New and Selected Poems (21 page)

I flash-glimpsed in the headlights – the high moment

Of driving through England – a killed badger

Sprawled with helpless legs. Yet again

Manoeuvred lane-ends, retracked, waited

Out of decency for headlights to die,

Lifted by one warm hindleg in the world-night

A slain badger. August dust-heat. Beautiful,

Beautiful, warm, secret beast. Bedded him

Passenger, bleeding from the nose. Brought him close

Into my life. Now he lies on the beam

Torn from a great building. Beam waiting two years

To be built into new building. Summer coat

Not worth skinning off him. His skeleton – for the future.

Fangs, handsome concealed. Flies, drumming,

Bejewel his transit. Heatwave ushers him hourly

Towards his underworlds. A grim day of flies

And sunbathing. Get rid of that badger.

A night of shrunk rivers, glowing pastures,

Sea-trout shouldering up through trickles. Then the sun again

Waking like a torn-out eye. How strangely

He stays on into the dawn – how quiet

The dark bear-claws, the long frost-tipped guard hairs!

Get rid of that badger today.

And already the flies.

More passionate, bringing their friends. I don’t want

To bury and waste him. Or skin him (it is too late).

Or hack off his head and boil it

To liberate his masterpiece skull. I want him

To stay as he is. Sooty gloss-throated,

With his perfect face. Paws so tired,

Power-body relegated. I want him

To stop time. His strength staying, bulky,

Blocking time. His rankness, his bristling wildness,

His thrillingly painted face.

A badger on my moment of life.

Not years ago, like the others, but now.

I stand

Watching his stillness, like an iron nail

Driven, flush to the head,

Into a yew post. Something has to stay.

Was the silkiest day of the young year,

The first reconnaissance of the real spring,

The first confidence of the sun.

That was yesterday. Last night, frost.

And as hard as any of all winter.

Mars and Saturn and the Moon dangling in a bunch

On the hard, littered sky.

Today is Valentine’s day.

Earth toast-crisp. The snowdrops battered.

Thrushes spluttering. Pigeons gingerly

Rubbing their voices together, in stinging cold.

Crows creaking, and clumsily

Cracking loose.

The bright fields look dazed.

Their expression is changed.

They have been somewhere awful

And come back without him.

The trustful cattle, with frost on their backs,

Waiting for hay, waiting for warmth,

Stand in a new emptiness.

From now on the land

Will have to manage without him.

But it hesitates, in this slow realization of light,

Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun,

With roots cut

And a great blank in its memory.

Dawn – a smouldering fume of dry frost.

Sky-edge of red-hot iron.

Daffodils motionless – some fizzled out.

The birds – earth-brim simmering.

Sycamore buds unsticking – the leaf out-crumpling, purplish.

The pheasant cock’s glare-cry. Jupiter ruffling softly.

Hunting salmon. And hunted

And haunted by apparitions from tombs

Under the smoothing tons of dead element

In the river’s black canyons.

The lure is a prayer. And my searching –

Like the slow sun.

A prayer, like a flower opening.

A surgeon operating

On an open heart, with needles –

And bang! the river grabs at me

A mouth-flash, an electrocuting malice

Like a trap, trying to rip life off me –

And the river stiffens alive,

The black hole thumps, the whole river hauls

And I have one.

A piling voltage hums, jamming me stiff –

Something terrified and terrifying

Gleam-surges to and fro through me

From the river to the sky, from the sky into the river

Uprooting dark bedrock, shatters it in air,

Cartwheels across me, slices thudding through me

As if I were the current –

Till the fright flows all one way down the line

And a ghost grows solid, a hoverer,

A lizard green slither, banner heavy –

Then the wagging stone pebble head

Trying to think on shallows –

Then the steel spectre of purples

From the forge of water

Gagging on emptiness

As the eyes of incredulity

Fix their death-exposure of the celandine and the cloud.

We had a motorbike all through the war

In an outhouse – thunder, flight, disruption

Cramped in rust, under washing, abashed, outclassed

By the Brens, the Bombs, the Bazookas elsewhere.

The war ended, the explosions stopped.

The men surrendered their weapons

And hung around limply.

Peace took them all prisoner.

They were herded into their home towns.

A horrible privation began

Of working a life up out of the avenues

And the holiday resorts and the dance-halls.

Then the morning bus was as bad as any labour truck,

The foreman, the boss, as bad as the S.S.

And the ends of the street and the bends of the road

And the shallowness of the shops and the shallowness of the beer

And the sameness of the next town

Were as bad as electrified barbed wire

The shrunk-back war ached in their testicles

And England dwindled to the size of a dog-track.

So there came this quiet young man

And he bought our motorbike for twelve pounds.

And he got it going, with difficulty.

He kicked it into life – it erupted

Out of the six-year sleep, and he was delighted.

A week later, astride it, before dawn,

A misty frosty morning,

He escaped

Into a telegraph pole

On the long straight west of Swinton.

The deaf children were monkey-nimble, fish-tremulous and sudden.

Their faces were alert and simple

Like faces of little animals, small night lemurs caught in the flash-light.

They lacked a dimension,

They lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound and responses to sound.

The whole body was removed

From the vibration of air, they lived through the eyes,

The clear simple look, the instant full attention.

Their selves were not woven into a voice

Which was woven into a face

Hearing itself, its own public and audience,

An apparition in camouflage, an assertion in doubt –

Their selves were hidden, and their faces looked out of hiding.

What they spoke with was a machine,

A manipulation of fingers, a control-panel of gestures

Out there in the alien space

Separated from them –

Their unused faces were simple lenses of watchfulness

Simple pools of earnest watchfulness

Their bodies were like their hands

Nimbler than bodies, like the hammers of a piano,

A puppet agility, a simple mechanical action

A blankness of hieroglyph

A stylized lettering

Spelling out approximate signals

While the self looked through, out of the face of simple concealment

A face not merely deaf, a face in darkness, a face unaware,

A face that was simply the front skin of the self concealed and separate

Death also is trying to be life.

Death is in the sperm like the ancient mariner

With his horrible tale.

Death mews in the blankets – is it a kitten?

It plays with dolls but cannot get interested.

It stares at the windowlight and cannot make it out.

It wears baby clothes and is patient.

It learns to talk, watching the others’ mouths.

It laughs and shouts and listens to itself numbly.

It stares at people’s faces

And sees their skin like a strange moon, and stares at the grass

In its position just as yesterday.

And stares at its fingers and hears: ‘Look at that child!’

Death is a changeling

Tortured by daisy chains and Sunday bells

It is dragged about like a broken doll

By little girls playing at mothers and funerals.

Death only wants to be life. It cannot quite manage.

Weeping it is weeping to be life

As for a mother it cannot remember.

Death and Death and Death, it whispers

With eyes closed, trying to feel life

Like the shout in joy

Like the glare in lightning

That empties the lonely oak.

                                            And that is the death

In the antlers of the Irish Elk. It is the death

In the cave-wife’s needle of bone. Yet it still is not death –

Or in the shark’s fang which is a monument

Of its lament

On a headland of life.

Not your eyes, but what they disguise

Not your skin, with just that texture and light

But what uses it as cosmetic

Not your nose – to be or not to be beautiful

But what it is the spy for

Not your mouth, not your lips, not their adjustments

But the maker of the digestive tract

Not your breasts

Because they are diversion and deferment

Not your sexual parts, your proffered rewards

Which are in the nature of a flower

Technically treacherous

Not the webs of your voice, your poise, your tempo

Your drug of a million micro-signals

But the purpose.

The unearthly stone in the sun.

The glare

Of the falcon, behind its hood

Tamed now

To its own mystifications

And the fingerings of men.