Collected Poems (4 page)

On television screens, rats behind

A million miles of counters

Wielding guide-books, tables, catalogues

Slide-rules, stethoscopes, maps

Election registers, passports, insurance stamps

Death certificates, prison records

Visas, references, forms to sign

Case histories, birth certificates

Statistics, interview reports

Personality tests, loyalty rating

And knives to cure

The pyrotechnic paranoia of the anti-rats.

7

The city is seething with discontent

For they all wonder where the deserters went:

They took no beer and they took no bread

And everyone says that they must be dead:

Some speak with anger (a few speak with tears)

But most out of vague speculatory fears

That they still live among us, active and thin

Or are out in the wilderness about to dig in

And return to besiege us when winter has fled.

The deserters are waiting without beer or bread

Around ancient fires of obstinate coke,

And they laugh in the city and wonder who spoke

When the wind lifts a flame from wilderness fires

(Caught in snowlight – quickly expires)

They look up and listen from parlour debates

Then resume their relinquished sensory states

Within and without their crumbling walls,

Like jungle tigers secure in their night

When the forlorn bark of the jackal calls.

8

Behind the rat-horizons of the world

Try to decipher what history has hurled

Against the white range of your exposed spine;

Sit in your isolated jungle and define

(Among pine-needles and a flask of wine)

Your lack of Revolutionary fire

Love of safety (number one desire)

Happily tied to the waterwheel

For irrigation that will soon congeal

Blood in brain and arms, will sit you still

And quiet while the busy rats distil

Sweet liquor as a chaser for each pill

That saps away the flame of heart and will.

You found it hard to struggle for house and bread

To hone a sword and guide a plough

Found the ache too much for your tread

From one loaf to another, held your head

Low because you killed the man who stood

Before you for a faggot of dry wood.

Sailing from one coast to another grew

Wearying. You wanted women and a mild brew

To dull what wits the day's work left sound,

To sleep your life out on dry ground

Find a warm hut and a midnight glow,

A woman clothed in black from head to toe.

Sling, spear, plough, lathe and pen

Made artificers of house and den

Weighed power on scales and gave books of law

To save you from the blight of fang and claw,

Until this comfort to Utopia goes

Beyond a golden mean and throws

Us into progress where perfection flags:

Scarecrows beneath banners of atomic rags.

Like Zeno's arrow the motion is but sure:

From good to bad or bad to good:

No ship stood in stillness pure

Moved north or south in flood-

Tide and wild wind, or smartly drove

Its mainsail back to struggle and song

After a doldrum residence wherein wove

Sea-dolphins – opium to the eyes in long

Performance. Either move,

Or the sea swells into another form,

Little choice between calm and storm.

Each man wants to move the boat

Clockwise with fashionable hands

Reading history on how to float

Upon the wash with watermusic bands.

One calls the tune but others play the music

And idle waves of Neptune make the crew sick.

The rats devise solutions for each lake

Each overture and song reduce to easy,

Fix stabilizers firm from wind to wake:

And still the crew persist in feeling queasy.

Old antagonisms rage:

Rat-machinations roped with force

Imprison beauty in a cage,

Encircle it with propaganda morse.

‘Corruption is corruption, sometimes sweet

Is only dangerous when it stagnates:

Corrupt before, corrupted ever

Only keep it moving to be safe.'

First Rat: Feed, house, educate and teach

Place anti-seasick tablets in their reach.

Second Rat: Dope, rope, spiflicate and preach

Colour them by sunray lamps or bleach.

Third Rat: Dazzle, flash, warp their speech

Send them every Sunday to the beach.

Fourth Rat: Deceive, demand, even beseech

Cleverly, cleverly – they'll never screech!

9

Retreat like Scythians, like men of hair

Back into folding earth and lair:

Burn and scorch black the rich fields that you leave,

Once tilled with freedom and passion-verse.

Prepare to destroy that for which you grieve:

It is already ruined by the worse

Rat venom. Do not wish for what was there

Before Rats came but keep the cleansed air

Uncloyed, devoid of devil-noses

And perverted paper roses

Who pander to each scheme that rat proposes.

When on the rack-and-pinion of retreat

Earn your wayside cigarettes and bread

By giving lessons on the rats' defeat

Disguised in languages more live than dead:

Tutor yourselves in map-reading and crime

And devil's courage for the bleak time

When you alone will face the empty plain

Armed only with a visionary brain

That tried to understand how earth and sky

Could meet beyond the reach of feet and eye.

The would-be Rat-destroyers may feel this:

Burdened with a glimpse of emptiness

Night after night, with dreams that kiss

Despair as a king's seal, and nothingness:

A dull light gleaming on continual fight

In a retreat that leads beyond the end of night.

10

It was a rabbit skin, without meat

That took me to the fleapit for a treat:

The wasteland that seemed to Mr Eliot death

Nurtured me with passion, life and breath

To prolong for one more generation

A wasteland satellite of veneration:

A bottle-top, a piece of bone, a stone

Marked on no posters or big banners

To catapult against the rodent planners.

… the rock stop and turbo-drill that goes

Through granite like a knife through butter

(Shall I follow Mr Eliot's nose

And clinch this verse by using ‘gutter'?)

Rock-a-bye-baby, reach the tree top

Sing as you reap the apple crop;

Rob each garbled voice of Wednesday's ash

Ring out the mardi gras to grab and smash:

Hook-up your ribbons to a new Maypole.

The wasteland was a place where I best played

As a snotty-nosed bottle-chasing raggèd-arsed kid:

From a rusty frame and two cot-wheels I made

A bike that took me on a roll and skid

Between canal banks, tip and plain

And junk shops advertising ‘Guns for Spain'.

I read the tadpole angler quite complete

What Katy did at her first Christmas treat

Envied Monte Cristo's endless riches

But not Eliza's shame at her dropped stitches,

The splendid sack of Usher's houses

By philanthropists with ragged trousers.

In wintertime were rabbit skins fair game

For keeping warm the embers of such knowledge:

The wasteland was my library and college.

11

What's past is past, what still to come:

King, queen and godhead of Time's guide.

Show your bottom-dogs and sparkling fangs

In conspiratorial well-clawed gangs.

Open Baedeker's
Handbook to the Jungle

A thin-leaved blood-bound untried book to plan

All expeditions on, and scan

Its well-mapped footpaths (thornbush to the right):

Mined offices avoid at any cost;

Advice from all contributors is sound

Gathered by ears pressed firmly to the ground.

Ignore policemen if you're lost

By-pass the Customs, frontier weak at X

Step on the skeletons of vanguard wrecks

Hillslopes good for cover, summit wrong,

Travellers had better go by night

And eat ripe berries as they walk along.

Landmarks described with economic prose:

This cathedral has a mildewed nose

From decades of unmedicated sores.

Decay comes quicker when it flouts Time's laws.

See this castle? Rotten doors:

King left owing bills for bread and cheese

Queen stored perfumes in deepfreeze

Was tricked for absolution with the whores.

Take those statues by the wall

Carved on a diet of olive-oil and gall:

Unbribable stern servants of the realm

Turned up their noses and let go the helm.

12

Watch the sky. Watch the warning

Floating down of an autumn morning.

Barricade your colleges and schools

Sharpen slide-rules into fighting tools.

Paper to a depth of thirty inches

May stop a bullet and prove good defences,

But fire will desolate consume and scorch

That to begin needs but a single torch.

A red sky at night will be their delight

And red in the morning the Rats' night dawning.

Admitted, you gave them ale and telly

But in return took each man's name and age

And locked his magic in a wicker cage

Burning it in secret while they filled

Unwittingly their bellies after hunger.

You cannot read the writing on the wall:

They were not given bread at all

But food to make them strong (and sane)

Enough to understand your orders.

A meal of pure white bread is bad

When given to a dog the dog goes mad.

The bread of life is of a different grain

It feeds the body wholemeal and the brain.

13

Slowly, slowly, Dungeness lighthouse

Dim in the distance dipped its wick:

Old Folkestone vowed to thee its country

And Beachy Head was being sick;

But stouter England stood and stouter

From Berwick's Tweed to Dover Castle

Hugging the Downs beneath its arm

Like an empty paper parcel;

And slowly also big Cape Grey Nose

Lays itself before the boat

Sends its white birds up to catch my

Soul while yet it stays afloat.

14

Retreat, dig in, retreat

Withdraw your shadow from the crimson

Gutters that run riot down the street.

Retreat, dig in, arrange your coat

As a protective covering

A clever camouflage of antidote.

Retreat still more, still more

Remembering your images and words:

Perfect the principles of fang-and-claw.

The shadows of retreat are wide

Town and desert equally bereft

Of honest hieroglyph or guide.

Release your territory and retreat

Record preserve and memorize

The journey where no drums can rouse nor beat:

Defeat is not the question. Withdraw

Into the hollows of the hills

Until this winter passes into thaw.

Dig in no more. Turn round and fight

Forget the wicked and regret the lame

And travel back the way you came,

In front the darkness, and behind –
THE LIGHT
.

from
A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, 1964

POEM LEFT BY A DEAD MAN

Let no one say I was cleaning this gun:

I killed myself because

I wanted the sun

But got the moon.

Sanity came back too soon.

I did not even clean the gun:

Put in two bullets for the moon and sun

Spun the chamber in a final game.

The sun and moon were both the same.

CAPE FINISTERRE

Borrow got here, so did I

Nothing in front but sea and sky.

Blue, traditional, unplanned,

Then white with envy at safe land:

Were such cold acres ever seen

Than vast and climbing for this rock?

Big as the fish that got away,

Bigger, but no one ever died from shock

At so much water, such wide space:

Vostok III and Vostok IV

Slap proportion in the face.

Rapier-thin horizons claw

At blasé tissue of bland eye:

While Man is climbing at the moon

The sea foams white on every shore,

Moonstruck where the start began

Moonlit in the wake of Man

Who turns his back on Finisterre.

WOODS

Woods are for observing from a distance

On your father's arms:

Woods are for being frightened of –

Bogie-men swing among those close-packed trees.

Woods are then for making fires in

Running before the wrath of cop or farmer:

Smoke and the smell of dandelions

In place of blood.

Later for loving girls in:

Untidy bushes lick damp hair,

Secret, dark and out of sight

With nothing now to replace blood.

Some use woods for attacking and defending

The black scream of unnatural possession,

Tree roots linchpinned into earth

By shudders and the soil of death.

By summer shunned in fear of lightning

The bitter roaming flash of snaked lightning;

In winter shelter us from rain or snow:

Tree-packs hold our fate like cards.

Woods are then forgotten two-score years

Power lapsing into midnight dreams,

The core of body and soul

Scooped by the knife of living.

The wood became jungle, and you its shadow: