Collected Poems (6 page)

While all trees wither and retreat.

Out of farm range or cottage eyes trees make war

Green heads, close as if to kiss

Roots to rip at quickening wood of tree-hearts

And tree-lungs, sap-running wood-flesh

Hurled at the moon, breaking oak

Like the dismemberment of ships,

At the truce of dawn wind trumpeting.

Sedate, dispassionate and beautiful

They know about panic and life and patience

Grow by guile into night's

Companions and day's evil

Setting landmarks and boundaries

That fight the worms.

Trees love, love love, love Death

Love a windscorched earth and copper sky

Love the burns of ice and fire

When lightning as a last hope is called in.

Boats on land they loathe the sea

And wait with all arms spread to catch the moon:

Pull back my skin and there is bark

Peel off my bark and there is skin:

I am a tree whose roots destroy me.

DITCHLING BEACON

End of life and before death

Feathers dipping towards oaken frost

A bird heard that shot:

The ink sky burst,

Stone colliding with the sun

Echo stunned its wing

String hauled it down.

Gamekeeper or poacher

Cut its free flight to the sea.

Vice had tongue, veins, teeth

Dogs in panoply, pressure

To ring a sunspot fitting neat

The blacked-out circle of a gun.

LIZARD

Fiddle-tongue and spite

Hang as if asleep

Safe on his tipped world,

But lizard-shoulders hunch

Pulsate at a fly on slanting wall.

Belly smooth, feet stuck firm

A thousand volts of paralyzing tongue

Rifle out and kill;

Weapons in one stomach pit.

Death is quick when looked on,

Sweet as food when the lamps of paradise

Blacken a brain that one day

Hoped to know.

Sparking tongue ignites

A common wink and into oblivion:

The lizard unaware of upside down

Eats as it runs.

EMPTY QUARTER

He meditates on the Empty Quarter:

Mosque of sand dissolving through eggtimer's

Neck. Looks on camel-loads

Starting for Oman or Muscat

By invisible Mercator's thread

That burns the hoof and shrivels

All humps of water. Empty Quarter lures,

He travels with his heaped caravan

Earth-tracks marked as lines

Of unstable land, golden sandgrit

Lifting up grey dunes near vulcan-

Trees and foul magnesium wells

That asps and camels drink from.

He throws off bells, beads, silk, guns

Knives and slippers, scattering all

No longer needed – camel meat

For scavengers, everything

But his own dishrags of flesh.

Naked and demented he hugs

A tree rooted in the widest waste

Catching dew from God at dawn

And dates dropping through rottenness,

Tastes the lone tree's shade

No one can chop or whip him from,

Till one day ravelled in his own white flame

He abandons the Empty Quarter

And trudges back to terrify the world.

FIRST POEM

Burned out, burned out

Water of rivers hold me

On a course towards the sea.

Burned out was like a tree

Cut down and hollowed

No branches left

Seasoned by fire into a boat:

Burned out through love's

Wilful spending

Yet sure it will float

Kindle a fresh blaze

Burn out again

On a stranger shore –

Unless pyromaniac emotions

Scorch me in midstream

And the sun turns black.

LOVE'S MANSION

To keep them healthily in thrall

They build a little fire in the hall –

And burn their opulent home to ash.

A ruin is better than no love at all.

Dark and ageing timbers crash

Cats surround it at full moon.

Did they abandon love too soon

Full of happiness to see it fall?

Let it fall, in sight of all

It kept them long enough in thrall

As cupboards burn and timbers fall.

They're still inside, nowhere to run

No windows through which they can crawl;

Only the trapped and burning see it fall.

It kept them like a snake in thrall.

A ruin is better than no love at all.

They smile unhappily to see it fall.

TO BURN OUT LOVE

To burn out love is to burn a star from the sky

But can touch reach so far,

Feel the fire increase

Careful the heart but not the star will burn?

Star that pulsates like a fish:

My heart meets you in dark or light

To taste the waters of the star which says:

Trust once gone can never be restored –

Such love can surely be put out,

The power to break its fire with my fist.

SEATALK

Talking on the beach:

Love has broken its heart

Is a pomegranate split

A waterfall pouring in.

Each half lifts

Drifts out to sea,

Eaten clean as January boats

By frost and salt.

One will sink, one go free:

Withered fruit-husk without salt

Or soul. Could be you

And could be me, watching January waves

Erupt like whales and thrones and tractors:

Stones clash back into their places.

You wait for a boat to come

And snatch you from love's pandemonium

Of humping tide and screeching stones.

But what shipwrecked you there?

Want to know, and cease to wonder:

The boat lurches into seas of danger

Waves turning phosphorous, turn fire:

Rowers begin work, and you not with them

When the numbness in you burns

Because you do not want to go, or stay.

Pomegranate is a far-off fruit

Scattered seeds fulfil no circle.

Love cannot kill

A broken heart, nor mend it.

The sea defends its dead

And those born from it,

Believes in broken hearts

Burns when it boils so.

No boat can stay, must fall apart

Floating through the open heart,

Like fruit bursting

At the shock of moonless water,

And two more hearts pulled in to slaughter.

NAKED

Naked, naked, I never see you naked

As if to be naked is to tell lies

With the body that you show –

Cover it and keep the truth.

Hide naked, keep it close

You never let me see you naked

Unless half so by accident or tease.

Hide it carefully: those lies are yours,

Not mine, speak them loudly if they burn.

Belong to someone else, not mine.

I see you naked through them,

Through love, naked beyond the truth

That will not let you see yourself.

Keep your body for someone else:

The lies that hide you are less sure

Than the truth that blinds me.

GHOSTS: WHAT JASON SAID TO MEDEA

It is time to part, before murder is done.

We have robbed each other of all we had,

Eaten bitter herbs of battleground and kitchen

And soaked our souls in them,

Digested the gall of trust so cannot give it back

In that pure state it was before:

Consumed ourselves by ignoble hatred.

So let us part like ghosts

And promise not to haunt each other –

Or make ghosts of others.

HUNGER

I haven't found my hunger yet. When will I know

The hunger to eat these walls away?

The smallest creature visible to the eye

Ran the pallid whiteness up this page

And when I crushed it, hungry at its freedom,

I found a tiny spider made of brick.

It had lived on brick, the bright red dust of brick

That filled its dust-dot of a body and even the speck

Of legs it ran upon. Its life was fed by dust,

The dust of bricks, and it had slaked its hunger

On bricks, no question asked or thought of,

Eating through walls was its life, its vital hunger

For the walls it ate through, even at times

Without hunger. It was so realized

I crushed it, a reddish smear

On the page to remind me

Of the hunger that I know about at last.

HEPHZIBAH

Why don't I write or speak the name?

No light at Hephzibah's window,

So do not use ‘love' in vain

Nor easily at this turn of the game.

Her name ignites the wind, breeds

Smoke in the snow of the heart

Gluttons the marrow as I watch

The bombed space

Phosphorized to blindness.

You cannot answer letters or my speeches,

A different man when salt burns

Till there is no more light.

Signals change before the gale

Wipes all traffic out.

Cogs and linchpins tattoo Hephzibah

So I can't forget your name, or use it,

But continually hear magic syllables

Shriller than my curse

As I speed through

White headlights flooding the world.

FULL MOON'S TONGUE

She said, when the full moon's tongue hung

Over Earls Court chimneypots,

And he circled slowly

Round the square to find

A suitable parking place –

She said: ‘Let's go away together.'

‘Keep clear,' he said. ‘You'd better not.

I'll take you, but watch out,

For I will bring you back

If at all,

In two pieces.'

She said: ‘I'll never want to come back

If I go away with you.'

‘They all do,' he said.

‘I'll bring you back in two pieces

And you'll live like that forever

And never join them up again.'

‘How cruel,' she said, seeing what he meant.

‘Oh no,' he said. ‘To take you apart completely

From yourself and make two separate pieces

Might be the one sure way of fixing

A whole person out of you –

Some do, some don't.'

He was exceptionally nonchalant.

‘I'm not sure now,' she said,

Screaming suddenly: ‘You bastard!

Let me get out, I want to walk.'

He stopped the car

But could not park it,

Someone with a similar problem

Was hooting him to move,

So she jumped free and walked away

Leaving him bewildered,

And in at least two pieces.

You talk too much,

Said one piece to another.

SILENCE AND STILLNESS

Silence and stillness

Are most prized in a whirlwind.

Panic is being caught

Between millstones of stillness –

Feel the bones of the body

Living out the heart's pain.

The whirlwind will penetrate

The stockade of a gaze erected

That nothing can break through,

While waiting for the force

That will pull you into the body

And draw all pain away.

A lawn grows in the palm of one hand:

Trees in the other combust

To chase worms out.

Nothing can soothe the battered soul,

But love cauterizes madness.

SMILE

Can't get him out –

Sits right in the fireplace

Curled up tight

Olive logs send red flames

Feeling the chimney spout.

Cold and safe, legs indrawn,

Wan smile, squats in his fireplace,

Irons cold, hair neat

Away and safe unless

A crowbar can prise him whimpering free.

He smiles wanly because no one has.

If and when he would be normal,

A dead man on the street, smiles

In a mirror no one can smash:

A moonless grimace of victory,

Insane as the sun

That cleanses better than any fire

Or his prison it once burned in.

CHAIN

The chain is weakest at its strongest point:

The strong link by its heart helps weaker parts,

And so weak links grow tauter than they should.

Thus, taking too much strength

The whole chain crumbles

Broken at both weak and stronger points.

Water breaks the strongest chain

When a stormtide drags the ship away.

Power changes all equations –

The strongest link a strand of hair,

And weakest at its strongest point

Shares its heart with weaker hearts.

GULF OF BOTHNIA – ON THE WAY TO RUSSIA

Midnight aches at the length of life

The endless day

Blocking the porthole-elbow of Bothnia:

One grand eye lit in twelve o'clock yellow,

Turquoise and carmine sun

A wound gouged by the night-dragon

Not yet asleep.

Day bleeds to death

Sea close enough to dip

The pen and write in.

No midsummer howitzer can give

A morphine blast and send the sun

To whatever will rise up at dawn for me.

Space and midnight fill all emptiness,

As lost love bleeds acidic dreams

Into the solvent sea:

Red like a Roman bath.

EURASIAN JETNOTE

Frontiers meet over steppe and meadow

At burial mound, salt waste or winter hut,

Beyond danubes and caspians

Where sturgeon breed by reed and barge-hull–

But wood outlives

Asia or Europe, love shaped by heart-torn

Internal bleeding of the stricken forest.