Collected Poems (8 page)

And lets the leaves go.

Trees suffer in frost and snow:

Force-fed by soil, drained by age

They brood and bide their time.

How many summers can they take such weight?

How long is life, how rich the earth,

How weak the heart?

ROSE

A rose about to open

Thinks air and sun

Can turn it into

Something it is not already.

The pink slit of life shows

Between tight green blades –

Hasn't it seen enough

Without wanting everything?

Behind its packed unopened petals

Are roses still to flower

And blossoms not yet dropped;

Outside, those same are tempting it,

Scorched and shrivelled on the grass.

Rose about to open, why do you do it?

What force pushes

So subtly that it does not feel?

What beckoning power beyond

Draws it with perfume sweeter than

The one that will be made?

They promise nothing but the last decay:

The will to come or stay is not their own.

CREATION

God did not write.

He spoke.

He made.

His jackknife had a superblade –

He sliced the earth

And carved the water,

Made man and woman

By an act of slaughter.

He scattered polished diamonds

In the sky like dust

And gave the world a push to set it spinning.

What super-Deity got him beginning

Whispered in his ear on how to do it

Gave hints on what was to be done?

Don't ask.

In his mouth he felt the sun

Spat it out because it burned;

From between his toes – the moon –

He could not walk so kicked it free.

His work was finished.

He put a river round his neck,

And vanished.

SIGNAL BOX

Level-crossing signal box

With three and a half hours between trains.

Bells stopped, gates shut and blocking the line:

Levers taller than himself palisade the moon,

He on the safer side.

Elbows space aside and tunnels

The last green spitter of sparks

Up the stars and soaking turf towards London,

Whispers along, snarling, a retreating song,

Signals on gauges like slicked hair downarrowed:

Line clear for the next open crossing.

Guard in waistcoat and jacket

(Good to children who just want to see)

Iron dragons slip through his fingers a hundred times a day

Responsibility too great to feel power,

Warning others down the line of its approach,

He sits by teaflask and prepares a book,

Needs an opium-portion to become

Captain of a rusting steamer

Crawling the coastal buffs of Patagonia,

Or Nemo in his flying boat

Lording at the Pole or South Sea hideout.

A good tale every night is better

That the telly or a homely bed.

Trains growl on steel snakes

Straight and sleeping close,

Locomotive kings of the dawn

Behind signals from another cured of sleep:

Wide gates open for the first black arrow

A circle in its packed and moving forehead,

As he closes his book

And lets the day pour through.

BARBARIANS

Walls he sat by had fallen long ago:

The city smoked after capture and rapine,

No brick left upon another.

These barbarians – this boy

Sitting on the littered scrub –

Belonged to a Scythian family

Who found the city as if following

A far-back shutter-flash,

Crazed with hope after a famished trudge

Over steppe whose herbs

Scorched by the haze of the sun

Pulled horses' ribs so far in

They were almost dead.

By tale and memory this Scythian offshoot

Saw a glittering metropolis,

People and laden horses queueing to get out.

No brick upon another. While the boy's

Mother scraped at rubbish

He played at tapping stone with stone

Cracked lips moving at the sky

Waiting for her to find food,

And idly placing one brick on another.

SOMME

A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:

Doesn't matter where it came from

Has a dead fly stuck

At the lefthand corner

By a place called Longueval,

Rusty from blood sucked

Out of British or German soldiers

Long since gone over the top

Where many went to in those olden days.

Whoever it was sat on an upturned

Tin and smoked a pipe.

Summer was finished beyond the parapet

And winter not yet willing

To let him through the mist

Of that long valley he was told to cross,

While the earth shook from gnat-bites of gunfire

As if to shrug all men from its shoulders.

A fly dropped on the opened map

Feet of fur and bloated with soot

Crawled over villages he hoped to see.

Bemused he followed it

Curious to know at which point it would stop

And finally take off from,

For that might be

Where death would fall on him.

Scorning the gamble

He squashed the stolid fly

Whose blood now decorates the map

Pinned on my wall after fifty years gone by.

Night came, he counted men into the trench

And crouching on the last day of June

In the earthen slit that stank

Of soil and Woodbines, cordite and shit

Held the wick close to his exhausted eyes,

Shut the dim glow into its case

And ceased to think.

ALCHEMIST

Lead melts. If I saw lead, I melted it

Poured it into sand and made shapes.

I melted all my soldiers,

Watched that rifle wilt

In an old tin can on a gas flame

Like a straw going down

From an invisible spark of summer.

He stood to attention in the tin

Rim gripped by fanatic pliers

From the old man's toolkit,

Looked on by beady scientific eyes

That vandalize a dapper grenadier.

The head sagged, sweating under a greater

Heat than Waterloo or Alma.

He leaned against the side

And lost an arm where no black grapeshot came.

His tired feet gave way,

A spreading pool to once proud groin,

Waist and busby falling in, as sentry-go

At such an India became too hard,

And he lay without pillow or blanket

Never to get up and see home again.

Another one, two more, I threw them in:

These went quicker, an elegant patrol

Dissolved in that infernal pit.

Eyes watering from fumes of painted

Soldiers melting under their own smoke,

The fire with me, hands hard at the plier grip

At soldiers rendered to peaceful lead

At the bottom of a tin.

Swords into ploughshares:

With the gas turned off I wondered

What to do with so much marvellous dead lead

That hardened like the surface of a pond.

VIEW FROM MISK HILL NEAR NOTTINGHAM

Armies have already met and gone.

When the best has happened

The worst is on its way.

Beware of its return in summer.

When fields are grey and should be green

Rub scars with ash and sulphur.

Full moon clears the land for its own view,

Whose fangs would bereave this field

Of hayrick and sheep.

In the quiet evening birds fly

Where armies are not fighting yet.

He looks a long way on at where he'll walk:

A cratered highway with all hedges gone.

Green land dips and smells of fire.

Topography is wide down there.

The moon waxes and then emaciates.

Birds fatten on fields before migration:

Smoke in summer hangs between earth and sky,

On ground where armies have not fought

But lay their ambush to dispute his passing.

from
Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979

LUCIFER'S ASTRONOMY LESSON

When Lucifer confessed his pride

His plans and turbulence

It was explained to him: the sun

Is fixed in its relation to the stars.

The stars are placed in their position

To each other. The planets with no heat or light

Get sufficient dazzle from the sun.

Satellites enlace the planets.

The earth, with its one moon

Revolves and in so doing

Takes a year to go lefthanded

In a lone ellipse around the fire of Heaven.

And now, a few celestial definitions:

The words came fast, like
nadir

Zenith, equinox
and
solstice
,

But when threatened with
meridian

And (especially)
declination

Lucifer shouted: Stop!

I've known this text from birth.

The Guardian of Sidereal Time

Is tired of the Party Line.

Navigators get their fix on
me –

And so did God.

Right through my heart

The recognition-vectors

Set to split-infinities of Time

Came all too plain yet none too simple,

Each emotion a position-line

Pegged like witch-pins in the victim's spleen.

Sextant-eye and timepiece heart

The brain set out in astronomic tables

Plot the way to harbour mouths

Where all life but Lucifer's is understood.

His geologic heart reversed

By extra-galactic longing

Was sensed by God.

Rays leapt from Lucifer's missiled sight:

A magnetic four-way flow

Confused the inner constant,

And mysterious refractions

Made him violent and obstinate,

Shifty and uncouth.

Habits lovable yet also vile

Were ludicrous in minor deities,

Holding mirrors to their chaos.

Handsome though he was, God kicked him out.

Lucifer keened in misery

But in the kernel of his fall

A final sentence frayed his lips:

‘God wills everyone to love like him.

In his own image must we love,

Or be stripped bare of everything but space.'

LUCIFER: THE OFFICIAL VERSION OF HIS FALL

Lucifer once ruled the nations

Till, raddled with perverted notions

He thought to ask God's circling stars

To form a flight of gentle stairs

By which he'd scale the heavenly throne,

Defile it with the rebel stain.

He'd dominate the Mount of Meeting

And silence God's eternal shouting,

Reign a prince in his new birth

Over the outermost poles of the north.

He swore to reach the cloudy peak

And strut on it in God's bright cloak.

He'd speak like God and spout His name

And wave his arms like wings of flame.

He'd rule with cataracts of words,

Keep order among lesser lords;

A universe with rhyme and reason

Would be a mayhem of confusion:

Lucifer control by pride

The gorgeous chaos he bestrode.

But God was neither drunk nor blind

To what Cosmogony had planned.

In his Omnipotence he froze

Restless Lucifer's swirling eyes,

Sent a hundred thousand stars

Hornet-buzzing in vast rays

To drive him mad who thought to try

And take the place of the Most High.

They pinioned him, then made him fall

To the utter depths of Hell.

They tangled him and brought him low.

United Zodiac foresaw

That Lucifer in peace or war

Would be no blessing to their realm.

Faces spurned his rending groan:

Four-point body wheeled and spun

Across the Wilderness of Sin

And struck the cinder of the Sun:

Eternity breeds evolution

And drinks the blood of Revolution.

Declaiming innocence of guile

Yet burned clean of the martyr's role

Lucifer in haughty rancour –

Spewing fire through milky groves –

Condemned the heart of God to canker

And all his satellites as slaves.

Pleas and questions he ignored

In order that the final word

Should stay with him; and then he'd rove

To search for burial and love.

LUCIFER TURNED

Lucifer turned to God and said:

You want my heart, you want my head.

In giving both I'd be your slave.

If only one, I'd bleed to death.

They are as inseparable as breath

That, coming from my mouth, meets ice

And on the stillest air makes smoke.

God did not speak. He never spoke.

Others had to work his throat

And shape such words in their own voice

That God, by silence, made his choice.

But only Lucifer used verse

To save his heart, to save his head –

And still God did not speak or curse

But, spewing cataclysmic gall

Condemned grand Lucifer to fall.

LUCIFER'S DECISION

Lucifer slept but once

On the journey south,

For in the morning had to decide

Whether, having crossed the river,

And said goodbye to God

When no more dogs were barking

Nor hut smoke could be seen

Nor any voices heard,

Whether to take the left

Or right arm of the road.

Best not to stop, not think of warmth

But lunge without thought to left or right.

Either that, or broach the centre –

A wilderness of granite-green –