Poems 1960-2000 (9 page)

Already I know my way around the bazaar,

can use half a dozen words of basic Nepali,

and recognise several incarnations of Shiva.

If I stay here much longer I shall learn to identify

more trees besides those in our compound,

other birds than the rock-dove and the crow.

That plink-plink rhythm in the distance is a rice-mill.

The cannon is fired at noon, or to mark a death –

an echoing gesture. Now on the foreign news

I hear that the serious thunder-makers from Ireland

have crossed the channel. A pall of thick black smoke,

says the tidy English voice, hangs over London.

Here the sky is crystal. It is time to go.

They give us moistened
BOAC
towels

and I scrub my forehead. Red powder

for Holi: a trace of Delhi, an assault

met there in the wild streets this morning.

Without compunction I obliterate it –

India’s not my country, let it go.

But crumpling the vermilion-stained napkin

(I shan’t read it: some priest may do that)

I think of the stone foreheads in their hundreds:

Ganesh and Hanuman, who made me smile,

and Vishnu, and the four faces of Buddha,

reddened with genuine devotions;

and of the wooden cleft in a twisted tree

which I saw a beggar-woman sign scarlet

before she pressed her face down on to it;

and here’s Nepal again. Sacred places

don’t travel. The gods are stronger at home.

But if my tentative western brow may wear

this reluctant blush, these grains at the hair-roots,

I claim the right also to an image

as guardian; and choose winged Garuda.

His bland archaic countenance beams out

that serenity to which I journey.

I am in a foreign country.

There are heron and cormorant on the lake.

Young men in T-shirts against an Atlantic gale

are wheeling gravel, renewing the paths

in a stone shell chalked with their own history:

something to fear and covet.

We are the only visitors.

Notices tell us in two old languages

(one mine) that this is Caisleán na dTúath,

Doe Castle. A castle for everyman.

It has ramparts, towers, a dungeon –

we step over gridded emptiness.

The floors have rotted away in seventy years;

the spiral stair endures, a little chipped,

after four hundred. Here is my phobia.

And for you, at the top of it,

yours: a wind-racked vacancy,

a savage drop, a view with no holds –

to which you climb; and if you do, I do:

going up, after all, is the lesser challenge.

The high ledge receives us.

We stand there half a minute longer

than honour and simple vanity require;

then I follow you down the stone gullet,

feet on the splintering treads, eyes inward,

and we step on springy grass

once again; there have been no lapses.

Now ravens ferrying food up to a nest

make their easy ascents. Pleased with our own

we stroll away to eat oranges in the car.

The hailstorm was in my head.

It drove us out into the blind lanes

to stumble over gravel and bog,

teeter on the skidding riverbank

together, stare down and consider.

But we drew back. When the real hail

began its pounding upon us

we were already half recovered.

Walking under that pouring icefall

hand in hand, towards lighted rooms,

we became patchworks of cold and hot,

glowing, streaming with water,

dissolving whatever dared to touch us.

Abandoning all my principles

I travel by car with you for days,

eat meat from tins, drink pints of Guinness,

smoke too much, and now on this pass

higher than all our settled landscapes

feed salted peanuts into your mouth

as you drive at eighty miles an hour.

It is going to be a splendid summer.

The apple tree will be thick with golden russets

expanding weightily in the soft air.

I shall finish the brick wall beside the terrace

and plant out all the geranium cuttings.

Pinks and carnations will be everywhere.

She will come out to me in the garden,

her bare feet pale on the cut grass,

bringing jasmine tea and strawberries on a tray.

I shall be correcting the proofs of my novel

(third in a trilogy – simultaneous publication

in four continents); and my latest play

will be in production at the Aldwych

starring Glenda Jackson and Paul Scofield

with Olivier brilliant in a minor part.

I shall probably have finished my translations

of Persian creation myths and the Pre-Socratics

(drawing new parallels) and be ready to start

on Lucretius. But first I’ll take a break

at the chess championships in Manila –

on present form, I’m fairly likely to win.

And poems? Yes, there will certainly be poems:

they sing in my head, they tingle along my nerves.

It is all magnificently about to begin.

We went to Malaya for an afternoon,

driving over the long dull roads

in Bill’s Toyota, the two boys in the back.

It was rubber plantations mostly

and villages like all Asian villages,

brown with dust and wood, bright with marketing.

Before we had to turn back we stopped

at a Chinese roadside cemetery

and visited among the long grass

the complicated coloured graves,

patchwork semi-circles of painted stone:

one mustn’t set a foot on the wrong bit.

Across the road were rubber trees again

and a kampong behind: we looked in

at thatched houses, flowering shrubs, melons,

unusual speckled poultry, and the usual

beautiful children. We observed

how the bark was slashed for rubber-tapping.

Does it sound like a geography lesson

or a dream? Rubber-seeds are mottled,

smooth, like nuts. I picked up three

and have smuggled them absent-mindedly

in and out of several countries.

Shall I plant them and see what grows?

Goslings dive in the lake,

leaves dazzle on the trees;

on the warm grass two ducks are parked neatly

together like a pair of shoes.

A coot plays beaks with its chick;

children laugh and exclaim.

Mr Morrison saunters past, smiling at them,

humming a Sunday-school hymn.

He wonders about his mood,

irredeemably content:

he should worry more about poverty, oppression,

injustice; but he can’t, he can’t.

He is not too callous to care

but is satisfied in his work,

well-fed, well-housed, tolerably married,

and enjoying a walk in the park.

Then the sun sticks in the sky,

the tune sticks in his throat,

a burning hand with razors for fingernails

reaches inside his coat

and hotly claws at his heart.

He stands very quiet and still,

seeing if he dares to breathe just a fraction;

sweating; afraid he’ll fall.

With stiff little wooden steps

he edges his way to a bench

and lowers his body with its secret fiery

tenant down, inch by inch.

He orders himself to be calm:

no doubt it will soon pass.

He resolves to smoke less, watch his cholesterol,

walk more, use the car less.

And it passes: he is released,

the stabbing fingers depart.

Tentatively at first, then easily,

he fills his lungs without hurt.

He is safe; and he is absolved:

it was not just pain, after all;

it enrolled him among the sufferers, allotted him

a stake in the world’s ill.

Doors open inside his head;

once again he begins to hum:

he’s been granted one small occasion for worry

and the promise of more to come.

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.

There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,

committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things

than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.

It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in

and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

The other option’s to become a bird.

That’s kindly done, to guess from how they sing,

decently independent of the word

as we are not; and how they use the air

to sail as we might soaring on a swing

higher and higher; but the rope’s not there,

it’s free fall upward, out into the sky;

or if the arc veer downward, then it’s planned:

a bird can loiter, skimming just as high

as lets him supervise the hazel copse,

the turnip field, the orchard, and then land

on just the twig he’s chosen. Down he drops

to feed, if so it be: a pretty killer,

a keen-eyed stomach weighted like a dart.

He feels no pity for the caterpillar,

that moistly munching hoop of innocent green.

It is such tender lapses twist the heart.

A bird’s heart is a tight little red bean,

untwistable. His beak is made of bone,

his feet apparently of stainless wire;

his coat’s impermeable; his nest’s his own.

The clogging multiplicity of things

amongst which other creatures, battling, tire

can be evaded by a pair of wings.

The point is, most of it occurs below,

earthed at the levels of the grovelling wood

and gritty buildings. Up’s the way to go.

If it’s escapist, if it’s like a dream

the dream’s prolonged until it ends for good.

I see no disadvantage in the scheme.

Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic,

waving about us with hair-fine fronds of straw,

with feathery flourishes of seed, inviting us

to cling together, fall, roll into it

blind and gasping, smothered by stalks and hair,

pollen and each other’s tongues on our hot faces?

Then imagine if the summer rain were to come,

heavy drops hissing through the warm air,

a sluice on our wet bodies, plastering us

with strands of delicious grass; a hum in our ears.

We walk a yard apart, talking

of literature and of botany.

We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.

We awakened facing each other

across the white counterpane.

I prefer to be alone in the mornings.

The waiter offered us

melon, papaya, orange juice or fresh raspberries.

We did not discuss it.

All those years of looking but not touching:

at most a kiss in a taxi.

And now this accident,

this blind unstoppable robot walk

into a conspiracy of our bodies.

Had we ruined the whole thing?

The waiter waited:

it was his business to appear composed.

Perhaps we should make it ours also?

We moved an inch or two closer together.

Our toes touched. We looked. We had decided.

Papaya then; and coffee and rolls. Of course.

Discreet, not cryptic. I write to you from the garden

in tawny, provoking August; summer is just

on the turn. The lawn is hayseeds and grassy dust.

There are brilliant yellow daisies, though, and fuchsia

(you’ll know why) and that mauve and silvery-grey

creeper under the apple tree where we lay.

There have been storms. The apples are few, but heavy,

heavy. And where blossom was, the tree

surges with bright pink flowers – the sweet pea

has taken it over again. Things operate

oddly here. Remember how I found

the buddleia dead, and cut it back to the ground?

That was in April. Now it’s ten feet high:

thick straight branches – they’ve never been so strong –

leaves like a new species, half a yard long,

and spikes of flowers, airily late for their season

but gigantic. A mutation, is it? Well,

summers to come will test it. Let time tell.

Gardens are rife with sermon-fodder. I delve

among blossoming accidents for their designs

but make no statement. Read between these lines.