Poems 1960-2000 (3 page)

A snail is climbing up the window-sill

into your room, after a night of rain.

You call me in to see, and I explain

that it would be unkind to leave it there:

it might crawl to the floor; we must take care

that no one squashes it. You understand,

and carry it outside, with careful hand,

to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:

your gentleness is moulded still by words

from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

your closest relatives, and who purveyed

the harshest kind of truth to many another.

But that is how things are: I am your mother,

and we are kind to snails.

The four-year-old believes he likes

vermouth; the cat eats cheese;

and you and I, though scarcely more

convincingly than these,

walk in the gardens, hand in hand,

beneath the summer trees.

It would not be true to say she was doing nothing:

she visited several bookshops, spent an hour

in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Indian section),

and walked carefully through the streets of Kensington

carrying five mushrooms in a paper bag,

a tin of black pepper, a literary magazine,

and enough money to pay the rent for two weeks.

The sky was cloudy, leaves lay on the pavements.

Nor did she lack human contacts: she spoke

to three shop-assistants and a newsvendor,

and returned the ‘Goodnight’ of a museum attendant.

Arriving home, she wrote a letter to someone

in Canada, as it might be, or in New Zealand,

listened to the news as she cooked her meal,

and conversed for five minutes with the landlady.

The air was damp with the mist of late autumn.

A full day, and not unrewarding.

Night fell at the usual seasonal hour.

She drew the curtains, switched on the electric fire,

washed her hair and read until it was dry,

then went to bed; where, for the hours of darkness,

she lay pierced by thirty black spears

and felt her limbs numb, her eyes burning,

and dark rust carried along her blood.

Viewed from the top, he said, it was like a wheel,

the paper-thin spokes raying out from the hub

to the half-transparent circumference of rind,

with small dark ellipses suspended between.

He could see the wood of the table-top through it.

Then he knelt, and with his eye at orange-level

saw it as the globe, its pithy core

upright from pole to flattened pole. Next,

its levitation: sustained (or so he told us)

by a week’s diet of nothing but rice-water

he had developed powers, drawing upon which

he raised it to a height of about two feet

above the table, with never a finger near it.

That was all. It descended, gradually opaque,

to rest; while he sat giddy and shivering.

(He shivered telling it.) But surely, we asked,

(and still none of us mentioned self-hypnosis

or hallucinations caused by lack of food),

surely triumphant too? Not quite, he said,

with his little crooked smile. It was not enough:

he should have been able to summon up,

created out of what he had newly learnt,

a perfectly imaginary orange, complete

in every detail; whereupon the real orange

would have vanished. Then came explanations

and his talk of mysticism, occult physics,

alchemy, the Qabalah – all his hobby-horses.

If there was failure, it was only here

in the talking. For surely he had lacked nothing,

neither power nor insight nor imagination,

when he knelt alone in his room, seeing before him

suspended in the air that golden globe,

visible and transparent, light-filled:

his only fruit from the Tree of Life. 

This darkness has a quality

that poses us in shapes and textures,

one plane behind another,

flatness in depth.

Your face; a fur of hair; a striped

curtain behind, and to one side cushions;

nothing recedes, all lies extended.

I sink upon your image.

I see a soft metallic glint,

a tinsel weave behind the canvas,

aluminium and bronze beneath the ochre.

There is more in this than we know.

I can imagine drawn around you

a white line, in delicate brush-strokes:

emphasis; but you do not need it.

You have completeness.

I am not measuring your gestures;

(I have seen you measure those of others,

know a mind by a hand’s trajectory,

the curve of a lip).

But you move, and I move towards you,

draw back your head, and I advance.

I am fixed to the focus of your eyes.

I share your orbit.

Now I discover things about you:

your thin wrists, a tooth missing;

and how I melt and burn before you.

I have known you always.

The greyness from the long windows

reduces visual depth; but tactile

reality defies half-darkness.

My hands prove you solid.

You draw me down upon your body,

hard arms behind my head.

Darkness and soft colours blur.

We have swallowed the light.

Now I dissolve you in my mouth,

catch in the corners of my throat

the sly taste of your love, sliding

into me, singing;

just as the birds have started singing.

Let them come flying through the windows

with chains of opals around their necks.

We are expecting them. 

All the flowers have gone back into the ground.

We fell on them, and they did not lie

crushed and crumpled, waiting to die

on the earth’s surface. No: they suddenly wound

the film of their growth backwards. We saw them shrink

from blossom to bud to tiny shoot,

down from the stem and up from the root.

Back to the seed, brothers. It makes you think.

Clearly they do not like us. They’ve gone away,

given up. And who could blame

anything else for doing the same?

I notice that certain trees look smaller today.

You can’t escape the fact: there’s a backward trend

from oak to acorn, and from pine

to cone; they all want to resign.

Understandable enough, but where does it end?

Harder, you’d think, for animals; yet the cat

was pregnant, but has not produced.

Her rounded belly is reduced,

somehow, to normal. How to answer that?

Buildings, perhaps, will be the next to go;

imagine it: a tinkle of glass,

a crunch of brick, and a house will pass

through the soil to the protest meeting below.

This whole conspiracy of inverted birth

leaves only us; and how shall we

endure as we deserve to be,

foolish and lost on the naked skin of the earth?

I ride on my high bicycle

into a sooty Victorian city

of colonnaded bank buildings,

horse-troughs, and green marble fountains.

I glide along, contemplating

the curly lettering on the shop-fronts.

An ebony elephant, ten feet tall,

is wheeled past, advertising something.

When I reach the dark archway

I chain my bicycle to a railing,

nod to a policeman, climb the steps,

and emerge into unexpected sunshine.

There below lies Caroline Bay,

its red roofs and its dazzling water.

Now I am running along the path;

it is four o’clock, there is still just time.

I halt and sit on the sandy grass

to remove my shoes and thick stockings;

but something has caught me; around my shoulders

I feel barbed wire; I am entangled.

It pulls my hair, dragging me downwards;

I am suddenly older than seventeen,

tired, powerless, pessimistic.

I struggle weakly; and wake, of course.

Well, all right. It doesn’t matter.

Perhaps I didn’t get to the beach:

but I have been there – to all the beaches

(waking or dreaming) and all the cities.

Now it is very early morning

and from my window I see a leopard

tall as a horse, majestic and kindly,

padding over the fallen snow. 

The room is full of clichés – ‘Throw me a crumb’

and ‘Now I see the writing on the wall’

and ‘Don’t take umbrage, dear’. I wish I could.

Instead I stand bedazzled by them all,

longing for shade. Belshazzar’s fiery script

glows there, between the prints of tropical birds,

in neon lighting, and the air is full

of crumbs that flash and click about me. Words

glitter in colours like those gaudy prints:

the speech of a computer, metal-based

but feathered like a cloud of darts. All right.

Your signal-system need not go to waste.

Mint me another batch of tokens: say

‘I am in your hands; I throw myself upon

your mercy, casting caution to the winds.’

Thank you; there is no need to go on.

Thus authorised by your mechanical

issue, I lift you like a bale of hay,

open the window wide, and toss you out;

and gales of laughter whirl you far away.

Three times I have slept in your house

and this is definitely the last.

I cannot endure the transformations:

nothing stays the same for an hour.

Last time there was a spiral staircase

winding across the high room.

People tramped up and down it all night,

carrying brief-cases, pails of milk, bombs,

pretending not to notice me

as I lay in a bed lousy with dreams.

Couldn’t you have kept them away?

After all, they were trespassing.

The time before it was all bathrooms,

full of naked, quarrelling girls –

and you claim to like solitude:

I do not understand your arrangements.

Now the glass doors to the garden

open on rows of stone columns;

beside them stands a golden jeep.

Where are we this time? On what planet?

Every night lasts for a week.

I toss and turn and wander about,

whirring from room to room like a moth,

ignored by those indifferent faces.

At last I think I have woken up.

I lift my head from the pillow, rejoicing.

The alarm-clock is playing Schubert:

I am still asleep. This is too much.

Well, I shall try again in a minute.

I shall wake into this real room

with its shadowy plants and patterned screens

(yes, I remember how it looks).

It will be cool, but I shan’t wait

to light the gas-fire. I shall dress

(I know where my clothes are) and slip out.

You needn’t think I am here to stay.

Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,

not only dead, not only fallen,

but full of maggots: what do you feel –

more pity or more revulsion?

Pity is for the moment of death,

and the moments after. It changes

when decay comes, with the creeping stench

and the wriggling, munching scavengers.

Returning later, though, you will see

a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,

an inoffensive symbol of what

once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.

It is clear then. But perhaps you find

the analogy I have chosen

for our dead affair rather gruesome –

too unpleasant a comparison.

It is not accidental. In you

I see maggots close to the surface.

You are eaten up by self-pity,

crawling with unlovable pathos.

If I were to touch you I should feel

against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.

Do not ask me for charity now:

go away until your bones are clean.

This house is floored with water,

wall to wall, a deep green pit,

still and gleaming, edged with stone.

Over it are built stairways

and railed living-areas

in wrought iron. All rather

impractical; it will be

damp in winter, and we shall

surely drop small objects – keys,

teaspoons, or coins – through the chinks

in the ironwork, to splash

lost into the glimmering

depths (and do we know how deep?).

It will have to be rebuilt:

a solid floor of concrete

over this dark well (perhaps

already full of coins, like

the flooded crypt of that church

in Ravenna). You might say

it could be drained, made into

a useful cellar for coal.

But I am sure the water

would return; would never go.

Under my grandmother’s house

in Drury, when I was three,

I always believed there was

water: lift up the floorboards

and you would see it – a lake,

a subterranean sea.

True, I played under the house

and saw only hard-packed earth,

wooden piles, gardening tools,

a place to hunt for lizards.

That was different: below

I saw no water. Above,

I knew it must still be there,

waiting. (For why did we say

‘Forgive us our trespasses,

deliver us from evil’?)

Always beneath the safe house

lies the pool, the hidden sea

created before we were.

It is not easy to drain

the waters under the earth.