Poems 1960-2000 (2 page)

Among the Roman love-poets, possession

is a rare theme. The locked and flower-hung door,

the shivering lover, are allowed. To more

buoyant moods, the canons of expression

gave grudging sanction. Do we, then, assume,

finding Propertius tear-sodden and jealous,

that Cynthia was inexorably callous?

Plenty of moonlight entered that high room

whose doors had met his Alexandrine battles;

and she, so gay a lutanist, was known

to stitch and doze a night away, alone,

until the poet tumbled in with apples

for penitence and for her head his wreath,

brought from a party, of wine-scented roses –

(the garland’s aptness lying, one supposes,

less in the flowers than in the thorns beneath:

her waking could, he knew, provide his verses

with less idyllic themes). Onto her bed

he rolled the round fruit, and adorned her head;

then gently roused her sleeping mouth to curses.

Here the conventions reassert their power:

the apples fall and bruise, the roses wither,

touched by a sallowed moon. But there were other

luminous nights – (even the cactus flower

glows briefly golden, fed by spiny flesh) –

and once, as he acknowledged, all was singing:

the moonlight musical, the darkness clinging

and she compliant to his every wish. 

Tarmac, take-off: metallic words conduct us

over that substance, black with spilt rain,

to this event. Sealed, we turn and pause.

Engines churn and throb to a climax, then

up: a hard spurt, and the passionate rise

levels out for this gradual incline.

There was something of pleasure in that thrust

from earth into ignorant cloud; but here,

above all tremors of sensation, rest

replaces motion; secretly we enter

the obscurely gliding current, and encased

in vitreous calm inhabit the high air.

Now I see, beneath the plated wing,

cloud edges withdrawing their slow foam

from shoreline, rippling hills, and beyond, the long

crested range of the land’s height. I am

carried too far by this blind rocketing:

faced with mountains, I remember him

whose death seems a convention of such a view:

another one for the mountains. Another one

who, climbing to stain the high snow

with his shadow, fell, and briefly caught between

sudden earth and sun, projected below

a flicker of darkness; as, now, this plane.

Only air to hold the wings;

only words to hold the story;

only a frail web of cells

to hold heat in the body.

Breath bleeds from throat and lungs

under the last cold fury;

words wither; meaning fails;

steel wings grow heavy.

Headlines announced it, over a double column of type:

the cabled facts, public regret, and a classified list

of your attainments – degrees, scholarships and positions,

and notable feats of climbing. So the record stands:

no place there for my private annotations. The face

that smiles in some doubt from a fuscous half-tone block

stirs me hardly more than those I have mistaken

daily, about the streets, for yours.

                                                      I can refer

to my own pictures; and turning first to the easiest,

least painful, I see Dave the raconteur,

playing a shoal of listeners on a casual line

of dry narration. Other images unreel:

your face in a car, silent, watching the dark road,

or animated and sunburnt from your hard pleasures

of snow and rock-face; again, I see you arguing,

practical and determined, as you draw with awkward puffs

at a rare cigarette.

                              So much, in vivid sequence

memory gives. And then, before I can turn away,

imagination adds the last scene: your eyes bruised,

mouth choked under a murderous weight of snow.

‘When you reach the top of a mountain, keep on climbing’
–

meaning, we may suppose,

to sketch on space the cool arabesques of birds

in plastic air, or those

exfoliating arcs, upward and outward,

of an aeronautic show.

Easier, such a free fall in reverse,

higher than clogging snow

or clutching gravity, than the awkward local

embrace of rocks. And observe

the planets coursing their elliptical race-tracks,

where each completed curve

cinctures a new dimension. Mark these patterns.

Mark, too, how the high

air thins. The top of any mountain

is a base for the sky.

Further by days and oceans than all my flying

you have gone, while here the air insensibly flowing

over a map of mountains drowns my dumbness.

A turn of the earth away, where a crawling dimness

waits now to absorb our light, another

snowscape, named like this one, took you; and neither

rope, nor crumbling ice, nor your unbelieving

uncommitted hands could hold you to living.

Wheels turn; the dissolving air rolls over

an arc of thunder. Gone is gone forever.

Carrying still the dewy rose

for which she’s bound to payment, Beauty goes

trembling through the gruesome wood:

small comfort to her that she’s meek and good.

A branch cracks, and the beast appears:

she sees the fangs, the eyes, the bristly ears,

stifles a scream, and smooths her dress;

but his concern is for his own distress.

He lays his muzzle on her hand,

says ‘Pity me!’ and ‘Can you understand?

Be kind!’ And then goes on to praise

her pretty features and her gentle ways.

Beauty inclines a modest ear,

hears what she has decided she should hear,

and with no thought to ask ‘What then?’

follows the creature to his hairy den.

The beast, like any hero, knows

sweet talk can lead him to
la belle chose.

All my scars are yours. We talk of pledges,

and holding out my hand I show

the faint burn on the palm and the hair-thin

razor-marks at wrist and elbow:

self-inflicted, yes; but your tokens –

made as distraction from a more

inaccessible pain than could have been

caused by cigarette or razor –

and these my slightest marks. In all our meetings

you were the man with the long knives,

piercing the living hopes, cutting connections,

carving and dissecting motives,

and with an expert eye for dagger-throwing:

a showman’s aim. Oh, I could dance

and dodge, as often as not, the whistling blades,

turning on a brave performance

to empty stands. I leaned upon a hope

that this might prove to have been less

a gladiatorial show, contrived for murder,

than a formal test of fitness

(initiation rites are always painful)

to bring me ultimately to your

regard. Well, in a sense it was; for now

I have found some kind of favour:

you have learnt softness; I, by your example,

am well-schooled in contempt; and while

you speak of truce I laugh, and to your pleading

turn a cool and guarded profile.

I have now, you might say, the upper hand:

these knives that bristle in my flesh

increase my armoury and lessen yours.

I can pull out, whet and polish

your weapons, and return to the attack,

well-armed. It is a pretty trick,

but one that offers little consolation.

such a victory would be Pyrrhic,

occurring when my strength is almost spent.

No: I would make an end of fighting

and, bleeding as I am from old wounds,

die like the bee upon a sting.

I would not have you drain

with your sodden lips the flesh that has fed mine,

and leech his bubbling blood to a decline:

not that pain;

nor visit on his mind

that other desiccation, where the wit

shrivels: so to be humbled in not fit

for his kind.

But use acid or flame,

secretly, to brand or cauterise;

and on the soft globes of his mortal eyes

etch my name.

When you were lying on the white sand,

a rock under your head, and smiling,

(circled by dead shells), I came to you

and you said, reaching to take my hand,

‘Lie down.’ So for a time we lay

warm on the sand, talking and smoking,

easy; while the grovelling sea behind

sucked at the rocks and measured the day.

Lightly I fell asleep then, and fell

into a cavernous dream of falling.

It was all the cave-myths, it was all

the myths of tunnel or tower or well –

Alice’s rabbit-hole into the ground,

or the path of Orpheus: a spiral staircase

to hell, furnished with danger and doubt.

Stumbling, I suddenly woke; and found

water about me. My hair was wet,

and you were lying on the grey sand

waiting for the lapping tide to take me:

watching, and lighting a cigarette.

I have nothing to say about this garden.

I do not want to be here, I can’t explain

what happened. I merely opened a usual door

and found this. The rain 

has just stopped, and the gravel paths are trickling

with water. Stone lions, on each side,

gleam like wet seals, and the green birds

are stiff with dripping pride. 

Not my kind of country. The gracious vistas,

the rose-gardens and terraces, are all wrong –

as comfortless as the weather. But here I am.

I cannot tell how long 

I have stood gazing at grass too wet to sit on,

under a sky so dull I cannot read

the sundial, staring along the curving walks

and wondering where they lead; 

not really hoping, though, to be enlightened.

It must be morning, I think, but there is no

horizon behind the trees, no sun as clock

or compass. I shall go 

and find, somewhere among the formal hedges

or hidden behind a trellis, a toolshed. There

I can sit on a box and wait. Whatever happens

may happen anywhere, 

and better, perhaps, among the rakes and flowerpots

and sacks of bulbs than under this pallid sky:

having chosen nothing else, I can at least

choose to be warm and dry.

‘Will I die?’ you ask. And so I enter on

the dutiful exposition of that which you

would rather not know, and I rather not tell you.

To soften my ‘Yes’ I offer compensations –

age and fulfilment (‘It’s so far away;

you will have children and grandchildren by then’)

and indifference (‘By then you will not care’).

No need: you cannot believe me, convinced

that if you always eat plenty of vegetables

and are careful crossing the street you will live for ever.

And so we close the subject, with much unsaid –

this, for instance: Though you and I may die

tomorrow or next year, and nothing remain

of our stock, of the unique, preciously-hoarded

inimitable genes we carry in us,

it is possible that for many generations

there will exist, sprung from whatever seeds,

children straight-limbed, with clear enquiring voices,

bright-eyed as you. Or so I like to think:

sharing in this your childish optimism.