Poems 1960-2000 (8 page)

Books, music, the garden, cats:

I have cocooned myself

in solitude, fatly silken.

Settled?

               I flatter myself.

Things buzz under my ribs;

there are ticklings, dim blunderings.

Ichneumon flies have got in.

That wet gravelly sound is rain.

Soil that was bumpy and crumbled

flattens under it, somewhere;

splatters into mud. Spiked grass

grows soft with it and bends like hair.

You lean over me, smiling at last.

We are dried and brittle this morning,

fragile with continence, quiet.

You have brought me to see a church.

I stare at a Norman arch in red sandstone

carved like a Mayan temple-gate;

at serpents writhing up the doorposts

and squat saints with South-American features

who stare back over our heads

from a panel of beasts and fishes.

The gargoyles jutting from under the eaves

are the colour of newborn children.

Last night you asked me

if poetry was the most important thing.

We walk on around the building

craning our heads back to look up

at lions, griffins, fat-faced bears.

The Victorians broke some of these figures

as being too obscene for a church;

but they missed the Whore of Kilpeck.

She leans out under the roof

holding her pink stony cleft agape

with her ancient little hands.

There was always witchcraft here, you say.

The sheep-track up to the fragments

of castle-wall is fringed with bright bushes.

We clamber awkwardly, separate.

Hawthorn and dog-rose offer hips and haws,

orange and crimson capsules, pretending

harvest. I taste a blackberry.

The soil here is coloured like brick-dust,

like the warm sandstone. A fruitful county.

We regard it uneasily.

There is little left to say

after all the talk we had last night

instead of going to bed –

fearful for our originality,

avoiding the sweet obvious act

as if it were the only kind of indulgence.

Silly perhaps.

                       We have our reward.

We are languorous now, heavy

with whatever we were conserving,

carrying each a delicate burden

of choices made or about to be made.

Words whisper hopefully in our heads.

Slithering down the track we hold hands

to keep a necessary balance.

The gargoyles extend their feral faces,

rosy, less lined than ours.

We are wearing out our identities.

Only a slight fever:

I was not quite out of my mind;

enough to forget my name

and the number and sex of my children

(while clinging to their existence –

three daughters, could it be?)

but not to forget my language

with
Words for Music Perhaps
,

Crazy Jane and the bishop,

galloping through my head.

As for my body, not

quite out of that either:

curled in an S-bend somewhere,

conscious of knees and skull

pressing against a wall

(if I was on my side)

or against a heavy lid

(if I was on my back);

or I could have been face downward

kneeling crouched on a raft,

castaway animal, drifting;

or shrivelled over a desk

head down asleep on it

like Harold, our wasted Orion,

who slept on the bare sand

all those nights in the desert

lightly, head on his briefcase;

who carried the new Peace

to chief after chief, winning

their difficult signatures

by wit and a cool head

under fire and public school charm;

who has now forgotten his Arabic

and the names of his brother’s children

and what he did last week;

dozes over an ashtray

or shuffles through
Who Was Who
.

Crazy Jane I can take –

the withered breasts that she flaunted,

her fierce remembering tongue;

but spare me his forgetting.

Age is a sad fever.

They call it pica,

this ranging after alien tastes:

acorns (a good fresh country food,

better than I'd remembered)

that morning in the wood,

and moonlit roses –

perfumed lettuce, rather unpleasant:

we rinsed them from our teeth with wine.

It seems a shared perversion,

not just a kink of mine –

you were the one

who nibbled the chrysanthemums.

All right: we are avoiding something.

Tonight you are here early.

We seem to lack nothing.

We are alone,

quiet, unhurried. The whisky has

a smoky tang, like dark chocolate.

You speak of ceremony, of

something to celebrate.

I hear the church bells

and suddenly fear blasphemy,

even name it. The word's unusual

between us. But you don't laugh.

We postpone our ritual

and act another:

sit face to face across a table,

talk about places we have known

and friends who are still alive

and poems (not our own).

It works. We are altered

from that fey couple who talked out

fountains of images, a spray

of loves, deaths, dramas, jokes:

their histories; who lay

manic with words,

fingers twined in each other's hair

(no closer) wasting nights and hours;

who chewed, as dry placebos,

those bitter seeds and flowers.

It is the moment.

We rise, and touch at last. And now

without pretence or argument,

fasting, and in our right minds,

go to our sacrament.

A letter from that pale city

I escaped from ten years ago

and no good news.

I carry it with me

devising comfortable answers

(the sickness, shall I say?

is not peculiarly yours),

as I walk along Beech Drive,

Church Vale, Ringwood Avenue

at eleven on a Tuesday morning

going nowhere.

the sky white as an ambulance,

and no one in sight.

Friend, I will say in my letter –

since you call me a friend still,

whatever I have been – forgive me.

Rounding the next corner

I see a van that crawls along

beside the birch-trunks and pink pavements.

A handbell rings from the driver’s window:

he has paraffin for sale

and ought to do good business

now that we have power-cuts.

But the painted doors do not open.

The wind in the ornamental hedges

rustles. Nobody comes.

The bell rings. The houses listen.

Bring out your dead.

I raise the blind and sit by the window

dry-mouthed, waiting for light.

One needs a modest goal,

something safely attainable.

An hour before sunrise

(due at seven fifty-three)

I go out into the cold new morning

for a proper view of that performance;

walk greedily towards the heath

gulping the blanched air

and come in good time to Kenwood.

They have just opened the gates.

There is a kind of world here, too:

on the grassy slopes above the lake

in the white early Sunday

I see with something like affection

people I do not know

walking their unlovable dogs.

Looking through the glass showcase

right into the glass of the shelf,

your eye level with it, not

swerving above it or below,

you see neither the reflected image

nor the object itself.

There is only a swimming horizon,

a watery prison for the sight,

acres of shadowy green jelly,

and no way yet to know

what they support, what stands

in the carefully-angled light.

You take a breath, raise your head,

and see whether the case reveals

Dutch goblet, carved reliquary,

the pope’s elaborately-petalled rose

of gold-leaf, or the bronze Cretan

balanced on his neat heels,

and you look, drowning or perhaps

rescued from drowning; and your eyes close.

All my dead people

seeping through the riverbank where they are buried

colouring the stream pale brown

are why I swim in the river,

feeling now rather closer to them

than when the water was clear,

when I could walk barefoot on the gravel

seeing only the flicker of minnows

possessing nothing but balance.

She keeps the memory-game

as a charm against falling in love

and each night she climbs out of the same window

into the same garden with the arch for roses –

no roses, though; and the white snake dead too;

nothing but evergreen shrubs, and grass, and water,

and the wire trellis that will trap her in the end.

Here are Paolo and Francesca

whirled around in the circle of Hell

clipped serenely together

her dead face raised against his.

I can feel the pressure of his arms

like yours about me, locking.

They float in a sea of whitish blobs –

fire, is it? It could have been

hail, said Ruskin, but Rossetti

‘didn’t know how to do hail’.

Well, he could do tenderness.

My spine trickles with little white flames.

The sheets have been laundered clean

of our joint essence – a compound,

not a mixture; but here are still

your forgotten pipe and tobacco,

your books open on my table,

your voice speaking in my poems.

The concrete road from the palace to the cinema

bruises the feet. At the Chinese Embassy

I turn past high new walls on to padded mud.

A road is intended – men with trowels and baskets

work on it daily, dreamy Nepali girls

tilt little pots of water on to cement –

but it’s gentle walking now. It leads ‘inside’.

The tall pine at the end – still notable

though it lost its lingam top for winter firewood –

begins the village: a couple of streets, a temple,

an open space with the pond and the peepul tree,

rows of brick houses, little businesses

proceeding under their doll’s-house-level beams;

rice being pounded, charcoal fires in pots,

rickshaws for people like me who don’t want them.

The children wave and call ‘Bye-bye! Paisa?’

holding out their perfect hands for my coins.

These houses may be eighteenth-century:

I covet their fretted lattice window-frames

and stare slightly too long into back rooms.

There are no screens at the carved windows, no filters

for the water they splash and drink at the common pump;

and no mosquitoes now, in the early spring.

But finally, stepping over the warm threshold

of the temple courtyard, I feel a tentative itch;

passing the scummy tank, a little sickness;

touching an infant’s head, a little pain.

I have made my pilgrimage a day early:

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow; this week is Losar.

Pacing clockwise around the chaitya

I twirl the prayerwheels, my foreign fingers

polishing their bronze by a fraction more.

The courtyard is crowded with Tibetans,

incredibly jewelled and furred and hatted –

colour-plates from the National Geographic.

The beggar-woman with her monstrous leg

and the snuffling children are genuine too.

I toss them paisa; then go to spend

thirty rupees on a turquoise-studded

silver spoon for the Watkins’ baby.

High on his whitewashed mound, Lord Buddha

overlooks the blossom of kite-tails

fluttering from his solid neck.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

His four painted square faces

turn twelve coloured eyes on the globe.

In the shrine below I see him again:

dim bronze, made of curves and surfaces,

shadowed, vulnerable, retiring.

Filmy scarves of white muslin

veil him; rice-grains lie at his feet;

in copper bowls arranged before him

smouldering incense crumbles to ash.