New and Selected Poems (3 page)

   He smiles in a mirror, shrinking the whole

Sun-swung zodiac of light to a trinket shape

   On the rise of his eye: it is a role

   In which he can fling a cape,

And outloom life like Faustus. But once when

   On an empty mountain slope

   A black goat clattered and ran

Towards him, and set forefeet firm on a rock

   Above and looked down

   A square-pupilled yellow-eyed look

The black devil head against the blue air,

   What gigantic fingers took

   Him up and on a bare

Palm turned him close under an eye

   That was like a living hanging hemisphere

   And watched his blood’s gleam with a ray

Slow and cold and ferocious as a star

   Till the goat clattered away.

October is marigold, and yet

A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn

Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if

The ice-age had begun its heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn

From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice

Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here

Restraining a ripple from the air; 

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;

Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight

Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate 

Reunion while a fist of cold

Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,

And now it is about to start.

Farmers in the fields, housewives behind steamed windows,

Watch the burning aircraft across the blue sky float,

As if a firefly and a spider fought,

Far above the trees, between the washing hung out.

They wait with interest for the evening news.

But already, in a brambled ditch, suddenly-smashed

Stems twitch. In the stubble a pheasant

Is craning every way in astonishment.

The hare that hops up, quizzical, hesitant,

Flattens ears and tears madly away and the wren warns.

Some, who saw fall, smoke beckons. They jostle above,

They peer down a sunbeam as if they expected there

A snake in the gloom of the brambles or a rare flower –

See the grave of dead leaves heave suddenly, hear

It was a man fell out of the air alive,

Hear now his groans and senses groping. They rip

The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils; they raise

A body that as the breeze touches it glows,

Branding their hands on his bones. Now that he has

No spine, against heaped sheaves they prop him up,

Arrange his limbs in order, open his eye,

Then stand, helpless as ghosts. In a scene

Melting in the August noon, the burned man

Bulks closer greater flesh and blood than their own,

As suddenly the heart’s beat shakes his body and the eye

Widens childishly. Sympathies

Fasten to the blood like flies. Here’s no heart’s more

Open or large than a fist clenched, and in there

Holding close complacency its most dear

Unscratchable diamond. The tears of their eyes

Too tender to let break, start to the edge

Of such horror close as mourners can,

Greedy to share all that is undergone,

Grimace, gasp, gesture of death. Till they look down

On the handkerchief at which his eye stares up.

Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw

In raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy,

Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge

That dazzled with rifle fire, hearing

Bullets smacking the belly out of the air –

He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm;

The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye

Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest –

In bewilderment then he almost stopped –

In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations

Was he the hand pointing that second? He was running

Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs

Listening between his footfalls for the reason

Of his still running, and his foot hung like

Statuary in mid-stride. Then the shot-slashed furrows

Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame

And crawled in a threshing circle, its mouth wide

Open silent, its eyes standing out.

He plunged past with his bayonet towards the green hedge,

King, honour, human dignity, etcetera

Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm

To get out of that blue crackling air

His terror’s touchy dynamite.

The celluloid of a photograph holds them well –

Six young men, familiar to their friends.

Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged

This photograph have not wrinkled the faces or the hands.

Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable,

Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile,

One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,

One is ridiculous with cocky pride –

Six months after this picture they were all dead.

All are trimmed for a Sunday jaunt. I know

That bilberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall,

Which are there yet and not changed. From where these sit

You hear the water of seven streams fall

To the roarer in the bottom, and through all

The leafy valley a rumouring of air go.

Pictured here, their expressions listen yet,

And still that valley has not changed its sound

Though their faces are four decades under the ground.

This one was shot in an attack and lay

Calling in the wire, then this one, his best friend,

Went out to bring him in and was shot too;

And this one, the very moment he was warned

From potting at tin-cans in no man’s land,

Fell back dead with his rifle-sights shot away.

The rest, nobody knows what they came to,

But come to the worst they must have done, and held it

Closer than their hope; all were killed.

Here see a man’s photograph,

The locket of a smile, turned overnight

Into the hospital of his mangled last

Agony and hours; see bundled in it

His mightier-than-a-man dead bulk and weight:

And on this one place which keeps him alive

(In his Sunday best) see fall war’s worst

Thinkable flash and rending, onto his smile

Forty years rotting into soil.

That man’s not more alive whom you confront

And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,

Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,

Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;

No thought so vivid as their smoking-blood:

To regard this photograph might well dement,

Such contradictory permanent horrors here

Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out

One’s own body from its instant and heat.

Burned by Bloody Mary’s men at Carmarthen. ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.’ (His words on being chained to the stake.) 

Bloody Mary’s venomous flames can curl:

They can shrivel sinew and char bone

Of foot, ankle, knee, and thigh, and boil

Bowels, and drop his heart a cinder down;

And her soldiers can cry, as they hurl

Logs in the red rush: ‘This is her sermon.’

The sullen-jowled watching Welsh townspeople

Hear him crack in the fire’s mouth; they see what

Black oozing twist of stuff bubbles the smell

That tars and retches their lungs: no pulpit

Of his ever held their eyes so still,

Never, as now his agony, his wit.

An ignorant means to establish ownership

Of his flock! Thus their shepherd she seized

And knotted him into this blazing shape

In their eyes, as if such could have cauterized

The trust they turned towards him, and branded on

Its stump her claim, to outlaw question.

So it might have been: seeing their exemplar

And teacher burned for his lessons to black bits,

Their silence might have disowned him to her,

And hung up what he had taught with their Welsh hats:

Who sees his blasphemous father struck by fire

From heaven, might well be heard to speak no oaths.

But the fire that struck here, come from Hell even,

Kindled little heavens in his words

As he fed his body to the flame alive.

Words which, before they will be dumbly spared,

Will burn their body and be tongued with fire

Make paltry folly of flesh and this world’s air.

When they saw what annuities of hours

And comfortable blood he burned to get

His words a bare honouring in their ears,

The shrewd townsfolk pocketed them hot:

Stamp was not current but they rang and shone

As good gold as any queen’s crown.

Gave all he had, and yet the bargain struck

To a merest farthing his whole agony,

His body’s cold-kept miserdom of shrieks

He gave uncounted, while out of his eyes,

Out of his mouth, fire like a glory broke,

And smoke burned his sermon into the skies.

From what dog’s dish or crocodile’s rotten

       Larder she had come

He questioned none: ‘It is enough

       That she is and I am.’

They caught each other by the body

       And fell in a heap:

A cockerel there struck up a tread

       Like a cabman’s whip.

And so they knit, knotted and wrought

       Braiding their ends in;

So fed their radiance to themselves

       They could not be seen.

And thereupon – a miracle!

       Each became, a lens

So focussing creation’s heat

       The other burst in flames.

Bawdry! Bawdry! Steadfastly

       Thy great protagonists

Died face to face, with bellies full,

       In the solar waste

Where there is neither skirt nor coat,

       And every ogling eye

Is a cold star to measure

       Their solitude by.