Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy (6 page)

We could never really say what it is like,

this hour of drinking wine together

on a hot summer night, in the living-room

with the windows open, in our underwear,

my pants with pale-gold gibbon monkeys on them

gleaming in the heat. We talk about our son disappearing

between the pine boughs,

we could not tell what was chrysalis or

bough and what was him. The wine

is powerful, each mouthful holds

for a moment its amber agate shape,

I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s

forehead the hour before his death. We talk about

those last days – that I was waiting for him to die.

You are lying on the couch, your underpants

a luminous white, your hand resting

relaxed, alongside your penis,

we talk about your father’s illness,

your nipple like a pure circle of

something risen to the surface of your chest.

Even if we wanted to,

we could not describe it,

the end of the second glass when I sometimes

weep and you start to get sleepy – I love

to drink and cry with you, and end up

sobbing to a sleeping man, your

long body filling the couch and

draped slightly over the ends, the

untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.

Yes, we know we will make love, but we’re

not getting ready to make love,

nor are we getting over making love,

love is simply our element,

it is the summer night, we are in it.

Snow melting when I left you, and I took

This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow

Before I left, exposed beside a brook

Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know,

Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day.

Though at the time her wild human hand

Had gestured inexplicably, I say

Her meaning now is more than I can stand.

We’ve reasons, we have reasons, so we say,

For giving love, and for withholding it.

I who would love must marvel at the way

I know aloneness when I’m holding it,

Know near and far as words for live and die,

Know distance, as I’m trying to draw near,

Growing immense, and know, but don’t know why,

Things seen up close enlarge, then disappear.

Tonight this small room seems too huge to cross.

And my life is that looming kind of place.

Here, left with this alone, and at a loss

I hold an alien and vacant face

Which shrinks away, and yet is magnified –

More so than I seem able to explain.

Tonight the giant galaxies outside

Are tiny, tiny on my windowpane.

What I get I bring home to you:

a dark handful, sweet-edged,

dissolving in one mouthful.

I bother to bring them for you

though they’re so quickly over,

pulpless, sliding to juice,

a grainy rub on the tongue

and the taste’s gone. If you remember

we were in the woods at wild strawberry time

and I was making a basket of dockleaves

to hold what you’d picked,

but the cold leaves unplaited themselves

and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves

until I gave up and ate wild strawberries

out of your hands for sweetness.

I lipped at your palm –

the little salt edge there,

the tang of money you’d handled.

As we stayed in the wood, hidden,

we heard the sound system below us

calling the winners at Chepstow,

faint as the breeze turned.

The sun came out on us, the shade blotches

went hazel: we heard names

bubble like stock-doves over the woods

as jockeys in stained silks gentled

those sweat-dark, shuddering horses

down to the walk.

There were never strawberries

like the ones we had

that sultry afternoon

sitting on the step

of the open french window

facing each other

your knees held in mine

the blue plates in our laps

the strawberries glistening

in the hot sunlight

we dipped them in sugar

looking at each other

not hurrying the feast

for one to come

the empty plates

laid on the stone together

with the two forks crossed

and I bent towards you

sweet in that air

in my arms

abandoned like a child

from your eager mouth

the taste of strawberries

in my memory

lean back again

let me love you

let the sun beat

on our forgetfulness

one hour of all

the heat intense

and summer lightning

on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;

and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal

surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,

or cherries, the rich spurt in the back

of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.

Give me the lover who yanks open the door

of his house and presses me to the wall

in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched

and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload

and begin their delicious diaspora

through the cities and small towns of my body.

To hell with the saints, with the martyrs

of my childhood meant to instruct me

in the power of endurance and faith,

to hell with the next world and its pallid angels

swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.

I want this world. I want to walk into

the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along

like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,

and I want to resist it. I want to go

staggering and flailing my way

through the bars and back rooms,

through the gleaming hotels and the weedy

lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks

where dogs are let off their leashes

in spite of the signs, where they sniff each

other and roll together in the grass, I want to

lie down somewhere and suffer for love until

it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again

and put on that little black dress and wait

for you, yes you, to come over here

and get down on your knees and tell me

just how fucking good I look.

but you know how to raise it in me

like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to

wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.

How to start clean. This love even sits up

and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.

Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want

to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive

to some cinderblock shithole in the desert

where she can drink and get sick and then

dance in nothing but her underwear. You know

where she's headed, you know she'll wake up

with an ache she can't locate and no money

and a terrible thirst. So to hell

with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt

and your tongue down my throat

like an oxygen tube. Cover me

in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

There is a kind of love called maintenance,

Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it; 

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget

The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs; 

Which answers letters; which knows the way

The money goes; which deals with dentists 

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,

And postcards to the lonely; which upholds 

The permanently ricketty elaborate

Structures of living; which is Atlas. 

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,

Which knows what time and weather are doing

To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;

Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers

My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps

My suspect edifice upright in air,

As Atlas did the sky. 

Nothing is plumb, level, or square:

    the studs are bowed, the joists

are shaky by nature, no piece fits

    any other piece without a gap

or pinch, and bent nails

    dance all over the surfacing

like maggots. By Christ

    I am no carpenter. I built

the roof for myself, the walls

    for myself, the floors

for myself, and got

    hung up in it myself. I

danced with a purple thumb

    at this house-warming, drunk

with my prime whiskey: rage.

    Oh I spat rage’s nails

into the frame-up of my work:

    it held. It settled plumb,

level, solid, square and true

    for that great moment. Then

it screamed and went on through,

    skewing as wrong the other way.

God damned it. This is hell,

    but I planned it, I sawed it,

I nailed it, and I

    will live in it until it kills me.

I can nail my left palm

    to the left-hand crosspiece but

I can’t do everything myself.

    I need a hand to nail the right,

a help, a love, a you, a wife.

From time to time our love is like a sail

and when the sail begins to alternate

from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail

and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;

and if the coat is yours, it has a tear

like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins

to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter

and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions

and this, my love, when millions come and go

beyond the need of us, is like a trick;

and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe

tiptoeing on a rope, which is like luck;

and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,

which is like love, which is like everything.

Side by side, their faces blurred,

The earl and countess lie in stone,

Their proper habits vaguely shown

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,

And that faint hint of the absurd –

The little dogs under their feet. 

Such plainness of the pre-baroque

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still

Clasped empty in the other; and

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. 

They would not think to lie so long.

Such faithfulness in effigy

Was just a detail friends would see:

A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace

Thrown off in helping to prolong

The Latin names around the base. 

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly they 

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

The endless altered people came, 

Washing at their identity.

Now, helpless in the hollow of

An unarmorial age, a trough

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

Above their scrap of history,

Only an attitude remains: 

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love. 

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.