And turned, watering, with all his hope, from the smoke
To the sea for the Saviour
Who is useful only in life.
So, under a tree a tree-creeper, on dead grass sleeping –
It was blind, its eyes matt as blood-lice
Feeding on a raw face of disease.
I set it on dry grass, and its head fell forward, it died
Into what must have cupped it kindly.
And a grey, aged mouse, humped shivering
On the bare path, under November drizzle –
A frail parcel, delivered in damaging mail and still unclaimed,
Its contents no longer of use to anybody.
I picked it up. It was looking neither outward nor inward.
The tremendous music of its atoms
Trembled it on my fingers. As I watched it, it died.
A grey, mangy mouse, and seamed with ancient scars,
Whose blood had said: ‘Sleep.’
So this year a swift’s embryo, cracked too early from its fallen egg –
There, among mineral fragments,
The blind blood stirred,
Freed,
And, mystified, sank into hopeful sleep.
Crow Wakes
I had exploded, a bombcloud, lob-headed, my huge fingers
Came feeling over the fields, like shadows.
I became smaller than water, I stained into the soil-crumble.
I became smaller.
My eyes fell out of my head and into an atom.
My right leg stood in the room raving at me like a dog.
I tried to stifle its bloody mouth with a towel
But it ran on ahead. I stumbled after it
A long way and came to a contraption like a trap
Baited with human intestines.
A stone drummed and an eye watched me out of a cat’s anus.
I swam upstream, cleansed, in the snow-water, upstream.
Till I grew tired and turned over. I slept.
When I woke I could hear voices, many voices.
It was my bones all chattering together
At the high-tide mark, bedded in rubble, littered among shells
And gull feathers.
And the breastbone was crying:
‘I begat a million and murdered a million:
I was a leopard.’ And ‘No, no, no, no,
We were a fine woman,’ a rib cried.
‘No, we were swine, we had devils, and the axe halved us,’
The pelvis was shouting. And the bones of the feet
And the bones of the hands fought: ‘We were alligators,
We dragged some beauties under, we did not let go.’
And, ‘We were suffering oxen,’ and ‘I was a surgeon,’
And ‘We were a stinking clot of ectoplasm that suffocated a nun
Then lay for years in a cobbler’s cellar.’
The teeth sang and the vertebrae were screeching
Something incomprehensible.
I tried to creep away –
I got up and ran. I tried to get up and run
But they saw me. ‘It’s him, it’s him again. Get him.’
They came howling after me and I ran.
A freezing hand caught hold of me by the hair
And lifted me off my feet and set me high
Over the whole earth on a blazing star
Called
from
WODWO
Thistles
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey, like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
Still Life
Outcrop stone is miserly
With the wind. Hoarding its nothings,
Letting wind run through its fingers,
It pretends to be dead of lack.
Even its grimace is empty,
Waited with quartz pebbles from the sea’s womb.
It thinks it pays no rent,
Expansive in the sun’s summerly reckoning.
Under rain, it gleams exultation blackly
As if receiving interest.
Similarly, it bears the snow well.
Wakeful and missing little and landmarking
The fly-like dance of the planets,
The landscape moving in sleep,
It expects to be in at the finish.
Being ignorant of this other, this harebell,
That trembles, as under threats of death,
In the summer turf’s heat-rise,
And in which – filling veins
Any known name of blue would bruise
Out of existence – sleeps, recovering,
The maker of the sea.
Her Husband
Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately
To grime the sink and foul towels and let her
Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board
The stubborn character of money.
And let her learn through what kind of dust
He has earned his thirst and the right to quench it
And what sweat he has exchanged for his money
And the blood-weight of money. He’ll humble her
With new light on her obligations.
The fried, woody chips, kept warm two hours in the oven,
Are only part of her answer.
Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back
And is away round the house-end singing
‘Come back to Sorrento’ in a voice
Of resounding corrugated iron.
Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult.
For they will have their rights.
Their jurors are to be assembled
From the little crumbs of soot. Their brief
Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.
Cadenza
The violinist’s shadow vanishes.
The husk of a grasshopper
Sucks a remote cyclone and rises.
The full, bared throat of a woman walking water,
The loaded estuary of the dead.
And I am the cargo
Of a coffin attended by swallows.
And I am the water
Bearing the coffin that will not be silent.
The clouds are full of surgery and collision
But the coffin escapes – a black diamond,
A ruby brimming blood,
An emerald beating its shores,
The sea lifts swallow wings and flings
A summer lake open,
Sips and bewilders its reflection,
Till the whole sky dives shut like a burned land back to its spark –
A bat with a ghost in its mouth
Struck at by lightnings of silence –
Blue with sweat, the violinist
Crashes into the orchestra, which explodes.
