Selected Poems (17 page)

that pipe our cold spring water from its source,

or a carpenter fits porch-posts, and they see,

from below or from above, the heartwood floors

made from virgin lumber, such men say,

as if they’d taught each other the same line:

Boards like them boards don’t exist today
!

then maybe add:
Now everything’s new pine
.

Though the house is in a scant surviving wood

that has black walnut, hackberry, pecan

and moss-festooned live-oaks that have withstood

centuries more of bad news than a man,

sometimes we can drive an hour or more

and see nothing but dense pine trees on both sides

and no glimpse of the timbers for such floors

from virgin forest laid for virgin brides.

The feller/buncher and delimber groans,

grappling the grovelling pines, and dozing flat

a whole stand to a mess of stumps and stones

like some Goliath gorged on them, then shat

what was no use to him back on the land.

The sun and moon are sharing the same sky

as we drive by this totally depleted stand

marked down for GP planks and layer-peeled ply.

We’d set off early but shrill loggers’ saws

were already shrieking in the stands of pines.

Fresh-felled, lopped slash pine tree-trunks in their scores

were being bull-dozed into ordered lines

waiting for the trucks in long convoy.

The trimmed-off branches were already burning.

The quiet, early road we’d wanted to enjoy

we did, but met the timber trucks returning.

Our early start was so that we could get

the trees we’d gone to buy into the ground,

watered and well-mulched, before sunset,

and not be digging in the dark with snakes around.

So with fig-trees, vines, and apples in the back,

wilting and losing their
Tree Garden
sheen,

we see on the road ahead a sky half black

and half as brilliantly blue as it had been.

The fast track was all wet, the crawler lane

we’d driven in most of the morning, dry.

The west side was in sun, the east in rain.

The east had black, the west had bright blue sky.

Armadillo blood, on the one side, ’s washed away,

and, on the other, further on, sun-dried,

according as the car-crushed creature lay

on the highway’s wet or sunny side.

Killed by traffic flowing through the night,

armadillos, rats, snake, dog, racoon,

dead on both road verges, left and right,

are scavenged on and half-decayed by noon,

and browsed over with hummed hubbub by blowfly

like loud necklaces, beads gone berserk,

that, whatever the day’s weather, wet or dry,

stay a high gloss green and do their work.

And as we accelerated fast and overtook,

moving on the rain side as we did,

first one and then another timber truck,

the sudden wet road made me scared we’d skid.

My heart leaped instantly into my mouth

till we seemed safe between two loads of pine,

part of that convoy travelling due South

with east lane raining, and west side fine.

Was it the danger that made me hold my breath,

the quick injection of adrenalin,

the vision of our simultaneous death

and the crushed Toyota we were riding in,

or the giant raindrops that were pelting

onto the windshield and shot through with sun,

that made it seem the two of us were melting

and in a radiant decay becoming one?

Good job with such visions going on

that you were driving and you kept your head,

or that sense of fleshly glory would be gone

with the visionary who sensed it, and you, dead,

as dead as the armadillo, possum or racoon

killed by the nighttime traffic and well

advanced into decay by afternoon

and already giving off a putrid smell.

At least the storm cleaned love-bugs off the car

and washed the windscreen glass so you could drive.

When they copulate in swarms you can’t see far.

They’d sooner fuck their brains out than survive.

They hit the car, embracing, and, squashed flat,

their twinned remains are merged into one mess.

Is it just the crushed canoodling gnat

that needs for its Nirvana nothingness?

Flattened in airborne couples as they fucked

their squashed millions would make the windscreen dark

if the wipers didn’t constantly conduct

the dead to sectors round the dozed-clear arc.

Choked radiators, speckled bumper bars

splattered with love-bugs, two by two,

camouflage the colour of parked cars

pulled up at
Chiang’s Mongolian Barbecue
.

From then on we were well and truly stuck

and anxious to get back to plant our trees

behind the huge pine-loaded lumber truck,

its red flag flapping in its slipstream breeze.

Because the lashed lopped slash was newly cut

the pungency of pine filled all the air.

We have to drive with all the windows shut,

the smell of pine too powerful to bear.

Now quite impossible to overtake

the convoy crawls up Highway 26.

Your foot keeps hovering above the brake

behind future coffin lids and cocktail sticks.

Our impatience at the slowness of the road

was not repugnance at the smell of pine,

however pungent, but worry for our load

of apple, pear, and fig, and muscadine.

Pine’s the lingering perfume newly-weds

in just-built houses smell off panelling,

off squeaky floorboards, off their platform beds,

that cows smell when their rheumy nostrils sting

and tingle on electric pasture fences,

of the USA’s best-selling bathroom spray

spritzed against those stinks that shock the senses,

shit, decomposition, and decay.

This is the smell in Walden that Thoreau’s

cabin-builder’s hands gave to his lunch,

the resinous pitch that prickled in his nose

whenever he took a sandwich out to munch,

and, maybe, thinking morosely as he chews

how woodlands mostly end up wooden goods,

the wrapping of his butties, week-old news,

was also nature once, and someone’s woods.

In some sub-Walden worlds his dream survives

though these dreams of independence are nightmares

where retiree DIYers save their lives

while everyone around them ’s losing theirs.

Spacemen go one way, these pioneers

mole down into the earth to find a place

to weather out the days, weeks, even yéars

that may well, but for these, kill off our race.

Considering their years it’s maybe kinder

when they burrow in the ground like gophers do

not to offer them the sobering reminder

that rattlesnakes use gopher burrows too.

However layered with rocks and earth the roof,

however stocked with freeze-drieds (praise the Lord!)

however broad the door, how bullet proof,

no matter how much water they have stored,

until the radiation count all-clear

broadcast (they don’t say how) on radio,

when they can, but cautiously, then reappear,

death got there before them, though they grow

by battery-powered Mazda lightbulb beams

alfalfa sprouts, damp blotting pads of cress,

while nations torn apart by common dreams

are united in a state of Nothingness.

Being neither newly-weds nor retirees

today we bought five figs, a pear, a vine,

and still have some belief in planting trees

with lifespans more than three times yours and mine.

Most of my life I’ve wanted to believe

those words of Luther that I’ve half-endorsed

about planting an apple tree the very eve

of the Apocalypse; or the Holocaust.

Every time my bags of red goat leather

are lying labelled England in the hall

and we take our last stroll round the land together

whether it’s winter, summer, spring or fall,

there’s always one last job I find to do,

pruned branches that I need to burn,

one last load of needles left to strew –

it’s a way of guaranteeing my return.

A neighbour learns the skills they call ‘survival’

living wild off sabal palm and game

killed by various means, knife, bow, or rifle,

even by throttling; me, I’ve learned to name

and know the subtle differences between

what once was only ‘woods’, or was before

mere nameless leaves of slightly varied green

but is now, say, persimmon or possumhaw.

Who lives for the future, who for now?

What good’s the
cigale
’s way or the
fourmi
’s

if both end up as nothing anyhow

unless they look at life like Socrates

who wished, at the very end, to learn to play

a new air on his novice lyre.
Why
?

said his teacher,
this is your last day
.

To know it before I die
, was the reply.

II

Chill, sterile, waterless, inert,

but full, the moon illuminates the night

enough for us to dig the still warm dirt

and plant the trees we’ve brought home by its light.

That globe above so different from here,

where no one lives and nothing ever grows,

no soil, no moisture and no atmosphere

to culture kumquats in or grow a rose.

From that great plain of death, inert and chill,

light may rebound but life will never come.

Those so-called seas are sterile, dry and still,

Mare Serenitatis, Sinus Iridum.

And yet, I thought, and yet, where would we be

without these light beams bounced off that dead land,

without these ungrassed dunes and lifeless sea

shedding their pallor on my scooping hand?

Light from a surface so cold and so dead

was the one we planted our new fruit-trees by,

the one that casts its glow now on our bed,

the one I find reflected in your eye.

Is not extinction with its eerie light

the appropriate presider when one swears

to sustain each other through the world of night

we’ve both decided is ‘best born in pairs’?

We see all that we need to by a light

beamed off a barrenness of pits and plain,

off the ’69 Apollo landing site

where planted flag and giant step remain.

That place, some men aspire to, discovers,

with light reflected from plains pocked with pits,

plantlife, a yellow house, a pair of lovers,

uniting in their love deep opposites.

This Earth, and this Earth’s sterile satellite

won’t always be, like life and death, apart,

if Man’s destructive mind with Nature’s might

leaves the planet pitted lunar chart

with no one here to name its barren craters

after rainbows, or discoverers, or peace,

though there’ll be peace when Earth’s worst agitators

find in final dissolution their release.

Despite barricaded bolt-holes deep below

it’s often said that what will come off best

once, step by step, we’ve reached All-Systems-Go,

of all life on this Earth, ’s the lowliest:

these bugs tonight like high-roast coffee beans

that fling themselves at flames and self-destruct,

that blue wasp juicing bugs like tangerines,

fat bucking locusts jockeyed on and sucked,

these trawling spiders that have rigged their nets

halfway between our porchlamps and the night,

their dawn webs threaded with dew jewelettes

and hauls of flies caught lurching for our light.

A blundering beetle with black lacquered back

that dialled its liquidation to the spider’s limb,

embalmed in abseil/bell-pull, a stored snack

swathed in white cerements of sticky scrim.

Phoning that zero gets the spider quick.

Each leg’s in touch with 45 degrees

of laddered circle where the insects stick

on tacky wires their weaver walks with ease.

Even the love-bugs, randy and ridiculous,

coupling regardless of death close behind

could still be fucking after all of us

are merged in the molten mess made of Mankind.

Falling asleep to loud cicada chirrs,

to scuttling cockroach, crashing carapace,

the noises that I hear are our inheritors

who’ll know the Earth both B. and A. our race.

And underneath those floorboards of good heart

I think I hear the slither of a snake

and then the rodent prey the snake makes start.

Let’s forget about the world until we wake!

III

Each board of ‘tongue in groove’ ’s scored by a line

I measure insect movements by from bed.

A spider crossing long since scentless pine

racks its nightcatch on a slender thread.

The blowfly’s hawsered body still looks wet

though all night it’s been suspended in the dry.

It spins round, flashing, in the spider’s net

with shredded cockroach wings and antennae.

I knew I’d wake today and find you gone

and look out of the window, knowing where

you’d be so early, still with nothing on,

watering our new plants with drowsy care.

The night, already stripped of half its dark,

now with the rest sloughed off, ’s revealed as day,

and the sun already makes small rainbows arc

out of the hose’s nozzle drizzling spray.

Crunching the rusted needles that I strew

to stunt the weed growth on the paths we hacked