Selected Poems (14 page)

seen through the wrong end of the telescope

making it so small I soon lost track.

The window’s open to the winter’s chill,

to air, to breezes and strong gusts that blow

my paper lantern nothing will keep still

and let me make things happen in its O.

When the circle, where my hand moves over white

with red and green advances on black ink,

first swung like this it gave me such a fright

I felt I was on a ship about to sink.

Now years of struggle make me concentrate

when it throws up images of planets hurled,

still glowing, off their courses, and a state

where there’s no gravity to hold the world.

I have to hold on when I think such things

and weather out these feelings so that when

the wind drops and the light no longer swings

I can focus on an Earth that still has men,

in this flooded orchestra where elbow grease,

deep thought, long practice and much sweat

gave me some inkling of an inner peace

I’d never found with women till I met

the one I wrote all those air letters for

and she’s the one I’m needing as I see

the North Wind once more strip my sycamore

and whip the last leaves off my elder tree.

Now when the wind flays my wild garden of its green

and blows, whistling through the flues, its old reminder

of the two cold poles all places are between,

though where she lives the climate’s a lot kinder,

and starts the lightbulb swinging to and fro,

and keeps it swinging, switched off, back and forth,

I feel the writing room I’m leaving grow

dark, and then darker with the whole view North.

Today I found the right fruit for my prime,

not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,

nor moon-like globes of grapefruit that now hang

outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon’s tang

(though last year full of bile and self-defeat

I wanted to believe no life was sweet)

nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine,

and no incongruous citrus ever seen

at greengrocers’ in Newcastle or Leeds

mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes,

a fruit an older poet might substitute

for the grape John Keats thought fit to be Joy’s fruit,

when, two years before he died, he tried to write

how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight,

and if he’d known the citrus that I mean

that’s not orange, lemon, lime or tangerine,

I’m pretty sure that Keats, though he had heard

‘of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd’

instead of ‘grape against the palate fine’

would have, if he’d known it, plumped for mine,

this Eastern citrus scarcely cherry size

he’d bite just once and then apostrophize

and pen one stanza how the fruit had all

the qualities of fruit before the Fall,

but in the next few lines be forced to write

how Eve’s apple tasted at the second bite,

and if John Keats had only lived to be,

because of extra years, in need like me,

at 42 he’d help me celebrate

that Micanopy kumquat that I ate

whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin –

or was it sweet outside, and sour within?

For however many kumquats that I eat

I’m not sure if it’s flesh or rind that’s sweet,

and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way

I’d offer Keats some kumquats and I’d say:

You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart:

say where the sweetness or the sourness start.

I find I can’t, as if one couldn’t say

exactly where the night became the day,

which makes for me the kumquat taken whole

best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul

of one in Florida at 42 with Keats

crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats

the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,

that this is how a full life ought to feel,

its perishable relish prick the tongue,

when the man who savours life ’s no longer young,

the fruits that were his futures far behind.

Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best

how days have darkness round them like a rind,

life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.

History, a life, the heart, the brain

flow to the taste buds and flow back again.

That decade or more past Keats’s span

makes me an older not a wiser man,

who knows that it’s too late for dying young,

but since youth leaves some sweetnesses unsung,

he’s granted days and kumquats to express

Man’s Being ripened by his Nothingness.

And it isn’t just the gap of sixteen years,

a bigger crop of terrors, hopes and fears,

but a century of history on this earth

between John Keats’s death and my own birth –

years like an open crater, gory, grim,

with bloody bubbles leering at the rim;

a thing no bigger than an urn explodes

and ravishes all silence, and all odes,

Flora asphyxiated by foul air

unknown to either Keats or Lemprière,

dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees

dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees,

a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats

children half the age of dying Keats …

Now were you twenty five or six years old

when that fevered brow at last grew cold?

I’ve got no books to hand to check the dates.

My grudging but glad spirit celebrates

that all I’ve got to hand ’s the kumquats, John,

the fruit I’d love to have your verdict on,

but dead men don’t eat kumquats, or drink wine,

they shiver in the arms of Proserpine,

not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne,

nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn

as I did, waking, when I saw her twist,

with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist,

the moon, that feebly lit our last night’s walk

past alligator swampland, off its stalk.

I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw,

as if I’d never seen the moon before,

the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light

make each citrus on the tree its satellite.

Each evening when I reach to draw the blind

stars seem the light zest squeezed through night’s black rind;

the night’s peeled fruit the sun, juiced of its rays,

first stains, then streaks, then floods the world with days,

days, when the very sunlight made me weep,

days, spent like the nights in deep, drugged sleep,

days in Newcastle by my daughter’s bed,

wondering if she, or I, weren’t better dead,

days in Leeds, grey days, my first dark suit,

my mother’s wreaths stacked next to Christmas fruit,

and days, like this in Micanopy. Days!

As strong sun burns away the dawn’s grey haze

I pick a kumquat and the branches spray

cold dew in my face to start the day.

The dawn’s molasses make the citrus gleam

still in the orchards of the groves of dream.

The limes, like Galway after weeks of rain,

glow with a greenness that is close to pain,

the dew-cooled surfaces of fruit that spent

all last night flaming in the firmament.

The new day dawns. O days! My spirit greets

the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats.

O kumquat, comfort for not dying young,

both sweet and bitter, bless the poet’s tongue!

I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew

against my palate. Fine, for 42!

I search for buzzards as the air grows clear

and see them ride fresh thermals overhead.

Their bleak cries were the first sound I could hear

when I stepped at the start of sunrise out of doors,

and a noise like last night’s bedsprings on our bed

from Mr Fowler sharpening farmers’ saws.

for David Hockney

The Californians read the sky aloud.

The Pasadena HAPPY turns to cloud!

My desk top’s like a Californian pool.

Practice mirrors from the ballet school,

meditation group, karate class

dodge or lay doggo in my desk-top glass,

but the opposite gymnasia both let through

enough clear sky to flood the desk with blue

which, like purposeful deletions, smoketrails cross.

Such smoketrails would have been of sphagnum moss

if these aeroplanes were floats displayed

at Pasadena’s New Year Rose Parade,

and in the air, plus HAPPY, there’d appear

as HAPPY starts dissolving, the NEW YEAR.

The seven puffs of white that made the Y

are disconnected cottonballs and sky.

As many floats as minutes are in hours

and nothing’s used to make them but fresh flowers,

raw cotton (wool not being flora) sheep

go bleating round a hyacinth Bo-Peep.

A woodwardia howdah delicately sways

with jonquil rajahs turbaned with bouquets,

the Cross in crocus and in baby’s breath

but no carnation Christ clamped to his death,

no battered nailheads of black onion seeds,

no spearthrust of poinsettia that bleeds.

A larkspur ‘Swoonatra’ in lunaria marquee

croons blue dendrobiums as do-re-mi,

a eucalyptus Calliope plays

furze and broom ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ays.

Next day in Pasadena the parade

succumbs to seconds and to Centigrade.

Mange-stricken mane and stripes moult in the heat,

the tiger’s marigolds, the lion’s wheat.

Poinsettia and poppy start to wilt

and deMcPhersonize the floral kilt.

Stoned teenagers in New Year t-shirts steal

the gladioli from the glockenspiel.

What struts in a sticky palm an hour or so ’s

no longer the snake’s pupil but a rose.

Real gardens make imaginary toads

as purple biro marks make funeral odes,

roses one huge daffodil, the clover moons,

and ferns make bars with cedar bark spitoons.

Life made out of minutes rings as true

as floragraphs of Cherokee and Sioux,

and like igloos quilted out of eglantine

1980’s made from ’79!

The new depth of my desk top’s like a pit’s!

The first stars spike its black with silver spritz.

The twilight shandygaff’s a little swish

of seltzer in a lake of liquorice.

Under plexiglass the crushed polestar

’s a boot-buffed Coke top stuck in Broadway tar.

Half conquered, half unconquerable space

in total darkness now reflects my face.

The space where Apollo slid into Soyuz

cries out for some strong, some tireless muse.

Like Arabella spider, I too try,

trailing these blown lines across the sky,

the creator with small letter c,

to learn to spin new webs in zero G.

And these figures lowered through my eyes

out of and into ever darkening skies,

they’re not the engrossed classes opposite

floating in free fall above my pit,

feeling each other’s faces like the blind,

or trying to rein still a racing mind,

nor those who’ve spent the new decade’s first weeks

mastering self-help anti-rape techniques –

Mummers from Allendale, that’s who they are!

Glum guisers with halved hogsheads of lit tar,

in costumes culled from soccer and crusade

cast crackling casks to start the new decade.

The firebarrels make a New Year blaze

that sparks a chain of beacons that are days.

The tossed in barrels send a noisy hiss

up from the surface of my desk’s abyss.

It’s up to someone else, not me to write

HAPPY in this smoke across the night.

Exeunt
the other mummers. ‘In comes I’

sounding with short plumb my blackened sky,

blackface Narcissus whose spirit has to pass

over the desk with dark depths in its glass.

In the glass desk now no lightening spark

pricks through the shiny carbon of its dark.

Night’s caulked over the light’s last penpoint chink.

The tarred creator stares at seas of ink,

and at the solstice of his silence cries aloud:

The Pasadena HAPPY turns to cloud!

And goes on repeating and repeating the same cry

until the seas of ink have all run dry.

Taos, New Mexico, 1980

for the 50th anniversary of the death of D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)

Juniper, aspen, blue spruce, just thawing snow

on the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico.

The trick’s to get that splendid view with all

those open spaces, without the hot-dog stall,

and those who shoot their photos as they pass

might well end up with billboards saying GAS!

The pueblo people live without TV

but will let you snap their houses, for a fee.

Their men get work as extras and are bussed

to ancestral battlefields to bite the dust.

And bussed, but to snap adobes, rubber necks

get excursion visits to ‘the priest of sex’.

They stay put in the bus. They smell the pine

not spritzed from aerosols but genuine,

dense in the thin air of that altitude.

They’ve heard about his work, and that it’s rude.

Back on the valley freeway at the first motel

they forget both noble Navajo and D.H.L.

Their call of nature ends through separate doors

branded in ranch pokerwork: BRAVES! SQUAWS!

Late last night on 77th I waited

to watch the Macy mammoths get inflated

and listen to the blear-eyed children cheer