Poems 1960-2000 (5 page)

It was the midnight train; I was tired and edgy.

The advertisement portrayed – I wrote it down – a

‘Skull-like young female, licking lips’ and I added

‘Prefer Grandma, even dead’ as she newly was.

I walked home singing one of her Irish ballads.

Death is one thing, necrophilia another.

So I climbed up that ladder in the frescoed barn –

a soft ladder, swaying and collapsing under

my feet (my hands alone hauled me into the loft) –

and found, without surprise, a decomposed lady

who drew me down to her breast, with her disengaged

armbones, saying ‘Come, my dearie, don’t be afraid,

come to me’ into a mess of sweetish decay.

It was a dream. I screamed and woke, put on the light,

dozed, woke again. For half a day I carried that

carcass in my own failing arms. Then remembered:

even the dead want to be loved for their own sake.

She was indeed my grandmother. She did not choose

to be dead and rotten. My blood too (Group A,

Rhesus negative, derived exactly from hers)

will suffer that deterioration; my much

modified version of her nose will fall away,

my longer bones collapse like hers. So let me now

apologise to my sons and their possible

children for the gruesomeness: we do not mean it.

The bee in the foxglove, the mouth on the nipple,

the hand between the thighs.

                                               Forgive me

these procreative images.

                                          Do you remember

that great hill outside Wellington, which we

had to climb, before they built the motorway,

to go north? The engine used to boil

in the old Chev. Straight up the road went

and tipped us over into Johnsonville.

Nothing on the way but rock and gorse, gravel-

pits, and foxgloves; and a tunnel hacked deep,

somewhere, into a cliff. Ah, my burgeoning new

country, I said (being fourteen). Yes, a steep

road to climb. But coming back was better;

a matter for some caution in a car,

but glorious and terrible on a bicycle.

Heart in my pedals, down I would roar

towards the sea; I’d go straight into it

if I didn’t brake. No time then to stare

self-consciously at New Zealand vegetation,

at the awkward landscape. I needed all my care

for making the right turn towards the city

at the hill’s base, where the paint-hoarding stood

between me and the harbour.

                                                For ten years

that city possessed me. In time it bred

two sons for me (little pink mouths tucked

like foxglove-bells over my nipples). Yes,

in this matter Wellington and I have no

quarrel. But I think it was a barren place.

‘But look at all this beauty,’

said the hotel manager’s wife

when asked how she could bear to

live there. True: there was a fine bay,

all hills and atmosphere; white

sand, and bush down to the sea’s edge;

oyster-boats, too, and Maori

fishermen with Scottish names (she

ran off with one that autumn).

As for me, I walked on the beach;

it was too cold to swim. My

seven-year-old collected shells

and was bitten by sandflies;

my four-year-old paddled, until

a mad seagull jetted down

to jab its claws and beak into

his head. I had already

decided to leave the country. 

He is my green branch growing in a far plantation.

He is my first invention.

No one can be in two places at once.

So we left Athens on the same morning.

I was in a hot railway carriage, crammed

between Serbian soldiers and peasant

women, on sticky seats, with nothing to

drink but warm mineral water.

                                                 He was

in a cabin with square windows, sailing

across the Mediterranean, fast,

to Suez.

               Then I was back in London

in the tarnished summer, remembering,

as I folded his bed up, and sent the

television set away. Letters came

from Aden and Singapore, late.

                                                  He was

already in his father’s house, on the

cliff-top, where the winter storms roll across

from Kapiti Island, and the flax bends

before the wind. He could go no further.

He is my bright sea-bird on a rocky beach. 

I am sitting on the step

drinking coffee and

smoking, listening to jazz.

The smoke separates

two scents: fresh paint in the house

behind me; in front,

buddleia.

                The neighbours cut

back our lilac tree –

it shaded their neat garden.

The buddleia will

be next, no doubt; but bees and

all those butterflies

approve of our shaggy trees.

                      *

I am painting the front door

with such thick juicy

paint I could almost eat it.

People going past

with their shopping stare at my

bare legs and old shirt.

The door will be sea-green.

                                          Our

black cat walked across

the painted step and left a

delicate paw-trail.

I swore at her and frightened

two little girls – this

street is given to children.

The other cat is younger,

white and tabby, fat,

with a hoarse voice. In summer

she sleeps all day long

in the rosebay willow-herb,

too lazy to walk

on paint.

                Andrew is upstairs;

having discovered

quick-drying non-drip gloss, he

is old enough now

to paint all his furniture

tangerine and the

woodwork green; he is singing.

                      *

I am lying in the sun,

in the garden. Bees

dive on white clover beside

my ears. The sky is

Greek blue, with a vapour-trail

chalked right across it.

My transistor radio

talks about the moon.

                      *

I am floating in the sky.

Below me the house

crouches among its trees like

a cat in long grass.

I want to stroke its roof-ridge

but I think I can

already hear it purring. 

Elm, laburnum, hawthorn, oak:

all the incredible leaves expand

on their dusty branches, like

Japanese paper flowers in water,

like anything one hardly believes

will really work this time; and

I am a stupefied spectator

as usual. What are they all, these

multiverdant, variously-made

soft sudden things, these leaves?

So I walk solemnly in the park

with a copy of
Let’s Look at Trees

from the children’s library,

identifying leaf-shapes and bark

while behind my back, at home,

my own garden is turning into a wood.

Before my house the pink may tree

lolls its heavy heads over mine

to grapple my hair as I come

in; at the back door I walk out

under lilac. The two elders

(I let them grow for the wine)

hang vastly over the fence, no doubt

infuriating my tidy neighbours.

In the centre the apple tree

needs pruning. And everywhere,

soaring over the garden shed,

camouflaged by roses, or snaking

up through the grass like vertical worms,

grows every size of sycamore.

Last year we attacked them; I saw

my son, so tender to ants, so sad

over dead caterpillars, hacking

at living roots as thick as his arms,

drenching the stumps with creosote.

No use: they continue to grow.

Under the grass, the ground

must be peppered with winged seeds,

meshed with a tough stringy net

of roots; and the house itself undermined

by wandering wood. Shall we see

the floorboards lifted one morning

by these indomitable weeds,

or find in the airing-cupboard

a rather pale sapling?

And if we do, will it be

worse than cracked pipes or dry rot?

Trees I can tolerate; they are why

I chose this house – for the apple tree,

elder, buddleia, lilac, may;

and outside my bedroom window, higher

every week, its leaves unfurling

pink at the twig-tips (composite

in form) the tallest sycamore.

First she made a little garden

of sorrel stalks wedged among

some yellowy-brown moss-cushions

and fenced it with ice-lolly sticks

(there were just enough); then she

set out biscuit-crumbs on a brick

for the ants; now she sits on a

deserted luggage-trolley

to watch them come for their dinner.

It’s nice here – cloudy but quite warm.

Five trains have swooshed through, and one

stopped, but at the other platform.

Later, when no one is looking,

she may climb the roof of that

low shed. Her mother is making

another telephone call (she

isn’t crying any more).

Perhaps they will stay here all day.

The three-toed sloth is the slowest creature we know

for its size. It spends its life hanging upside-down

from a branch, its baby nestling on its breast.

It never cleans itself, but lets fungus grow

on its fur. The grin it wears, like an idiot clown,

proclaims the joys of a life which is one long rest.

The three-toed sloth is content. It doesn’t care.

It moves imperceptibly, like the laziest snail

you ever saw blown up to the size of a sheep.

Disguised as a grey-green bough it dangles there

in the steamy Amazon jungle. That long-drawn wail

is its slow-motion sneeze. Then it falls asleep.

One cannot but envy such torpor. Its top speed,

when rushing to save its young, is a dramatic

fourteen feet per minute, in a race with fate.

The puzzle is this, though: how did nature breed

a race so determinedly unenergetic?

What passion ever inspired a sloth to mate?

I write in praise of the solitary act:

of not feeling a trespassing tongue

forced into one’s mouth, one’s breath

smothered, nipples crushed against the

ribcage, and that metallic tingling

in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help –

such eyes as a young girl draws life from,

listening to the vegetal

rustle within her, as his gaze

stirs polypal fronds in the obscure

sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.

There is much to be said for abandoning

this no longer novel exercise –

for not ‘participating in

a total experience’ – when

one feels like the lady in Leeds who

had seen
The Sound of Music
eighty-six times;

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress

producing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

for the seventh year running, with

yet another cast from 5B.

Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but

the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.

I advise you, then, to embrace it without

encumbrance. No need to set the scene,

dress up (or undress), make speeches.

Five minutes of solitude are

enough – in the bath, or to fill

that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

The surface dreams are easily remembered:

I wake most often with a comforting sense

of having seen a pleasantly odd film –

nothing too outlandish or too intense;

of having, perhaps, befriended animals,

made love, swum the Channel, flown in the air

without wings, visited Tibet or Chile:

simple childish stuff. Or else the rare

recurrent horror makes its call upon me:

I dream one of my sons is lost or dead,

or that I am trapped in a tunnel underground;

but my scream is enough to recall me to my bed.

Sometimes, indeed, I congratulate myself

on the nice precision of my observation:

on having seen so vividly a certain

colour; having felt the sharp sensation

of cold water on my hands; the exact taste

of wine or peppermints. I take a pride

in finding all my senses operative

even in sleep. So, with nothing to hide,

I amble through my latest entertainment

again, in the bath or going to work,

idly amused at what the night has offered;

unless this is a day when a sick jerk

recalls to me a sudden different vision:

I see myself inspecting the vast slit

of a sagging whore; making love with a hunchbacked

hermaphrodite; eating worms or shit;

or rapt upon necrophily or incest.

And whatever loathsome images I see

are just as vivid as the pleasant others.

I flush and shudder: my God, was that me?

Did I invent so ludicrously revolting

a scene? And if so, how could I forget

until this instant? And why now remember?

Furthermore (and more disturbing yet)

are all my other forgotten dreams like these?

Do I, for hours of my innocent nights,

wallow content and charmed through verminous muck,

rollick in the embraces of such frights?

And are the comic or harmless fantasies

I wake with merely a deceiving guard,

as one might put a Hans Andersen cover

on a volume of the writings of De Sade?

Enough, enough. Bring back those easy pictures,

Tibet or antelopes, a seemly lover,

or even the black tunnel. For the rest,

I do not care to know. Replace the cover.