Poems 1960-2000 (21 page)

Let’s be clear about this: I love toads.

So when I found our old one dying,

washed into the drain by flood-water

in the night and then – if I can bring myself

to say it – scalded by soapy lather

I myself had let out of the sink,

we suffered it through together. 

It was the summer of my father’s death.

I saw his spirit in every visiting creature,

in every small thing at risk of harm:

bird, moth, butterfly, beetle,

the black rabbit lolloping along concrete,

lost in suburbia; and our toad. 

If we’d seen it once a year that was often,

but the honour of being chosen by it

puffed us up: a toad of our own

trusting us not to hurt it

when we had to lift it out of its den

to let the plumber get at the water-main. 

And now this desperate damage: the squat

compactness unhinged, made powerless.

Dark, straight, its legs extended,

flippers paralysed, it lay lengthwise

flabby-skinned across my palm,

cold and stiff as the Devil’s penis. 

I laid it on soil; the shoulders managed

a few slow twitches, pulled it an inch forward.

But the blowflies knew: they called it dead

and stippled its back with rays of pearly stitching.

Into the leaves with it then, poor toad,

somewhere cool, where I can’t watch it. 

Perhaps it was very old? Perhaps it was ready?

Small comfort, through ten guilt-ridden days.

And then, one moist midnight, out in the country,

a little shadow shaped like a brown leaf

hopped out of greener leaves and came to me.

Twice I had to lift it from my doorway: 

a gently throbbing handful – calm, comely,

its feet tickling my palm like soft bees.

It’s hard to stay angry with a buttercup

threading through the turf (less and less a lawn

with each jagging rip of the fork or scoop

of the trowel) but a dandelion can

inspire righteous fury: that taproot

drilling down to where it’s impossible

ever quite to reach (although if it’s cut

through that’s merely a minor check) until

clunk: what’s this? And it’s spade-time. Several hours

later, eleven slabs of paving-stone

(submerged so long ago that the neighbours

who’ve been on the watch since 1941

lying marooned singly on three of them,

an octagonal threepence, a George the Fifth

penny and, vaguely missed from their last home

for fifteen years or so and rusted solid,

Grandpa’s scissors, the ones for hairdressing

from his barbering days: plain steel, not plated;

still elegant; the tip of one blade still missing.

How can I prove to you

that we’ve got wrens in the garden? 

A quick flick of a tail

in or out of the ivy hedge

is all you’ll ever see of them; 

and anyway, I’m asleep.

Not dreaming, though: I can hear him,

the boss-wren, out there in the summer dawn – 

his bubbling sequences,

an octave higher than a blackbird’s,

trickling silver seeds into my ears. 

I’ll get the tape-recorder.

But no, it’s in another room,

and I’ve no blank tapes for it; 

and anyway, I’m asleep.

Hard to wake up, after a sultry night

of restless dozing, even for the wren. 

I’ve tracked his piccolo solo

in the light evenings, from hedge to apple tree

to elder, sprints of zippy flight in between. 

I’ve looked him up: ‘A rapid

succession of penetrating and jubilant

trills, very loud for so small a bird.’ 

I’ll get the tape-recorder.

I’ll find an old cassette to record over.

I’m getting up to fetch it now – 

but no, I’m still asleep;

it was a dream, the getting up.

But the wren’s no dream. It
is
a wren.

You could have called it the year of their persecution:

some villain robbed her window-boxes of half

her petunias and pansies. She wrote a notice:

‘To the person who took my plants. I am disabled;

they cost me much labour to raise from seed.’

Next week, the rest went. Then his number-plates.

(Not the car itself. Who’d want the car? It stank.)

A gale blew in a pane of their front window –

crack: just like that. Why theirs? Why not, for example,

mine? Same gale; same row of elderly houses. 

And through it all the cats multiplied fatly –

fatly but scruffily (his weak heart, her illness:

‘They need grooming, I know, but they’re fat as butter’) –

and the fleas hopped, and the smell came through the walls.

How many cats? Two dozen? Forty? Fifty?

We could count the ones outside in the cages (twelve),

but inside? Always a different furry face

at a window; and the kittens – think of the kittens

pullulating like maggots over the chairs!

Someone reported them to the authorities. 

Who could have done it? Surely not a neighbour!

‘No, not a neighbour! Someone in the Fancy’ –

she was certain. ‘They’ve always envied my success.

The neighbours wouldn’t…’ A sunny afternoon.

I aimed my camera at them over the fence,

at their garden table, under the striped umbrella:

‘Smile!’ And they grinned: his gnome-hat, her witch-hair

in the sun – well out of earshot of the door-bell

and of the Environmental Health Inspector.

You could call it a bad year. But the next was worse.

This is the time of year when people die:

August, and these daisy-faced things

blare like small suns on their swaying hedge

of leaves, yellow as terror. Goodbye, 

they shout to the summer, and goodbye

to Jim, whose turn it was this morning:

while in another hospital his wife

lies paralysed, with nothing to do but lie 

wondering what’s being kept from her, and cry –

she can still do that. August in hospital

sweats and is humid. In the garden

grey airs blow moist, but the mean sky 

holds on to its water. The earth’s coke-dry;

the yellow daisies goggle, but other plants

less greedily rooted are at risk.

The sky surges and sulks. It will let them die.

Mud in their beaks, the house-martins are happy…

That’s anthropomorphism. Start again: 

mud being plentiful because last night

it rained, after a month of drought,

the house-martins are able to build their nests. 

They flitter under the eaves, white flashes

on their backs telling what they are:

house-martins. Not necessarily happy. 

Below in the mock-Tudor cul-de-sac

two kids on skateboards and a smaller girl

with a tricycle are sketching their own circles – 

being themselves, being children:

vaguely aware, perhaps, of the house-martins,

and another bird singing, and a scent of hedge. 

Anthropomorphism tiptoes away:

of human children it’s permissible

to say they’re happy – if indeed they are. 

It’s no use asking them; they wouldn’t know.

They may be bored, or in a sulk,

or worried (it doesn’t show; and they look healthy). 

Ask them in fifty years or so,

if they’re still somewhere. Arrange to present them with

(assuming all these things can still be assembled) 

a blackbird’s song, the honeyed reek of privet,

and a flock of house-martins, wheeling and scrambling

about a group of fake-half-timbered semis. 

Call it a Theme Park, if you like:

‘Suburban childhood, late 1980s’

(or 70s, or 50s – it’s hardly changed). 

Ask them ‘Were you happy in Shakespeare Close?’

and watch them gulp, sick with nostalgia for it.

A wall of snuffling snouts in close-up,

ten coloured, two in black and white,

each in its frame; all magnified,

some more than others. Voles, are they?

Shrews? Water-rats? Whiskers waggling,

they peep from under twelve tree-roots

and vanish. Next, a dozen barn-owls,

pale masks, almost filling the dark screens.

Cut; and now two dozen hedgehogs

come trotting forward in headlong pairs:

they’ll fall right out on the floor among the

cookers and vacuum-cleaners unless

the camera – just in time – draws back.

Here they come again, in their various

sizes, on their various grass:

olive, emerald, acid, bluish,

dun-tinged, or monochrome. The tones

are best, perhaps, on the 22-inch

ITT Squareline: more natural

than the Philips – unless you find them too

muted, in which case the Sony

might do. Now here are the owls again.

Meanwhile at the Conference Centre

three fire-engines have screamed up. Not,

for once, a student smoking in a bedroom:

this time a cloud of thunderflies

has chosen to swarm on the pearly-pink

just-warm globe of a smoke-detector.

Here are the ploughed fields of Middle England;

and here are the scarecrows, flapping polythene arms

over what still, for the moment, looks like England:

bare trees, earth-colours, even a hedge or two. 

The scarecrows’ coats are fertiliser bags;

their heads (it’s hard to see from the swift windows

of the Intercity) are probably 5-litre

containers for some chemical or other. 

And what are the scarecrows guarding? Fields of rape?

Plenty of that in Middle England; also

pillage, and certain other medieval

institutions – some things haven’t changed, 

now that the men of straw are men of plastic.

They wave their rags in fitful semaphore,

in the March wind; our train blurs past them.

Whatever their message was, we seem to have missed it.

What can I have done to earn

the Batterer striding here beside me,

checking up with his blue-china

sidelong eyes that I’ve not been bad – 

not glanced across the street, forgetting

to concentrate on what he’s saying;

not looked happy without permission,

or used the wrong form of his name? 

How did he get here, out of the past,

with his bulging veins and stringy tendons,

fists clenched, jaw gritted,

about to burst with babble and rage? 

Did I elect him? Did I fall

asleep and vote him in again?

Yes, that’ll be what he is: a nightmare;

but someone else’s now, not mine. 

Emily Brontë’s cleaning the car:

water sloshes over her old trainers

as she scrubs frail blood-shapes from the windscreen

and swirls the hose-jet across the roof.

When it’s done she’ll go to the supermarket;

then, if she has to, face her desk. 

I’m striding on the moor in my hard shoes,

a shawl over my worsted bodice,

the hem of my skirt scooping dew from the grass

as I pant up towards the breathless heights.

I’ll sit on a rock I know and write a poem.

It may not come out as I intend.

Too jellied, viscous, floating a condition

to inspire more action than a sigh –

like being supported on warm porridge 

gazing at this: may-blossom, bluebells, robin,

the tennis-players through the trees,

the trotting magpie (not good news, but handsome) 

asking the tree-stump next to where I’m sitting

‘Were you a rowan last time? No?

That’s what the seedling wedged in your roots is planning.’

On the wall above the bedside lamp

a large crane-fly is jump-starting

a smaller crane-fly – or vice versa.

They do it tail to tail, like Volkswagens:

their engines must be in their rears. 

It looks easy enough. Let’s try it.

As if the week had begun anew –

and certainly something has:

this fizzing light on the harbour, these

radiant bars and beams and planes

slashed through flaps and swags of sunny vapour.

Aerial water, submarine light:

Wellington’s gone Wordsworthian again.

He’d have admired it –

admired but not approved, if he’d heard

about fossil fuels, and aerosols,

and what we’ve done to the ozone layer,

or read in last night’s
Evening Post

that ‘November ended the warmest spring

since meteorological records began’.

Not that it wasn’t wet:

moisture’s a part of it. 

As for this morning (Friday),

men in shorts raking the beach

have constructed little cairns of evidence:

driftwood, paper, plastic cups.

A seagull’s gutting a bin.

The rain was more recent than I thought:

I’m sitting on a wet bench.

Just for now, I can live with it.