Collected Poems (13 page)

No strength to break my own.

DEAD TREE

Say good things about the dead,

You'll never see them again.

That tree I just pulled down

Was dry from top to bottom.

Five years ago the taproots hissed

And a bullfinch sat on its highest twig

To eat the sky.

The tree drew clouds to climbing buds.

The brittle trunk snapped in two places,

Fell horizontal in the bracken

Broken by soil too thin,

And ivy fed off its over-reaching.

Say good things about that tree.

A young one near at ten feet high:

Bullfinch talons hold it down,

The poison kiss of ivy laps its base.

I scare one off and rip the other,

Drag the dead tree clear for winter wood,

Thinking good things about the dead

That only the blind of soul won't love.

SPRING IN THE LANGUEDOC

Rows of vines, cleaned up and tended

Like military graveyards in the north;

A magpie horseshoes back in guilty flight

Or at a yellow cartridge in the scrub.

A bee clings early to a flower

As if it might be last year's flame.

Warm grit under belly: a snake

Takes time to cross the sunny track.

Thyme and sage and olive died by winter

When they pledged undying love through storms and fevers

(Final and official when they said it)

Not knowing that undying love dies soonest.

WAKENING

A stiletto of light insidiosed

morning into the black room

pushed by a man stricken

with medieval pox

galvanized, Vitus-minded,

a jump-reaction to rip

the
paysage
like a painting into shreds

with halberded hands

when the shutters swing out.

A slight refraction of the haze

mars the hills and villages of dawn:

when I read the
Divine Comedy
at twenty

I didn't know that thirty years will

pass before my fingers turn the page

to nightingale and stonechat voices

plaiting their song

into an anthem of the Casentino.

DEPARTURE FROM POPPI

On days of leaving

Flowers come

Rain holds back

Clouds give the sun a chance.

Driving away,

Blue sky fills the rearward mirror

Before a bend is turned.

Paradise draws off, a glint of flowers

Ahead, clouds like robbers gather

To discuss the lay-out of a forest.

Go in, trees starken:

The only land is Travel,

Recalling sun and flowers never met.

LIVING ALONE (FOR THREE MONTHS)

When you live alone

No goldfish or canary to adorn

The baffle between room and sky;

When you live alone –

Reveille out of bed at the alarm:

A dim pantechnicon of dreams

Darkens up the cul-de-sac of sleeping

Suddenly a flower of smithereens;

Do ten-minute jumps so that the heart

Won't burst at running for a bus:

Bathe;

Set breakfast: appetite's topography

Of battlefield hurdles, to infiltrate

And leap the parapet to wideawake;

Dump supper et cetera;

Then do your day;

And when dusk threatens

A fresh skirmishing of dreams

You (like a soldier between campaigns)

Devise a meal before lights-out

And bivouac –

When you live like such –

The person that you are turns two

Divides into a body and a voice

One moment stentor and the other glib

(Morality contending: talks

To the stack of flesh that cannot speak)

But only to hear the voice's tune

Flagging words both ears must listen to:

On the activating of what's gone

The switching on from plasmic and bewitching times

Where you thought yourself in love but weren't

Or when you said: I love, but didn't

Or would, but couldn't:

But no denying love's starlined coordinates

Crossing the heart of positively did:

The onrush, the complete positioning

Of being in love, and loved,

When the one same voice and body sang

The breath of passion into memory,

Into death via love –

The faces, her face, the truth

Of love that lasts forever but could not:

Yet giving life along the way

Through mist's uncertainties

Because it was and did.

Living by yourself, you talk,

Reshaping the heart

To fill the empty spaces

Out of spaces that you one time filled,

Making the alone-day,

Breaking the day like a stone.

HOME

Landfall after the storm, going home through

White waves crumbling along the shore

Like piano keys pressed by invisible fingers,

Blue sky unfeeling what the sea does

To your boat, winds and subtle currents

Insidiously concerting.

Getting safe home through the storm

Provides no harbour or grandmother's face;

Waves turn you back as in a mirror breaking,

Each cliff falling on the soul

Like an animal with endless teeth.

PEARL

No wonder Job loved God.

He lived. God let him live,

Gave seven score years beyond his testing.

Job knew excoriations on his skin

Catastrophe dimmed one eye then the other.

He bounced words against God

But never despaired.

In gratitude God let him live

With friends and fatted kine

And fourteen thousand sheep.

God tested him, and let him live.

Pearl died without a Book,

Silent words flitting like dust

Till the dust inside her settled.

No winds could fan the dying fire into life,

She felt the dust settling,

Eyes from her wasted head saw the dust falling

And through the dust she saw me,

Cleared it with a smile to say goodbye.

LANCASTER

At twenty-two he was an older man,

Done sixty raids and dropped 500 tons on target

Or near enough. Come for a ride, son:

Hi-di-hi and ho-di-ho, war over and be going soon.

He opened a map and showed the side that mattered,

Thumbed a line from Syerston to Harwell.

Our bomber shouldered up the runway

Cut the silver Trent in May:

Three years in factories

Made a decade out of each twelve-month,

From the cockpit viewing Southwell Minster

Under a continent of candyfloss,

Fields wheatened green recalling

Chaff blown and remaining corn

To soften in my sweetheart's mouth,

Then into a hedge and crush the dockleaves into greensmear.

The pilot banked his hundred wingspan south:

How much magnetic, how much true, how much compass –

Work the variation through,

Two hundred miles an hour and a following wind,

Harder to get home again over lace of roads and lanes

Plus or minus deviation for a course to steer

Red and black on spread map at the navigator's table,

A smell for life of petrol, peardrops and rexine.

Run a pencil down from A to B –

Now on the fortieth anniversary I reinvigorate

The game which formed my life's dead reckoning

Impossible to fathom as in that bomber I assumed I could –

Everything mechanical and easy to work,

Map in top-left pocket, crawling the long coffin

Between bombracks and centre section

No view of the world for forty feet,

Parachute forgotten but who goes back

At seventeen? Who thinks the air is not for him,

Merlin engines all his own, strip map beckoning

Through Death's cathedral for a dwarf?

Everything is there to open: the rear gunner's turret

For a technicolor backward view

A track made good of woods and the botch of Leicester

Railways of Rugby, the sandstone of Oxford

The peace of Abingdon and first view of the Thames,

Canals and rivers of new reality, calico tablecloth

Hiding all in me, unseen from my chosen seat.

Better not to know how I reached the far-back turret

Of downdraught and upcurrents, eyes on the past's

Wide fan shaping my destination.

A button put me side-on to the slipstream,

An east-west variation of the view. People ignored

The buzzing of our passage, engines hiding the silence

Of a so-far buried life, looking over four guns

Ready to suck all spirits up like fishes to a net.

Cherish the distance between them and me

But get inside the theatre of what goes on,

Or open the door and tumble into space –

No one would know I'd gone or where, destroying

The homely panorama and my body.

Death would not burn the spirit but I'd be off

And out of the map, shoes, tunic and cap looted

By gravity: Hello! as I spin, so glad to know you

But I never will. There, I don't belong,

My place forever looking down and in.

Alone, far back, to face the vanishing horizon squarely on.

Dim as it is, don't go, corrupted by haze

Loving what I cannot reach. The theatre's anatomy

And madness missed, don't care about a full cast waiting

To come in order of appearance and perform their dreams,

Ambition's engine, curtains holding back

Till the planet Lancaster divides the space

And I return over empty bombracks to get born again.

SHYLOCK THE WRITER

Humanity is good to bait fish with,

Salt fish that dries in the throat

And needs vodka to turn it down.

Such human quality pressed

A jackboot onto his vocation.

A mob was set on him whose rage

Needed no stoking.

A writer has eyes, hands, a heart

A pen that sometimes scratches

Like a rose-thorn at a gardener's vein.

He borrows words

And lends them out at interest,

Turns from each season and

With no humility or ignorance

Tells a story to keep the world quiet.

DELACROIX'S ‘LIBERTY GUIDING THE PEOPLE'

For the first few hundred yards

They knew her as a shirtmaker

Urging them over smoky corpses,

And when they said enough was enough

She climbed the lip of the barricade

To lead them over.

The world

Was impossible to open with a bayonet

That could not stop a cannon-ball in flight:

Nor could her red flag light them

Through a more than human darkness.

Then, whoever she was, she became
LIBERTY
.

No one knew when, by wonderful inspiration

She stripped off her shirt

And showed her bosom as a reminder

Of what brought them out of darkness.

Liberty, clothe your breasts

With that red flag –

I'll love you then.

Or let it guide the broken locomotive

Not the mob.

The boy with a pistol –

A cannon-ball took off his leg.

Your breasts gave liberty

But cured his worship.

Now he sells cheap pictures by the Louvre

Of
Mona Lisa
and
The Wreck of the Medusa
.

THE ITALIAN WOMAN

An Italian woman talking to her lover

On some far-off ocean

Mellifluously

From a villa in Liguria:

When are you coming back?

Shortwave static gruffed his voice.

I thought it would be soon, she said,

The scent of shrubs around her.

I love you, he said, but Neptune rules.

A sad laugh in her throat:

Yes, I understand,

So goodbye my handsome man,

I love you too.

The click of a telephone put down,

Sea noise rushing back.

Ah, love, I haven't lost you yet.

I love the sad laugh in her throat,

Face and body never to be seen

Nor flowers surrounding her.

I congratulate my rival,

And swing the needle onto other voices.

THE LIBERTY TREE

First of all

The brambles had to be pulled out

By the roots.

With thick gardening gloves

Against the spikes

I burrowed around the tree bole

And clasped them tight

And tugged their stomachs

Out of cosy soil.

It wasn't enough.

I had to walk away

Dragging the whole entanglement

From topmost branches,

Evergreen needles snowing me

As claws protested.

I got them down.

And yanked them loose

But it was slow work

Then cut away the ivy

Broke each brittle snake-branch

From sucker tracks

Halfway up and round the trunk,

Some fingers

More tenacious than an arm.

Next it was the nettles' turn

Them I grasped low down;

The taller they were

The easier they came,

Bunches of stings

Cast out to die.

Every parasite has its protection

Stings or prickles

Growing in alliance,

Making it difficult to start.

At last it's done:

The tree no longer burdened.

Space cleared:

The beauty of its trunk revealed:

The biggest anaconda of them all.

A tree with space

Grows ten years in two,

Breathing sky unhindered,

Vibrations

Running through both hands to say:

People need freedom like a tree.