TED HUGHES

New Selected Poems 1957–1994

Table of Contents

Title Page

from THE HAWK IN THE RAIN
The Thought-Fox
Song
The Jaguar
Famous Poet
Soliloquy
The Horses
Fallgrief’s Girlfriends
Egg-Head
Vampire
The Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water
Meeting
Wind
October Dawn
The Casualty
Bayonet Charge
Six Young Men
The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar
Song from Bawdry Embraced

from LUPERCAL
Mayday on Holderness
February
Crow Hill
A Woman Unconscious
Strawberry Hill
Fourth of July
Esther’s Tomcat
Wilfred Owen’s Photographs
Relic
Hawk Roosting
Fire-Eater
To Paint a Water Lily
The Bull Moses
Cat and Mouse
View of a Pig
The Retired Colonel
November
An Otter 
Witches
Thrushes
Snowdrop
Pike
Sunstroke
Cleopatra to the Asp

UNCOLLECTED
Recklings
Crow Wakes

from WODWO
Thistles
Still Life
Her Husband
Cadenza
Ghost Crabs
Public Bar TV
Kafka
Second Glance at a Jaguar
Fern
Stations
The Green Wolf
The Bear
Scapegoats and Rabies
Theology
Gog
Kreutzer Sonata
Out
New Moon in January
The Warriors of the North
Song of a Rat 
Heptonstall
Skylarks
Pibroch
The Howling of Wolves
Gnat-Psalm
Full Moon and Little Frieda
Wodwo

from CROW
Two Legends 
Lineage
Examination at the Womb-Door
A Childish Prank
Crow’s First Lesson
That Moment
Crow Tyrannosaurus
The Black Beast
Crow’s Account of the Battle
Crow’s Fall
Crow and the Birds
Crow on the Beach
The Contender
Crow’s Vanity
A Horrible Religious Error
In Laughter
Robin Song
Conjuring in Heaven
Owl’s Song
Crow’s Elephant Totem Song
Dawn’s Rose
The Smile
Crow’s Battle Fury
Crow Blacker than Ever
Revenge Fable
Bedtime Anecdote
Apple Tragedy
Crow’s Last Stand
Fragment of an Ancient Tablet
Lovesong
Notes for a Little Play
The Lovepet
How Water Began to Play
Littleblood

from CAVE BIRDS
The Scream
The Executioner
The Knight
A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement
The Guide
His Legs Ran About
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days
The Risen

from SEASON SONGS
A March Calf
The River in March
Apple Dumps
Swifts
Sheep 
Evening Thrush
The Harvest Moon
Leaves
from Autumn Notes
A Cranefly in September

from GAUDETE
Collision with the earth has finally come –
Once I said lightly
This is the maneater’s skull.
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
A primrose petal’s edge
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
The swallow – rebuilding –
The grass-blade is not without
I know well
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
A bang – a burning –
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.
Your tree – your oak

from REMAINS OF ELMET
Football at Slack
Stanbury Moor
Leaf Mould
Moors
Chinese History of Colden Water
Rhododendrons
Sunstruck
Curlews
For Billy Holt
When Men Got to the Summit
The Canal’s Drowning Black
Cock-Crows
Mount Zion
The Long Tunnel Ceiling
Tree
Heptonstall Old Church
Widdop
Emily Brontë

from MOORTOWN DIARY
Rain
Dehorning
Bringing in New Couples
Tractor
Roe-Deer
Sketching a Thatcher
Ravens
February 17th
Birth of Rainbow
Coming Down Through Somerset
The Day He Died
A Memory

from EARTH-NUMB
Earth-Numb
A Motorbike
Deaf School
Life is Trying to be Life
Speech out of Shadow
from Seven Dungeon Songs
Tiger-Psalm
Orts
The Beacon
A God

UNCOLLECTED
Remembering Teheran
Bones
Do not Pick up the Telephone
Reckless Head
from Prometheus on His Crag

from FLOWERS AND INSECTS
A Violet at Lough Aughresberg
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies
Where I Sit Writing My Letter
Tern
The Honey Bee
Sunstruck Foxglove
Eclipse
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper

from WHAT IS THE TRUTH?
New Foal
The Hen
The Hare

from RIVER
The River
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan
Low Water
Japanese River Tales
Ophelia
Strangers
The Gulkana
Go Fishing
Salmon Eggs
A Cormorant
An Eel
Performance
Night Arrival of Sea-Trout
October Salmon
That Morning

from WOLFWATCHING
Astrological Conundrums
Dust As We Are
Telegraph Wires
Sacrifice
For the Duration
Walt
Little Whale Song
On the Reservations

from RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY
Rain-Charm for the Duchy

UNCOLLECTED
Old Oats
The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers
Anniversary
Chaucer
You Hated Spain
The Earthenware Head
The Tender Place
Black Coat
Being Christlike
The God
The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother
The Other
The Locket
Shibboleth
Snow
Folktale
Opus 131
Descent
The Error
Lines about Elias
A Dove
INDEXES
INDEX OF TITLES
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
About the Author
Copyright

NEW SELECTED POEMS

from THE HAWK IN THE RAIN

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Song

O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you

You became soft fire with a cloud’s grace;

The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face;

You stood, and your shadow was my place:

You turned, your shadow turned to ice

       O my lady.

O lady, when the sea caressed you

You were a marble of foam, but dumb.

When will the stone open its tomb?

When will the waves give over their foam?

You will not die, nor come home,

       O my lady.

O lady, when the wind kissed you

You made him music for you were a shaped shell.

I follow the waters and the wind still

Since my heart heard it and all to pieces fell

Which your lovers stole, meaning ill,

       O my lady.

O lady, consider when I shall have lost you

The moon’s full hands, scattering waste,

The sea’s hands, dark from the world’s breast,

The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed,

And my head, worn out with love, at rest

In my hands, and my hands full of dust,

       O my lady.

The Jaguar

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut

Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.

Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil

Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or

Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.

It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives

At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,

As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged

Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom –

The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear –

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Famous Poet

   Stare at the monster: remark

How difficult it is to define just what

Amounts to monstrosity in that

Very ordinary appearance. Neither thin nor fat,

   Hair between light and dark,

   And the general air

Of an apprentice – say, an apprentice house-

Painter amid an assembly of famous

Architects: the demeanour is of mouse,

   Yet is he monster.

   First scrutinize those eyes

For the spark, the effulgence: nothing. Nothing there

But the haggard stony exhaustion of a near-

Finished variety artist. He slumps in his chair

   Like a badly hurt man, half life-size.

   Is it his dreg-boozed inner demon

Still tankarding from tissue and follicle

The vital fire, the spirit electrical

That puts the gloss on a normal hearty male?

   Or is it women?

   The truth – bring it on

With black drapery, drums and funeral tread

Like a great man’s coffin – no, no, he is not dead

But in this truth surely half-buried:

   Once, the humiliation

   Of youth and obscurity,

The autoclave of heady ambition trapped,

The fermenting of the yeasty heart stopped –

Burst with such pyrotechnics the dull world gaped

   And ‘Repeat that!’ still they cry.

   But all his efforts to concoct

The old heroic bang from their money and praise

From the parent’s pointing finger and the child’s amaze,

Even from the burning of his wreathed bays,

   Have left him wrecked: wrecked,

   And monstrous, so,

As a Stegosaurus, a lumbering obsolete

Arsenal of gigantic horn and plate

From a time when half the world still burned, set

   To blink behind bars at the zoo.

Soliloquy

Whenever I am got under my gravestone

Sending my flowers up to stare at the church-tower,

Gritting my teeth in the chill from the church-floor,

I shall praise God heartily, to see gone,

As I look round at old acquaintance there,

Complacency from the smirk of every man,

And every attitude showing its bone,

And every mouth confessing its crude shire;

But I shall thank God thrice heartily

To be lying beside women who grimace

Under the commitments of their flesh,

And not out of spite or vanity.

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird, –

A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –

Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –

Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,

Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.

Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.

The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun

Orange, red, red erupted.

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,

Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –

I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards

The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.

                                  There, still they stood,

But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves

Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.

Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons

High over valleys, in the red levelling rays –

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,

Hearing the horizons endure.

Fallgrief’s Girlfriends

Not that she had no equal, not that she was

His before flesh was his or the world was;

Not that she had the especial excellence

To make her cat-indolence and shrew-mouth

Index to its humanity. Her looks

Were what a good friend would not comment on.

If he made flattery too particular,

Admiring her cookery or lipstick,

Her eyes reflected painfully. Yet not that

He pitied her: he did not pity her.

‘Any woman born,’ he said, ‘having

What any woman born cannot but have,

Has as much of the world as is worth more

Than wit or lucky looks can make worth more;

And I, having what I have as a man

Got without choice, and what I have chosen,

City and neighbour and work, am poor enough

To be more than bettered by a worst woman.

Whilst I am this muck of man in this

Muck of existence, I shall not seek more

Than a muck of a woman: wit and lucky looks

Were a ring disabling this pig-snout,

And a tin clasp on this diamond.’

By this he meant to break out of the dream

Where admiration’s giddy mannequin

Leads every sense to motley; he meant to stand naked

Awake in the pitch dark where the animal runs,

Where the insects couple as they murder each other,

Where the fish outwait the water.

                                                The chance changed him:

He has found a woman of such wit and looks

He can brag of her in every company.

Egg-Head

   A leaf’s otherness,

The whaled monstered sea-bottom, eagled peaks

And stars that hang over hurtling endlessness,

   With manslaughtering shocks

   Are let in on his sense:

So many a one has dared to be struck dead

Peeping through his fingers at the world’s ends,

   Or at an ant’s head.

   But better defence

Than any militant pride are the freebooting crass

Veterans of survival and those champions

   Forgetfulness, madness.

   Brain in deft opacities,

Walled in translucencies, shuts out the world’s knocking

With a welcome, and to wide-eyed deafnesses

   Of prudence lets it speak.

   Long the eggshell head’s

Fragility rounds and resists receiving the flash

Of the sun, the bolt of the earth: and feeds

   On the yolk’s dark and hush

   Of a helplessness coming

By feats of torpor, by circumventing sleights

Of stupefaction, juggleries of benumbing,

   By lucid sophistries of sight

   To a staturing ‘I am’,

To the upthrust affirmative head of a man.

Braggart-browed complacency in most calm

   Collusion with his own

   Dewdrop frailty

Must stop the looming mouth of the earth with a pin-

Point cipher, with a blank-stare courtesy

   Confront it and preen,

   Spurn it muck under

His foot-clutch, and, opposing his eye’s flea-red

Fly-catching fervency to the whelm of the sun,

   Trumpet his own ear dead.

Vampire

You hosts are almost glad he gate-crashed: see,

How his eyes brighten on the whisky, how his wit

Tumbles the company like a lightning stroke –

You marvel where he gets his energy from … 

But that same instant, here, far underground,

This fusty carcase stirs its shroud and swells.

‘Stop, stop, oh for God’s sake, stop!’ you shriek

As your tears run down, but he goes on and on

Mercilessly till you think your ribs must crack …

While this carcase’s eyes grimace, stitched

In the cramp of an ordeal, and a squeeze of blood

Crawls like scorpions into its hair.

You plead, limp, dangling in his mad voice, till

With a sudden blood-spittling cough, he chokes: he leaves

Trembling, soon after. You slump back down in a chair

Cold as a leaf, your heart scarcely moving …

Deep under the city’s deepest stone

This grinning sack is bursting with your blood.

The Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water

‘This water droplet, charity of the air,

Out of the watched blue immensity –

(Where, where are the angels?) out of the draught in the door,

The Tuscarora, the cloud, the cup of tea,

The sweating victor and the decaying dead bird –

This droplet has travelled far and studied hard.

‘Now clings on the cream paint of our kitchen wall.

Aged eye! This without heart-head-nerve lens

Which saw the first and earth-centering jewel

Spark upon darkness, behemoth bulk and lumber

Out of the instant flash, and man’s hand

Hoist him upright, still hangs clear and round.

‘Having studied a journey in the high

Cathedralled brain, the mole’s ear, the fish’s ice,

The abattoir of the tiger’s artery,

The slum of the dog’s bowel, and there is no place

His bright look has not bettered, and problem none

But he has brought it to solution.

‘Venerable elder! Let us learn of you.

Read us a lesson, a plain lesson how

Experience has worn or made you anew,

That on this humble kitchen wall hang now,

O dew that condensed of the breath of the Word

On the mirror of the syllable of the Word.’

So he spoke, aloud, grandly, then stood

For an answer, knowing his own nature all

Droplet-kin, sisters and brothers of lymph and blood,

Listened for himself to speak for the drop’s self.

This droplet was clear simple water still.

It no more responded than the hour-old child

Does to finger-toy or coy baby-talk,

But who lies long, long and frowningly

Unconscious under the shock of its own quick

After that first alone-in-creation cry

When into the mesh of sense, out of the dark,

Blundered the world-shouldering monstrous ‘I’.

Meeting

   He smiles in a mirror, shrinking the whole

Sun-swung zodiac of light to a trinket shape

   On the rise of his eye: it is a role

   In which he can fling a cape,

And outloom life like Faustus. But once when

   On an empty mountain slope

   A black goat clattered and ran

Towards him, and set forefeet firm on a rock

   Above and looked down

   A square-pupilled yellow-eyed look

The black devil head against the blue air,

   What gigantic fingers took

   Him up and on a bare

Palm turned him close under an eye

   That was like a living hanging hemisphere

   And watched his blood’s gleam with a ray

Slow and cold and ferocious as a star

   Till the goat clattered away.

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up –

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap:

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

October Dawn

October is marigold, and yet

A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn

Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if

The ice-age had begun its heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn

From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice

Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here

Restraining a ripple from the air; 

Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;

Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight

Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate 

Reunion while a fist of cold

Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,

And now it is about to start.

The Casualty

Farmers in the fields, housewives behind steamed windows,

Watch the burning aircraft across the blue sky float,

As if a firefly and a spider fought,

Far above the trees, between the washing hung out.

They wait with interest for the evening news.

But already, in a brambled ditch, suddenly-smashed

Stems twitch. In the stubble a pheasant

Is craning every way in astonishment.

The hare that hops up, quizzical, hesitant,

Flattens ears and tears madly away and the wren warns.

Some, who saw fall, smoke beckons. They jostle above,

They peer down a sunbeam as if they expected there

A snake in the gloom of the brambles or a rare flower –

See the grave of dead leaves heave suddenly, hear

It was a man fell out of the air alive,

Hear now his groans and senses groping. They rip

The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils; they raise

A body that as the breeze touches it glows,

Branding their hands on his bones. Now that he has

No spine, against heaped sheaves they prop him up,

Arrange his limbs in order, open his eye,

Then stand, helpless as ghosts. In a scene

Melting in the August noon, the burned man

Bulks closer greater flesh and blood than their own,

As suddenly the heart’s beat shakes his body and the eye

Widens childishly. Sympathies

Fasten to the blood like flies. Here’s no heart’s more

Open or large than a fist clenched, and in there

Holding close complacency its most dear

Unscratchable diamond. The tears of their eyes

Too tender to let break, start to the edge

Of such horror close as mourners can,

Greedy to share all that is undergone,

Grimace, gasp, gesture of death. Till they look down

On the handkerchief at which his eye stares up.

Bayonet Charge

Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw

In raw-seamed hot khaki, his sweat heavy,

Stumbling across a field of clods towards a green hedge

That dazzled with rifle fire, hearing

Bullets smacking the belly out of the air –

He lugged a rifle numb as a smashed arm;

The patriotic tear that had brimmed in his eye

Sweating like molten iron from the centre of his chest –

In bewilderment then he almost stopped –

In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations

Was he the hand pointing that second? He was running

Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs

Listening between his footfalls for the reason

Of his still running, and his foot hung like

Statuary in mid-stride. Then the shot-slashed furrows

Threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame

And crawled in a threshing circle, its mouth wide

Open silent, its eyes standing out.

He plunged past with his bayonet towards the green hedge,

King, honour, human dignity, etcetera

Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm

To get out of that blue crackling air

His terror’s touchy dynamite.

Six Young Men

The celluloid of a photograph holds them well –

Six young men, familiar to their friends.

Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged

This photograph have not wrinkled the faces or the hands.

Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable,

Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile,

One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,

One is ridiculous with cocky pride –

Six months after this picture they were all dead.

All are trimmed for a Sunday jaunt. I know

That bilberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall,

Which are there yet and not changed. From where these sit

You hear the water of seven streams fall

To the roarer in the bottom, and through all

The leafy valley a rumouring of air go.

Pictured here, their expressions listen yet,

And still that valley has not changed its sound

Though their faces are four decades under the ground.

This one was shot in an attack and lay

Calling in the wire, then this one, his best friend,

Went out to bring him in and was shot too;

And this one, the very moment he was warned

From potting at tin-cans in no man’s land,

Fell back dead with his rifle-sights shot away.

The rest, nobody knows what they came to,

But come to the worst they must have done, and held it

Closer than their hope; all were killed.

Here see a man’s photograph,

The locket of a smile, turned overnight

Into the hospital of his mangled last

Agony and hours; see bundled in it

His mightier-than-a-man dead bulk and weight:

And on this one place which keeps him alive

(In his Sunday best) see fall war’s worst

Thinkable flash and rending, onto his smile

Forty years rotting into soil.

That man’s not more alive whom you confront

And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,

Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,

Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;

No thought so vivid as their smoking-blood:

To regard this photograph might well dement,

Such contradictory permanent horrors here

Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out

One’s own body from its instant and heat.

The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar

Burned by Bloody Mary’s men at Carmarthen. ‘If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.’ (His words on being chained to the stake.) 

Bloody Mary’s venomous flames can curl:

They can shrivel sinew and char bone

Of foot, ankle, knee, and thigh, and boil

Bowels, and drop his heart a cinder down;

And her soldiers can cry, as they hurl

Logs in the red rush: ‘This is her sermon.’

The sullen-jowled watching Welsh townspeople

Hear him crack in the fire’s mouth; they see what

Black oozing twist of stuff bubbles the smell

That tars and retches their lungs: no pulpit

Of his ever held their eyes so still,

Never, as now his agony, his wit.

An ignorant means to establish ownership

Of his flock! Thus their shepherd she seized

And knotted him into this blazing shape

In their eyes, as if such could have cauterized

The trust they turned towards him, and branded on

Its stump her claim, to outlaw question.

So it might have been: seeing their exemplar

And teacher burned for his lessons to black bits,

Their silence might have disowned him to her,

And hung up what he had taught with their Welsh hats:

Who sees his blasphemous father struck by fire

From heaven, might well be heard to speak no oaths.

But the fire that struck here, come from Hell even,

Kindled little heavens in his words

As he fed his body to the flame alive.

Words which, before they will be dumbly spared,

Will burn their body and be tongued with fire

Make paltry folly of flesh and this world’s air.

When they saw what annuities of hours

And comfortable blood he burned to get

His words a bare honouring in their ears,

The shrewd townsfolk pocketed them hot:

Stamp was not current but they rang and shone

As good gold as any queen’s crown.

Gave all he had, and yet the bargain struck

To a merest farthing his whole agony,

His body’s cold-kept miserdom of shrieks

He gave uncounted, while out of his eyes,

Out of his mouth, fire like a glory broke,

And smoke burned his sermon into the skies.

Song from Bawdry Embraced

From what dog’s dish or crocodile’s rotten

       Larder she had come

He questioned none: ‘It is enough

       That she is and I am.’

They caught each other by the body

       And fell in a heap:

A cockerel there struck up a tread

       Like a cabman’s whip.

And so they knit, knotted and wrought

       Braiding their ends in;

So fed their radiance to themselves

       They could not be seen.

And thereupon – a miracle!

       Each became, a lens

So focussing creation’s heat

       The other burst in flames.

Bawdry! Bawdry! Steadfastly

       Thy great protagonists

Died face to face, with bellies full,

       In the solar waste

Where there is neither skirt nor coat,

       And every ogling eye

Is a cold star to measure

       Their solitude by.

from LUPERCAL

Mayday on Holderness

This evening, motherly summer moves in the pond.

I look down into the decomposition of leaves –

The furnace door whirling with larvae.

                       From Hull’s sunset smudge

Humber is melting eastward, my south skyline:

A loaded single vein, it drains

The effort of the inert North – Sheffield’s ores.

Bog pools, dregs of toadstools, tributary

Graves, dunghills, kitchens, hospitals.

The unkillable North Sea swallows it all.

Insects, drunken, drop out of the air.

                                                 Birth-soils,

The sea-salts, scoured me, cortex and intestine,

To receive these remains.

As the incinerator, as the sun,

As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.

Flowerlike, I loved nothing.

Dead and unborn are in God comfortable.

What a length of gut is growing and breathing –

This mute eater, biting through the mind’s

Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,

With creepy-crawly and the root,

With the sea-worm, entering its birthright.

The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity.

The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.

There are eye-guarded eggs in these hedgerows,

Hot haynests under the roots in burrows.

Couples at their pursuits are laughing in the lanes. 

The North Sea lies soundless. Beneath it

Smoulder the wars: to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet.

‘Mother, Mother!’ cries the pierced helmet.

Cordite oozings of Gallipoli,

Curded to beastings, broached my palate,

The expressionless gaze of the leopard,

The coils of the sleeping anaconda,

The nightlong frenzy of shrews.

February

The wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles;

Nibelung wolves barbed like black pineforest

Against a red sky, over blue snow; or that long grin

Above the tucked coverlet – none suffice.

A photograph: the hairless, knuckled feet

Of the last wolf killed in Britain spoiled him for wolves:

The worst since has been so much mere Alsatian.

Now it is the dream cries ‘Wolf!’ where these feet

Print the moonlit doorstep, or run and run

Through the hush of parkland, bodiless, headless;

With small seeming of inconvenience

By day, too, pursue, siege all thought;

Bring him to an abrupt poring stop

Over engravings of gibbet-hung wolves,

As at a cage where the scraggy Spanish wolf

Danced, smiling, brown eyes doggily begging

A ball to be thrown. These feet, deprived,

Disdaining all that are caged, or storied, or pictured,

Through and throughout the true world search

For their vanished head, for the world

Vanished with the head, the teeth, the quick eyes –

Now, lest they choose his head,

Under severe moons he sits making

Wolf-masks, mouths clamped well onto the world.

Crow Hill

The farms are oozing craters in

Sheer sides under the sodden moors:

When it is not wind it is rain,

Neither of which will stop at doors:

One will damp beds and the other shake

Dreams beneath sleep it cannot break.

Between the weather and the rock

Farmers make a little heat;

Cows that sway a bony back,

Pigs upon delicate feet

Hold off the sky, trample the strength

That shall level these hills at length.

Buttoned from the blowing mist

Walk the ridges of ruined stone.

What humbles these hills has raised

The arrogance of blood and bone,

And thrown the hawk upon the wind,

And lit the fox in the dripping ground.

A Woman Unconscious

Russia and America circle each other;

Threats nudge an act that were without doubt

A melting of the mould in the mother,

Stones melting about the root,

The quick of the earth burned out:

The toil of all our ages a loss

With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought

(Not to be thought ridiculous)

Shies from the world-cancelling black

Of its playing shadow: it has learned

That there’s no trusting (trusting to luck)

Dates when the world’s due to be burned;

That the future’s no calamitous change

But a malingering of now,

Histories, towns, faces that no

Malice or accident much derange.

And though bomb be matched against bomb,

Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure –

Earth gone in an instant flare –

Did a lesser death come

Onto the white hospital bed

Where one, numb beyond her last of sense,

Closed her eyes on the world’s evidence

And into pillows sunk her head?

Strawberry Hill

A stoat danced on the lawns here

To the music of the maskers;

Drinking the staring hare dry, bit

Through grammar and corset. They nailed to a door

The stoat with the sun in its belly,

But its red unmanageable life

Has licked the stylist out of their skulls

Has sucked that age like an egg and gone off

Along ditches where flies and leaves

Overpower our tongues, got into some grave –

Not a dog to follow it down –

Emerges, thirsting, in far Asia, in Brixton.

Fourth of July

The hot shallows and seas we bring our blood from

Slowly dwindled; cooled

To sewage estuary, to trout-stocked tarn.

Even the Amazon’s taxed and patrolled

To set laws by the few jaws –

Piranha and jaguar.

Columbus’ huckstering breath

Blew inland through North America

Killing the last of the mammoths.

The right maps have no monsters.

Now the mind’s wandering elementals,

Ousted from their traveller-told

Unapproachable islands,

From their heavens and their burning underworld,

Wait dully at the traffic crossing,

Or lean over headlines, taking nothing in.

Esther’s Tomcat

Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat

As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes,

Continual wars and wives are what

Have tattered his ears and battered his head.

Like a bundle of old rope and iron

Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear

His eyes, green as ringstones: he yawns wide red,

Fangs fine as a lady’s needle and bright.

A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,

Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks

While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.

After hundreds of years the stain’s there

On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom:

That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still

Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,

Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,

Is unkillable. From the dog’s fury,

From gunshot fired point-blank he brings

His skin whole, and whole

From owlish moons of bekittenings

Among ashcans. He leaps and lightly

Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon.

Nightly over the round world of men,

Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.

Wilfred Owen’s Photographs

When Parnell’s Irish in the House

Pressed that the British Navy’s cat-

O-nine-tails be abolished, what

Shut against them? It was

Neither Irish nor English nor of that

Decade, but of the species.

Predictably, Parliament

Squared against the motion. As soon

Let the old school tie be rent

Off their necks, and give thanks, as see gone

No shame but a monument –

Trafalgar not better known.

‘To discontinue it were as much

As ship not powder and cannonballs

But brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing which

A witty profound Irishman calls

For a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watch

The gentry fingering its stained tails.

Whereupon …

                        quietly, unopposed,

The motion was passed.

Relic

I found this jawbone at the sea’s edge:

There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed

To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust

Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:

In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,

Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose

Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws

Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:

This is the sea’s achievement; with shells,

Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these

Indigestibles, the spars of purposes

That failed far from the surface. None grow rich

In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh

But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads –

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

Fire-Eater

Those stars are the fleshed forebears

Of these dark hills, bowed like labourers,

And of my blood.

The death of a gnat is a star’s mouth: its skin,

Like Mary’s or Semele’s, thin

As the skin of fire:

A star fell on her, a sun devoured her.

My appetite is good

Now to manage both Orion and Dog

With a mouthful of earth, my staple.

Worm-sort, root-sort, going where it is profitable.

A star pierces the slug,

The tree is caught up in the constellations.

My skull burrows among antennae and fronds.

To Paint a Water Lily

A green level of lily leaves

Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves

The flies’ furious arena: study

These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air’s dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by

Or stands in space to take aim;

Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts

And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise

To see the colours of these flies

Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle

Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse

Is the pond-bed’s matter of course;

Prehistorie bedragonned times

Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,

Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour –

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still

As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,

Whatever horror nudge her root.

The Bull Moses

A hoist up and I could lean over

The upper edge of the high half-door,

My left foot ledged on the hinge, and look in at the byre’s

Blaze of darkness: a sudden shut-eyed look

Backward into the head.

                                       Blackness is depth

Beyond star. But the warm weight of his breathing,

The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly-tongued

Mash of his cud, steamed against me.

Then, slowly, as onto the mind’s eye –

The brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck:

Something come up there onto the brink of the gulf,

Hadn’t heard of the world, too deep in itself to be called to,

Stood in sleep. He would swing his muzzle at a fly

But the square of sky where I hung, shouting, waving,

Was nothing to him; nothing of our light

Found any reflection in him.

                                            Each dusk the farmer led him

Down to the pond to drink and smell the air,

And he took no pace but the farmer

Led him to take it, as if he knew nothing

Of the ages and continents of his fathers,

Shut, while he wombed, to a dark shed

And steps between his door and the duckpond;

The weight of the sun and the moon and the world hammered

To a ring of brass through his nostrils. He would raise

His streaming muzzle and look out over the meadows,

But the grasses whispered nothing awake, the fetch

Of the distance drew nothing to momentum

In the locked black of his powers. He came strolling gently back,

Paused neither toward the pig-pens on his right,

Nor toward the cow-byres on his left: something

Deliberate in his leisure, some beheld future

Founding in his quiet.

                                    I kept the door wide,

Closed it after him and pushed the bolt.

Cat and Mouse

On the sheep-cropped summit, under hot sun,

The mouse crouched, staring out the chance

It dared not take,

                            Time and a world

Too old to alter, the five mile prospect –

Woods, villages, farms – hummed its heat-heavy

Stupor of life.

                         Whether to two

Feet or four, how are prayers contracted!

Whether in God’s eye or the eye of a cat.

View of a Pig

The pig lay on a barrow dead.

It weighed, they said, as much as three men.

Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.

Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk

Set in death seemed not just dead.

It was less than lifeless, further off.

It was like a sack of wheat.

I thumped it without feeling remorse.

One feels guilty insulting the dead,

Walking on graves. But this pig

Did not seem able to accuse.

It was too dead. Just so much

A poundage of lard and pork.

Its last dignity had entirely gone.

It was not a figure of fun.

Too dead now to pity.

To remember its life, din, stronghold

Of earthly pleasure as it had been,

Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

Too deadly factual. Its weight

Oppressed me – how could it be moved?

And the trouble of cutting it up!

The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Once I ran at a fair in the noise

To catch a greased piglet

That was faster and nimbler than a cat,

Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.

Their bite is worse than a horse’s –

They chop a half-moon clean out.

They eat cinders, dead cats.

Distinctions and admirations such

As this one was long finished with.

I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,

Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

The Retired Colonel

Who lived at the top end of our street

Was a Mafeking stereotype, ageing.

Came, face pulped scarlet with kept rage,

For air past our gate.

Barked at his dog knout and whipcrack

And cowerings of India: five or six wars

Stiffened in his reddened neck;

Brow bull-down for the stroke.

Wife dead, daughters gone, lived on

Honouring his own caricature.

Shot through the heart with whisky wore

The lurch like ancient courage, would not go down

While posterity’s trash stood, held

His habits like a last stand, even

As if he had Victoria rolled

In a Union Jack in that stronghold.

And what if his sort should vanish?

The rabble starlings roar upon

Trafalgar. The man-eating British lion

By a pimply age brought down.

Here’s his head mounted, though only in rhymes.

Beside the head of the last English

Wolf (those starved gloomy times!)

And the last sturgeon of Thames.

November

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land

Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake,

Treed with iron and birdless. In the sunk lane

The ditch – a seep silent all summer –

Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots

On the lane’s scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves,

Against the hill’s hanging silence;

Mist silvering the droplets on the bare thorns

Slower than the change of daylight.

In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep;

Face tucked down into beard, drawn in

Under his hair like a hedgehog’s. I took him for dead,

But his stillness separated from the death

Of the rotting grass and the ground. A wind chilled,

And a fresh comfort tightened through him,

Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve.

His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy band,

Rubbed each other, resettling. The wind hardened;

A puff shook a glittering from the thorns,

And again the rains’ dragging grey columns

Smudged the farms. In a moment

The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns

Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals.

I stayed on under the welding cold

Watching the tramp’s face glisten and the drops on his coat

Flash and darken. I thought what strong trust

Slept in him – as the trickling furrows slept,

And the thorn-roots in their grip on darkness;

And the buried stones, taking the weight of winter;

The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth.

Rain plastered the land till it was shining

Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood

Shuttered by a black oak leaned.

The keeper’s gibbet had owls and hawks

By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows:

Some, stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits

In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape,

Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests,

Patient to outwait these worst days that beat

Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.

An Otter 

I

       Underwater eyes, an eel’s

Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter:

   Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish;

       With webbed feet and long ruddering tail

       And a round head like an old tomcat.

       Brings the legend of himself

From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and

                                                         vermin-poles;

   Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;

       Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;

       Re-enters the water by melting.

       Of neither water nor land. Seeking

Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot

                                                        come at since,

   Takes his changed body into the holes of lakes;

       As if blind, cleaves the stream’s push till he licks

       The pebbles of the source; from sea

       To sea crosses in three nights

Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the

                                                           starlit land,

   Over sunken farms where the bats go round,

       Without answer. Till light and birdsong come

       Walloping up roads with the milk wagon.

II

The hunt’s lost him. Pads on mud,

Among sedges, nostrils a surface bead,

The otter remains, hours. The air,

Circling the globe, tainted and necessary,

Mingling tobacco-smoke, hounds and parsley,

Comes carefully to the sunk lungs.

So the self under the eye lies,

Attendant and withdrawn. The otter belongs

In double robbery and concealment –

From water that nourishes and drowns, and from land

That gave him his length and the mouth of the hound.

He keeps fat in the limpid integument

Reflections live on. The heart beats thick,

Big trout muscle out of the dead cold;

Blood is the belly of logic; he will lick

The fishbone bare. And can take stolen hold

On a bitch otter in a field full

Of nervous horses, but linger nowhere.

Yanked above hounds, reverts to nothing at all,

To this long pelt over the back of a chair.

Witches

Once was every woman the witch

To ride a weed the ragwort road:

Devil to do whatever she would:

Each rosebud, every old bitch.

Did they bargain their bodies or no?

Proprietary the devil that

Went horsing on their every thought

When they scowled the strong and lucky low.

Dancing in Ireland nightly, gone

To Norway (the ploughboy bridled),

Nightlong under the blackamoor spraddled,

Back beside their spouse by dawn

As if they had dreamed all. Did they dream it?

Oh, our science says they did.

It was all wishfully dreamed in bed.

Small psychology would unseam it.

Bitches still sulk, rosebuds blow,

And we are devilled. And though these weep

Over our harms, who’s to know

Where their feet dance while their heads sleep?

Thrushes

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,

More coiled steel than living – a poised

Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs

Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab

Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.

No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares.

No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab

And a ravening second.

Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained

Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats

Gives their days this bullet and automatic

Purpose? Mozart’s brain had it, and the shark’s mouth

That hungers down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own

Side and devouring of itself: efficiency which

Strikes too streamlined for any doubt to pluck at it

Or obstruction deflect.

With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,

Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,

Carving at a tiny ivory ornament

For years: his act worships itself – while for him,

Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and above what

Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils

Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness

Of black silent waters weep.

Snowdrop

Now is the globe shrunk tight

Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.

Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,

Move through an outer darkness

Not in their right minds,

With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,

Brutal as the stars of this month,

Her pale head heavy as metal.

Pike

Pike, three inches long, perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads –

Gloom of their stillness:

Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.

Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

Not to be changed at this date;

A life subdued to its instrument;

The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

And four and a half: fed fry to them –

Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

And indeed they spare nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb –

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks –

The same iron in this eye

Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,

Whose lilies and muscular tench

Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted them –

Stilled legendary depth:

It was as deep as England. It held

Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished

With the hair frozen on my head

For what might move, for what eye might move.

The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream

Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,

That rose slowly towards me, watching.

Sunstroke

Frightening the blood in its tunnel

The mowing machine ate at the field of grass.

My eyes had been glared dark. Through a red heat

The cradled guns, damascus, blued, flared –

At every stir sliding their molten embers

Into my head. Sleekly the clover

Bowed and flowed backward

Over the saw-set swimming blades

Till the blades bit – roots, stones, ripped into red –

Some baby’s body smoking among the stalks.

Reek of paraffin oil and creosote

Swabbing my lungs doctored me back

Laid on a sack in the great-beamed engine-shed.

I drank at stone, at iron of plough and harrow;

Dulled in a pit, heard thick walls of rain

And voices in swaddled confinement near me

Warm as veins. I lay healing

Under the ragged length of a dog fox

The dangled head downward from one of the beams,

With eyes open, forepaws strained at a leap –

Also surprised by the rain.

Cleopatra to the Asp

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it

Loved me like my soul, my soul:

Now that I seek myself in a serpent

My smile is fatal.

Nile moves in me; my thighs splay

Into the squalled Mediterranean;

My brain hides in that Abyssinia

Lost armies foundered towards.

Desert and river unwrinkle again.

Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk

Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.

Now let the snake reign.

A half-deity out of Capricorn,

This rigid Augustus mounts

With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn

Summarily the moon-horned river

From my bed. May the moon

Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole

With coiled Egypt’s past; then from my delta

Swim like a fish toward Rome.

UNCOLLECTED

Recklings

Stealing Trout on a May Morning

I park the car half in the ditch and switch off and sit.

The hot astonishment of my engine’s arrival

Sinks through 5 a.m. silence and frost.

At the end of a long gash

An atrocity through the lace of first light

I sit with the reeking instrument.

I am on delicate business.

I want the steel to be cold instantly

And myself secreted three fields away

And the farms, back under their blankets, supposing a plane passed.

Because this is no wilderness you can just rip into.

Every leaf is plump and well-married,

Every grain of soil of known lineage, well-connected.

And the gardens are like brides fallen asleep

Before their weddings have properly begun.

The orchards are the hushed maids, fresh from convent …

It is too hushed, something improper is going to happen.

It is too ghostly proper, all sorts of liveried listenings

Tiptoe along the lanes and peer over hedges.

I listen for the eyes jerked open on pillows,

Their dreams washed with sudden ugly petroleum.

They need only look out at a sheep.

Every sheep within two miles

Is nailing me accurately down

With its hellishly-shaven starved-priest expression.

I emerge. The air, after all, has forgotten everything.

The sugared spindles and wings of grass

Are etched on great goblets. A pigeon falls into space.

The earth is coming quietly and darkly up from a great depth,

Still under the surface. I am unknown,

But nothing is surprised. The tarmac of the road

Is velvet with sleep, the hills are out cold.

A new earth still in its wrappers

Of gauze and cellophane,

The frost from the storage still on its edges,

My privilege to poke and sniff.

The sheep are not much more than the primroses.

And the river there, amazed with itself,

Flexing and trying its lights

And unused fish, that are rising And sinking for the sheer novelty

As the sun melts the hill’s spine and the spilled light

Flows through their gills …

My mind sinks, rising and sinking.

And the opening arms of the sky forget me

Into the buried tunnel of hazels. There

My boot dangles down, till a thing black and sudden

Savages it, and the river is heaping under,

Alive and malevolent,

A coiling glider of shock, the space-black

Draining off the night-moor, under the hazels …

But I drop and stand square in it, against it,

Then it is river again, washing its soul,

Its stones, its weeds, its fish, its gravels

And the rooty mouths of the hazels clear

Of the discolourings bled in

Off ploughlands and lanes …

At first, I can hardly look at it –

The riding tables, the corrugated

Shanty roofs tightening

To braids, boilings where boulders throw up

Gestures of explosion, black splitting everywhere

To drowning skirts of whiteness, a slither of mirrors

Under the wading hazels. Here it is shallow,

Ropes my knees, lobbing fake boomerangs,

A drowned woman loving each ankle,

But I’m heavier and I wade with them upstream,

Flashing my blue minnow

Up the open throats of water

And across through the side of the rush

Of alligator escaping along there

Under the beards of the hazels, and I slice

The wild nape-hair off the bald bulges,

Till the tightrope of my first footholds

Tangles away downstream

And my bootsoles move as to magnets.

Soon I deepen. And now I meet the piling mob

Of voices and hurriers coming towards me

And tumbling past me. I press through a panic …

This headlong river is a rout

Of tumbrils and gun-carriages, rags and metal,

All the funeral woe-drag of some overnight disaster

Mixed with planets, electrical storms and darkness

On a mapless moorland of granite,

Trailing past me with all its frights, its eyes

With what they have seen and still see,

They drag the flag off my head, a dark insistence

Tearing the spirits from my mind’s edge and from under …

To yank me clear takes the sudden, strong spine

Of one of the river’s real members –

Thoroughly made of dew, lightning and granite

Very slowly over four years. A trout, a foot long,

Lifting its head in a shawl of water,

Fins banked stiff like a trireme

It forces the final curve wide, getting

A long look at me. So much for the horror

It has changed places.

                                    Now I am a man in a painting

(Under the mangy, stuffed head of a fox)

Painted about 1905

Where the river steams and the frost relaxes

On the pear-blossoms. The brassy wood-pigeons

Bubble their colourful voices, and the sun

Rises upon a world well-tried and old.

Water

On moors where people get lost and die of air

On heights where the goat’s stomach fails

In gorges where the toad lives on starlight

In deserts where the bone comes through the camel’s nostril

On seas where the white bear gives up and dies of water

In depths where only the shark’s tooth resists

At altitudes where the eagle would explode

Through falls of air where men become bombs

At the poles where zero is the sole hearth

Water is not lost, is snug, is at home –

Sometimes with its wife, stone –

An open-armed host, of poor cheer.

Memory

The morass is bulging and aborting –

Mother, mother, mother, what am I?

Hands of light, hands of light

Wash the writhing darkness.

Mother, the eel in the well is eating the moon!

If I stop my heart and hold my breath

The needle will thread itself.

Daring the no-man quiet of my no-being

A mouse buds at the washboarding. A nose

Of ginger spider weaves its hairs toward me.

Claws trickle onto my palm.

An ounce pins itself there,

Nose wavering to investigate me.

Am I a mouse’s remembrance?

I start, and it bounces past its shadow

Into my mother’s shoe

Which twists out.

                               I fly up flustered

Into the winter of a near elm.

Tutorial

Like a propped skull,

His humour is mediaeval.

What are all those tomes? Tomb-boards

Pressing the drying remains of men.

He brings some out, we stew them up to a dark amber and sit sipping.

He is fat, this burst bearskin, but his mind is an electric mantis

Plucking the heads and legs off words, the homunculi.

I am thin but I can hardly move my bulk, I go round and

round numbly under the ice of the North Pole.

This scholar dribbling tea

Onto his tie, straining pipe-gargle

Through the wharf-weed that ennobles

The mask of enquiry, advancing into the depths like a harbour,

Like a sphinx cliff,

Like the papery skull of a fish

Lodged in dune sand, with a few straws,

Rifled by dry cold.

His words

Twitch and rustle, twitch

And rustle.

The scarred world looks through their gaps. 

I listen

With bleak eyeholes.

Trees

I whispered to the holly …

There was a rustle of answer – dark,

Dark, dark, a gleamer recoiling tensely backward

Into a closing nest of shattered weapons,

Like a squid into clouds of protection.

I plucked a spiny leaf. Nothing protested.

Glints twitched, watched me.

I whispered to the birch …

My breath crept up into a world of shudderings.

Was she veiled?

Herself her own fountain

She pretended to be absent from it, or to be becoming air

Filtering herself from her fingertips,

Till her bole paled, like a reflection on water,

And I felt the touch of my own ghostliness –

I moved on, looking neither way,

Trying to hear

The outcry that must go with all

Those upflung maidenly gestures, that arrested

humpback rout

Stumbling in blackberries and bracken –

Silence.

Trees, it is your own strangeness, in the dank wood,

Makes me so horrifying

I dare not hear my own footfall.

The Lake

Better disguised than the leaf-insect,

A sort of subtler armadillo,

The lake turns with me as I walk.

Snuffles at my feet for what I might drop or kick up,

Sucks and slobbers the stones, snorts through its lips

Into broken glass, smacks its chops.

It has eaten several my size

Without developing a preference –

Prompt, with a splash, to whatever I offer.

It ruffles in its wallow, or lies sunning,

Digesting old senseless bicycles

And a few shoes. The fish down there

Do not know they have been swallowed

Any more than the girl out there, who over the stern of a rowboat

Tests its depth with her reflection.

Yet how the outlet fears it!

                                           – dragging it out,

Black and yellow, a maniac eel,

Battering it to death with sticks and stones.

A Match

Spluttering near out, before it touches the moors,

You start, threatened by your own tears.

But not your skin, not doors, not borders

Will be proof against your foraging

Through everything unhuman or human

To savour and own the dimensions of woman

As water does those of water.

                                                    But the river

Is a prayer to its own waters

Where the circulation of our world is pouring

In stillness –

Everyone’s peace, no less your own peace.

No movement but rooted willows.

Out of bedrock your blood’s operation

Carves your eyes clear not so quickly

As your mouth dips deeper

Into the massed darkness.

Small Events

The old man’s blood had spoken the word: ‘Enough.’

Now nobody had the heart to see him go on.

His photographs were a cold mercy, there on the mantel.

So his mouth became a buttonhole and his limbs became wrapped iron.

Towards dying his eyes looked just above the things he looked at.

They were the poor rearguard on the beach

And turned, watering, with all his hope, from the smoke

To the sea for the Saviour

Who is useful only in life.

So, under a tree a tree-creeper, on dead grass sleeping –

It was blind, its eyes matt as blood-lice

Feeding on a raw face of disease.

I set it on dry grass, and its head fell forward, it died

Into what must have cupped it kindly.

And a grey, aged mouse, humped shivering

On the bare path, under November drizzle –

A frail parcel, delivered in damaging mail and still unclaimed,

Its contents no longer of use to anybody.

I picked it up. It was looking neither outward nor inward.

The tremendous music of its atoms

Trembled it on my fingers. As I watched it, it died.

A grey, mangy mouse, and seamed with ancient scars,

Whose blood had said: ‘Sleep.’

So this year a swift’s embryo, cracked too early from its fallen egg –

There, among mineral fragments,

The blind blood stirred,

Freed,

And, mystified, sank into hopeful sleep.

Crow Wakes

I had exploded, a bombcloud, lob-headed, my huge fingers

Came feeling over the fields, like shadows.

I became smaller than water, I stained into the soil-crumble.

I became smaller.

My eyes fell out of my head and into an atom.

My right leg stood in the room raving at me like a dog.

I tried to stifle its bloody mouth with a towel

But it ran on ahead. I stumbled after it

A long way and came to a contraption like a trap

Baited with human intestines.

A stone drummed and an eye watched me out of a cat’s anus.

I swam upstream, cleansed, in the snow-water, upstream.

Till I grew tired and turned over. I slept.

When I woke I could hear voices, many voices.

It was my bones all chattering together

At the high-tide mark, bedded in rubble, littered among shells

And gull feathers.

                                And the breastbone was crying:

‘I begat a million and murdered a million:

I was a leopard.’ And ‘No, no, no, no,

We were a fine woman,’ a rib cried.

‘No, we were swine, we had devils, and the axe halved us,’

The pelvis was shouting. And the bones of the feet

And the bones of the hands fought: ‘We were alligators,

We dragged some beauties under, we did not let go.’

And, ‘We were suffering oxen,’ and ‘I was a surgeon,’

And ‘We were a stinking clot of ectoplasm that suffocated a nun

Then lay for years in a cobbler’s cellar.’

The teeth sang and the vertebrae were screeching

Something incomprehensible.

                                                I tried to creep away –

I got up and ran. I tried to get up and run

But they saw me. ‘It’s him, it’s him again. Get him.’

They came howling after me and I ran.

A freezing hand caught hold of me by the hair

And lifted me off my feet and set me high

Over the whole earth on a blazing star

Called

from WODWO

Thistles

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men

Thistles spike the summer air

Or crackle open under a blue-black pressure.

Every one a revengeful burst

Of resurrection, a grasped fistful

Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up 

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.

They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.

Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey, like men.

Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,

Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.

Still Life

Outcrop stone is miserly

With the wind. Hoarding its nothings,

Letting wind run through its fingers,

It pretends to be dead of lack.

Even its grimace is empty,

Waited with quartz pebbles from the sea’s womb.

It thinks it pays no rent,

Expansive in the sun’s summerly reckoning.

Under rain, it gleams exultation blackly

As if receiving interest.

Similarly, it bears the snow well.

Wakeful and missing little and landmarking

The fly-like dance of the planets,

The landscape moving in sleep,

It expects to be in at the finish.

Being ignorant of this other, this harebell,

That trembles, as under threats of death,

In the summer turf’s heat-rise,

And in which – filling veins

Any known name of blue would bruise

Out of existence – sleeps, recovering,

The maker of the sea.

Her Husband

Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately

To grime the sink and foul towels and let her

Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board

The stubborn character of money.

And let her learn through what kind of dust

He has earned his thirst and the right to quench it

And what sweat he has exchanged for his money

And the blood-weight of money. He’ll humble her

With new light on her obligations.

The fried, woody chips, kept warm two hours in the oven,

Are only part of her answer.

Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back

And is away round the house-end singing

‘Come back to Sorrento’ in a voice

Of resounding corrugated iron.

Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult.

For they will have their rights.

Their jurors are to be assembled

From the little crumbs of soot. Their brief

Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.

Cadenza

The violinist’s shadow vanishes.

The husk of a grasshopper

Sucks a remote cyclone and rises.

The full, bared throat of a woman walking water,

The loaded estuary of the dead.

And I am the cargo

Of a coffin attended by swallows.

And I am the water

Bearing the coffin that will not be silent.

The clouds are full of surgery and collision

But the coffin escapes – a black diamond,

A ruby brimming blood,

An emerald beating its shores,

The sea lifts swallow wings and flings

A summer lake open,

Sips and bewilders its reflection,

Till the whole sky dives shut like a burned land back to its spark –

A bat with a ghost in its mouth

Struck at by lightnings of silence –

Blue with sweat, the violinist

Crashes into the orchestra, which explodes.

Ghost Crabs

At nightfall, as the sea darkens,

A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands,

To the sea’s edge. To begin with

It looks like rocks uncovering, mangling their pallor.

Gradually the labouring of the tide

Falls back from its productions,

Its power slips back from glistening nacelles, and they are crabs.

Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland

Like a packed trench of helmets.

Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.

They emerge

An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold

Over the man who strolls along the sands.

They spill inland, into the smoking purple

Of our woods and towns – a bristling surge

Of tall and staggering spectres

Gliding like shocks through water.

Our walls, our bodies, are no problem to them.

Their hungers are homing elsewhere.

We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.

Their bubbling mouths, their eyes

In a slow mineral fury

Press through our nothingness where we sprawl on beds,

Or sit in rooms. Our dreams are ruffled maybe,

Or we jerk awake to the world of possessions

With a gasp, in a sweat burst, brains jamming blind

Into the bulb-light. Sometimes, for minutes, a sliding

Staring

Thickness of silence

Presses between us. These crabs own this world.

All night, around us or through us,

They stalk each other, they fasten on to each other,

They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,

They utterly exhaust each other.

They are the powers of this world.

We are their bacteria,

Dying their lives and living their deaths.

At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.

They are the turmoil of history, the convulsion

In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.

To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.

All day they recuperate under the sea.

Their singing is like a thin sea-wind flexing in the rocks of a headland,

Where only crabs listen.

They are God’s only toys.

Public Bar TV

On a flaked ridge of the desert

Outriders have found foul water. They say nothing;

With the cactus and the petrified tree

Crouch numbed by a wind howling all

Visible horizons equally empty.

The wind brings dust and nothing

Of the wives, the children, the grandmothers

With the ancestral bones, who months ago

Left the last river,

Coming at the pace of oxen.

Kafka

And he is an owl

He is an owl, ‘Man’ tattooed in his armpit

Under the broken wing

(Stunned by the wall of glare, he fell here)

Under the broken wing of huge shadow that twitches across the floor.

He is a man in hopeless feathers.

Second Glance at a Jaguar

Skinful of bowls he bowls them,

The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine

With the urgency of his hurry

Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,

Glancing sideways, running

Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle

Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,

Club-swinging, trying to grind some square

Socket between his hind legs round,

Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers,

And the black bit of his mouth, he takes it

Between his back teeth, he has to wear his skin out,

He swipes a lap at the water-trough as he turns,

Swivelling the ball of his heel on the polished spot,

Showing his belly like a butterfly.

At every stride he has to turn a corner

In himself and correct it. His head

Is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar,

His body is just the engine shoving it forward,

Lifting the air up and shoving on under,

The weight of his fangs hanging the mouth open,

Bottom jaw combing the ground. A gorged look,

Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,

He’s wearing himself to heavy ovals,

Muttering some mantra, some drum-song of murder

To keep his rage brightening, making his skin

Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the Cain-brands,

Wearing the spots off from the inside,

Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,

The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,

The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes

The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,

Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.

Fern

Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture,

Like a conductor whose music will now be pause

And the one note of silence

To which the whole earth dances gravely.

The mouse’s ear unfurls its trust,

The spider takes up her bequest,

And the retina

Reins the creation with a bridle of water.

And, among them, the fern

Dances gravely, like the plume

Of a warrior returning, under the low hills,

Into his own kingdom.

Stations

I

Suddenly his poor body

Had its drowsy mind no longer

For insulation.

Before the funeral service foundered

The lifeboat coffin had shaken to pieces

And the great stars were swimming through where he had been.

For a while

The stalk of the tulip at the door that had outlived him,

And his jacket, and his wife, and his last pillow

Clung to each other.

II

I can understand the haggard eyes

Of the old

Dry wrecks

Broken by seas of which they could drink nothing.

III

They have sunk into deeper service. They have gone down

To labour with God on the beaches. They fatten

Under the haddock’s thumb. They rejoice

Through the warped mouth of the flounder

And are nowhere they are not here I know nothing

Cries the poulterer’s hare hanging

Upside down above the pavement

Staring into a bloody bag. Not here

Cry the eyes from the depths

Of the mirror’s seamless sand.

IV

You are a wild look – out of an egg

Laid by your absence.

In the great Emptiness you sit complacent,

Blackbird in wet snow.

If you could make only one comparison –

Your condition is miserable, you would give up.

But you, from the start, surrender to total Emptiness,

Then leave everything to it.

Absence. It is your own

Absence

Weeps its respite through your accomplished music,

Wraps its cloak dark about your feeding.

V

Whether you say it, think it, know it

Or not, it happens, it happens as

Over rails over

The neck the wheels leave

The head with its vocabulary useless,

Among the flogged plantains.

The Green Wolf

My neighbour moves less and less, attempts less.

If his right hand still moves, it is a farewell

Already days posthumous.

But the left hand seems to freeze,

And the left leg with its crude plumbing,

And the left half jaw and the left eyelid and the words all the huge cries

Frozen in his brain his tongue cannot unfreeze –

While somewhere through a dark heaven

The dark bloodclot moves in.

I watch it approaching but I cannot fear it.

The punctual evening star,

Worse, the warm hawthorn blossoms, their foam,

Their palls of deathly perfume,

Worst of all the beanflower

Badged with jet like the ear of the tiger

Unmake and remake me. That star

And that flower and that flower

And living mouth and living mouth all

One smouldering annihilation

Of old brains, old bowels, old bodies

In the scarves of dew, the wet hair of nightfall.

The Bear

In the huge, wide-open, sleeping eye of the mountain

The bear is the gleam in the pupil

Ready to awake

And instantly focus.

The bear is glueing

Beginning to end

With glue from people’s bones

In his sleep.

The bear is digging

In his sleep

Through the wall of the Universe

With a man’s femur.

The bear is a well

Too deep to glitter

Where your shout

Is being digested. 

The bear is a river

Where people bending to drink

See their dead selves.

The bear sleeps

In a kingdom of walls

In a web of rivers.

He is the ferryman

To dead land.

His price is everything.

Scapegoats and Rabies

I A HAUNTING

Soldiers are marching singing down the lane

They get their abandon

From the fixed eyes of girls, from their own

Armed anonymity

And from having finally paid up

All life might demand. They get

Their heroic loom

From the statue stare of old women,

From the trembling chins of old men,

From the napes and bow legs of toddlers,

From the absolute steel

Of their automatic rifles, and the lizard spread

Of their own fingers, and from their bird stride.

They get their facelessness

From the blank, deep meadows and the muddling streams

And the hill’s eyeless outlook,

The babel of gravestones, the mouldering

Of letters and citations

On rubbish dumps. They get the drumming engine

Of their boots

From their hearts,

From their eyeless, earless hearts,

Their brainless hearts. And their bravery

From the dead millions of ghosts

Marching in their boots, cumbering their bodies,

Staring from under their brows, concentrating

Toward a repeat performance. And their hopelessness

From the millions of the future

Marching in their boots, blindfold and riddled,

Rotten heads on their singing shoulders,

The blown-off right hand swinging to the stride

Of the stump-scorched and blown-off legs

Helpless in the terrible engine of the boots.

The soldiers go singing down the deep lane

Wraiths into the bombardment of afternoon sunlight,

Whelmed under the flashing onslaught of the barley,

Strangled in the drift of honeysuckle.

Their bodiless voices rally on the slope and again

In the far woods

Then settle like dust

Under the ancient burden of the hill.

II THE MASCOT

Somewhere behind the lines, over the map,

The General’s face hangs in the dark, like a lantern.

Every shell that bursts

Blows it momentarily out, and he has to light it.

Every bullet that bangs off

Goes in at one of his ears and out at the other.

Every attack every rout

Storms through that face, like a flood through a footbridge.

Every new-dead ghost

Comes to that worn-out blood for its death-ration. 

Every remotest curse, weighted with a bloodclot,

Enters that ear like a blowfly.

Knives, forks, spoons divide his brains.

The supporting earth, and the night around him,

Smoulder like the slow, curing fire

Of a Javanese head-shrinker.

Nothing remains of the tête d’armée but the skin –

A dangling parchment lantern

Slowly revolving to right, revolving to left,

Trembling a little with the incessant pounding,

Over the map, empty in the ring of light.

III WIT’S END

The General commits his emptiness to God.

And in place of his eyes

Crystal balls

Roll with visions. 

And his voice rises

From the dead fragments of men

A Frankenstein

A tank

A ghost

Roaming the impossible

Raising the hair on men’s heads.

His hand

Has swept the battlefield flat as a sheet of foolscap.

He writes:

I AM A LANTERN

                              IN THE HAND

                                                    OF A BLIND PEOPLE

IV TWO MINUTES’ SILENCE

The soldier’s boots, beautifully bulled,

Are graves

On the assembly line

Rolls Royces

Opera boxes

Double beds

Safes

With big smiles and laced-up eyes

His stockings

Are his own intestines

Cut into lengths –

They wear better and are

Nobody else’s loss,

So he needn’t charge diffidently

His battledress

Is Swanwhite’s undies

Punch and Judy curtains

The Queen’s pajamas

The Conjuror’s hankie

The flapping sheet

Of the shithouse phantom

His helmet

Is a Ministry pisspot

His rifle

Is a Thames turd

And away downwind he runs, over no man’s land,

In a shouting flight

From his own stink

Into the mushroom forest

Watched from the crowded walls.

V THE RED CARPET

So the leaves trembled.

He leaned for a moment

Into the head-on leaden blast of ghost

From death’s doorway

Then fell forward, under his equipment.

But though the jungle morass has gripped him to the knees

His outflung left hand clawed and got a hold

On Notting Hill

His brow banged hard down once then settled gently

Onto Hampstead Heath

The thumb of his twisted, smashed right hand

Settled in numb snugness

Across the great doorway of St Paul’s

His lips oozed soft words and blood bubbles

Into the Chalk Farm railway cutting

Westminster knuckled his riddled chest

His belt-buckle broke Clapham

His knees his knees were dissolving in the ebb of the Channel

And there he lay alive

His body full of lights, the restaurants seethed,

He groaned in the pushing of traffic that would not end

The girls strolled and their perfumes gargled in his throat

And in the holes in his chest

And though he could not lift his eyes to the streetlights

And though he could not stir either hand

He knew in that last stride, that last

Ten thousand league effort, and even off balance,

He had made it home. And he called –

Into mud.

Again the leaves trembled.

Splinters flew off Big Ben.

Theology

No, the serpent did not

Seduce Eve to the apple.

All that’s simply

Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.

Eve ate Adam.

The serpent ate Eve.

This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,

Sleeps his meal off in Paradise –

Smiling to hear

God’s querulous calling.

Gog

I woke to a shout: ‘I am Alpha and Omega.

Rocks and a few trees trembled

Deep in their own country.

I ran and an absence bounded beside me.

The dog’s god is a scrap dropped from the table.

The mouse’s saviour is a ripe wheat grain.

Hearing the Messiah cry

My mouth widens in adoration.

How fat are the lichens!

They cushion themselves on the silence.

The air wants for nothing.

The dust, too, is replete.

What was my error? My skull has sealed it out.

My great bones are massed in me.

They pound on the earth, my song excites them.

I do not look at the rocks and trees, I am frightened of what they see.

I listen to the song jarring my mouth

Where the skull-rooted teeth are in possession.

I am massive on earth. My feetbones beat on the earth

Over the sounds of motherly weeping …

Afterwards I drink at a pool quietly.

The horizon bears the rocks and trees away into twilight.

I lie down. I become darkness.

Darkness that all night sings and circles stamping.

Kreutzer Sonata

Now you have stabbed her good

A flower of unknown colour appallingly

Blackened by your surplus of bile

Blooms wetly on her dress.

‘Your mystery! Your mystery! …’

All facts, with all absence of facts,

Exhale as the wound there

Drinks its roots and breathes them to nothing.

Vile copulation! Vile! – etcetera.

But now your dagger has outdone everybody’s.

Say goodbye, for your wife’s sweet flesh goes off,

Booty of the envious spirit’s assault.

A sacrifice, not a murder.

One hundred and forty pounds

Of excellent devil, for God.

She tormented Ah demented you

With that fat lizard Trukachevsky,

That fiddling, leering penis.

Yet why should you castrate yourself

To be rid of them both?

Now you have stabbed her good

Trukachevsky is cut off

From any further operation on you.

And she can find nobody else.

Rest in peace, Tolstoy!

It must have taken supernatural greed

To need to corner all the meat in the world,

Even from your own hunger.

Out

I THE DREAM TIME

My father sat in his chair recovering

From the four-year mastication by gunfire and mud,

Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking

In the colours of mutilation.

                                            His outer perforations

Were valiantly healed, but he and the hearth-fire, its blood-flicker

On biscuit-bowl and piano and table leg,

Moved into strong and stronger possession

Of minute after minute, as the clock’s tiny cog

Laboured and on the thread of his listening

Dragged him bodily from under

The mortised four-year strata of dead Englishmen

He belonged with. He felt his limbs clearing

With every slight, gingerish movement. While I, small and four,

Lay on the carpet as his luckless double,

His memory’s buried, immovable anchor,

Among jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shellcases and craters,

Under rain that goes on drumming its rods and thickening

Its kingdom, which the sun has abandoned, and where nobody

Can ever again move from shelter.

II ‘The dead man in his cave beginning to sweat’,

The dead man in his cave beginning to sweat;

The melting bronze visor of flesh

Of the mother in the baby-furnace –

Nobody believes, it

Could be nothing, all

Undergo smiling at

The lulling of blood in

Their ears, their ears, their ears, their eyes

Are only drops of water and even the dead man suddenly

Sits up and sneezes – Atishoo!

Then the nurse wraps him up, smiling,

And, though faintly, the mother is smiling,

And it’s just another baby.

As after being blasted to bits

The reassembled infantryman

Tentatively totters out, gazing around with the eyes

Of an exhausted clerk.

III REMEMBRANCE DAY

The poppy is a wound, the poppy is the mouth

Of the grave, maybe of the womb searching –

A canvas-beauty puppet on a wire

Today whoring everywhere. It is years since I wore one.

It is more years

The shrapnel that shattered my father’s paybook

Gripped me, and all his dead

Gripped him to a time

He no more than they could outgrow, but, cast into one, like iron,

Hung deeper than refreshing of ploughs

In the woe-dark under my mother’s eye –

One anchor

Holding my juvenile neck bowed to the dunkings of the Atlantic.

So goodbye to that bloody-minded flower.

You dead bury your dead.

Goodbye to the cenotaphs on my mother’s breasts.

Goodbye to all the remaindered charms of my father’s survival.

Let England close. Let the green sea-anemone close.

New Moon in January

A splinter, flicked

Into the wide eyeball,

Severs its warning.

The head, severed while staring,

Felt nothing, only

Tilted slightly.

O lone

Eyelash on the darkening

Stripe of blood, O sail of death!

Frozen

In ether

Unearthly

Shelley’s faint-shriek

Trying to thaw while zero

Itself loses consciousness.

The Warriors of the North

Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes, their salt-bleached hair,

The snow’s stupefied anvils in rows,

Bringing their envy,

The slow ships feelered Southward, snails over the steep sheen of the water-globe.

Thawed at the red and black disgorging of abbeys,

The bountiful, cleft casks,

The fluttered bowels of the women of dead burghers,

And the elaborate, patient gold of the Gaels.

To no end

But this timely expenditure of themselves,

A cash-down, beforehand revenge, with extra,

For the gruelling relapse and prolongueur of their blood

Into the iron arteries of Calvin.

Song of a Rat 

I THE RAT’S DANCE

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,

And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches like torn tin,

An effective gag.

When it stops screeching, it pants

And cannot think

‘This has no face, it must be God’ or

‘No answer is also an answer.’

Iron jaws, strong as the whole earth

Are stealing its backbone

For a crumpling of the Universe with screechings,

For supplanting every human brain inside its skull with a rat-body that knots and unknots,

A rat that goes on screeching,

Trying to uproot itself into each escaping screech,

But its long fangs bar that exit –

The incisors bared to the night spaces, threatening the constellations,

The glitterers in the black, to keep off,

Keep their distance,

While it works this out. 

The rat understands suddenly. It bows and is still,

With a little beseeching of blood on its nose-end.

II THE RAT’S VISION

The rat hears the wind saying something in the straw

And the night-fields that have come up to the fence, leaning their silence,

The widowed land

With its trees that know how to cry

The rat sees the farm bulk of beam and stone

Wobbling like reflection on water.

The wind is pushing from the gulf

Through the old barbed wire, in through the trenched gateway, past the gates of the ear, deep into the worked design of days,

Breathes onto the solitary snow crystal

The rat screeches

And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly

And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only their infernal aftermath

And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of starlight and zero

‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars

Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.

III THE RAT’S FLIGHT

The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,

And the stars jolt in their sockets.

And the sleep-souls of eggs

Wince under the shot of shadow –

That was the Shadow of the Rat

Crossing into power

Never to be buried

The horned Shadow of the Rat

Casting here by the door

A bloody gift for the dogs

While it supplants Hell.

Heptonstall

Black village of gravestones.

Skull of an idiot

Whose dreams die back

Where they were born.

Skull of a sheep

Whose meat melts

Under its own rafters.

Only the flies leave it.

Skull of a bird,

The great geographies

Drained to sutures

Of cracked windowsills. 

Life tries.

Death tries.

The stone tries.

Only the rain never tires.

Skylarks

I

The lark begins to go up

Like a warning

As if the globe were uneasy –

Barrel-chested for heights,

Like an Indian of the high Andes,

A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,

But leaden

With muscle

For the struggle

Against

Earth’s centre.

And leaden

For ballast

In the rocketing storms of the breath.

Leaden

Like a bullet

To supplant

Life from its centre.

II

Crueller than owl or eagle

A towered bird, shot through the crested head

With the command, Not die

But climb

Climb

Sing

Obedient as to death a dead thing.

III

I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings

Rip in and out through your voicebox

                                                          O lark

And sing inwards as well as outwards

Like a breaker of ocean milling the shingle

                                                                 O lark

O song, incomprehensibly both ways –

Joy! Help! Joy! Help!

                                  O lark

IV

You stop to rest, far up, you teeter

Over the drop

But not stopping singing

Resting only for a second

Dropping just a little

Then up and up and up

Like a mouse with drowning fur

Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall

Lamenting, mounting a little –

But the sun will not take notice

And the earth’s centre smiles.

V

My idleness curdles

Seeing the lark labour near its cloud

Scrambling

In a nightmare difficulty

Up through the nothing

Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor,

As if it were too late, too late

Dithering in ether

Its song whirls faster and faster

And the sun whirls

The lark is evaporating

Till my eye’s gossamer snaps

                           and my hearing floats back widely to earth

After which the sky lies blank open

Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod.

Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.

VI

All the dreary Sunday morning

Heaven is a madhouse

With the voices and frenzies of the larks,

Squealing and gibbering and cursing

Heads flung back, as I see them,

Wings almost torn off backwards – far up

Like sacrifices set floating

The cruel earth’s offerings

The mad earth’s missionaries.

VII

Like those flailing flames

The lift from the fling of a bonfire

Claws dangling full of what they feed on

The larks carry their tongues to the last atom

Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit –

So it’s a relief, a cool breeze

When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out

And the sun’s sucked them empty

And the earth gives them the O.K.

And they relax, drifting with changed notes

Dip and float, not quite sure if they may

Then they are sure and they stoop

And maybe the whole agony was for this

The plummeting dead drop

With long cutting screams buckling like razors

But just before they plunge into the earth

They flare and glide off low over grass, then up

To land on a wall-top, crest up,

Weightless,

Paid-up,

Alert,

Conscience perfect.

VIII

Manacled with blood,

Cuchulain listened bowed,

Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone)

Hearing the far crow

Guiding the near lark nearer

With its blind song 

‘That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself

Take thy head

Thine ear 

And thy life’s career from thee.’ 

Pibroch

The sea cries with its meaningless voice

Treating alike its dead and its living,

Probably bored with the appearance of heaven

After so many millions of nights without sleep,

Without purpose, without self-deception.

Stone likewise. A pebble is imprisoned

Like nothing in the Universe.

Created for black sleep. Or growing

Conscious of the sun’s red spot occasionally,

Then dreaming it is the foetus of God.

Over the stone rushes the wind

Able to mingle with nothing,

Like the hearing of the blind stone itself.

Or turns, as if the stone’s mind came feeling

A fantasy of directions.

Drinking the sea and eating the rock

A tree struggles to make leaves –

An old woman fallen from space

Unprepared for these conditions.

She hangs on, because her mind’s gone completely.

Minute after minute, aeon after aeon,

Nothing lets up or develops.

And this is neither a bad variant nor a tryout.

This is where the staring angels go through.

This is where all the stars bow down.

The Howling of Wolves

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound

That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,

Brings the wolves running.

Tuning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,

Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing and slavering,

The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,

The eyes that never learn how it has come about

That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.

It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,

A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.

The wolf is living for the earth.

But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly.

It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.

Gnat-Psalm

When the gnats dance at evening

Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,

Scrambling their crazy lexicon,

Shuffling their dumb Cabala,

Under leaf shadow

Leaves only leaves

Between them and the broad swipes of the sun

Leaves muffling the dusty stabs of the late sun

From their frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments

Dancing

Dancing

Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write

Jerking their letters into knots, into tangles

Everybody everybody else’s yoyo

Immense magnets fighting around a centre

Not writing and not fighting but singing

That the cycles of this Universe are no matter

That they are not afraid of the sun

That the one sun is too near

It blasts their song, which is of all the suns

That they are their own sun

Their own brimming over

At large in the nothing

Their wings blurring the blaze

Singing

That they are the nails

In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god

That they hear the wind suffering

Through the grass

And the evening tree suffering

The wind bowing with long cat-gut cries

And the long roads of dust

Dancing in the wind

The wind’s dance, the death-dance, entering the mountain

And the cow dung villages huddling to dust

But not the gnats, their agility

Has outleaped that threshold

And hangs them a little above the claws of the grass

Dancing

Dancing

In the glove shadows of the sycamore

A dance never to be altered

A dance giving their bodies to be burned

And their mummy faces will never be used

Their little bearded faces

Weaving and bobbing on the nothing

Shaken in the air, shaken, shaken

And their feet dangling like the feet of victims

O little Hasids

Ridden to death by your own bodies

Riding your bodies to death

You are the angels of the only heaven!

And God is an Almighty Gnat!

You are the greatest of all the galaxies!

My hands fly in the air, they are follies

My tongue hangs up in the leaves

My thoughts have crept into crannies

Your dancing

Your dancing

Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

And you listening.

A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –

A dark river of blood, many boulders,

Balancing unspilled milk.

‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.

Wodwo

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over

Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge

I enter water. What am I to split

The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed

Of the river above me upside down very clear

What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find

this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret

interior and make it my own? Do these weeds

know me and name me to each other have they

seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem

separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped

out of nothing casually I’ve no threads

fastening me to anything I can go anywhere

I seem to have been given the freedom

of this place what am I then? And picking

bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me

no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it

me and doing that have coincided very queerly

But what shall I be called am I the first

have I an owner what shape am I what

shape am I am I huge if I go

to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees

till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me

for the moment if I sit still how everything

stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre

but there’s all this what is it roots

roots roots roots and here’s the water

again very queer but I’ll go on looking

from CROW

Two Legends 

I

Black was the without eye

Black the within tongue

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

Black the blood in its loud tunnel

Black the bowels packed in furnace

Black too the muscles

Striving to pull out into the light

Black the nerves, black the brain

With its tombed visions

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, swelling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

II

Black is the wet otter’s head, lifted.

Black is the rock, plunging in foam.

Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.

Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,

An egg of blackness

Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow

Bent in emptiness

                              over emptiness

But flying

Lineage

In the beginning was Scream

Who begat Blood

Who begat Eye

Who begat Fear

Who begat Wing

Who begat Bone

Who begat Granite

Who begat Violet

Who begat Guitar

Who begat Sweat

Who begat Adam

Who begat Mary

Who begat God

Who begat Nothing

Who begat Never

Never Never Never

Who begat Crow

Screaming for Blood

Grubs, crusts

Anything

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest’s filth

Examination at the Womb-Door

Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death.

Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death.

Who owns these still-working lungs? Death.

Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death.

Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death.

Who owns these questionable brains? Death.

All this messy blood? Death. 

These minimum-efficiency eyes? Death.

This wicked little tongue? Death.

This occasional wakefulness? Death. 

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?

Held. 

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.

Who owns all of space? Death. 

Who is stronger than hope? Death.

Who is stronger than the will? Death.

Stronger than love? Death.

Stronger than life? Death. 

But who is stronger than death?

                                             Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

A Childish Prank

Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls,

Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert

On the flowers of Eden.

God pondered.

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.

Crow laughed.

He bit the Worm, God’s only son,

Into two writhing halves.

He stuffed into man the tail half

With the wounded end hanging out.

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman

And it crept in deeper and up

To peer out through her eyes

Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly

Because O it was painful.

Man awoke being dragged across the grass.

Woman awoke to see him coming.

Neither knew what had happened.

God went on sleeping.

Crow went on laughing.

Crow’s First Lesson

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.

‘Love,’ said God. ‘Say, Love.’

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

‘No, no,’ said God. ‘Say Love. Now try it. LOVE.’

Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito

Zoomed out and down

To their sundry flesh-pots.

‘A final try,’ said God. ‘Now, LOVE.’

Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and

Man’s bodiless prodigious head

Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,

Jabbering protest –

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.

And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened.

The two struggled together on the grass.

God struggled to part them, cursed, wept –

Crow flew guiltily off.

That Moment

When the pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour

Was lifted away

Like a cigarette lifted from an ashtray

And the only face left in the world

Lay broken

Between hands that relaxed, being too late

And the trees closed forever

And the streets closed forever

And the body lay on the gravel

Of the abandoned world

Among abandoned utilities

Exposed to infinity forever

Crow had to start searching for something to eat.

Crow Tyrannosaurus

Creation quaked voices –

It was a cortege

Of mourning and lament

Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.

The swift’s body fled past

Pulsating

With insects

And their anguish, all it had eaten.

The cat’s body writhed

Gagging

A tunnel

Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.

And the dog was a bulging filterbag

Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.

It could not digest their screeching finales.

Its shapeless cry was a blort of all those voices.

Even man he was a walking

Abattoir

Of innocents –

His brain incinerating their outcry.

Crow thought ‘Alas

Alas ought I

To stop eating

And try to become the light?’

But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.

And he listened

And he heard

Weeping

Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed

Weeping

Weeping

Weeping he walked and stabbed

Thus came the eye’s

                                  roundness

                                                the ear’s

                                                            deafness.

The Black Beast

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow, like an owl, swivelled his head.

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow hid in its bed, to ambush it.

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow sat in its chair, telling loud lies against the Black Beast.

Where is it?

Crow shouted after midnight, pounding the wall with a last.

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow split his enemy’s skull to the pineal gland.

Where is the Black Beast? 

Crow crucified a frog under a microscope, he peered into the brain of a dogfish.

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow roasted the earth to a clinker, he charged into space –

Where is the Black Beast?

The silences of space decamped, space flitted in every direction –

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow flailed immensely through the vacuum, he screeched after the disappearing stars –

Where is it? Where is the Black Beast?

Crow’s Account of the Battle

There was this terrific battle.

The noise was as much

As the limits of possible noise could take.

There were screams higher groans deeper

Than any ear could hold.

Many eardrums burst and some walls

Collapsed to escape the noise.

Everything struggled on its way

Through this tearing deafness

As through a torrent in a dark cave.

The cartridges were banging off, as planned,

The fingers were keeping things going

According to excitement and orders.

The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness.

The bullets pursued their courses

Through clods of stone, earth and skin,

Through intestines, pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth

According to Universal laws.

And mouths cried ‘Mamma’

From sudden traps of calculus,

Theorems wrenched men in two,

Shock-severed eyes watched blood

Squandering as from a drain-pipe

Into the blanks between stars.

Faces slammed down into clay

As for the making of a life-mask

Knew that even on the sun’s surface

They could not be learning more or more to the point.

Reality was giving its lesson,

Its mishmash of scripture and physics,

With here, brains in hands, for example,

And there, legs in a treetop.

There was no escape except into death.

And still it went on – it outlasted

Many prayers, many a proved watch,

Many bodies in excellent trim,

Till the explosives ran out

And sheer weariness supervened

And what was left looked round at what was left.

Then everybody wept,

Or sat, too exhausted to weep,

Or lay, too hurt to weep.

And when the smoke cleared it became clear

This had happened too often before

And was going to happen too often in future

And happened too easily

Bones were too like lath and twigs

Blood was too like water

Cries were too like silence

The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud

And shooting somebody through the midriff

Was too like striking a match

Too like potting a snooker ball

Too like tearing up a bill

Blasting the whole world to bits

Was too like slamming a door

Too like dropping in a chair

Exhausted with rage

Too like being blown to bits yourself

Which happened too easily

With too like no consequences.

So the survivors stayed.

And the earth and the sky stayed.

Everything took the blame. 

Not a leaf flinched, nobody smiled.

Crow’s Fall

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.

He decided it glared much too whitely.

He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength flush and in full glitter.

He clawed and fluffed his rage up.

He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,

Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened –

It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

‘Up there,’ he managed,

‘Where white is black and black is white, I won.’

Crow and the Birds

When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald.

When the curlew trawled in seadusk through a chime of wineglasses

When the swallow swooped through a woman’s song in a cavern

And the swift flicked through the breath of a violet

When the owl sailed clear of tomorrow’s conscience

And the sparrow preened himself of yesterday’s promise

And the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer upglare

And the bluetit zipped clear of lace panties

And the woodpecker drummed clear of the rotovator and the rose-farm

And the peewit tumbled clear of the laundromat

While the bullfinch plumped in the apple bud

And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun

And the wryneck crooked in the moon

And the dipper peered from the dewball

Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.

Crow on the Beach

Hearing shingle explode, seeing it skip,

Crow sucked his tongue.

Seeing sea-grey mash a mountain of itself

Crow tightened his goose-pimples.

Feeling spray from the sea’s root nothinged on his crest

Crow’s toes gripped the wet pebbles.

When the smell of the whale’s den, the gulfing of the crab’s last prayer,

Gimletted in his nostril

He grasped he was on earth.

                                             He knew he grasped

Something fleeting

Of the sea’s ogreish outcry and convulsion.

He knew he was the wrong listener unwanted

To understand or help –

His utmost gaping of brain in his tiny skull

Was just enough to wonder, about the sea,

What could be hurting so much?

The Contender

There was this man and he was the strongest

Of the strong.

He gritted his teeth like a cliff.

Though his body was sweeling away like a torrent on a cliff

Smoking towards dark gorges

There he nailed himself with nails of nothing

All the women in the world could not move him

They came their mouths deformed against stone

They came and their tears salted his nail-holes

Only adding their embitterment

To his effort

He abandoned his grin to them his grimace

In his face upwards body he lay face downwards

As a dead man adamant

His sandals could not move him they burst their thongs

And rotted from his fixture

All the men in the world could not move him

They wore at him with their shadows and little sounds

Their arguments were a relief

Like heather flowers

His belt could not endure the siege – it burst

And lay broken

He grinned

Little children came in chorus to move him

But he glanced at them out of his eye-corners

Over the edge of his grin

And they lost their courage for life

Oak forests came and went with the hawk’s wing

Mountains rose and fell

He lay crucified with all his strength

On the earth

Grinning towards the sun

Through the tiny holes of his eyes

And towards the moon

And towards the whole paraphernalia of the heavens

Through the seams of his face

With the strings of his lips

Grinning through his atoms and decay

Grinning into the black

Into the ringing nothing

Through the bones of his teeth

Sometimes with eyes closed

In his senseless trial of strength.

Crow’s Vanity

Looking close in the evil mirror Crow saw

Mistings of civilizations towers gardens

Battles he wiped the glass but there came

Mistings of skyscrapers webs of cities

Steaming the glass he wiped it there came

Spread of swampferns fronded on the mistings

A trickling spider he wiped the glass he peered

For a glimpse of the usual grinning face

But it was no good he was breathing too heavy

And too hot and space was too cold

And here came the misty ballerinas

The burning gulfs the hanging gardens it was eerie

A Horrible Religious Error

When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel brown,

From the hatched atom

With its alibi self twisted around it

Lifting a long neck

And balancing that deaf and mineral stare

The sphinx of the final fact

And flexing on that double flameflicker tongue

A syllable like the rustling of the spheres

God’s grimace writhed, a leaf in the furnace

And man’s and woman’s knees melted, they collapsed

Their neck-muscles melted, their brows bumped the ground

Their tears evacuated visibly

They whispered ‘Your will is our peace.’

But Crow only peered.

                                     Then took a step or two forward,

Grabbed this creature by the slackskin nape,

Beat the hell out of it, and ate it.

In Laughter

Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies

In laughter

The steamer upends and goes under saluting like a Stuntman

In laughter

The nosediving aircraft concludes with a boom

In laughter

People’s arms and legs fly off and fly on again

In laughter

The haggard mask on the bed rediscovers its pang

In laughter, in laughter

The meteorite crashes

With extraordinarily ill-luck on the pram

The ears and eyes are bundled up

Are folded up in the hair,

Wrapped in the carpet, the wallpaper, tied with the lampflex

Only the teeth work on

And the heart, dancing on in its open cave

Helpless on the strings of laughter

While the tears are nickel-plated and come through doors with a bang

And the wails stun with fear

And the bones

Jump from the torment flesh has to stay for

Stagger some distance and fall in full view

Still laughter scampers around on centipede boots

Still it runs all over on caterpillar tread

And rolls back onto the mattress, legs in the air

But it’s only human

And finally it’s had enough – enough!

And slowly sits up, exhausted,

And slowly starts to fasten buttons,

With long pauses,

Like somebody the police have come for.

Robin Song

I am the hunted king

   Of the frost and big icicles

       And the bogey cold

       With its wind boots. 

I am the uncrowned

   Of the rainworld

       Hunted by lightning and thunder

       And rivers. 

I am the lost child

   Of the wind

       Who goes through me looking for something else

       Who can’t recognize me though I cry. 

I am the maker

   Of the world

       That rolls to crush 

       And silence my knowledge. 

Conjuring in Heaven

So finally there was nothing.

It was put inside nothing.

Nothing was added to it

And to prove it didn’t exist

Squashed flat as nothing with nothing.

Chopped up with a nothing

Shaken in a nothing

Turned completely inside out

And scattered over nothing –

So everybody saw that it was nothing

And that nothing more could be done with it

And so it was dropped. Prolonged applause in Heaven.

It hit the ground and broke open –

There lay Crow, cataleptic.

Owl’s Song

He sang

How the swan blanched forever

How the wolf threw away its telltale heart

And the stars dropped their pretence

The air gave up appearances

Water went deliberately numb

The rock surrendered its last hope

And cold died beyond knowledge

He sang

How everything had nothing more to lose

Then sat still with fear

Seeing the clawtrack of star

Hearing the wingbeat of rock

And his own singing

Crow’s Elephant Totem Song

Once upon a time

God made this Elephant.

Then it was delicate and small

It was not freakish at all

Or melancholy

The Hyenas sang in the scrub: You are beautiful –

They showed their scorched heads and grinning expressions

Like the half-rotted stumps of amputations –

We envy your grace

Waltzing through the thorny growth

O take us with you to the Land of Peaceful

O ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness

Lift us from the furnaces

And furies of our blackened faces

Within these hells we writhe

Shut in behind the bars of our teeth

In hourly battle with a death

The size of the earth

Having the strength of the earth.

So the Hyenas ran under the Elephant’s tail

As like a lithe and rubber oval

He strolled gladly around inside his ease

But he was not God no it was not his

To correct the damned

In rage in madness then they lit their mouths

They tore out his entrails

They divided him among their several hells

To cry all his separate pieces

Swallowed and inflamed

Amidst paradings of infernal laughter.

At the Resurrection

The Elephant got himself together with correction

Deadfall feet and toothproof body and bulldozing bones

And completely altered brains

Behind aged eyes, that were wicked and wise.

So through the orange blaze and blue shadow

Of the afterlife, effortless and immense,

The Elephant goes his own way, a walking sixth sense,

And opposite and parallel

The sleepless Hyenas go

Along a leafless skyline trembling like an oven roof

With a whipped run

Their shame-flags tucked hard down

Over the gutsacks

Crammed with putrefying laughter

Blotched black with the leakage and seepings

And they sing: ‘Ours is the land

Of loveliness and beautiful

Is the putrid mouth of the leopard

And the graves of fever

Because it is all we have –’

And they vomit their laughter.

And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze

About a star of deathless and painless peace

But no astronomer can find where it is.

Dawn’s Rose

Is melting an old frost moon.

Agony under agony, the quiet of dust,

And a crow talking to stony skylines.

Desolate is the crow’s puckered cry

As an old woman’s mouth

When the eyelids have finished

And the hills continue.

A cry

Wordless

As the newborn baby’s grieving

On the steely scales.

As the dull gunshot and its after-râle

Among conifers, in rainy twilight.

Or the suddenly dropped, heavily dropped

Star of blood on the fat leaf.

The Smile

Began under the groan of the oldest forest

It ran through the clouds, a third light

And it ran through the skin of the earth

It came circling the earth

Like the lifted bow

Of a wave’s submarine running

Tossing the willows, and swelling the elm-tops

Looking for its occasion

But people were prepared

They met it

With visor smiles, mirrors of ricochet

With smiles that stole a bone

And smiles that went off with a mouthful of blood

And smiles that left poison in a numb place

Or doubled up

Covering a getaway

But the smile was too vast, it outflanked all

It was too tiny it slipped between the atoms

So that the steel screeched open

Like a gutted rabbit, the skin was nothing

Then the pavement and the air and the light

Confined all the jumping blood

No better than a paper bag

People were running with bandages

But the world was a draughty gap

The whole creation

Was just a broken gutter pipe

And there was the unlucky person’s eye

Pinned under its brow

Widening for the darkness behind it

Which kept right on getting wider, darker

As if the soul were not working

And at that very moment the smile arrived

And the crowd, shoving to get a glimpse of a man’s soul

Stripped to its last shame,

Met this smile

That rose through his torn roots

Touching his lips, altering his eyes

And for a moment

Mending everything

Before it swept out and away across the earth.

Crow’s Battle Fury

When the patient, shining with pain,

Suddenly pales,

Crow makes a noise suspiciously like laughter.

Seeing the night-city, on the earth’s blue bulge,

Trembling its tambourine,

He bellows laughter till the tears come.

Remembering the painted masks and the looming of the balloons

Of the pinpricked dead

He rolls on the ground helpless.

And he sees his remote feet and he chokes he

Holds his aching sides –

He can hardly bear it.

One of his eyes sinks into his skull, tiny as a pin,

One opens, a gaping dish of pupils,

His temple-veins gnarl, each like the pulsing head of a month-old baby,

His heels double to the front,

His lips lift off his cheekbone, his heart and his liver fly in his throat,

Blood blasts from the crown of his head in a column –

Such as cannot be in this world.

A hair’s breadth out of the world

He comes forward a step,

                                          and a step,

                                                         and a step –

Crow Blacker than Ever

When God, disgusted with man,

Turned towards Heaven,

And man, disgusted with God,

Turned towards Eve,

Things looked like falling apart.

But Crow Crow

Crow nailed them together,

Nailing Heaven and earth together –

So man cried, but with God’s voice.

And God bled, but with man’s blood.

Then Heaven and earth creaked at the joint

Which became gangrenous and stank –

A horror beyond redemption.

The agony did not diminish.

Man could not be man nor God God.

The agony

Grew.

Crow

Grinned

Crying: ‘This is my Creation,’

Flying the black flag of himself.

Revenge Fable

There was a person

Could not get rid of his mother

As if he were her topmost twig.

So he pounded and hacked at her

With numbers and equations and laws

Which he invented and called truth.

He investigated, incriminated

And penalized her, like Tolstoy,

Forbidding, screaming and condemning,

Going for her with a knife,

Obliterating her with disgusts

Bulldozers and detergents

Requisitions and central heating

Rifles and whisky and bored sleep. 

With all her babes in her arms, in ghostly weepings, She died.

His head fell off like a leaf.

Bedtime Anecdote

There was a man

Who got up from a bed that was no bed

Who pulled on his clothes that were no clothes

(A million years whistling in his ear)

And he pulled on shoes that were no shoes

Carefully jerking the laces tight – and tighter

To walk over floors that were no floor

Down stairs that were no stairs

Past pictures that were no pictures

To pause

To remember and forget the night’s dreams that were no dreams

And there was the cloud, primeval, the prophet;

There was the rain, its secret writing, the water-kernel

Of the tables of the sun;

And there was the light with its loose rant;

There were the birch trees, insisting and urging.

And the wind, reproach upon reproach.

At the table he cupped his eyes in his hands

As if to say grace

Avoiding his reflection in the mirror

Huddled to read news that was no news

(A million years revolving on his stomach)

He entered the circulation of his life

But stopped reading feeling the weight of his hand

In the hand that was no hand

And he did not know what to do or where to begin

To live the day that was no day

And Brighton was a picture

The British Museum was a picture

The battleship off Flamborough was a picture

And the drum-music the ice in the glass the mouths

Stretched open in laughter

That was no laughter

Were what was left of a picture

In a book

Under a monsoon downpour

In a ruinous mountain hut

From which years ago his body was lifted by a leopard.

Apple Tragedy

So on the seventh day

The serpent rested.

God came up to him.

‘I’ve invented a new game,’ he said. 

The serpent stared in surprise

At this interloper.

But God said: ‘You see this apple?

I squeeze it and look – Cider.’

The serpent had a good drink

And curled up into a questionmark.

Adam drank and said: ‘Be my god.’

Eve drank and opened her legs

And called to the cockeyed serpent

And gave him a wild time.

God ran and told Adam

Who in drunken rage tried to hang himself in the orchard.

The serpent tried to explain, crying ‘Stop’

But drink was splitting his syllable

And Eve started screeching: ‘Rape! Rape!’

And stamping on his head.

Now whenever the snake appears she screeches

‘Here it comes again! Help! O help!’

Then Adam smashes a chair on its head,

And God says: ‘I am well pleased’

And everything goes to hell.

Crow’s Last Stand

Burning

                burning

                           burning

                                      there was finally something

The sun could not burn, that it had rendered

Everything down to – a final obstacle

Against which it raged and charred

And rages and chars

Limpid among the glaring furnace clinkers

The pulsing blue tongues and the red and the yellow

The green lickings of the conflagration

Limpid and black –

Crow’s eye-pupil, in the tower of its scorched fort.

Fragment of an Ancient Tablet

Above – the well-known lips, delicately downed.

Below – beard between thighs.

Above – her brow, the notable casket of gems.

Below – the belly with its blood-knot.

Above – many a painful frown.

Below – the ticking bomb of the future.

Above – her perfect teeth, with the hint of a fang at the corner.

Below – the millstones of two worlds.

Above – a word and a sigh.

Below – gouts of blood and babies.

Above – the face, shaped like a perfect heart.

Below – the heart’s torn face.

Lovesong

He loved her and she loved him

His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to

He had no other appetite

She bit him she gnawed him she sucked

She wanted him complete inside her

Safe and sure forever and ever

Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away

Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows

He gripped her hard so that life

Should not drag her from that moment

He wanted all future to cease

He wanted to topple with his arms round her

Off that moment’s brink and into nothing

Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press

To print him into her bones

His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace

Where the real world would never come

Her smiles were spider bites

So he would lie still till she felt hungry

His words were occupying armies

Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts

His looks were bullets daggers of revenge

Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets

His whispers were whips and jackboots

Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing

His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway

Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks

And their deep cries crawled over the floors

Like an animal dragging a great trap 

His promises were the surgeon’s gag

Her promises took the top off his skull

She would get a brooch made of it

His vows pulled out all her sinews

He showed her how to make a love-knot

Her vows put his eyes in formalin

At the back of her secret drawer

Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves

Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs

In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other’s face

Notes for a Little Play

First – the sun coming closer, growing by the minute.

Next – clothes torn off.

Without a goodbye

Faces and eyes evaporate.

Brains evaporate.

Hands arms legs feet head and neck

Chest and belly vanish

With all the rubbish of the earth.

And the flame fills all space.

The demolition is total

Except for two strange items remaining in the flames –

Two survivors, moving in the flames blindly.

Mutations – at home in the nuclear glare.

Horrors – hairy and slobbery, glossy and raw.

They sniff towards each other in the emptiness.

They fasten together. They seem to be eating each other.

But they are not eating each other.

They do not know what else to do.

They have begun to dance a strange dance.

And this is the marriage of these simple creatures –

Celebrated here, in the darkness of the sun,

Without guest or God.

The Lovepet

Was it an animal was it a bird?

She stroked it. He spoke to it softly.

She made her voice its happy forest.

He brought it out with sugarlump smiles.

Soon it was licking their kisses.

She gave it the strings of her voice which it swallowed

He gave it the blood of his face it grew eager

She gave it the liquorice of her mouth it began to thrive

He opened the aniseed of his future

And it bit and gulped, grew vicious, snatched

The focus of his eyes

She gave it the steadiness of her hand

He gave it the strength of his spine it ate everything

It began to cry what could they give it

They gave it their calendars it bolted their diaries

They gave it their sleep it gobbled their dreams

Even while they slept

It ate their bodyskin and the muscle beneath

They gave it vows its teeth clashed its starvation

Through every word they uttered

It found snakes under the floor it ate them

It found a spider horror

In their palms and ate it

They gave it double smiles and blank silence

It chewed holes in their carpets

They gave it logic

It ate the colour of their hair

They gave it every argument that would come

They gave it shouting and yelling they meant it

It ate the faces of their children

They gave it their photograph albums they gave it their records

It ate the colour of the sun

They gave it a thousand letters they gave it money

It ate their future complete it waited for them

Staring and starving

They gave it screams it had gone too far

It ate into their brains

It ate the roof

It ate lonely stone it ate wind crying famine

It went furiously off

They wept they called it back it could have everything

It stripped out their nerves chewed chewed flavourless

It bit at their numb bodies they did not resist

It bit into their blank brains they hardly knew

It moved bellowing

Through a ruin of starlight and crockery

It drew slowly off they could not move

It went far away they could not speak

How Water Began to Play

Water wanted to live

It went to the sun it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the trees they burned it came weeping back

They rotted it came weeping back

Water wanted to live

It went to the flowers they crumpled it came weeping back

It wanted to live

It went to the womb it met blood

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met knife

It came weeping back

It went to the womb it met maggot and rottenness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

It went to time it went through the stone door

It came weeping back

It went searching through all space for nothingness

It came weeping back it wanted to die

Till it had no weeping left

It lay at the bottom of all things

Utterly worn out utterly clear

Littleblood

O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains

Wounded by stars and leaking shadow

Eating the medical earth.

O littleblood, little boneless little skinless

Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase

Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.

O littleblood, drumming in a cow’s skull

Dancing with a gnat’s feet

With an elephant’s nose with a crocodile’s tail.

Grown so wise grown so terrible

Sucking death’s mouldy tits.

Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.

from CAVE BIRDS

The Scream

There was the sun on the wall – my childhood’s

Nursery picture. And there my gravestone

Shared my dreams, and ate and drank with me happily.

All day the hawk perfected its craftsmanship

And even through the night the miracle persisted.

Mountains lazed in their smoky camp.

Worms in the ground were doing a good job.

Flesh of bronze, stirred with a bronze thirst,

Like a newborn baby at the breast,

Slept in the sun’s mercy.

And the inane weights of iron

That come suddenly crashing into people, out of nowhere,

Only made me feel brave and creaturely.

When I saw little rabbits with their heads crushed on roads

I knew I rode the wheel of the galaxy.

Calves’ heads all dew-bristled with blood on counters

Grinned like masks where sun and moon danced.

And my mate with his face sewn up

Where they’d opened it to take something out

Lifted a hand –

He smiled, in half-coma,

A stone temple smile.

Then I, too, opened my mouth to praise –

But a silence wedged my gullet.

Like an obsidian dagger, dry, jag-edged,

A silent lump of volcanic glass,

The scream

Vomited itself.

The Executioner

Fills up

Sun, moon, stars, he fills them up

With his hemlock –

They darken

He fills up the evening and the morning, they darken

He fills up the sea

He comes in under the blind filled-up heaven

Across the lightless filled-up face of water

He fills up the rivers he fills up the roads, like tentacles

He fills up the streams and the paths, like veins

The tap drips darkness darkness

Sticks to the soles of your feet

He fills up the mirror, he fills up the cup

He fills up your thoughts to the brims of your eyes

You just see he is filling the eyes of your friends

And now lifting your hand you touch at your eyes

Which he has completely filled up

You touch him

You have no idea what has happened

To what is no longer yours

It feels like the world

Before your eyes ever opened

The Knight

Has conquered. He has surrendered everything.

Now he kneels. He is offering up his victory

And unlacing his steel.

In front of him are the common wild stones of the earth –

The first and last altar

Onto which he lowers his spoils.

And that is right. He has conquered in earth’s name.

Committing these trophies

To the small madness of roots, to the mineral stasis

And to rain.

An unearthly cry goes up.

The Universes squabble over him –

Here a bone, there a rag.

His sacrifice is perfect. He reserves nothing.

Skylines tug him apart, winds drink him,

Earth itself unravels him from beneath –

His submission is flawless.

Blueflies lift off his beauty.

Beetles and ants officiate

Pestering him with instructions.

His patience grows only more vast.

His eyes darken bolder in their vigil

As the chapel crumbles.

His spine survives its religion,

The texts moulder –

The quaint courtly language

Of wingbones and talons.

And already

Nothing remains of the warrior but his weapons

And his gaze.

Blades, shafts, unstrung bows – and the skull’s beauty

Wrapped in the rags of his banner.

He is himself his banner and its rags.

While hour by hour the sun

Deepens its revelation.

A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement

All darkness comes together, rounding an egg.

Darkness in which there is now nothing.

A blot has knocked me down. It clogs me.

A globe of blot, a drop of unbeing.

Nothingness came close and breathed on me – a frost

A shawl of annihilation curls me up like a shrimpish foetus.

I rise beyond height – I fall past falling.

I float on a nowhere

As mist-balls float, and as stars.

A condensation, a gleam simplification

Of all that pertained.

This cry alone struggles in its tissues.

Where am I going? What will come to me here?

Is this everlasting? Is it

Stoppage and the start of nothing?

Or am I under attention?

Do purposeful cares incubate me?

Am I the self of some spore

In this white of death blackness,

This yoke of afterlife?

What feathers shall I have? What is my weakness

Good for? Great fear

Rests on the thing I am, as a feather on a hand.

I shall not fight

Against whatever is allotted to me.

My soul skinned, and my soul-skin pinned out

A mat for my judges.

The Guide

When everything that can fall has fallen

Something rises.

And leaving here, and evading there

And that, and this, is my headway.

Where the snow glare blinded you

I start.

Where the snow mama cuddled you warm

I fly up. I lift you.

Tumbling worlds

Open my way

And you cling.

And we go

Into the wind. The flame-wind – a red wind

And a black wind. The red wind comes

To empty you. And the black wind, the longest wind

The headwind

To scour you.

Then the non-wind, a least breath,

Fills you from easy sources.

I am the needle

Magnetic

A tremor

The searcher

The finder

His Legs Ran About

Till they seemed to trip and trap

Her legs in a single tangle

His arms lifted things, felt through dark rooms, at last with their hands

Caught her arms

And lay down enwoven at last at last

His chest pushed until it came against

Her breasts at the end of everything

His navel fitted over her navel as closely as possible

Like a mirror face down flat on a mirror

And so when every part

Like a bull pressing towards its cows, not to be stayed

Like a calf seeking its mama

Like a desert staggerer, among his hallucinations

Finding the hoof-churned hole

Finally got what it needed, and grew still, and closed its eyes

Then such truth and greatness descended

As over a new grave, when the mourners have gone

And the stars come out

And the earth, bristling and raw, tiny and lost

Resumes its search

Rushing through the vast astonishment.

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days

She gives him his eyes, she found them

Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin

He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her

She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment 

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists

They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully

And sets them in perfect order

A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired

She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing, incredulous

Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them

So that his whole body lights up

And he has fashioned her new hips

With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled

He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily

To test each new thing at each new step

And now she smooths over him the plates of his skull

So that the joints are invisible

And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach

With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying their roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stitches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep-cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment

Like two gods of mud

Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care

They bring each other to perfection.

The Risen

He stands, filling the doorway

In the shell of earth.

He lifts wings, he leaves the remains of something,

A mess of offal, muddled as an afterbirth.

His each wingbeat – a convict’s release.

What he carries will be plenty.

He slips behind the world’s brow

As music escapes its skull, its clock and its skyline.

Under his sudden shadow, flames cry out among thickets.

When he soars, his shape

Is a cross, eaten by light,

On the Creator’s face.

He shifts world weirdly as sunspots

Emerge as earthquakes.

A burning unconsumed,

A whirling tree –

Where he alights

A skin sloughs from a leafless apocalypse.

On his lens

Each atom engraves with a diamond.

In the wind-fondled crucible of his splendour

The dirt becomes God.

But when will he land

On a man’s wrist. 

from SEASON SONGS

A March Calf

Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites

Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,

A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,

Standing in dunged straw

Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,

Half of him legs,

Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more

But that mother’s milk come back often.

Everything else is in order, just as it is.

Let the summer skies hold off, for the moment.

This is just as he wants it.

A little at a time, of each new thing, is best.

Too much and too sudden is too frightening –

When I block the light, a bulk from space,

To let him in to his mother for a suck,

He bolts a yard or two, then freezes,

Staring from every hair in all directions,

Ready for the worst, shut up in his hopeful religion,

A little syllogism

With a wet blue-reddish muzzle, for God’s thumb.

You see all his hopes bustling

As he reaches between the worn rails towards

The topheavy oven of his mother.

He trembles to grow, stretching his curl-tip tongue –

What did cattle ever find here

To make this dear little fellow

So eager to prepare himself?

He is already in the race, and quivering to win –

His new purpled eyeball swivel-jerks

In the elbowing push of his plans.

Hungry people are getting hungrier,

Butchers developing expertise and markets, 

But he just wobbles his tail – and glistens

Within his dapper profile

Unaware of how his whole lineage

Has been tied up.

He shivers for feel of the world licking his side.

He is like an ember – one glow

Of lighting himself up

With the fuel of himself, breathing and brightening.

Soon he’ll plunge out, to scatter his seething joy,

To be present at the grass,

To be free on the surface of such a wideness,

To find himself himself. To stand. To moo.

The River in March

Now the river is rich, but her voice is low.

It is her Mighty Majesty the sea

Travelling among the villages incognito.

Now the river is poor. No song, just a thin mad whisper.

The winter floods have ruined her.

She squats between draggled banks, fingering her rags and rubbish.

And now the river is rich. A deep choir.

It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven,

Going on their holiday to the sea.

The river is poor again. All her bones are showing.

Through a dry wig of bleached flotsam she peers up ashamed

From her slum of sticks.

Now the river is rich, collecting shawls and minerals.

Rain brought fatness, but she takes ninety-nine percent

Leaving the fields just one percent to survive on.

And now she is poor. Now she is East wind sick.

She huddles in holes and corners. The brassy sun gives her a headache.

She has lost all her fish. And she shivers.

But now once more she is rich. She is viewing her lands.

A hoard of king-cups spills from her folds, it blazes, it cannot be hidden.

A salmon, a sow of solid silver,

Bulges to glimpse it.

Apple Dumps

After the fiesta, the beauty-contests, the drunken wrestling

Of the blossom

Come some small ugly swellings, the dwarfish truths

Of the prizes.

After blushing and confetti, the breeze-blown bridesmaids, the shadowed snapshots

Of the trees in bloom

Come the gruelling knuckles, and the cracked housemaid’s hands,

The workworn morning plainness of apples. 

Unearthly was the hope, the wet star melting the gland,

Staggering the offer –

But pawky the real returns, not easy to see,

Dull and leaf-green, hidden, still-bitter, and hard.

The orchard flared wings, a new heaven, a dawn-lipped apocalypse

Kissing the sleeper –

The apples emerge, in the sun’s black shade, among stricken trees,

A straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing. 

Swifts

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts

Materialize at the tip of a long scream

Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone

On a steep

Controlled scream of skid

Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.

Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,

Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing

Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they

Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,

Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.

                               They’ve made it again,

Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s

Still waking refreshed, our summer’s

Still all to come –

                              And here they are, here they are again

Erupting across yard stones

Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,

Speedway goggles, international mobsters –

A bolas of three or four wire screams

Jockeying across each other

On their switchback wheel of death.

They swat past, hard-fletched,

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,

And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,

Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy

And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue –

                                      Not ours any more.

Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.

Round luckier houses now

They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,

Head-height, clipping the doorway

With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,

Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly-flying

Misfit flopped in our yard,

Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.

He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly

Till I tossed him up – then suddenly he flowed away under

His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,

Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,

And crashed among the raspberries.

Then followed fiery hospital hours

In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank

Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.

Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.

The inevitable balsa death.

                                                 Finally burial 

For the husk

Of my little Apollo –

The charred scream

Folded in its huge power.

Sheep 

I

The sheep has stopped crying.

All morning in her wire-mesh compound

On the lawn, she has been crying

For her vanished lamb. Yesterday they came.

Then her lamb could stand, in a fashion,

And make some tiptoe cringing steps.

Now he has disappeared.

He was only half the proper size,

And his cry was wrong. It was not

A dry little hard bleat, a baby-cry

Over a flat tongue, it was human,

It was a despairing human smooth Oh!

Like no lamb I ever heard. Its hindlegs

Cowered in under its lumped spine,

Its feeble hips leaned towards

Its shoulders for support. Its stubby

White wool pyramid head, on a tottery neck,

Had sad and defeated eyes, pinched, pathetic,

Too small, and it cried all the time

Oh! Oh! staggering towards

Its alert, baffled, stamping, storming mother

Who feared our intentions. He was too weak

To find her teats, or to nuzzle up in under,

He hadn’t the gumption. He was fully

Occupied just standing, then shuffling

Towards where she’d removed to. She knew

He wasn’t right, she couldn’t

Make him out. Then his rough-curl legs,

So stoutly built, and hooved

With real quality tips,

Just got in the way, like a loose bundle

Of firewood he was cursed to manage,

Too heavy for him, lending sometimes

Some support, but no strength, no real help.

When we sat his mother on her tail, he mouthed her teat,

Slobbered a little, but after a minute

Lost aim and interest, his muzzle wandered,

He was managing a difficulty

Much more urgent and important. By evening

He could not stand. It was not

That he could not thrive, he was born

With everything but the will –

That can be deformed, just like a limb.

Death was more interesting to him.

Life could not get his attention.

So he died, with the yellow birth-mucus

Still in his cardigan.

He did not survive a warm summer night.

Now his mother has started crying again.

The wind is oceanic in the elms

And the blossom is all set.

II

What is it this time the dark barn again

Where men jerk me off my feet

And shout over me with murder voices

And do something painful to somewhere on my body

Why am I grabbed by the leg and dragged from my friends

Where I was hidden safe though it was hot

Why am I dragged into the light and whirled onto my back

Why am I sat up on my rear end with my legs splayed

A man grips me helpless his knees grip me helpless

What is that buzzer what is it coming

Buzzing like a big fierce insect on a long tangling of snake

What is the man doing to me with his buzzing thing

That I cannot see he is pressing it into me

I surrender I let my legs kick I let myself be killed 

I let him hoist me about he twists me flat

In a leverage of arms and legs my neck pinned under his ankle

While he does something dreadful down the whole length of my belly

My little teats stand helpless and terrified as he buzzes around them

Poor old ewe! She peers around from her ridiculous position.

Cool intelligent eyes, of grey-banded agate and amber,

Eyes deep and clear with feeling and understanding

While her monster hooves dangle helpless

And a groan like no bleat vibrates in her squashed windpipe

And the cutter buzzes at her groin and her fleece piles away

Now it buzzes at her throat and she emerges whitely

More and more grotesquely female and nude

Paunchy and skinny, while her old rug, with its foul tassels

Heaps from her as a foam-stiff, foam-soft, yoke-yellow robe

Numbed all over she suddenly feels much lighter

She feels herself free, her legs are her own and she scrambles up

Waiting for that grapple of hands to fling her down again

She stands in the opened arch of his knees she is facing a bright doorway

With a real bleat to comfort the lamb in herself

She trots across the threshold and makes one high clearing bound

To break from the cramp of her fright

And surprised by her new lightness and delighted

She trots away, noble-nosed, her pride unsmirched.

Her greasy winter-weight stays coiled on the foul floor, for somebody else to bother about.

She has a beautiful wet green brand on her bobbing brand-new backside,

She baas, she has come off best.

III

The mothers have come back

From the shearing, and behind the hedge

The woe of sheep is like a battlefield

In the evening, when the fighting is over,

And the cold begins, and the dew falls,

And bowed women move with water.

Mother mother mother the lambs

Are crying, and the mothers are crying.

Nothing can resist that probe, that cry

Of a lamb for its mother, or an ewe’s crying

For its lamb. The lambs cannot find

Their mothers among those shorn strangers.

A half-hour they have lamented,

Shaking their voices in desperation.

Bald brutal-voiced mothers braying out,

Flat-tongued lambs chopping off hopelessness.

Their hearts are in panic, their bodies

Are a mess of woe, woe they cry,

They mingle their trouble, a music

Of worse and worse distress, a worse entangling,

They hurry out little notes

With all their strength, cries searching this way and that.

The mothers force out sudden despair, blaaa!

On restless feet, with wild heads.

Their anguish goes on and on, in the June heat.

Only slowly their hurt dies, cry by cry,

As they fit themselves to what has happened.

Evening Thrush

Beyond a twilight of limes and willows

The church craftsman is still busy –

Switing idols,

Rough pre-Goidelic gods and goddesses,

Out of old bits of churchyard yew.

Suddenly flinging

Everything off, head-up, flame-naked,

Plunges shuddering into the creator –

Then comes plodding back, with a limp, over cobbles.

That was a virtuoso’s joke.

Now, serious, stretched full height, he aims

At the zenith. He situates a note

Right on the source of light.

Sews a seamless garment, simultaneously

Hurls javelins of dew

Three in air together, catches them. 

Explains a studied theorem of sober practicality.

Cool-eyed,

Gossips in a mundane code of splutters

With Venus and Jupiter.

                                  Listens –

Motionless, intent astronomer.

Suddenly launches a soul –

The first roses hang in a yoke stupor.

Globe after globe rolls out

Through his fluteful of dew –

The tree-stacks ride out on the widening arc.

Alone and darkening

At the altar of a star

With his sword through his throat

The thrush of clay goes on arguing

Over the graves.

O thrush,

If that really is you, behind the leaf-screen,

Who is this –

Worn-headed, on the lawn’s grass, after sunset,

Humped, voiceless, turdus, imprisoned

As a long-distance lorry-driver, dazed

With the pop and static and unending

Of worms and wife and kids?

The Harvest Moon

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,

Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,

A vast balloon,

Till it takes off, and sinks upward

To lie in the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.

The harvest moon has come,

Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.

And earth replies all night, like a deep drum.

So people can’t sleep,

So they go out where elms and oak trees keep

A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.

The harvest moon has come!

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep

Stare up at her petrified, while she swells

Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing

Closer and closer like the end of the world.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat

Cry ‘We are ripe, reap us!’ and the rivers

Sweat from the melting hills.

Leaves

Who’s killed the leaves?

Me, says the apple, I’ve killed them all.

Fat as a bomb or a cannonball

I’ve killed the leaves.

Who sees them drop?

Me, says the pear, they will leave me all bare

So all the people can point and stare.

I see them drop.

Who’ll catch their blood?

Me, me, me, says the marrow, the marrow.

I’ll get so rotund that they’ll need a wheelbarrow.

I’ll catch their blood.

Who’ll make their shroud?

Me, says the swallow, there’s just time enough

Before I must pack all my spools and be off.

I’ll make their shroud.

Who’ll dig their grave?

Me, says the river, with the power of the clouds

A brown deep grave I’ll dig under my floods.

I’ll dig their grave.

Who’ll be their parson?

Me, says the Crow, for it is well known

I study the bible right down to the bone.

I’ll be their parson.

Who’ll be chief mourner?

Me, says the wind, I will cry through the grass

The people will pale and go cold when I pass.

I’ll be chief mourner.

Who’ll carry the coffin?

Me, says the sunset, the whole world will weep

To see me lower it into the deep.

I’ll carry the coffin.

Who’ll sing a psalm?

Me, says the tractor, with my gear-grinding glottle

I’ll plough up the stubble and sing through my throttle.

I’ll sing the psalm.

Who’ll toll the bell?

Me, says the robin, my song in October

Will tell the still gardens the leaves are over.

I’ll toll the bell.

from Autumn Notes

III

The chestnut splits its padded cell.

It opens an African eye.

A cabinet-maker, an old master

In the root of things, has done it again.

Its slippery gloss is a swoon,

A peek over the edge into – what?

Down the well-shaft of swirly grain,

Past the generous hands that lifted the May-lamps,

Into the Fairytale of a royal tree

That does not know about conkers

Or the war-games of boys.

Invisible though he is, this plump mare

Bears a tall armoured rider towards

The mirk-forest of rooty earth.

He rides to fight the North corner.

He must win a sunbeam princess

From the cloud castle of the rains.

If he fails, evil faces,

Jaws without eyes, will tear him to pieces.

If he succeeds, and has the luck

To snatch his crown from the dragon

Which resembles a slug

He will reign over our garden

For two hundred years.

IV

When the Elm was full

When it heaved and all its tautnesses drummed

Like a full-sail ship

It was just how I felt.

Waist-deep, I ploughed through the lands,

I leaned at horizons, I bore down on strange harbours.

As the sea is a sail-ship’s root

So the globe was mine.

When the swell lifted the crow from the Elm-top

Both Poles were my home, they rocked me and supplied me.

But now the Elm is still

All its frame bare

Its leaves are a carpet for the cabbages

And it stands engulfed in the peculiar golden light

With which Eternity’s flash

Photographed the sudden cock pheasant –

Engine whinneying, the fire-ball bird clatters up,

Shuddering full-throttle

Its three-tongued tail-tip writhing

And the Elm stands, astonished, wet with light,

And I stand, dazzled to my bones, blinded.

V

Through all the orchard’s boughs

A honey-colour stillness, a hurrying stealth,

A quiet migration of all that can escape now.

Under ripe apples, a snapshot album is smouldering.

With a bare twig,

Glow-dazed, I coax its stubborn feathers.

A gold furred flame. A blue tremor of the air.

The fleshless faces dissolve, one by one,

As they peel open. Blackenings shrivel

To grey flutter. The clump’s core hardens. Everything

Has to be gone through. Every corpuscle

And its gleam. Everything must go.

My heels squeeze wet mulch, and my crouch aches.

A wind-swell lifts through the oak.

Scorch-scathed, crisping, a fleeing bonfire

Hisses in invisible flames – and the flame-roar.

An alarmed blackbird, lean, alert, scolds

The everywhere slow exposure – flees, returns.

VI

Water-wobbling blue-sky-puddled October.

The distance microscopic, the ditches brilliant.

Flowers so low-powered and fractional

They are not in any book.

I walk on high fields feeling the bustle

Of the million earth-folk at their fair.

Fieldfares early, exciting foreigners.

A woodpigeon pressing over, important as a policeman.

A far Bang! Then Bang! and a litter of echoes –

Country pleasures. The farmer’s guest,

In U.S. combat green, will be trampling brambles,

Waving his gun like a paddle.

I thought I’d brushed with a neighbour –

Fox-reek, a warm web, rich as creosote,

Draping the last watery blackberries –

But it was the funeral service.

Two nights he has lain, patient in his position,

Puckered under the first dews of being earth,

Crumpled like dead bracken. His reek will cling

To his remains till spring.

Then I shall steal his fangs, and wear them, and honour them.

A Cranefly in September

She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying,

Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs

Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart

Across mountain summits

(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)

But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings

And ginger-glistening wings

From collision to collision.

Aimless in no particular direction,

Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming

Of whatever it is, legs, grass,

The garden, the county, the country, the world –

Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest

Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.

She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest

In which, for instance, this giant watches –

The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.

Her jointed bamboo fuselage,

Her lobster shoulders, and her face

Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,

And the simple colourless church windows of her wings

Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.

Everything about her, every perfected vestment

Is already superfluous.

The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet

Are a problem beyond her.

The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate

To plot her through the infinities of the stems.

The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor

Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications

Like other galaxies.

The sky’s Northward September procession, the vast soft armistice,

Like an Empire on the move,

Abandons her, tinily embattled

With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain. 

from GAUDETE

Collision with the earth has finally come –

Collision with the earth has finally come –

How far can I fall?

A kelp, adrift

In my feeding substance

A mountain

Rooted in stone of heaven

A sea

Full of moon-ghost, with mangling waters

Dust on my head

Helpless to fit the pieces of water

A needle of many Norths

Ark of blood

Which is the magic baggage old men open

And find useless, at the great moment of need

Error on error

Perfumed

With a ribbon of fury

*

Once I said lightly

Once I said lightly

Even if the worst happens

We can’t fall off the earth.

And again I said

No matter what fire cooks us

We shall be still in the pan together.

And words twice as stupid.

Truly hell heard me.

She fell into the earth

And I was devoured.

*

This is the maneater’s skull.

This is the maneater’s skull.

These brows were the Arc de Triomphe

To the gullet.

The deaf adder of appetite

Coiled under. It spied through these nacelles

Ignorant of death.

And the whole assemblage flowed hungering through the long ways.

Its cry

Quieted the valleys.

It was looking for me.

I was looking for you.

You were looking for me.

*

I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.

I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.

Nuptials among prehistoric insects

The tremulous convulsion

The inching hydra strength

Among frilled lizards

Dropping twigs, and acorns, and leaves.

The oak is in bliss

Its roots

Lift arms that are a supplication

Crippled with stigmata

Like the sea-carved cliffs earth lifts

Loaded with dumb, uttering effigies

The oak seems to die and to be dead

In its love-act.

As I lie under it

In a brown leaf nostalgia

An acorn stupor.

*

A primrose petal’s edge

A primrose petal’s edge

Cuts the vision like laser. 

And the eye of a hare

Strips the interrogator naked

Of all but some skin of terror –

A starry frost.

Who is this?

She reveals herself, and is veiled.

Somebody

Something grips by the nape

And bangs the brow, as against a wall

Against the untouchable veils

Of the hole which is bottomless

Till blood drips from the mouth.

*

Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,

Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,

Waving, weeping, smiling, flushed

It happened

You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase.

It was the third time. And it smashed.

I turned

I bowed

In the morgue I kissed

Your temple’s refrigerated glazed

As rained-on graveyard marble, my

Lips queasy, heart non-existent

And straightened

Into sun-darkness

Like a pillar over Athens

Defunct

In the blinding metropolis of cameras.

*

The swallow – rebuilding –

The swallow – rebuilding –

Collects the lot

From the sow’s wallow.

But what I did only shifted the dust about.

And what crossed my mind

Crossed into outer space.

And for all rumours of me read obituary

What there truly remains of me

Is that very thing – my absence.

So how will you gather me?

I saw my keeper

Sitting in the sun –

If you can catch that, you are the falcon of falcons.

*

The grass-blade is not without

The grass-blade is not without

The loyalty that never was beheld.

And the blackbird

Sleeking from common anything and worm-dirt

Balances a precarious banner

Gold on black, terror and exultation.

The grim badger with armorial mask

Biting spade-steel, teeth and jaw-strake shattered,

Draws that final shuddering battle cry

Out of its backbone.

Me too,

Let me be one of your warriors.

Let your home

Be my home. Your people

My people.

*

I know well

I know well

You are not infallible

I know how your huge your unmanageable

Mass of bronze hair shrank to a twist

As thin as a silk scarf, on your skull,

And how your pony’s eye darkened larger

Holding too lucidly the deep glimpse

After the humane killer

And I had to lift your hand for you

While your chin sank to your chest

With the sheer weariness

Of taking away from everybody

Your envied beauty, your much-desired beauty

Your hardly-used beauty

Of lifting away yourself

From yourself

And weeping with the ache of the effort

*

Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,

Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,

Like the flushed gossip

With the tale that kills

Sometimes it strengthens very slowly

What is already here –

A tree darkening the house. 

The saviour

From these veils of wrinkle and shawls of ache

Like the sun

Which is itself cloudless and leafless

Was always here, is always as she was.

*

Calves harshly parted from their mamas

Calves harshly parted from their mamas

Stumble through all the hedges in the country

Hither thither crying day and night

Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.

After some days, a stupor sadness

Collects them again in their field.

They will never stray any more.

From now on, they only want each other.

So much for calves.

As for the tiger

He lies still

Like left luggage.

He is roaming the earth light, unseen.

He is safe.

Heaven and hell have both adopted him.

*

A bang – a burning –

A bang – a burning –

I opened my eyes

In a vale crumbling with echoes.

A solitary dove

Cries in the tree – I cannot bear it.

From this centre

It wearies the compass.

Am I killed?

Or am I searching?

Is this the rainbow silking my body?

Which wings are these?

*

At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.

At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.

Or ‘Terrible as an army with banners’.

If I wait, I am a castle

Built with blocks of pain.

If I set out

A kayak stitched with pain

*

Your tree – your oak

Your tree – your oak

A glare

Of black upward lightning, a wriggling grab

Momentary

Under the crumbling of stars.

A guard, a dancer

At the pure well of leaf.

Agony in the garden. Annunciation

Of clay, water and the sunlight.

They thunder under its roof.

Its agony is its temple.

Waist-deep, the black oak is dancing

And my eyes pause

On the centuries of its instant

As gnats

Try to winter in its wrinkles.

              The seas are thirsting

              Towards the oak.

              The oak is flying

              Astride the earth.

from REMAINS OF ELMET

Football at Slack

Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill

Men in bunting colours

Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.

The blown ball jumped, and the merry-coloured men

Spouted like water to head it.

The ball blew away downwind –

The rubbery men bounced after it.

The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind

Over a gulf of treetops.

Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.

Winds from fiery holes in heaven

Piled the hills darkening around them

To awe them. The glare light

Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.

Then the rain lowered a steel press.

Hair plastered, they all just trod water

To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up

Coming fine and thin, washed and happy

While the humped world sank foundering

And the valleys blued unthinkable

Under depth of Atlantic depression –

But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air

And the goalie flew horizontal

And once again a golden holocaust

Lifted the cloud’s edge, to watch them.

Stanbury Moor

These grasses of light

Which think they are alone in the world

These stones of darkness

Which have a world to themselves

This water of light and darkness

Which hardly savours Creation

And this wind

Which has enough just to exist

Are not

A poor family huddled at a poor gleam

Or words in any phrase

Or wolf-beings in a hungry waiting

Or neighbours in a constellation

They are

The armour of bric-à-brac

To which your soul’s caddis

Clings with all its courage.

Leaf Mould

In Hardcastle Crags, that echoey museum,

Where she dug leaf mould for her handfuls of garden

And taught you to walk, others are making poems, 

Between finger and thumb roll a pine-needle.

Feel the chamfer, feel how they threaded

The sewing machines. 

                                    And

Billy Holt invented a new shuttle

As like an ant’s egg, with its folded worker,

As every other.

You might see an ant carrying one.

                                                        And

The cordite conscripts tramped away. But the cenotaphs

Of all the shells that got their heads blown off

And their insides blown out

Are these beech-bole stalwarts.

                                                  And oak, birch,

Holly, sycamore, pine.

                                                        The lightest air-stir

Released their love-whispers when she walked

The needles weeping, singing, dedicating

Your spectre-double, still in her womb,

To this temple of her Missa Solemnis. 

White-faced, brain-washed by her nostalgias,

You were her step-up transformer.

She grieved for her girlhood and the fallen.

You mourned for Paradise and its fable.

Giving you the kiss of life

She hung round your neck her whole valley

Like David’s harp.

Now, whenever you touch it, God listens

Only for her voice.

Leaf mould. Blood-warm. Fibres crumbled alive

Between thumb and finger.

Feel again

The clogs twanging your footsoles, on the street’s steepness,

As you escaped. 

Moors

Are a stage

For the performance of heaven.

Any audience is incidental.

A chess-world of top-heavy Kings and Queens

Circling in stilted majesty

Tremble the bog-cotton

Under the sweep of their robes.

Fools in sunny motley tumble across,

A laughter – fading in full view

To grass-tips tapping at stones.

The witch-brew boiling in the sky-vat

Spins electrical terrors

In the eyes of sheep.

Fleeing wraith-lovers twist and collapse

In death-pact languor

To bedew harebells

On the spoil-heaps of quarries.

Wounded champions lurch out of sunset

To gurgle their last gleams into potholes.

Shattered, bowed armies, huddling leaderless

Escape from a world

Where snipe work late.

Chinese History of Colden Water

A fallen immortal found this valley –

Leafy conch of whispers

On the shore of heaven. He brought to his ear

The mad singing in the hills,

The prophetic mouth of the rain –

These hushings lulled him. So he missed

The goblins toiling up the brook.

The clink of fairy hammers forged his slumber

To a migraine of headscarves and clatter

Of clog-irons and looms and gutter water

And clog-irons and biblical texts.

Till he woke in a terror, tore free, lay panting.

The dream streamed from him. He blinked away

The bloody matter of the Cross

And the death’s-head after-image of ‘Poor’.

Chapels, chimneys, roofs in the mist – scattered.

Hills with raised wings were standing on hills.

They rode the waves of light

That rocked the conch of whispers

And washed and washed at his eye.

                                                     Washed from his ear

All but the laughter of foxes.

Rhododendrons

Dripped a chill virulence

Into my nape –

Rubberized prison-wear of suppression!

Guarding and guarded by

The Council’s black

Forbidding forbidden stones.

The policeman’s protected leaf!

Detestable evergreen sterility!

Over dead acid gardens

Where blue widows, shrined in Sunday, shrank

To arthritic clockwork,

Yapped like terriers and shook sticks from doorways

Vast and black and proper as museums.

Cenotaphs and the moor-silence!

Rhododendrons and rain!

It is all one. It is over.

Evergloom of official titivation –

Uniform at the reservoir, and the chapel,

And the graveyard park,

Ugly as a brass-band in India.

Sunstruck

The freedom of Saturday afternoons

Starched to cricket dazzle, nagged at a theorem –

Shaggy valley parapets

Pending like thunder, narrowing the spin-bowler’s angle.

The click, disconnected, might have escaped –

A six! And the ball slammed flat!

And the bat in flinders! The heart soaring!

And everybody jumping up and running –

Fleeing after the ball, stampeding

Through the sudden hole in Saturday – but

Already clapped into hands and the trap-shout

The ball jerked back to the stumper on its elastic.

Everything collapsed that bit deeper

Towards Monday.

Misery of the brassy sycamores!

Misery of the swans and the hard ripple!

Then again Yes Yes a wild YES –

The bat flashed round the neck in a tight coil,

The stretched shout snatching for the North Sea –

But it fell far short, even of Midgley.

And the legs running for dear life, twinkling white

In the cage of wickets

Were cornered again by the ball, pinned to the crease,

Blocked by the green and white pavilion.

Cross-eyed, mid-stump, sun-descending headache!

Brain sewn into the ball’s hide

Hammering at four corners of abstraction

And caught and flung back, and caught, and again caught

To be bounced on baked earth, to be clubbed

Toward the wage-mirage sparkle of mills

Toward Lord Savile’s heather

Toward the veto of the poisonous Calder

Till the eyes, glad of anything, dropped

From the bails

Into the bottom of a teacup,

To sandwich crusts for the canal cygnets.

The bowler had flogged himself to a dishclout.

And the burned batsmen returned, with changed faces,

‘Like men returned from a far journey’,

Under the long glare walls of evening

To the cool sheet and the black slot of home.

Curlews

I

They lift

Out of the maternal watery blue lines

Stripped of all but their cry

Some twists of near-inedible sinew

They slough off

The robes of bilberry blue

The cloud-stained bogland

They veer up and eddy away over

The stone horns

They trail a long, dangling, falling aim

Across water

Lancing their voices

Through the skin of this light

Drinking the nameless and naked

Through trembling bills.

II

Curlews in April

Hang their harps over the misty valleys

A wobbling water-call

A wet-footed god of the horizons

New moons sink into the heather

And full golden moons

Bulge over spent walls.

For Billy Holt

The longships got this far. Then

Anchored in nose and chin.

Badlands where outcast and outlaw

Fortified the hill-knowle’s long outlook.

A far, veiled gaze of quietly

Homicidal appraisal.

A poverty

That cut rock lumps for words.

Requisitioned rain, then more rain,

For walls and roof.

Enfolding arms of sour hills

For company.

Blood in the veins

For amusement.

A graveyard

For homeland.

When Men Got to the Summit

Light words forsook them.

They filled with heavy silence.

Houses came to support them,

But the hard, foursquare scriptures fractured

And the cracks filled with soft rheumatism.

Streets bent to the task

Of holding it all up

Bracing themselves, taking the strain

Till their vertebrae slipped.

The hills went on gently

Shaking their sieve.

Nevertheless, for some giddy moments

A television

Blinked from the wolf’s lookout.

The Canal’s Drowning Black

Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus.

Loach. Torpid, ginger-bearded, secret

Prehistory of the canal’s masonry,

With little cupid mouths.

Five inches huge!

On the slime-brink, over bridge reflections,

I teetered. Then a ringing, skull-jolt stamp

And their beards flowered sudden anemones

All down the sunken cliff. A mad-house thrill –

The stonework’s tiny eyes, two feet, three feet,

Four feet down through my reflection

Watched for my next move.

Their schooldays were over.

Peeping man was no part of their knowledge.

So when a monkey god, a Martian

Tickled their underchins with his net rim

They snaked out and over the net rim easy

Back into the oligocene –

Only restrained by a mesh of kitchen curtain.

Then flopped out of their ocean-shifting aeons

Into a two-pound jam-jar

On a windowsill

Blackened with acid rain fall-out

From Manchester’s rotten lung.

Next morning, Mount Zion’s

Cowled, Satanic majesty behind me

I lobbed – one by one – high through the air

The stiff, pouting, failed, paled new moons

Back into their Paradise and mine.

Cock-Crows

I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –

Tidal dawn was splitting heaven from earth,

The oyster

Opening to taste gold.

And I heard the cock-crows kindling in the valley

Under the mist –

They were sleepy,

Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.

Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets

And sank back again dimming.

Then soaring harder, brighter, higher

Tearing the mist,

Bubble-glistenings flung up and bursting to light

Brightening the undercloud,

The fire-crests of the cocks – the sickle shouts,

Challenge against challenge, answer to answer,

Hooking higher,

Clambering up the sky as they melted,

Hanging smouldering from the night’s fringes.

Till the whole valley brimmed with cock-crows,

A magical soft mixture boiling over,

Spilling and sparkling into other valleys

Lobbed-up horse-shoes of glow-swollen metal

From sheds in back-gardens, hen-cotes, farms

Sinking back mistily

Till the last spark died, and embers paled

And the sun climbed into its wet sack

For the day’s work

While the dark rims hardened

Over the smoke of towns, from holes in earth.

Mount Zion

Blackness

Was a building blocking the moon.

Its wall – my first world-direction –

Mount Zion’s gravestone slab.

Above the kitchen window, that uplifted mass

Was a deadfall –

Darkening the sun of every day

Right to the eleventh hour.

Marched in under, gripped by elders

Like a jibbing calf

I knew what was coming.

The convicting holy eyes, the convulsed Moses mouthings –

Mouths that God had burnt with the breath of Moriah.

They were terrified too.

A mesmerized commissariat,

They terrified me, but they terrified each other.

And Christ was only a naked bleeding worm

Who had given up the ghost.

Women bleak as Sunday rose-gardens

Or crumpling to puff-pastry, and cobwebbed with deaths.

Men in their prison-yard, at attention,

Exercising their cowed, shaven souls.

Lips stretching saliva, eyes fixed like the eyes

Of cockerels hung by the legs,

As the bottomless cry

Beat itself numb again against Wesley’s foundation stone.

Alarm shouts at dusk!

A cricket had rigged up its music

In a crack of Mount Zion wall.

A cricket! The news awful, the shouts awful, at dusk –

Like the bear-alarm, at dusk, among smoky tents –

What was a cricket? How big is a cricket?

Long after I’d been smothered in bed

I could hear them

Riving at the religious stonework

With their furious chisels and screwdrivers.

The Long Tunnel Ceiling

Of the main-road canal bridge

Cradled black stalactite reflections.

That was the place for dark loach!

At the far end, the Moderna blanket factory

And the bushy mask of Hathershelf above it

Peered in through the cell-window.

Lorries from Bradford, baled with plump and towering

Wools and cottons met, above my head,

Lorries from Rochdale, and ground past each other

Making that cavern of air and water tremble –

Suddenly a crash!

The long gleam-ponderous watery echo shattered.

And at last it had begun!

That could only have been a brick from the ceiling!

The bridge was starting to collapse!

But the canal swallowed its scare,

The heavy mirror reglassed itself,

And the black arch gazed up at the black arch.

Till a brick

Rose through its eruption – hung massive

Then slammed back with a shock and a shattering.

An ingot!

Holy of holies! A treasure!

A trout

Nearly as long as my arm, solid

Molten pig of many a bronze loach!

There he lay – lazy – a free lord,

Ignoring me. Caressing, dismissing

The eastward easing traffic of drift,

Master of the Pennine Pass!

Found in some thin glitter among mean gritstone,

High under ferns, high up near sour heather,

Brought down on a midnight cloudburst

In a shake-up of heaven and the hills

When the streams burst with zig-zags and explosions

A seed

Of the wild god now flowering for me

Such a tigerish, dark, breathing lily

Between the tyres, under the tortured axles.

Tree

A priest from a different land

Fulminated

Against heather, black stones, blown water.

Excommunicated the clouds

Damned the wind

Cast the bog pools into outer darkness

Smote the horizons

With the jawbone of emptiness

Till he ran out of breath –

In that teetering moment

Of lungs empty

When only his eye-water protected him

He saw

Heaven and earth moving.

And words left him.

Mind left him. God left him.

Bowed –

The lightning conductor

Of a maiming glimpse – the new prophet –

Under unending interrogation by wind

Tortured by huge scaldings of light

Tried to confess all but could not

Bleed a word

Stripped to his root-letter, cruciform

Contorted

Tried to tell all

Through crooking of elbows

Twitching of finger-ends.

Finally

Resigned

To be dumb.

Lets what happens to him simply happen.

Heptonstall Old Church

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,

Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys

And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space

And set it in men’s heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones

Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men’s heads

Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.

The moorland broke loose.

Widdop

Where there was nothing

Somebody put a frightened lake.

Where there was nothing

Stony shoulders

Broadened to support it.

A wind from between the stars

Swam down to sniff at the trembling.

Trees, holding hands, eyes closed,

Acted at world.

Some heath-grass crept close, in fear.

Nothing else

Except when a gull blows through

A rip on the fabric

Out of nothingness into nothingness

Emily Brontë

The wind on Crow Hill was her darling.

His fierce, high tale in her ear was her secret.

But his kiss was fatal.

Through her dark Paradise ran

The stream she loved too well

That bit her breast.

The shaggy sodden king of that kingdom

Followed through the wall

And lay on her love-sick bed.

The curlew trod in her womb.

The stone swelled under her heart.

Her death is a baby-cry on the moor.

from MOORTOWN DIARY

Rain

Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain.

Dull roof-drumming. Wraith-rain pulsing across purple-bare woods

Like light across heaved water. Sleet in it.

And the poor fields, miserable tents of their hedges.

Mist-rain off-world. Hills wallowing

In and out of a grey or silvery dissolution. A farm gleaming,

Then all dull in the near drumming. At field-corners

Brown water backing and brimming in grass.

Toads hop across rain-hammered roads. Every mutilated leaf there

Looks like a frog or a rained-out mouse. Cattle

Wait under blackened backs. We drive post-holes.

They half fill with water before the post goes in.

Mud-water spurts as the iron bar slam-burns

The oak stake-head dry. Cows

Tamed on the waste mudded like a rugby field

Stand and watch, come very close for company

In the rain that goes on and on, and gets colder.

They sniff the wire, sniff the tractor, watch. The hedges

Are straggles of gap. A few haws. Every half-ton cow

Sinks to the fetlock at every sliding stride.

They are ruining their field and they know it.

They look out sideways from under their brows which are

Their only shelter. The sunk scrubby wood

Is a pulverized wreck, rain riddles its holes

To the drowned roots. A pheasant looking black

In his waterproofs, bends at his job in the stubble.

The mid-afternoon dusk soaks into

The soaked thickets. Nothing protects them.

The fox corpses lie beaten to their bare bones,

Skin beaten off, brains and bowels beaten out.

Nothing but their blueprint bones last in the rain,

Sodden soft. Round their hay racks, calves

Stand in a shine of mud. The gateways

Are deep obstacles of mud. The calves look up, through plastered forelocks,

Without moving. Nowhere they can go

Is less uncomfortable. The brimming world

And the pouring sky are the only places

For them to be. Fieldfares squeal over, sodden

Toward the sodden wood. A raven,

Cursing monotonously, goes over fast

And vanishes in rain-mist. Magpies

Shake themselves hopelessly, hop in the spatter. Misery.

Surviving green of ferns and brambles is tumbled

Like an abandoned scrapyard. The calves

Wait deep beneath their spines. Cows roar

Then hang their noses to the mud.

Snipe go over, invisible in the dusk,

With their squelching cries.

4 December 1973

Dehorning

Bad-tempered bullying bunch, the horned cows

Among the unhorned. Feared, spoilt.

Cantankerous at the hay, at assemblies, at crowded

Yard operations. Knowing their horn-tips’ position

To a fraction, every other cow knowing it too.

Like their own tenderness. Horning of bellies, hair-tufting

Of horn-tips. Handy levers. But

Off with the horns.

So there they all are in the yard –

The pick of the bullies, churning each other

Like thick fish in a bucket, churning their mud.

One by one, into the cage of the crush: the needle,

A roar not like a cow – more like a tiger,

Blast of air down a cavern, and long, long

Beginning in pain and ending in terror – then the next.

The needle between the horn and the eye, so deep

Your gut squirms for the eyeball twisting

In its pink-white fastenings of tissue. This side and that.

Then the first one anaesthetized, back in the crush.

The bulldog pincers in the septum, stretched full strength,

The horn levered right over, the chin pulled round

With the pincers, the mouth drooling, the eye

Like a live eye caught in a pan, like the eye of a fish

Imprisoned in air. Then the cheese cutter

Of braided wire, and stainless steel peg handles,

Aligned on the hair-bedded root of the horn, then leaning

Backward full weight, pull-punching backwards,

Left right left right and the blood leaks

Down over the cheekbone, the wire bites

And buzzes, the ammonia horn-burn smokes

And the cow groans, roars shapelessly, hurls

Its half-ton commotion in the tight cage. Our faces

Grimace like faces in the dentist’s chair. The horn

Rocks from its roots, the wire pulls through

The last hinge of hair, the horn is heavy and free,

And a water-pistol jet of blood

Rains over the one who holds it – a needle jet

From the white-rasped and bloody skull-crater. Then tweezers

Twiddle the artery nozzle, knotting it enough,

And purple antiseptic squirts a cuttlefish cloud over it.

Then the other side the same. We collect

A heap of horns. The floor of the crush

Is a trampled puddle of scarlet. The purple-crowned cattle,

The bullies, with suddenly no horns to fear,

Start ramming and wrestling. Maybe their heads

Are still anaesthetized. A new order

Among the hornless. The bitchy high-headed

Straight-back brindle, with her Spanish bull trot,

And her head-shaking snorting advance and her crazy spirit,

Will have to get maternal. What she’s lost

In weapons, she’ll have to make up for in tits.

But they’ve all lost one third of their beauty.

14 May 1974

Bringing in New Couples

Wind out of freezing Europe. A mean snow

Fiery cold. Ewes caked crusty with snow,

Their new hot lambs wet trembling

And crying on trampled patches, under the hedge –

Twenty miles of open lower landscape

Blows into their wetness. The field smokes and writhes

Burning like a moor with snow-fumes.

Lambs nestling to make themselves comfortable

While the ewe nudges and nibbles at them

And the numbing snow-wind blows on the blood tatters

At her breached back-end.

The moor a grey sea-shape. The wood

Thick-fingered density, a worked wall of whiteness.

The old sea-roar, sheep-shout, lamb-wail.

Redwings needling invisible. A fright

Smoking among trees, the hedges blocked.

Lifting of ice-heavy ewes, trampling anxieties

As they follow their wide-legged tall lambs,

Tripods craning to cry bewildered.

We coax the mothers to follow their babies

And they do follow, running back

In sudden convinced panic to the patch

Where the lamb had been born, dreading

She must have been deceived away from it

By crafty wolvish humans, then coming again

Defenceless to the bleat she’s attuned to

And recognizing her own – a familiar

Detail in the meaningless shape-mass

Of human arms, legs, body-clothes – her lamb on the white earth

Held by those hands. Then vanishing again

Lifted. Then only the disembodied cry

Going with the human, while she runs in a circle

On the leash of the cry. While the wind

Presses outer space into the grass

And alarms wrens deep in brambles

With hissing fragments of stars.

16 February 1975

Tractor

The tractor stands frozen – an agony

To think of. All night

Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,

A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,

Pours into its steel.

At white heat of numbness it stands

In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defies flesh and won’t start.

Hands are like wounds already

Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable

As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.

I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it

The copse hisses – capitulates miserably

In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,

A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over

Towards plantations eastward.

All the time the tractor is sinking

Through the degrees, deepening

Into its hell of ice.

The starter lever

Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.

The battery is alive – but like a lamb

Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother –

While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites

With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined

In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire

Down the black throat – it just coughs.

It ridicules me – a trap of iron stupidity

I’ve stepped into. I drive the battery

As if I were hammering and hammering

The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer

And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly

Into happy life.

And stands

Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly

Like a demon demonstrating

A more-than-usually-complete materialization –

Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity

With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion

Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon

Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels,

Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,

Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.

The blind and vibrating condemned obedience

Of iron to the cruelty of iron,

Wheels screeched out of their night-locks –

Fingers

Among the tormented

Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes

Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,

Raging and trembling and rejoicing.

31 January 1976

Roe-Deer

In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year

Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

They had happened into my dimension

The moment I was arriving just there.

They planted their two or three years of secret deerhood

Clear on my snow-screen vision of the abnormal

And hesitated in the all-way disintegration

And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

I could think the deer were waiting for me

To remember the password and sign

That the curtain had blown aside for a moment

And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

The deer had come for me.

Then they ducked through the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

Away downhill over a snow-lonely field

Towards tree dark – finally

Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

Into the boil of big flakes.

The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well

Revising its dawn inspiration

Back to the ordinary.

13 February 1973

Sketching a Thatcher

Bird-bones is on the roof. Seventy-eight

And still a ladder squirrel,

Three or four nitches at a time, up forty rungs,

Then crabbing out across the traverse,

Cock-crows of insulting banter, liberated

Into his old age, like a royal fool

But still tortured with energy. Thatching

Must be the sinless job. Weathered

Like a weathercock, face bright as a ploughshare,

Skinny forearms of steely cable, batting

The reeds flush, crawling, cliff-hanging,

Lizard-silk of his lizard-skinny hands,

Hands never still, twist of body never still –

Bounds in for a cup of tea, ‘Caught you all asleep!’

Markets all the gossip – cynical old goblin

Cackling with wicked joy. Bounds out –

Trips and goes full length, bounces back upright,

‘Haven’t got the weight to get hurt with!’ Cheers

Every departure – ‘Off for a drink?’ and ‘Off

To see his fancy woman again!’ – leans from the sky,

Sun-burned-out pale eyes, eyes bleached

As old thatch, in the worn tool of his face,

In his haggard pants and his tired-out shirt –

They can’t keep up with him. He just can’t

Stop working. ‘I don’t want the money!’ He’d

Prefer a few years. ‘Have to sell the house to pay me!’

Alertness built into the bird-stare,

The hook of his nose, bill-hook of his face.

Suns have worn him, like an old sun-tool

Of the day-making, an old shoe-tongue

Of the travelling weathers, the hand-palm, ageless,

Of all winds on all roofs. He lams the roof

And the house quakes. Was everybody

Once like him? He’s squirmed through

Some tight cranny of natural selection.

The nut-stick yealm-twisťs got into his soul,

He didn’t break. He’s proof

As his crusty roofs. He ladder-dances

His blood light as spirit. His muscles

Must be clean as horn.

And the whole house

Is more pleased with itself, him on it,

Cresting it, and grooming it, and slapping it

Than if an eagle rested there. Sitting

Drinking his tea, he looks like a tatty old eagle,

And his yelping laugh of derision

Is just like a tatty old eagle’s.

Ravens

As we came through the gate to look at the few new lambs

On the skyline of lawn smoothness,

A raven bundled itself into air from midfield

And slid away under hard glistenings, low and guilty.

Sheep nibbling, kneeling to nibble the reluctant nibbled grass.

Sheep staring, their jaws pausing to think, then chewing again,

Then pausing. Over there a new lamb

Just getting up, bumping its mother’s nose

As she nibbles the sugar coating off it

While the tattered banners of her triumph swing and drip from her rear-end.

She sneezes and a glim of water flashes from her rear-end.

She sneezes again and again, till she’s emptied.

She carries on investigating her new present and seeing how it works.

Over here is something else. But you are still interested

In that new one, and its new spark of voice,

And its tininess.

Now over here, where the raven was,

Is what interests you next. Born dead,

Twisted like a scarf, a lamb of an hour or two,

Its insides, the various jellies and crimsons and transparencies

And threads and tissues pulled out

In straight lines, like tent ropes

From its upward belly opened like a lamb-wool slipper,

The fine anatomy of silvery ribs on display and the cavity,

The head also emptied through the eye-sockets,

The woolly limbs swathed in birth-yolk and impossible

To tell now which in all this field of quietly nibbling sheep

Was its mother. I explain

That it died being born. We should have been here, to help it.

So it died being born. ‘And did it cry?’ you cry.

I pick up the dangling greasy weight by the hooves soft as dogs’ pads

That had trodden only womb-water

And its raven-drawn strings dangle and trail,

Its loose head joggles, and ‘Did it cry?’ you cry again.

Its two-fingered feet splay in their skin between the pressures

Of my fingers and thumb. And there is another,

Just born, all black, splaying its tripod, inching its new points

Towards its mother, and testing the note

It finds in its mouth. But you have eyes now

Only for the tattered bundle of throwaway lamb.

‘Did it cry?’ you keep asking, in a three-year-old field-wide

Piercing persistence. ‘Oh yes’ I say ‘it cried.’

Though this one was lucky insofar

As it made the attempt into a warm wind

And its first day of death was blue and warm

The magpies gone quiet with domestic happiness

And skylarks not worrying about anything

And the blackthorn budding confidently

And the skyline of hills, after millions of hard years,

Sitting soft.

15 April 1974

February 17th

A lamb could not get born. Ice wind

Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother

Lay on the mudded slope. Harried, she got up

And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end

Under her tail. After some hard galloping,

Some manoeuvring, much flapping of the backward

Lump head of the lamb looking out,

I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill

And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen

Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap

Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,

Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,

Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the slippery

Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof,

Right back to the port-hole of the pelvis.

But there was no hoof. He had stuck his head out too early

And his feet could not follow. He should have

Felt his way, tip-toe, his toes

Tucked up under his nose

For a safe landing. So I kneeled wrestling

With her groans. No hand could squeeze past

The lamb’s neck into her interior

To hook a knee. I roped that baby head

And hauled till she cried out and tried

To get up and I saw it was useless. I went

Two miles for the injection and a razor.

Sliced the lamb’s throat-strings, levered with a knife

Between the vertebrae and brought the head off

To stare at its mother, its pipes sitting in the mud

With all earth for a body. Then pushed

The neck-stump right back in, and as I pushed

She pushed. She pushed crying and I pushed gasping.

And the strength

Of the birth push and the push of my thumb

Against that wobbly vertebra were deadlock,

A to-fro futility. Till I forced

A hand past and got a knee. Then like

Pulling myself to the ceiling with one finger

Hooked in a loop, timing my effort

To her birth push groans, I pulled against

The corpse that would not come. Till it came.

And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow

Parcel of life

In a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups –

And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head.

17 February 1974

Birth of Rainbow

This morning blue vast clarity of March sky

But a blustery violence of air, and a soaked overnight

Newpainted look to the world. The wind coming

Off the snowed moor in the South, razorish

Heavy-bladed and head-cutting, off snow-powdered ridges.

Flooded ruts shook. Hoof-puddles flashed. A daisy

Mud-plastered unmixed its head from the mud.

The black and white cow, on the highest crest of the round ridge,

Stood under the end of a rainbow.

Head down licking something, full in the painful wind

That the pouring haze of the rainbow ignored.

She was licking her gawky black calf

Collapsed wet-fresh from the womb, blinking his eyes

In the low morning dazzling washed sun.

Black, wet as a collie from a river, as she licked him,

Finding his smells, learning his particularity.

A flag of bloody tissue hung from her back-end

Spreading and shining, pink-fleshed and raw, it flapped and coiled

In the unsparing wind. She positioned herself, uneasy

As we approached, nervous small footwork

On the hoof-ploughed drowned sod of the ruined field.

She made uneasy low noises, and her calf too

With his staring whites, mooed the full clear calf-note

Pure as woodwind, and tried to get up,

Tried to get his cantilever front legs

In operation, lifted his shoulders, hoisted to his knees,

Then hoisted his back-end and lurched forward

On his knees and crumpling ankles, sliding in the mud

And collapsing plastered. She went on licking him.

She started eating the banner of thin raw flesh that

Spinnakered from her rear. We left her to it.

Blobbed antiseptic on to the sodden blood-dangle

Of his muddy birth-cord, and left her

Inspecting the new smell. The whole South West

Was black as nightfall.

Trailing squall-smokes hung over the moor leaning

And whitening towards us, then the world blurred

And disappeared in forty-five degree hail

And a gate-jerking blast. We got to cover.

Left to God the calf and his mother.

19 March 1974

Coming Down Through Somerset

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.

8 August 1975

The Day He Died

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.

A Memory

Your bony white bowed back, in a singlet,

Powerful as a horse,

Bowed over an upturned sheep

Shearing under the East chill through-door draught

In the cave-dark barn, sweating and freezing –

Flame-crimson face, drum-guttural African curses

As you bundled the sheep

Like tying some oversize, overweight, spilling bale

Through its adjustments of position

The attached cigarette, bent at its glow

Preserving its pride of ash

Through all your suddenly savage, suddenly gentle

Masterings of the animal

You were like a collier, a face-worker

In a dark hole of obstacle

Heedless of your own surfaces

Inching by main strength into the solid hour,

Bald, arch-wrinkled, weathered dome bowed

Over your cigarette comfort

Till you stretched erect through a groan

Letting a peeled sheep leap free

Then nipped the bud of stub from your lips

And with glove-huge, grease-glistening carefulness

Lit another at it

from EARTH-NUMB

Earth-Numb

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.

A Motorbike

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.

Deaf School

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

Life is Trying to be Life

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.

Speech out of Shadow

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.

from Seven Dungeon Songs

I

Dead, she became space-earth

Broken to pieces.

Plants nursed her death, unearthed her goodness.

But her murderer, mad-innocent

Sucked at her offspring, reckless of blood,

Consecrating them in fire, muttering

It is good to be God.

He used familiar hands

Incriminating many,

And he borrowed mouths, leaving names

Being himself nothing

But a tiger’s sigh, a wolf’s music

A song on a lonely road

What it is

Risen out of mud, fallen from space

That stares through a face.

II

Face was necessary – I found face.

Hands – I found hands.

I found shoulders, I found legs

I found all bits and pieces.

We were me, and lay quiet.

I got us all of a piece, and we lay quiet.

We just lay.

Sunlight had prepared a wide place

And we lay there.

Air nursed us.

We recuperated.

While maggots blackened to seeds, and blood warmed its stone.

Only still something

Stared at me and screamed

Stood over me, black across the sun,

And mourned me, and would not help me get up.

III

The earth locked out the light,

Blocking the light, like a door locked.

But a crack of light

Between sky and earth, was enough.

He called it, Earth’s halo.

And the lizard spread of his fingers

Reached for it.

He called it, The leakage of air

Into this suffocation of earth.

And the gills of his rib-cage

Gulped to get more of it.

His lips pressed to its coolness

Like an eye to a crack.

He lay like the already-dead

Tasting the tears

Of the wind-shaken and weeping

Tree of light.

IV

I walk

Unwind with activity of legs

The tangled ball

Which was once the orderly circuit of my body

Some night in the womb

All my veins and capillaries were taken out

By some evil will

And knotted in a great ball and stuffed back inside me

Now I rush to and fro

I try to attach a raw broken end

To some steady place, then back away

I look for people with clever fingers

Who might undo me

The horrible ball just comes

People’s fingers snarl it worse

I hurl myself

To jerk out the knot

Or snap it

And come up short

So dangle and dance

The dance of unbeing

V

If mouth could open its cliff

If ear could unfold from this strata

If eyes could split their rock and peep out finally

If hands of mountain-fold

Could get a proper purchase

If feet of fossil could lift

If head of lakewater and weather

If body of horizon

If whole body and balancing head

If skin of grass could take messages

And do its job properly

If spine of earth-foetus

Could unfurl

If man-shadow out there moved to my moves

The speech that works air

Might speak me

Tiger-Psalm

The tiger kills hungry. The machine-guns

Talk, talk, talk across their Acropolis.

The tiger

Kills expertly, with anaesthetic hand.

The machine-guns

Carry on arguing in heaven

Where numbers have no ears, where there is no blood.

The tiger

Kills frugally, after close inspection of the map.

The machine-guns shake their heads,

They go on chattering statistics.

The tiger kills by thunderbolt:

God of her own salvation.

The machine-guns

Proclaim the Absolute, according to morse,

In a code of bangs and holes that makes men frown.

The tiger

Kills with beautiful colours in her face,

Like a flower painted on a banner.

The machine-guns

Are not interested.

They laugh. They are not interested. They speak and

Their tongues burn soul-blue, haloed with ashes,

Puncturing the illusion.

The tiger

Kills and licks her victim all over carefully.

The machine-guns

Leave a crust of blood hanging on the nails

In an orchard of scrap-iron.

The tiger

Kills

With the strength of five tigers, kills exalted.

The machine-guns

Permit themselves a snigger. They eliminate the error

With a to-fro dialectic

And the point proved stop speaking.

The tiger

Kills like the fall of a cliff, one-sinewed with the earth,

Himalayas under eyelid, Ganges under fur –

Does not kill.

Does not kill. The tiger blesses with a fang.

The tiger does not kill but opens a path

Neither of Life nor of Death:

The tiger within the tiger:

The Tiger of the Earth.

                                     O Tiger!

O Sister of the Viper!

                                  O Beast in Blossom!

Orts

In the M5 Restaurant

Our sad coats assemble at the counter

The tyre face pasty

The neon of plaster flesh

With little inexplicable eyes

Holding a dish with two buns

Symbolic food

Eaten by symbolic faces

Symbolic eating movements

The road drumming in the wall, drumming in the head

The road going nowhere and everywhere

My freedom evidently

Is to feed my life

Into a carburettor

Petroleum has burned away all

But a still-throbbing column

Of carbon-monoxide and lead.

I attempt a firmer embodiment

With illusory coffee

And a gluey quasi-pie.

That Star

That star

Will blow your hand off

That star

Will scramble your brains and your nerves

That star

Will frazzle your skin off

That star

Will turn everybody yellow and stinking

That star

Will scorch everything dead fumed to its blueprint

That star

Will make the earth melt

That star … and so on.

And they surround us. And far into infinity.

These are the armies of the night.

There is no escape.

Not one of them is good, or friendly, or corruptible.

One chance remains: KEEP ON DIGGING THAT HOLE

KEEP ON DIGGING AWAY AT THAT HOLE

Poets

Crowd the horizons, poised, wings

Lifted in elation, vast

Armadas of illusion

Waiting for a puff.

Or they dawn, singing birds – all

Mating calls

Battle bluff

And crazy feathers.

Or disappear

Into the grass-blade atom – one flare

Annihilating the world

To the big-eyed, simple light that fled

When the first word lumped out of the flint.

Grosse Fuge

Rouses in its cave

Under faint peaks of light

Flares abrupt at the sun’s edge, dipping again

This side of the disc

Now coming low out of the glare

Coming under skylines

Under seas, under liquid corn

Snaking among poppies

Soft arrival pressing the roof of ghost

Creaking of old foundations

The ear cracking like a dry twig

Heavy craving weight

Of eyes on your nape

Unadjusted to world

Huge inching through hair, through veins

Tightening stealth of blood

Breath in the tunnel of spine

And the maneater

Opens its mouth and the music

Sinks its claw

Into your skull, a single note

Picks you up by the small of the back, weightless

Vaults into space, dangling your limbs

Devours you leisurely among litter of stars

Digests you into its horrible joy

This is the tiger of heaven

Hoists people out of their clothes

Leaves its dark track across the octaves

Children

                                new to the blood

Whose hot push has surpassed

The sabretooth

Never doubt their rights of conquest.

Their voices, under the leaf-dazzle

An occupying army

A foreign tongue

Loud in their idleness and power.

Figures in the flaming of hell

A joy beyond good and evil

Breaking their toys.

Soon they’ll sleep where they struck.

They’ll leave behind

A man like a licked skull

A gravestone woman, their playthings.

Prospero and Sycorax

She knows, like Ophelia,

The task has swallowed him.

She knows, like George’s dragon,

Her screams have closed his helmet.

She knows, like Jocasta,

It is over.

He prefers

Blindness.

She knows, like Cordelia,

He is not himself now,

And what speaks through him must be discounted –

Though it will be the end of them both.

She knows, like God,

He has found

Something

Easier to live with –

His death, and her death.

The Beacon

The Stone

Has not yet been cut.

It is too heavy already

For consideration. Its edges

Are so super-real, already,

And at this distance,

They cut real cuts in the unreal

Stuff of just thinking. So I leave it.

Somewhere it is.

Soon it will come.

I shall not carry it. With horrible life

It will transport its face, with sure strength,

To sit over mine, wherever I look,

Instead of hers.

It will even have across its brow

Her name.

Somewhere it is coming to the end

Of its million million years –

Which have worn her out.

It is coming to the beginning

Of her million million million years

Which will wear out it.

Because she will never move now

Till it is worn out.

She will not move now

Till everything is worn out.

TV Off

He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass –

Staring into flames, through the grille of age

Like a late fish, face clothed with fungus,

Keeping its mouth upstream.

Remorseful for what nobody any longer suffers

Nostalgic for what he would not give twopence to see back

Hopeful for what he will not miss when it fails

Who lay a night and a day and a night and a day

Golden-haired, while his friend beside him

Attending a small hole in his brow

Ripened black.

A God

Pain was pulled down over his eyes like a fool’s hat.

They pressed electrodes of pain through the parietals.

He was helpless as a lamb

Which cannot be born

Whose head hangs under its mother’s anus.

Pain was stabbed through his palm, at the crutch of the M,

Made of iron, from earth’s core.

From that pain he hung,

As if he were being weighed.

The cleverness of his fingers availed him

As the bullock’s hooves, in the offal bin,

Avail the severed head

Hanging from its galvanized hook.

Pain was hooked through his foot.

From that pain, too, he hung

As on display.

His patience had meaning only for him

Like the sanguine upside-down grin

Of a hanging half-pig.

There, hanging,

He accepted the pain beneath his ribs

Because he could no more escape it

Than the poulterer’s hanging hare,

Hidden behind eyes growing concave,

Can escape

What has replaced its belly.

He could not understand what had happened.

Or what he had become.

UNCOLLECTED

Remembering Teheran

How it hung

In the electrical loom

Of the Himalayas – I remember

The spectre of a rose.

All day the flag on the military camp flowed South.

In the Shah’s Evin Motel

The Manageress – a thunderhead Atossa –

Wept on her bed

Or struck awe. Tragic Persian

Quaked her bosom – precarious balloons of water –

But still nothing worked.

Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dust.

With a splash of keys

She ripped through the lock, filled my room, sulphurous,

With plumbers –

Twelve-year-olds, kneeling to fathom

A pipeless tap sunk in a blank block wall.

*

I had a funny moment

Beside the dried-up river of boulders. A huddle of families

Were piling mulberries into wide bowls, under limp, dusty trees.

All the big males, in their white shirts,

Drifted out towards me, hands hanging –

I could see the bad connections sparking inside their heads

As I picked my way among thistles

Between dead-drop wells – open man-holes

Parched as snake-dens –

Later, three stoned-looking Mercedes,

Splitting with arms and faces, surfed past me

Warily over a bumpy sea of talc,

The uncials on their number-plates like fragments of scorpions.

*

I imagined all Persia

As a sacred scroll, humbled to powder

By the God-conducting script on it –

The lightning serifs of Zoroaster –

The primal cursive.

*

Goats, in charred rags,

Eyes and skulls

Adapted to sunstroke, woke me

Sunbathing among the moon-clinker.

When one of them slowly straightened into a goat-herd

I knew I was in the wrong century

And wrongly dressed.

All around me stood

The tense, abnormal thistles, desert fanatics;

Politicos, in their zinc-blue combat issue;

Three-dimensional crystal theorems

For an optimum impaling of the given air;

Arsenals of pragmatic ideas –

I retreated to the motel terrace, to loll there

And watch the officers half a mile away, exercising their obsolete horses.

A bleaching sun, cobalt-cored,

Played with the magnetic field of the mountains.

And prehistoric giant ants, outriders, long-shadowed,

Cast in radiation-proof metals,

Galloped through the land, lightly and unhindered,

Stormed my coffee-saucer, drinking the stain –

At sunset

The army flag rested for a few minutes

Then began to flow North.

*

I found a living thread of water

Dangling from a pipe. A snake-tongue flicker.

An incognito whisper.

It must have leaked and smuggled itself, somehow,

From the high Mother of Snows, halfway up the sky.

It wriggled these last inches to ease

A garden of pot-pourri, in a tindery shade of peach-boughs,

And played there, a fuse crackling softly –

As the whole city

Sank in the muffled drumming

Of a subterranean furnace.

And over it

The desert’s bloom of dust, the petroleum smog, the transistor commotion

Thickened a pinky-purple thunderlight.

The pollen of the thousands of years of voices

Murmurous, radio-active, rubbing to flash-point –

*

Scintillating through the migraine

The world-authority on Islamic Art

Sipped at a spoonful of yoghurt

And smiling at our smiles described his dancing

Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads

(But only God, he said, can create a language).

Journalists proffered, on platters of silence,

Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –

*

Chastened, I listened. Then for the belly-dancer

(Who would not dance on my table, would not kiss me

Through her veil, spoke to me only

Through the mouth

Of her demon-mask

Warrior drummer)

I composed a bouquet – a tropic, effulgent

Puff of publicity, in the style of Attar,

And saw myself translated by the drummer

Into her liquid

Lashing shadow, those arabesques of God,

That thorny fount.

Bones

Bones is a crazy pony.

Moon-white – star-mad.

All skull and skeleton.

Her hooves pound. The sleeper awakes with a cry.

Who has broken her in?

Who has mounted her and come back

Or kept her?

She lifts under them, the snaking crest of a bullwhip.

Hero by hero they go –

Grimly get astride

And their hair lifts.

She laughs, smelling the battle – their cry comes back.

Who can live her life?

Every effort to hold her or turn her falls off her

Like rotten harness.

Their smashed faces come back, the wallets and the watches.

And this is the stunted foal of the earth –

She that kicks the cot

To flinders and is off.

Do not Pick up the Telephone

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech

Before the soft words with their spores

The cosmetic breath of the gravestone

Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death

Do not worship the telephone

It drags its worshippers into actual graves

With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices

Sit godless when you hear the religious wail of the telephone

Do not think your house is a hide-out it is a telephone

Do not think you walk your own road, you walk down a telephone

Do not think you sleep in the hand of God you sleep in the mouthpiece of a telephone

Do not think your future is yours it waits upon a telephone

Do not think your thoughts are your own thoughts they are the toys of the telephone

Do not think these days are days they are the sacrificial priests of the telephone

The secret police of the telephone

O phone get out of my house

You are a bad god

Go and whisper on some other pillow

Do not lift your snake head in my house

Do not bite any more beautiful people

You plastic crab

Why is your oracle always the same in the end?

What rake-off for you from the cemeteries?

Your silences are as bad

When you are needed, dumb with the malice of the clairvoyant insane

The stars whisper together in your breathing

World’s emptiness oceans in your mouthpiece

Stupidly your string dangles into the abysses

Plastic you are then stone a broken box of letters

And you cannot utter

Lies or truth, only the evil one

Makes you tremble with sudden appetite to see somebody undone

Blackening electrical connections

To where death bleaches its crystals

You swell and you writhe

You open your Buddha gape

You screech at the root of the house

Do not pick up the detonator of the telephone

A flame from the last day will come lashing out of the telephone

A dead body will fell out of the telephone

Do not pick up the telephone

Reckless Head

When it comes down to it

Hair is afraid. Words from within are afraid.

They sheer off, like a garment,

Cool, treacherous, no part of you.

Hands the same, feet, and all blood

Till nothing is left. Nothing stays

But what your gaze can carry.

And maybe you vomit even that, like a too-much poison.

Then it is

That the brave hunger of your skull

Supplants you. It stands where you stood

And shouts, with a voice you can’t hear,

For what you can’t take.

from Prometheus on His Crag

2

Prometheus On His Crag

Relaxes

In the fact that it has happened.

The blue wedge through his breastbone, into the rock,

Unadjusted by vision or prayer – so.

His eyes, brainless police.

His brain, simple as an eye.

Nevertheless, now he exults – like an eagle

In the broadening vastness, the reddening dawn

Of the fact

That cannot be otherwise

And could not have been otherwise,

And never can be otherwise.

And now, for the first time

                                           relaxing

                                                      helpless

The Titan feels his strength.

3

Prometheus On His Crag

Pestered by birds roosting and defecating,

The chattering static of the wind-honed summit,

The clusterers to heaven, the sun-darkeners –

Shouted a world’s end shout.

Then the swallow folded its barbs and fell,

The dove’s bubble of fluorescence burst,

Nightingale and cuckoo

Plunged into padded forests where the woodpecker

Eyes bleached insane

Howled laughter into dead holes.

The birds became what birds have ever since been,

Scratching, probing, peering for a lost world –

A world of holy, happy notions shattered

By the shout

That brought Prometheus peace

And woke the vulture.

9

Now I know I never shall

Be let stir.

The man I fashioned and the god I fashioned

Dare not let me stir.

This leakage of cry these face-ripples

Calculated for me – for mountain water

Dammed to powerless stillness.

What secret stays

Stilled under my stillness?

Not even I know.

Only he knows – that bird, that

Filthy-gleeful emissary and

The hieroglyph he makes of my entrails

Is all he tells.

10

Prometheus On His Crag

Began to admire the vulture

It knew what it was doing

It went on doing it

Swallowing not only his liver

But managing also to digest its guilt

And hang itself again just under the sun

Like a heavenly weighing scales

Balancing the gift of life

And the cost of the gift

Without a tremor

As if both were nothing.

14

Prometheus On His Crag

Sees the wind

Whip all things to whip all things

The light whips the water the water whips the light

And men and women are whipped

By invisible tongues

They claw and tear and labour forward

Or cower cornered under the whipping

They whip their animals and their engines

To get them from under the whips

They lift their faces and look all round

For their master and tormentor

When they collapse to curl inwards

They are like cut plants and blind

Already beyond pain or fear

Even the snails are whipped

The swifts too screaming to outstrip the whip

Even as if being were a whipping

Even the earth leaping

Like a great ungainly top

19

Prometheus On His Crag

Shouts and his words

Go off in every direction

Like birds

Like startled birds

They cry the way they fly away

Start up others which follow

For words are the birds of everything –

So soon

Everything is on the wing and gone

So speech starts hopefully to hold

Pieces of the wordy earth together

But pops to space-silence and space-cold

Emptied by words

Scattered and gone.

                                    And the mouth shuts

Savagely on a mouthful

Of space-fright which makes the ears ring.

from FLOWERS AND INSECTS

A Violet at Lough Aughresberg

The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs.

Against the opened furnace of the West –

A branch of apple-blossom.

A bullock of sooted bronze

Cools on an emerald

That is crumbling to granite embers.

Milk and blood are frail

In the shivering wind off the sea.

       Only a purple flower – this amulet

       (Once Prospero’s) – holds it all, a moment,

       In a rinsed globe of light.

Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies

Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,

After May snow. After a winter

Worst in human memory, a freeze

Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,

And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly

A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled

With the sweatings of earth

And with the sweatings-out of winter

Feverish under the piled

Maywear of the lawn.

                                    Now two

Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,

She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he

Drunk with her, float in eddies

Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,

Settling to nod her long spring tongue down

Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s

Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.

He settling behind her, among plain glistenings

Of the new grass, edging and twitching

To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing

Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open

Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching

To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –

Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly

Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her

Off any escape. She turns that

To her purpose, and veers down

Onto another Dandelion, attaching

Her weightless yacht to its crest.

Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter

Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,

A sealed book, absorbed in itself.

She ignores him

Where he edges to left and to right, flitting

His wings open, titillating her fur

With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,

His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,

Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,

Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –

And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops

On an elastic to settle accurately

Under her tail again as she clamps to

This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,

Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted

To what’s required

Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin

That performs piercings

Out of the still-bare ash,

The whole air just like him, just breathing

Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first

Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth

Opening its petals, the whole sky

Opening a flower

Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.

Where I Sit Writing My Letter

Suddenly hooligan baby starlings

Rain all round me squealing,

Shouting how it’s tremendous and everybody

Has to join in and they’re off this minute!

Probably the weird aniseed corpse-odour

Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,

As it disturbs me. Now they all rise

Flutter-floating, oddly eddying,

Squalling their dry gargles. Then, mad, they

Hurl off, on a new wrench of excitement,

Leaving me out.

                           I pluck apple-blossom,

Cool, blood-lipped, wet open.

And I’m just quieting thoughts towards my letter

When they all come storming back,

Giddy with hoarse hissings and snarls

And clot the top of an ash sapling –

Sizzling bodies, snaky black necks craning

For a fresh thrill – Where next? Where now? Where? – they’re off

All rushing after it

Leaving me fevered, and addled.

They can’t believe their wings.

Snow-bright clouds boil up.

Tern

for Norman Nicholson

The breaker humps its green glass.

You see the sunrise through it, the wrack dark in it,

And over it – the bird of sickles

Swimming in the wind, with oiled spasm.

That is the tern. A blood-tipped harpoon

Hollow-ground in the roller-dazzle,

Honed in the wind-flash, polished

By his own expertise –

Now finished and in use.

The wings – remote-controlled

By the eyes

In his submarine swift shadow

Feint and tilt in their steel.

Suddenly a triggered magnet

Connects him downward, through a thin shatter,

To a sand-eel. He hoists out, with a twinkling,

Through some other wave-window.

His eye is a gimlet.

Deep in the churned grain of the roller

His brain is a gimlet. He hangs,

A blown tatter, a precarious word

In the mouth of ocean pronouncements.

His meaning has no margin. He shudders

To the tips of his tail-tines.

Momentarily, his lit scrap is a shriek.

The Honey Bee

The Honey Bee

Brilliant as Einstein’s idea

Can’t be taught a thing.

Like the sun, she’s on course forever.

As if nothing else at all existed

Except her flowers.

No mountains, no cows, no beaches, no shops.

Only the rainbow waves of her flowers

A tremor in emptiness

A flying carpet of flowers

                                         – a pattern

Coming and going – very loosely woven –

Out of which she works her solutions.

Furry goblin midgets

(The beekeeper’s thoughts) clamber stickily

Over the sun’s face – gloves of shadow.

But the Honey Bee

Cannot imagine him, in her brilliance,

Though he’s a stowaway on her carpet of colour-waves

And drinks her sums.

Sunstruck Foxglove

As you bend to touch

The gypsy girl

Who waits for you in the hedge

Her loose dress falls open.

Midsummer ditch-sickness!

Flushed, freckled with earth-fever,

Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing,

A lolling armful, and so young! Hot

Among the insane spiders.

You glimpse the reptile under-speckle

Of her sunburned breasts

And your head swims. You close your eyes.

Can the foxes talk? Your head throbs.

Remember the bird’s tolling echo,

The dripping fern-roots, and the butterfly touches

That woke you.

Remember your mother’s

Long, dark dugs.

Her silky body a soft oven

For loaves of pollen.

Eclipse

For half an hour, through a magnifying glass,

I’ve watched the spiders making love undisturbed,

Ignorant of the voyeur, horribly happy.

First in the lower left-hand corner of the window

I saw an average spider stirring. There

In a midden of carcases, the shambles

Of insects dried in their colours,

A trophy den of uniforms, reds, greens,

Yellow-striped and detached wing-frails, last year’s

Leavings, parched a winter, scentless – heads,

Bodices, corsets, leg-shells, a crumble of shards

In a museum of dust and neglect, there

In the crevice, concealed by corpses in their old wrappings,

A spider has come to live. She has spun

An untidy nearly invisible

Floss of strands, a few aimless angles

Camouflaged as the grey dirt of the rain-stains

On the glass. I saw her moving. Then a smaller,

Just as ginger, similar all over,

Only smaller. He had suddenly appeared.

Upside down, she was doing a gentle

Sinister dance. All legs clinging

Except for those leading two, which tapped on the web,

Trembling it, I thought, like a fly, to attract

The immobile, upside-down male, near the frame,

Only an inch from her. He moved away,

Turning ready to flee, I guessed. Maybe

Fearful of her intentions and appetites:

Doubting. But her power, focussing,

Making no error after the millions of years

Perfecting this art, turned him round

At a distance of two inches, and hung him

Upside down, head under, belly towards her.

Motionless, except for a faint

And just-detectable throb of his hair-leg tips.

She came closer, upside down, gently,

And enmeshed his forelegs in hers.

So, I imagined, here is the famous murder.

I got closer to watch. Something

Difficult to understand, difficult

To properly observe was going on.

Her two hands seemed swollen, like tiny crab-claws.

Those two nippers she folds up under her nose

To bring things to her pincers, they were moving,

Glistening. He convulsed now and again.

Her abdomen pod twitched – spasmed slightly

Little mean ecstasies. Was she pulling him to pieces?

Something much more delicate, a much more

Delicate agreement was in process.

Under his abdomen he had a nozzle –

Presumably his lumpy little cock,

Just as ginger as the rest of him, a teat,

An infinitesimal nipple. Probably

Under a microscope it is tooled and designed

Like some micro-device in a space rocket.

To me it looked crude and simple. Far from simple,

Though, were her palps, her boxing-glove nippers –

They were like the mechanical hands

That manipulate radio-active matter

On the other side of safe screen glass.

But hideously dexterous. She reached out one,

I cannot imagine how she saw to do it,

And brought monkey-fingers from under her crab-nippers

And grasped his nipple cock. As soon as she had it

A bubble of glisteny clear glue

Ballooned up from her nipper, the size of her head,

Then shrank back, and as it shrank back

She wrenched her grip off his cock

As if it had locked there, and doubled her fistful

Of shining wet to her jaw-pincers

And rubbed her mouth and underskin with it,

Six, seven stiff rubs, while her abdomen twitched,

Her tail-tip flirted, and he hung passive.

Then out came her other clutcher, on its elbow,

And grabbed his bud, and the gloy-thick bubble

Swelled above her claws, a red spur flicked

Inside it, and he jerked in his ropes.

Then the bubble shrank and she twisted it off

And brought it back to stuff her face-place

With whatever it was. Very still,

Except for those stealths and those twitchings

They hung upside down, face to face,

Holding forelegs. It was still obscure

Just what was going on. It went on.

Half an hour. Finally she backed off.

He hung like a dead spider, just as he’d hung

All the time she’d dealt with him.

I thought it must be over. So now, I thought,

I see the murder. I could imagine now

If he stirred she’d think he was a fly,

And she’d be feeling ravenous. And so far

She’d shown small excitement about him

With all that concentration on his attachment,

As if he upside down were just the table

Holding the delicacy. She moved off.

Aimlessly awhile she moved round,

Till I realized she was concentrating

On a V of dusty white, a delta

Of floss that seemed just fuzz. Then I could see

How she danced her belly low in the V.

I saw her fitting, with accurate whisker-fine feet,

Blobs of glue to the fibres, and sticking others

To thicken and deepen the V, and knot its juncture.

Then she danced in place, belly down, on this –

Suddenly got up and hung herself

Over the V. Sitting in the cup of the V

Was a tiny blob of new whiteness.

A first egg? Already? Then very carefully

She dabbed at the blob, and worked more woolly fibres

Into the V, to either side of it,

Diminishing it as she dabbed. I could see

I was watching mighty nature

In a purposeful mood, but not what she worked at.

Soon, the little shapeless dot of white

Was a dreg of speck, and she left it. She returned

Towards her male, who hung still in position.

She paused and laboriously cleaned her hands,

Wringing them in her pincers. And suddenly

With a swift, miraculously-accurate snatch

Took something from her mouth, and dumped it

On an outermost cross-strand of web –

A tiny scrap of white – refuse, I thought,

From their lovemaking. So I stopped watching.

Ten minutes later they were at it again.

Now they have vanished. I have scrutinized

The whole rubbish tip of carcases

And the window-frame crannies beneath it.

They are hidden. Is she devouring him now?

Or are there still some days of bliss to come

Before he joins her antiques. They are hidden

Probably together in the fusty dark,

Holding forearms, listening to the rain, rejoicing

As the sun’s edge, behind the clouds,

Comes clear of our shadow.

In the Likeness of a Grasshopper

A trap

Waits on the field path.

A wicker contraption, with working parts,

Its spring tensed and set.

So flimsily made, out of grass

(Out of the stems, the joints, the raspy-dry flags).

Baited with a fur-soft caterpillar,

A belly of amorous life, pulsing signals.

Along comes a love-sick, perfume-footed

Music of the wild earth.

The trap, touched by a breath,

Jars into action, its parts blur –

And music cries out.

A sinewy violin

Has caught its violinist.

Cloud-fingered summer, the beautiful trapper,

Picks up the singing cage

And takes out the Song, adds it to the Songs

With which she robes herself, which are her wealth,

Sets her trap again, a yard further on.

from WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

New Foal

Yesterday he was nowhere to be found

In the skies or under the skies.

Suddenly he’s here – a warm heap

Of ashes and embers, fondled by small draughts.

A star dived from outer space – flared

And burned out in the straw.

Now something is stirring in the smoulder.

We call it a foal.

Still stunned

He has no idea where he is.

His eyes, dew-dusky, explore gloom walls and a glare doorspace.

Is this the world?

It puzzles him. It is a great numbness.

He pulls himself together, getting used to the weight of things

And to that tall horse nudging him, and to this straw.

He rests

From the first blank shock of light, the empty daze

Of the questions –

What has happened? What am I?

His ears keep on asking, gingerly.

But his legs are impatient,

Recovering from so long being nothing

They are restless with ideas, they start to try a few out,

Angling this way and that,

Feeling for leverage, learning fast –

And suddenly he’s up

And stretching – a giant hand

Strokes him from nose to heel

Perfecting his outline, as he tightens

The knot of himself.

                                  Now he comes teetering

Over the weird earth. His nose

Downy and magnetic, draws him, incredulous,

Towards his mother. And the world is warm

And careful and gentle. Touch by touch

Everything fits him together.

Soon he’ll be almost a horse.

He wants only to be Horse,

Pretending each day more and more Horse

Till he’s perfect Horse. Then unearthly Horse

Will surge through him, weightless, a spinning of flame

Under sudden gusts,

It will coil his eyeball and his heel

In a single terror – like the awe

Between lightning and thunderclap.

And curve his neck, like a sea-monster emerging

Among foam,

And fling the new moons through his stormy banner,

And the full moons and the dark moons.

The Hen

The Hen

Worships the dust. She finds God everywhere.

Everywhere she finds his jewels.

And she does not care

What the cabbage thinks.

She has forgotten flight

Because she has interpreted happily

Her recurrent dream

Of clashing cleavers, of hot ovens,

And of the little pen-knife blade

Splitting her palate.

She flaps her wings, like shallow egg-baskets,

To show her contempt

For those who live on escape

And a future of empty sky.

She rakes, with noble, tireless foot,

The treasury of the dirt,

And clucks with the mechanical alarm clock

She chose instead of song

When the Creator

Separated the Workers and the Singers.

With her eye on reward

She tilts her head religiously

At the most practical angle

Which reveals to her

That the fox is a country superstition,

That her eggs have made man her slave

And that the heavens, for all their threatening,

Have not yet fallen.

And she is stern. Her eye is fierce – blood

(That weakness) is punished instantly.

She is a hard bronze of uprightness.

And indulges herself in nothing

Except to swoon a little, a delicious slight swoon,

One eye closed, just before sleep,

Conjuring the odour of tarragon.

The Hare

I

That Elf

Riding his awkward pair of haunchy legs

That weird long-eared Elf

Wobbling down the highway

Don’t overtake him, don’t try to drive past him,

He’s scatty, he’s all over the road,

He can’t keep his steering, in his ramshackle go-cart,

His big loose wheels, buckled and rusty,

Nearly wobbling off

And all the screws in his head wobbling and loose

And his eyes wobbling

II

The Hare is a very fragile thing.

The life in the hare is a glassy goblet, and her yellow-fringed frost-flake belly says: Fragile.

The hare’s bones are light glass. And the hare’s face –

Who lifted her face to the Lord?

Her new-budded nostrils and lips,

For the daintiest pencillings, the last eyelash touches

Delicate as the down of a moth,

And the breath of awe

Which fixed the mad beauty-light

In her look

As if her retina

Were a moon perpetually at full.

Who is it, at midnight on the A30,

The Druid soul,

The night-streaker, the sudden lumpy goblin

That thumps your car under the belly

Then cries with human pain

And becomes a human baby on the road

That you dare hardly pick up?

Or leaps, like a long bat with little headlights,

Straight out of darkness

Into the driver’s nerves

With a jangle of cries

As if the car had crashed into a flying harp

So that the driver’s nerves flail and cry

Like a burst harp.

III

Uneasy she nears

As if she were being lured, but fearful,

Nearer.

Like a large egg toppling itself – mysterious!

Then she’ll stretch, tall, on her hind feet,

And lean on the air,

Taut – like a stilled yacht waiting on the air –

And what does the hunter see? A fairy woman?

A dream beast?

A kangaroo of the March corn?

The loveliest face listening,

Her black-tipped ears hearing the bud of the blackthorn

Opening its lips,

Her black-tipped hairs hearing tomorrow’s weather

Combing the mare’s tails,

Her snow-fluff belly feeling for the first breath,

Her orange nape, foxy with its dreams of the fox –

Witch-maiden

Heavy with trembling blood – astounding

How much blood there is in her body!

She is a moony pond of quaking blood

Twitched with spells, her gold-ringed eye spellbound –

Carrying herself so gently, balancing

Herself with the gentlest touches

As if her eyes brimmed –

IV

I’ve seen her,

A lank, lean hare, with her long thin feet

And her long, hollow thighs,

And her ears like ribbons

Careering by moonlight

In her Flamenco, her heels flinging the dust

On the drum of the hill.

And I’ve seen him, hobbling stiffly

God of Leapers

Surprised by dawn, earth-bound, and stained

With drying mud,

Painfully rocking over the furrows

With his Leaping-Legs, his Power-Thighs

Much too powerful for ordinary walking,

So powerful

They seem almost a burden, almost a problem,

Nearly an aching difficulty for him

When he tries to loiter or pause,

Nearly a heaving pain to lift and move

Like turning a cold car-engine with a bent crank handle –

Till a shock, a terror, with a bang

Grabs at her ears. An oven door

Bangs open, both barrels, and a barking

Bursts out of onions –

                                   and she leaps

And her heels

Hard as angle-iron kick salt and pepper

Into the lurcher’s eyes –

                                       and kick and kick

The spinning, turnip world

Into the lurcher’s gullet –

                                        as she slips

Between thin hawthorn and thinner bramble

Into tomorrow.

from RIVER

The River

Fallen from heaven, lies across

The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on

Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness

Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried

Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils.

It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit

It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.

So the river is a god

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,

Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.

Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan

for Hilary and Simon

‘Up in the pools,’ they’d said, and ‘Two miles upstream.’

Something sinister about bogland rivers.

And a shock –

     after the two miles of tumblequag, of Ice-Age hairiness, crusty, quaking cadaver and me lurching over it in elation like a daddy-long-legs –

     after crooked little clatterbrook and again clatterbrook (a hurry of shallow grey light so distilled it looked like acid) –

     and after the wobbly levels of a razor-edged, blood-smeared grass, the flood-sucked swabs of bog-cotton, the dusty calico rip-up of snipe –

     under those petrified scapulae, vertebrae, horn-skulls the Cuillins (asylum of eagles) that were blue-silvered like wrinkled baking foil in the blue noon that day, and tremulous –

     early August, in a hot lateness (only three hours before my boat), a glimpse of my watch and suddenly

     up to my hip in a suck-hole then on again teetering over the broken-necked heath-bobs a good half-hour and me melting in my combined fuel of toil and clobber suddenly

The shock.

The sheer cavern of current piling silence

Under my feet.

So lonely-drowning deep, so drowned-hair silent

So clear

Cleansing the body cavity of the underbog.

Such a brilliant cut-glass interior

Sliding under me

And I felt a little bit giddy

Ghostly

As I fished the long pool-tail

Peering into that superabundance of spirit.

And now where were they, my fellow aliens from prehistory?

Those peculiar eyes

So like mine, but fixed at zero,

Pressing in from outer darkness

Eyes of aimed sperm and of egg on their errand,

Looking for immortality

In the lap of a broken volcano, in the furrow of a lost glacier,

Those shuttles of love-shadow?

Only humbler beings waved at me –

Weeds grazing the bottom, idling their tails.

Till the last pool –

A broad, coiling whorl, a deep ear

Of pondering amber,

Greenish and precious like a preservative,

With a ram’s skull sunk there – magnified, a Medusa,

Funereal, phosphorescent, a lamp

Ten feet under the whisky.

I heard this pool whisper a warning.

I tickled its leading edges with temptation.

I stroked its throat with a whisker.

I licked the moulded hollows

Of its collarbones

Where the depth, now underbank opposite,

Pulsed up from contained excitements –

Eerie how you know when it’s coming –

So I felt it now, my blood

Prickling and thickening, altering

With an ushering-in of chills, a weird onset

As if mountains were pushing mountains higher

Behind me, to crowd over my shoulder –

Then the pool lifted a travelling bulge

And grabbed the tip of my heart-nerve, and crashed,

Trying to wrench it from me, and again

Lifted a flash of arm for leverage

And it was a Gruagach of the Sligachan!

Some Boggart up from a crack in the granite!

A Glaistig out of the skull!

                                          – what was it gave me

Such a supernatural, beautiful fright

And let go, and sank disembodied

Into the eye-pupil darkness?

Only a little salmon.

                                Salmo salar

The loveliest, left-behind, most-longed-for ogress

Of the Palaeolithic

Watched me through her time-warped judas-hole

In the ruinous castle of Skye

As I faded from the light of reality.

Low Water

                                 This evening

The river is a beautiful idle woman.

The day’s August burn-out has distilled

A heady sundowner.

She lies back, bored and tipsy.

She lolls on her deep couch. And a long thigh

Lifts from the flash of her silks.

Adoring trees, kneeling, ogreish eunuchs

Comb out her spread hair, massage her fingers.

She stretches – and an ecstasy tightens

Over her skin, and deep in her gold body

Thrills spasm and dissolve. She drowses.

Her half-dreams lift out of her, light-minded

Love-pact suicides. Copulation and death.

She stirs her love-potion – ooze of balsam

Thickened with fish-mucus and algae.

You stand under leaves, your feet in shallows.

She eyes you steadily from the beginning of the world.

Japanese River Tales

I

Tonight

From the swaddled village, down the padded lane

Snow is hurrying

To the tryst, is touching

At her hair, at her raiment

Glint-slippered

Over the stubble,

                             naked under

Her light robe, jewels

In her hair, in her ears, at her bare throat

Dark eye-flash

                         twigs and brambles

Catch at her

                  as she lifts

The raggy curtains

Of the river’s hovel, and plunges

Into his grasping bed.

II

The lithe river rejoices all morning

In his juicy bride – the snow princess

Who peeped from clouds, and chose him,

                           and descended.

The tale goes on

With glittery laughter of immortals

Shaking the alders –

In the end a drowsy after-bliss

Blue-hazes the long valley. High gulls

Look down on the flash

And languor of suppled shoulders

Bedded in her ermine.

                                   Night

Lifts off the illusion. Lifts

The beauty from her skull. The sockets, in fact,

Are root-arches – empty

To ashes of stars. Her kiss

Grips through the full throat and locks

On the dislodged vertebrae.

                                            Her talons

Lengthened by moonlight, numb open

The long belly of blood.

                                       And the river

Is a gutter of death,

A spill of glitters

                            dangling from her grasp

As she flies

Through the shatter of space and

Out of being.

Ophelia

Where the pool unfurls its undercloud –

There she goes.

And through and through

The kneading tumble and the water-hammer.

If a trout leaps into air, it is not for a breather.

It has to drop back immediately

Into this peculiar engine

That made it, and keeps it going,

And that works it to death –

                                     there she goes

Darkfish, finger to her lips,

Staringly into the afterworld.

Strangers

Dawn. The river thins.

The combed-out coiffure at the pool-tail

Brightens thinly.

The slung pool’s long hammock still flat out.

The sea-trout, a salt flotilla, at anchor,

Substanceless, flame-shadowed,

Hang in a near emptiness of sunlight.

There they actually are, under homebody oaks,

Close to teddybear sheep, near purple loose-strife –

Space-helms bowed in preoccupation,

Only a slight riffling of their tail-ailerons

Corrective of drift,

Gills easing.

And the pool’s toiled rampart roots,

The cavorting of new heifers, water-skeeters

On their abacus, even the slow claim

Of the buzzard’s hand

Merely decorate a heaven

Where the sea-trout, fixed and pouring,

Lean in the speed of light.

                                        And make nothing

Of the strafed hogweed sentry skeletons,

Nothing of the sun, so openly aiming down.

Thistle-floss bowls over them. First, lost leaves

Feel over them with blind shadows.

The sea-trout, upstaring, in trance,

Absorb everything and forget it

Into a blank of bliss.

And this is the real samadhi – worldless, levitated.

Till, bulging, a man-shape

Wobbles their firmament.

                                        Now see the holy ones

Shrink their auras, slim, sink, focus, prepare

To scram like trout.

The Gulkana

Jumbled iceberg hills, away to the North –

And a long wreath of fire-haze.

The Gulkana, where it meets the Copper,

Swung, jade, out of the black spruce forest,

And disappeared into it.

Strange word, Gulkana. What does it mean?

A pre-Columbian glyph.

A pale blue thread – scrawled with a child’s hand

Across our map. A Lazarus of water

Returning from seventy below.

                                                   We stumbled,

Not properly awake

In a weird light – a bombardment

Of purplish emptiness –

Among phrases that lumped out backwards. Among rocks

That kept startling me – too rock-like,

Hypnagogic rocks –

                                  A scrapyard of boxy shacks

And supermarket refuse, dogs, wrecked pick-ups,

The Indian village where we bought our pass

Was comatose – on the stagnation toxins

Of a cultural vasectomy. They were relapsing

To Cloud-like-a-boulder, Mica, Bear, Magpie.

We hobbled along a tightrope shore of pebbles

Under a trickling bluff

That bounced the odd pebble onto us, eerily.

(The whole land was in perpetual, seismic tremor.)

Gulkana –

Biblical, a deranging cry

From the wilderness – burst past us.

A stone voice that dragged at us.

I found myself clinging

To the lifted skyline fringe of rag spruce

And the subsidence under my bootsoles

With balancing glances – nearly a fear,

Something I kept trying to deny

With deliberate steps. But it came with me

As if it swayed on my pack –

A nape-of-the-neck unease. We’d sploshed far enough

Through the spongy sinks of the permafrost

For this river’s

Miraculous fossils – creatures that each midsummer

Resurrected through it, in a blood-rich flesh.

Pilgrims for a fish!

Prospectors for the lode in a fish’s eye!

In that mercury light, that ultra-violet,

My illusion developed. I felt hunted.

I tested my fear. It seemed to live in my neck –

A craven, bird-headed alertness.

And in my eye

That felt blind somehow to what I stared at

As if it stared at me. And in my ear –

So wary for the air-stir in the spruce-tips

My ear-drum almost ached. I explained it

To my quietly arguing, lucid panic

As my fear of one inside me,

A bodiless twin, some doppelgänger

Disinherited other, unliving,

Ever-living, a larva from prehistory,

Whose journey this was, who now exulted

Recognizing his home,

And whose gaze I could feel as he watched me

Fiddling with my gear – the interloper,

The fool he had always hated. We pitched our tent

And for three days

Our tackle scratched the windows of the express torrent.

We seemed underpowered. Whatever we hooked

Bent in air, a small porpoise,

Then went straight downriver under the weight

And joined the glacial landslide of the Copper

Which was the colour of cement.

Even when we got one ashore

It was too big to eat.

But there was the eye!

                                       I peered into that lens

Seeking what I had come for. (What had I come for?

The camera-flash? The burned-out, ogling bulb?)

What I saw was small, crazed, snake-like.

It made me think of a dwarf, shrunken sun

And of the black, refrigerating pressures

Under the Bering Sea.

We relaunched their mulberry-dark torsos,

Those gulping, sooted mouths, the glassy visors –

Arks of an undelivered covenant,

Egg-sacs of their own Eden,

Seraphs of heavy ore

They surged away, magnetized,

Into the furnace boom of the Gulkana.

Bliss had fixed their eyes

Like an anaesthetic. They were possessed

By that voice in the river

And its accompaniment –

The flutes, the drumming. And they rose and sank

Like voices, themselves like singers

In its volume. We watched them, deepening away.

They looked like what they were, somnambulists,

Drugged, ritual victims, melting away

Towards a sacrament –

                                         a consummation

That could only be death.

Which it would be, within some numbered days,

On some stony platform of water,

In a spillway, where a man could hardly stand –

Aboriginal Americans,

High among rains, in an opening of the hills,

They will begin to circle,

Shedding their ornaments,

In shufflings and shudders, male by female,

Begin to dance their deaths –

The current hosing over their brows and shoulders,

Bellies riven open and shaken empty

Into a gutter of pebbles

In the orgy of eggs and sperm,

The dance orgy of being reborn

From which masks and regalia drift empty,

Torn off – at last their very bodies,

In the numbed, languorous frenzy, as obstacles,

Ripped away –

                            ecstasy dissolving

In the mercy of water, at the star of the source,

Devoured by revelation,

Every molecule drained, and counted, and healed

Into the amethyst of emptiness –

I came back to myself. A spectre of fragments

Lifted my quivering coffee, in the aircraft,

And sipped at it.

I imagined the whole 747

As if a small boy held it

Making its noise. A spectre,

Escaping the film’s flicker, peered from the porthole

Under the sun’s cobalt core-darkness

Down at Greenland’s corpse

Tight-sheeted with snow-glare.

                                                    Word by word

The voice of the river moved in me.

It was like lovesickness.

A numbness, a secret bleeding.

Waking in my body.

                                    Telling of the King

Salmon’s eye.

                           Of the blood-mote mosquito.

And the stilt-legged, subarctic, one-rose rose

With its mock-aperture

Tilting towards us

In our tent-doorway, its needle tremor.

And the old Indian Headman, in his tatty jeans and socks, who smiled

Adjusting to our incomprehension – his face

A whole bat, that glistened and stirred.

Go Fishing

Join water, wade in underbeing

Let brain mist into moist earth

Ghost loosen away downstream

Gulp river and gravity

Lose words

Cease

Be assumed into glistenings of lymph

As if creation were a wound

As if this flow were all plasm healing

Be supplanted by mud and leaves and pebbles

By sudden rainbow monster-structures

That materialize in suspension gulping

And dematerialize under pressure of the eye

Be cleft by the sliding prow

Displaced by the hull of light and shadow

Dissolved in earth-wave, the soft sun-shock,

Dismembered in sun-melt

Become translucent – one untangling drift

Of water-mesh, and a weight of earth-taste light

Mangled by wing-shadows

Everything circling and flowing and hover-still

Crawl out over roots, new and nameless

Search for face, harden into limbs

Let the world come back, like a white hospital

Busy with urgency words

Try to speak and nearly succeed

Heal into time and other people

Salmon Eggs

The salmon were just down there –

Shivering together, touching at each other,

Shedding themselves for each other –

Now beneath flood-murmur

They peel away deathwards.

                                                     January haze,

With a veined yolk of sun. In bone-damp cold

I lean and watch the water, listening to water

Till my eyes forget me

And the piled flow supplants me, the mud-blooms

All this ponderous light of everlasting

Collapsing away under its own weight

Mastodon ephemera

Mud-curdling, bull-dozing, hem-twinkling

Caesarean of Heaven and Earth, unfelt

With exhumations and delirious advents –

                                      Catkins

Wriggle at their mother’s abundance. The spider clings to his craft.

Something else is going on in the river

More vital than death – death here seems a superficiality

Of small scaly limbs, parasitical. More grave than life

Whose reflex jaws and famished crystals

Seem incidental

To this telling – these tidings of plasm –

The melt of mouthing silence, the charge of light

Dumb with immensity.

                                  The river goes on

Sliding through its place, undergoing itself

In its wheel.

                                   I make out the sunk foundations

Of dislocated crypts, a bedrock

Time-hewn, time-riven altar. And this is the liturgy

Of Earth’s advent – harrowing, crowned – a travail

Of raptures and rendings. Perpetual mass

Of the waters

Wells from the cleft.

                                  This is the swollen vent

Of the nameless

Teeming inside atoms – and inside the haze

And inside the sun and inside the earth.

It is the font, brimming with touch and whisper,

Swaddling the egg.

                                Only birth matters

Say the river’s whorls.

                                     And the river

Silences everything in a leaf-mouldering hush

Where sun rolls bare, and earth rolls,

And mind condenses on old haws.

A Cormorant

Here before me, snake-head

My waders weigh seven pounds.

My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary

For its pockets, is proof

Against the sky at my back. My bag

Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough

For a year in the Pleistocene.

My hat, of use only

If this May relapses to March,

Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,

Optimistic, awkward, infatuated

With every twig-snag and fence-barb

Will slowly ruin the day. I paddle

Precariously on slimed shale,

And infiltrate twenty yards

Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam

Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic

Of the river’s tunnel, and pray

With futuristic, archaic under-breath

So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,

Will attach its incomprehension

To the bauble I offer to space in general.

The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,

Body snake-low – sea-serpentish.

He’s thinking: ‘Will that stump

Stay a stump just while I dive?’ He dives.

He sheds everything from his tail end

Except fish-action, becomes fish,

Disappears from bird,

Dissolving himself

Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally

Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,

Himself as he was, and escapes me.

Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,

A deep-sea diver in two inches of water.

An Eel

I

The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely ripened

Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles

For some large containment. Lobed glands

Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.

This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.

Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,

The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,

Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold

Distilled only enough to be different

From the olive lode of her body,

The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger

With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye

Behind her eye, paler, blinder,

Inward. Her buffalo hump

Begins the amazement of her progress.

Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin – concession

To fish-life – secretes itself

Flush with her concealing suit: under it

The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel

As her belly is, a dulled pearl.

Strangest, the thumb-print skin, the rubberized weave

Of her insulation. Her whole body

Damascened with identity. This is she

Suspends the Sargasso

In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell

Sealed from event, her patience

Global and furthered with love

By the bending stars as if she

Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone

In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,

The nun of water.

II

Where does the river come from?

And the eel, the night-mind of water –

The river within the river and opposite –

The night-nerve of water?

Not from the earth’s remembering mire

Not from the air’s whim

Not from the brimming sun. Where from?

From the bottom of the nothing pool

Sargasso of God

Out of the empty spiral of stars

A glimmering person

Performance

Just before the curtain falls in the river

The Damselfly, with offstage, inaudible shriek

Reappears, weightless.

Hover-poised, in her snake-skin leotards,

Her violet-dark elegance.

Eyelash-delicate, a dracula beauty,

In her acetylene jewels.

Her mascara smudged, her veils shimmer-fresh –

Late August. Some sycamore leaves

Already in their museum, eaten to lace.

Robin song bronze-touching the stillness

Over posthumous nettles. The swifts, as one,

Whipcracked, gone. Blackberries.

                                                      And now, lightly,

Adder-shock of this dainty assassin

Still in mid-passion –

                                   still in her miracle play:

Masked, archaic, mute, insect mystery

Out of the sun’s crypt.

                                       Everything is forgiven

Such a metamorphosis in love!

Phaedra Titania

Dragon of crazed enamels!

Tragedienne of the ultra-violet,

So sulphurous and so frail,

Stepping so magnetically to her doom!

Lifted out of the river with tweezers

Dripping the sun’s incandescence –

                                                        suddenly she

Switches her scene elsewhere.

              (Find him later, halfway up a nettle,

              A touch-crumple petal of web and dew –

              Midget puppet-clown, tranced on his strings,

              In the nightfall pall of balsam.)

Night Arrival of Sea-Trout

Honeysuckle hanging her fangs.

Foxglove rearing her open belly.

Dogrose touching the membrane.

Through the dew’s mist, the oak’s mass

Comes plunging, tossing dark antlers.

Then a shattering

Of the river’s hole, where something leaps out –

An upside-down, buried heaven

Snarls, moon-mouthed, and shivers.

Summer dripping stars, biting at the nape.

Lobworms coupling in saliva.

Earth singing under her breath.

And out in the hard corn a horned god

Running and leaping

With a bat in his drum.

October Salmon

He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,

Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,

Half under a tangle of brambles.

After his two thousand miles, he rests,

Breathing in that lap of easy current

In his graveyard pool.

About six pounds weight,

Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –

But already a veteran,

Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it’s over!

So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!

Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s beauty-dress,

Her life-robe –

Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,

Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –

An autumnal pod of his flower,

The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,

With the sea-going Aurora Borealis

Of his April power –

The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –

Ripened to muddy dregs,

The river reclaiming his sea-metals.

In the October light

He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.

Death has already dressed him

In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,

Mapping the completion of his service,

His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body

A fungoid anemone of canker –

Can the caress of water ease him?

The flow will not let up for a minute.

What a change! from that covenant of polar light

To this shroud in a gutter!

What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!

His living body become death’s puppet,

Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes

He haunts his own staring vigil

And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,

And the humiliation of the role!

And that is how it is,

That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour,

That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,

And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty

In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,

Body simply the armature of energy

In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,

The salt mouthful of actual existence

With strength like light –

Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.

This chamber of horrors is also home.

He was probably hatched in this very pool.

And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows

Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car tyres, bottles

And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.

People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.

If boys see him they will try to kill him.

All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,

The epic poise

That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient

In the machinery of heaven.

That Morning

We came where the salmon were so many

So steady, so spaced, so far-aimed

On their inner map, England could add

Only the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire

Hung with the drumming drift of Lancasters

Till the world had seemed capsizing slowly.

Solemn to stand there in the pollen light

Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed

As from the hand of God. There the body

Separated, golden and imperishable,

From its doubting thought – a spirit-beacon

Lit by the power of the salmon

That came on, came on, and kept on coming

As if we flew slowly, their formations

Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing

One wrong thought might darken. As if the fallen

World and salmon were over. As if these

Were the imperishable fish

That had let the world pass away –

There, in a mauve light of drifted lupins,

They hung in the cupped hands of mountains

Made of tingling atoms. It had happened.

Then for a sign that we were where we were

Two gold bears came down and swam like men

Beside us. And dived like children.

And stood in deep water as on a throne

Eating pierced salmon off their talons.

So we found the end of our journey.

So we stood, alive in the river of light

Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

from WOLFWATCHING

Astrological Conundrums

I THE FOOL’S EVIL DREAM

I was just walking about.

Trees here, trees there, ferny accompaniment.

Rocks sticking through their moss jerseys.

A twilight like smoked spectacles, depressive.

I saw a glowing beast – a tigress.

Only different with flower-smells, wet-root smells,

Fish-still-alive-from-their-weed-river smells

And eyes that hurt me with beauty.

She wanted to play so we gambolled.

She promised to show me her cave

Which was the escape route from death

And which came out into a timeless land.

To find this cave, she said, we lie down

And you hold me, so, and we fly.

So it was I came to be folded

In the fur of a tiger. And as we travelled

She told me of a very holy man

Who fed himself to a tigress

Because hunger had dried up her milk

And as he filled her belly he became

The never-dying god who gives everything

Which he had always wanted to be.

As I heard her story I dissolved

In the internal powers of tiger

And passed through a dim land

Swinging under her backbone. Till I heard

A sudden cry of fear, an infant’s cry –

Close, as if my own ear had cried it.

I sat up

Wet and alone

Among starry rocks.

A bright spirit went away weeping.

II NEARLY AWAKE

The bulls swing their headweights,

Eyes bulging storms and moon-terrors.

Their cleft roots creak all round you

Where you lie, face-bedded, vegetable.

A frozen stone – the stone of your headbone.

The Universe flies dark.

The bulls bulk darker, as their starred nostrils

Blow and ponder your spine.

You lie, helpless as grass. Your prayer,

Petrified into the earth’s globe,

Supports you, a crest of fear

On its unstirring.

The wild bulls of your mother have found you.

Huge nudgings of blood, sperm, saliva

Rasp you alive, towel you awake with tongues.

Now they start gnawing the small of your back.

The cry you dare not cry in these moments

Will last you a lifetime.

III TELL

This was my dream. Suddenly my old steel bow

Sprang into my hand and my whole body

Leaned into the bend a harp frame

So perfectly strung it seemed weightless.

I saw the Raven sitting alone

On the crest of the globe. I could see

The Raven’s eye agleam in the sky river

Like an emblem on a flowing banner.

I saw the Raven’s eye watching me

Through the slitted fabric of the skyflow.

I bent the bow’s full weight against the star

In that eye until I could see nothing

But that star. Then as I sank my aim

Deeper into the star that had grown

To fill the Universe I heard a whisper:

‘Be careful. I’m here. Don’t forget me.’

With all my might – I hesitated.

Dust As We Are

My post-war father was so silent

He seemed to be listening. I eavesdropped

On the hot line. His lonely sittings

Mangled me, in secret – like TV

Watched too long, my nerves lasered.

Then, an after image of the incessant

Mowing passage of machine-gun effects,

What it filled a trench with. And his laugh

(How had that survived – so nearly intact?)

Twitched the curtain never quite deftly enough

Over the hospital wards

Crowded with his (photographed) shock-eyed pals.

I had to use up a lot of spirit

Getting over it. I was helping him.

I was his supplementary convalescent.

He took up his pre-war joie de vivre.

But his displays of muscular definition

Were a bleached montage – lit landscapes:

Swampquakes of the slime of puddled soldiers

Where bones and bits of equipment

Showered from every shell-burst.

                                                    Naked men

Slithered staring where their mothers and sisters

Would never have to meet their eyes, or see

Exactly how they sprawled and were trodden.

So he had been salvaged and washed.

His muscles very white – marble white.

He had been heavily killed. But we had revived him.

Now he taught us a silence like prayer.

There he sat, killed but alive – so long

As we were very careful. I divined,

With a comb,

Under his wavy, golden hair, as I combed it,

The fragility of skull. And I filled

With his knowledge.

                                  After mother’s milk

This was the soul’s food. A soap-smell spectre

Of the massacre of innocents. So the soul grew.

A strange thing, with rickets – a hyena.

No singing – that kind of laughter.

Telegraph Wires

Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor,

And fit them together. The thing comes alive in your ear.

Towns whisper to towns over the heather.

But the wires cannot hide from the weather.

So oddly, so daintily made

It is picked up and played.

Such unearthly airs

The ear hears, and withers!

In the revolving ballroom of space,

Bowed over the moor, a bright face

Draws out of telegraph wires the tones

That empty human bones.

Sacrifice

Born at the bottom of the heap. And as he grew upwards

The welts of his brow deepened, fold upon fold.

Like the Tragic Mask.

Cary Grant was his living double.

They said: When he was little he’d drop

And kick and writhe, and kick and cry:

‘I’ll break my leg! I’ll break my leg!’

Till he’d ground his occiput bald.

While the brothers built cords, moleskins, khakis

Into dynastic, sweated ziggurats,

His fateful forehead sank

Away among Westerns, the ruts of the Oregon Trail.

Screwdriver, drill, chisel, saw, hammer

Were less than no use.

A glass-fronted cabinet was his showpiece.

His wife had locked him in there with the china.

His laugh jars at my ear. That laugh

Was an elastic vault into freedom.

Sound as a golfball.

He’d belt it into the blue.

He never drank in a bar. When he stood

Before he’d stepped she’d plumped the cushions beneath him.

So perfectly kept.

Sundays they drove here and there in the car.

An armchair Samson. Baffled and shorn

His dream bulged into forearms

That performed their puppet-play of muscles

To make a nephew stare. He and I

Lammed our holly billets across Banksfields –

A five-inch propeller climbing the skylines

For two, three seconds – to the drop. And the paced-out length

Of his leash! The limit of human strength!

Suddenly he up and challenged

His brothers for a third of the partnership.

The duumvirate of wives turned down their thumbs.

Brotherly concern – Rain from Rochdale!

Snow from Halifax! Stars over valley walls!

His fireside escape

Simple as leaping astride a bare-back pinto

Was a kick at the ceiling, and that laugh.

He toiled in his attic after midnight

Mass-producing toy ducks

On wooden wheels, that went with clicks.

Flight! Flight!

The brothers closed their eyes. They quivered their jowls:

British Columbia’s the place for a chap like thee!

The lands of the future! Look at Australia –

Crying out for timber buildings! Get out there!

On the canal bridge bend, at Hawkscluffe,

A barrel bounced off a lorry.

His motorbike hit the wall.

‘I just flew straight up – and when I dropped

I missed the canal! I actually missed the canal!

I nearly broke the bank! For once

I landed smack on my feet!

My shoelaces burst from top to bottom!

His laugh thumped my body.

When he tripped

The chair from beneath him, in his attic,

Midsummer dusk, his sister, forty miles off,

Cried out at the hammer blow on her nape.

And his daughter

Who’d climbed up to singsong: ‘Supper, Daddy’

Fell back down the stairs to the bottom.

For the Duration

I felt a strange fear when the war-talk,

Like a creeping barrage, approached you.

Jig and jag I’d fitted much of it together.

Our treasure, your D.C.M. – again and again

Carrying in the wounded

Collapsing with exhaustion. And as you collapsed

A shell-burst

Just in front of you lifting you upright

For the last somnambulist yards

Before you fell under your load into the trench.

The shell, some other time, that buried itself

Between your feet as you walked

And thoughtfully failed to go off.

The shrapnel hole, over your heart – how it spun you.

The blue scar of the bullet at your ankle

From a traversing machine-gun that tripped you

As you cleared the parapet. Meanwhile

The horrors were doled out, everybody

Had his appalling tale.

But what alarmed me most

Was your silence. Your refusal to tell.

I had to hear from others

What you survived and what you did.

Maybe you didn’t want to frighten me.

Now it’s too late.

Now I’d ask you shamelessly.

But then I felt ashamed.

What was my shame? Why couldn’t I have borne

To hear you telling what you underwent?

Why was your war so much more unbearable

Than anybody else’s? As if nobody else

Knew how to remember. After some uncle’s

Virtuoso tale of survival

That made me marvel and laugh –

I looked at your face, your cigarette

Like a dial-finger. And my mind

Stopped with numbness.

Your day-silence was the coma

Out of which your night-dreams rose shouting.

I could hear you from my bedroom –

The whole hopelessness still going on,

No man’s land still crying and burning

Inside our house, and you climbing again

Out of the trench, and wading back into the glare

As if you might still not manage to reach us

And carry us to safety.

Walt

I UNDER HIGH WOOD

Going up for the assault that morning

They passed the enclosure of prisoners.

‘A big German stood at the wire‚’ he said,

‘A big German, and he caught my eye.

And he cursed me. I felt his eye curse me.’

Halfway up the field, the bullet

Hit him in the groin. He rolled

Into a shell-hole. The sun rose and burned.

A sniper clipped his forehead. He wormed

Deeper down. Bullet after bullet

Dug at the crater rim, searching for him.

Another clipped him. Then the sniper stopped.

All that day he lay. He went walks

Along the Heights Road, from Peckett to Midgley,

Down to Mytholmroyd (past Ewood

Of his ancestors, past the high-perched factory

Of his future life). Up the canal bank,

Up Redacre, along and down into Hebden,

Then up into Crimsworth Dene, to their old campground

In the happy valley.

And up over Shackleton Hill, to Widdop,

Back past Greenwood Lea, above Hardcastles,

To Heptonstall – all day

He walked about the valley, as he lay

Under High Wood in the shell-hole.

I knew the knot of scar on his temple.

We stood in the young March corn

Of a perfect field. His fortune made.

His life’s hope over. Me beside him

Just the age he’d been when that German

Took aim with his eye and hit him so hard

It brought him and his wife down together,

With all his children one after the other.

A misty rain prickled and hazed.

‘Here‚’ he hazarded. ‘Somewhere just about here.

This is where he stopped me. I got this far.’

He frowned uphill towards the skyline tree-fringe

As through binoculars

Towards all that was left.

II THE ATLANTIC

Night after night he’d sat there,

Eighty-four, still telling the tale.

With his huge thirst for anaesthetics.

‘Time I were dead‚’ I’d heard. ‘I want to die.’

That’s altered.

                            We lean to a cliff rail

Founded in tremblings.

Beneath us, two thousand five hundred

Miles of swung worldweight

Hit England’s western wall

With a meaningless bump.

‘Aye!’ he sighs. Over and over. ‘Aye!’

And massages his temples.

Can he grasp what’s happened? His frown

Won’t connect. Familiar eagle frown –

Dark imperial eye. The ground flinches.

Mountains of dissolution

Boil cold geysers, bespatter us.

                                                     Tranquillizers,

Steroids, and a whole crateful

Of escapist Madeira, collided

Three evenings ago –

They swamped and drowned

The synapses, the breath-born spinnaker shells

Of consonants and vowels.

                                              I found him

Trying to get up out of a chair,

Fish-eyed, and choking, clawing at air,

Dumbness like a bone stuck in his throat.

He’s survived with a word – one last word.

A last mouthful. I listen.

And I almost hear a new baby’s

Eyeless howl of outrage – sobered to ‘Aye!’

Sighed slow. Like blessed breath. He breathes it.

I dare hardly look at him. I watch.

He’d crept into my care.

A cursed hulk of marriage, a full-rigged fortune

Cast his body, crusted like Job’s,

Onto my threshold. Strange Dead Sea creature.

He crawled in his ruins, like Timon.

The Times Index was his morning torture.

Fairy gold of a family of dead leaves.

‘Why?’ he’d cried. ‘Why can’t I just die?’

His memory was so sharp – a potsherd.

He raked at his skin, whispering ‘God! God!’

Nightly, a nurse eased his scales with ointment.

I’ve brought him out for air. And the cliffs. And there

The sea towards America – wide open.

Untrodden, glorious America!

Look, a Peregrine Falcon – they’re rare!

Nothing will connect.

He peers down past his shoes

Into a tangle of horizons –

Black, tilted bedrock struggling up,

Mouthing disintegration.

Every weedy breath of the sea

Is another swell of overwhelming.

Meaningless. And a sigh. Meaningless.

Now he’s closed his eyes. He caresses

His own skull, over and over, comforting.

The Millmaster, the Caesar whose frown

Tossed my boyhood the baffling coin ‘guilty’.

His fingers are my mother’s. They seem astray

In quaverings and loss

As he strokes and strokes at his dome.

The sea thuds and sighs. Bowed at the rail

He seems to be touching at a wound he dare not touch.

He seems almost to find the exact spot.

His eyelids quiver, in the certainty of touch –

And ‘Aye!’ he breathes. ‘Aye!’

We turn away. Then as he steadies himself,

Still gripping the rail, his reaching stare

Meets mine watching him. I can’t escape it

Or hold it. Walt! Walt!

                                     I bury it

Hugger-mugger anyhow

Inside my shirt.

Little Whale Song

for Charles Causley 

What do they think of themselves

With their global brains –

The tide-power voltage illumination

Of those brains? Their X-ray all-dimension

Grasp of this world’s structures, their brains budded

Clone replicas of the electron world

Lit and re-imagining the world,

Perfectly tuned receivers and perceivers,

Each one a whole tremulous world

Feeling through the world? What

Do they make of each other?

‘We are beautiful. We stir

Our self-colour in the pot of colours

Which is the world. At each

Tail-stroke we deepen

Our being into the world’s lit substance,

And our joy into the world’s

Spinning bliss, and our peace

Into the world’s floating, plumed peace.’

Their body-tons, echo-chambered,

Amplify the whisper

Of currents and airs, of sea-peoples

And planetary manoeuvres,

Of seasons, of shores, and of their own

Moon-lifted incantation, as they dance

Through the original Earth-drama

In which they perform, as from the beginning,

The Royal House.

                               The loftiest, spermiest

Passions, the most exquisite pleasures,

The noblest characters, the most god-like

Oceanic presence and poise –

The most terrible fall.

On the Reservations

for Jack Brown

I SITTING BULL ON CHRISTMAS MORNING

Who put this pit-head wheel,

Smashed but carefully folded

In some sooty fields, into his stocking?

And his lifetime nightshirt – a snarl

Of sprung celluloid? Here’s his tin flattened,

His helmet. And the actual sun closed

Into what looks like a bible of coal

That drops to bits as he lifts it. Very strange.

Packed in mossy woods, mostly ashes,

Here’s a doll’s cot. And a tiny coffin.

And here are Orca Tiger Eagle tattered

In his second birthday’s ragbook

From before memory began.

All the props crushed, the ceilings collapsed

In his stocking. Torremolinos, Cleethorpes –

The brochures screwed up in a tantrum

As her hair shrivelled to a cinder

In his stocking. Pit boots. And, strange,

A London, burst, spewing tea-leaves,

With a creased postcard of the Acropolis.

Chapels pews broken television.

(Who dumped these, into his stocking,

Under coal-slag in a flooded cellar?)

Pink Uns and a million whippet collars –

Did he ask for these? A jumbo jet

Parcelled in starred, split, patched Christmas wrappings

Of a concrete yard and a brick wall

Black with scribble

In his stocking. No tobacco. A few

Rabbits and foxes broken leaking feathers.

Nevertheless, he feels like a new man –

Though tribally scarred (stitch-tattoos of coal-dust),

Though pale (soiled, the ivory bulb of a snowdrop

Dug up and tossed aside),

Though one of the lads (the horde, the spores of nowhere

Cultured under lamps and multiplied

In the laboratories

Between Mersey and Humber),

He stands, lungs easy, freed hands –

Bombarded by pollens from the supernovae,

Two eyepits awash in the millennia –

With his foot in his stocking.

II NIGHTVOICE

My young men shall never work. Men who work cannot dream, and wisdom comes in dreams.’ Smohalla, Nez Percé Indians

She dreams she sleepwalks crying the Don River

relieves its nine

circles through her kitchen her kids

mops and brooms herself a squeegee and not

soaking in but

bulging pulsing out of their pores the

ordure déjà vu in Tesco’s makes her

giddy

She dreams she sleepwalks crying her Dad alive

dug up is being

pushed into a wood-burning stove

by pensioners who chorus in croaks

While Shepherds

Watched Their television gives her

palpitations

She dreams she sleepwalks crying all the dead

huddle

in the slag-heaps wrong

land wrong

time tepees a final

resting for the epidemic

solution every

pit-shaft a

mass-grave herself

in a silly bottle shawled

in the canal’s

fluorescence the message

of the survivors a surplus people

the words

washed off her wrists

and hands she complains keep feeling

helpless

She dreams she sleepwalks mainstreet nightly crying

Stalin

keeps her as an ant

in a formicary in a

garbage-can which is his private office

urinal she thinks her aerials

must be bent

Remembering how a flare of pure torrent

sluiced the pit muck

off his shoulder-slopes while her hands

soapy with milk blossom anointed

him and in their hearth

fingers of the original sun opened

the black

bright book of the stone

he’d brought from beneath dreams

or did she dream it

III THE GHOST DANCER

‘We are not singing sportive songs. It is as if we were weeping, asking for life –’ Owl, Fox Indians 

A sulky boy. And he stuns your ear with song.

Swastika limbs, his whole physique – a dance.

The fool of prophecy, nightlong, daylong

Out of a waste lot brings deliverance.

Just some kid, with a demonic roar

Spinning in vacuo, inches clear of the floor.

Half-anguish half-joy, half-shriek half-moan:

He is the gorgon against his own fear.

Through his septum a dog’s penile bone.

A chime of Chubb keys dangling at each ear.

Temenos Jaguar mask – a vogue mandala:

Half a Loa, half a drugged Oglala.

With woad cobras coiling their arm-clasp

Out of his each arm-pit, their ganch his grasp.

Bracelets, anklets; girlish, a bacchus chained.

An escapologist’s pavement, padlock dance.

A mannequin elf, topped with a sugarfloss mane

Or neon rhino power-cone on a shorn sconce,

Or crest of a Cock of the Rock, or Cockatoo shock,

Or the sequinned crown of a Peacock.

And snake-spined, all pentecostal shivers,

This megawatt, berserker medium

With his strobe-drenched battle cry delivers

The nineteenth century from his mother’s womb:

The work-house dread that brooded, through her term,

Over the despair of salvaged sperm.

Mau-Mau Messiah’s showbiz lightning stroke

Puffs the stump of Empire up in smoke.

Brain-box back to front, heart inside out,

Aura for body, and for so-called soul

Under the moment’s touch a reed that utters

Out of the solar cobalt core a howl

Bomblit, rainbowed, aboriginal:

‘Start afresh, this time unconquerable.’

from RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY

Rain-Charm for the Duchy

for H.R.H. Prince Harry

After the five-month drought

My windscreen was frosted with dust.

Sight itself had grown a harsh membrane

Against glare and particles.

Now the first blobby tears broke painfully.

Big, sudden thunderdrops. I felt them sploshing like vapoury petrol

Among the ants

In Cranmere’s cracked heath-tinder. And into the ulcer craters

Of what had been river pools.

Then, like taking a great breath, we were under it.

Thunder gripped and picked up the city.

Rain didn’t so much fall as collapse.

The pavements danced, like cinders in a riddle.

Flash in the pan, I thought, as people scampered.

Soon it was falling vertical, precious, pearled.

Thunder was a brass-band accompaniment

To some festive, civic event. Squeals and hurry. With tourist bunting.

The precinct saplings lifted their arms and faces. And the heaped-up sky

Moved in mayoral pomp, behind buildings,

With flash and thump. It had almost gone by

And I almost expected the brightening. Instead, something like a shutter

Jerked and rattled – and the whole county darkened.

Then rain really came down. You scrambled into the car

Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush.

What a weight of warm Atlantic water!

The car-top hammered. The Cathedral jumped in and out

Of a heaven that had obviously caught fire

And couldn’t be contained.

A girl in high heels, her handbag above her head,

Risked it across the square’s lit metals.

We saw surf cuffed over her and the car jounced.

Grates, gutters, clawed in the backwash.

She kept going. Flak and shrapnel

Of thundercracks

Hit the walls and roofs. Still a swimmer

She bobbed off, into sea-smoke,

Where headlights groped. Already

Thunder was breaking up the moors.

It dragged tors over the city –

Uprooted chunks of map. Smeltings of ore, pink and violet,

Spattered and wriggled down

Into the boiling sea

Where Exeter huddled –

A small trawler, nets out.

‘Think of the barley!’ you said.

You remembered earlier harvests.

But I was thinking

Of joyful sobbings –

The throb

In the rock-face mosses of the Chains,

And of the exultant larvae in the Barle’s shrunk trench, their filaments ablur like propellers, under the churned ceiling of light,

And of the Lyn’s twin gorges, clearing their throats, deepening their voices, beginning to hear each other

Rehearse forgotten riffles,

And the Mole, a ditch’s choked whisper

Rousing the stagnant camps of the Little Silver, the Crooked Oak and the Yeo

To a commotion of shouts, muddied oxen

A rumbling of wagons,

And the red seepage, the smoke of life

Lowering its ringlets into the Taw,

And the Torridge, rising to the kiss,

Plunging under sprays, new-born,

A washed cherub, clasping the breasts of light,

And the Okement, nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans,

And the Tamar, roused and blinking under the fifty-mile drumming,

Declaiming her legend – her rusty knights tumbling out of their clay vaults, her cantrevs assembling from shillets,

With a cheering of aged stones along the Lyd and the Lew, the Wolf and the Thrushel,

And the Tavy, jarred from her quartzy rock-heap, feeling the moor shift

Rinsing her stale mouth, tasting tin, copper, ozone,

And the baby Erme, under the cyclone’s top-heavy, toppling sea-fight, setting afloat odd bits of dead stick,

And the Dart, her shaggy horde coming down

Astride bareback ponies, with a cry,

Loosening sheepskin banners, bumping the granite,

Flattening rowans and frightening oaks,

And the Teign, startled in her den

By the rain-dance of bracken

Hearing Heaven reverberate under Gidleigh,

And the highest pool of the Exe, her coil recoiling under the sky-shock

Where a drinking stag flings its head up

From a spilled skyful of lightning –

My windscreen wipers swam as we moved.

                                                  I imagined the two moors

The two stone-age hands

Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering –

And I thought of those other, different lightnings, the patient, thirsting ones

Under Crow Island, inside Bideford Bar,

And between the Hamoaze anchor chains,

And beneath the thousand, shivering, fibreglass hulls

Inside One Gun Point, and aligned

Under the Ness, and inside Great Bull Hill:

The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit

And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings,

Twisting their glints in the suspense,

Biting at the stir, beginning to move.

UNCOLLECTED

Old Oats

‘Mad Laughter’, your sister – her grey perm

Rayed out in electrified frazzles.

But you were the backfiring

Heart of your double-humped,

Sooty, two hundred acres.

Alex cracked. Strabismic, pitiable,

Gawky, adopted Alex!

That morning on the stack – and you

In a Führer frenzy,

Your coalface vocabulary

Going up in one flame!

Alex never came back.

Where did you end up?

Chimpanzee, dangle-pawed,

Shambling, midget ogre. Jehovah

Of my fallen Eden.

Undershot, bristly jowl –

Chimpanzee. That dazzled scowl –

Chimpanzee. Shoulder wing-stumps

In the waistcoat bossed

And polished to metal –

Chimpanzee. Cap an oil-rag,

Chewing your twist,

Raw disintegrating boots –

Your free knuckles lay quaking

At ease on the mudguard

Or pointed out to me

The bright, startling, pretty

Shrapnel in the stubble.

Your spittle curse, bitten off

Among the unshaven silver,

You’d give me the damned farm!

Nothing too stubborn,

Ferguson brains, running on pink paraffin,

Up in the dark, head in the cow’s crutch

Under the throb of Dorniers,

Staring into the warm foam,

Hobbling with a bucket and a lantern

Under the sky-burn of Sheffield,

Breaking your labourers with voice –

A royal succession of Georges!

What was it all for?

Collapsing between the stooks,

Up again, jump-starting your old engine

With your hip-flask,

Hoisting the top-heavy stackyard

Summer after summer. How many horses

Worn to chaffy dust? How many tractors

Battered to scrap? What’s become of you? Nobody

Could have kept it up. Only

One thing’s certain. Somewhere

You rest.

The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers

A Souvenir of the Gallipoli Landings

The father capers across the yard cobbles

Look, like a bird, a water-bird, an ibis going over pebbles

We laughed, like warships fluttering bunting.

Heavy-duty design, deep-seated in ocean-water

The warships flutter bunting.

A fiesta day for the warships

Where war is only an idea, as drowning is only an idea

In the folding of a wave, in the mourning

Funeral procession, the broadening wake

That follows a ship under power.

War is an idea in the muzzled calibre of the big guns.

In the grey, wolvish outline.

War is a kind of careless health, like the heart-beat

In the easy bodies of sailors, feeling the big engines

Idling between emergencies.

It is what has left the father

Who has become a bird.

Once he held war in his strong pint mugful of tea

And drank at it, heavily sugared.

It was all for him

Under the parapet, under the periscope, the look-out

Under Achi Baba and the fifty billion flies.

Now he has become a long-billed, spider-kneed bird

Bow-backed, finding his footing, over the frosty cobbles

A wader, picking curiosities from the shallows.

His sons don’t know why they laughed, watching him through the window

Remembering it, remembering their laughter

They only want to weep

As after the huge wars

Senseless huge wars

Huge senseless weeping.

Anniversary

My mother in her feathers of flame

Grows taller. Every May Thirteenth

I see her with her sister Miriam. I lift

The torn-off diary page where my brother jotted

‘Ma died today’ – and there they are.

She is now as tall as Miriam.

In the perpetual Sunday morning

Of everlasting, they are strolling together

Listening to the larks

Ringing in their orbits. The work of the cosmos,

Creation and destruction of matter

And of anti-matter

Pulses and flares, shudders and fades

Like the Northern Lights in their feathers.

My mother is telling Miriam

About her life, which was mine. Her voice comes, piping,

Down a deep gorge of woodland echoes:

‘This is the water-line, dark on my dress, look,

Where I dragged him from the reservoir.

And that is the horse on which I galloped

Through the brick wall

And out over the heather simply

To bring him a new pen. This is the pen

I laid on the altar. And these

Are the mass marriages of him and his brother

Where I was not once a guest.’ Then suddenly

She is scattering the red coals with her fingers

To find where I had fallen

For the third time. She laughs

Helplessly till she weeps. Miriam

Who died at eighteen

Is Madonna-like with pure wonder

To hear of all she missed. Now my mother

Shows her the rosary prayers of unending worry,

Like pairs of shoes, or one dress after another,

‘This is the sort of thing‚’ she is saying,

‘I liked to wear best.’ And: ‘Much of it,

You know, was simply sitting at the window

Watching the horizon. Truly

Wonderful it was, day after day,

Knowing they were somewhere. It still is.

Look.’

And they pause, on the brink

Of the starry dew. They are looking at me.

My mother, darker with her life,

Her Red Indian hair, her skin

So strangely olive and other-worldly,

Miriam now sheer flame beside her.

Their feathers throb softly, iridescent.

My mother’s face is glistening

As if she held it into the skyline wind

Looking towards me. I do this for her.

She is using me to tune finer

Her weeping love for my brother, through mine,

As if I were the shadow cast by his approach.

As when I came a mile over fields and walls

Towards her, and found her weeping for him –

Able for all that distance to think me him.

Chaucer

‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote…

At the top of your voice, where you swayed on the top of a stile,

Your arms raised – somewhat for balance, somewhat

To hold the reins of the straining attention

Of your imagined audience – you declaimed Chaucer

To a field of cows. And the Spring sky had done it

With its flying laundry, and the new emerald

Of the thorns, the hawthorn, the blackthorn,

And one of those bumpers of champagne

You snatched unpredictably from pure spirit.

Your voice went over the fields towards Grantchester.

It must have sounded lost. But the cows

Watched, then approached: they appreciated Chaucer.

You went on and on. Here were reasons

To recite Chaucer. Then came the Wyf of Bath,

Your favourite character in all literature.

You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.

They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring,

To gaze into your face, with occasional snorts

Of exclamation, renewed their astounded attention,

Ears angling to catch every inflection,

Keeping their awed six feet of reverence

Away from you. You just could not believe it.

And you could not stop. What would happen

If you were to stop? Would they attack you,

Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more – ?

So you had to go on. You went on –

And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.

How did you stop? I can’t remember

You stopping. I imagine they reeled away –

Rolling eyes, as if driven from their fodder.

I imagine I shooed them away. But

Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer

Was already perpetual. What followed

Found my attention too full

And had to go back into oblivion.

You Hated Spain

                                        Spain frightened you. Spain

Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,

The oiled anchovy faces, the African

Black edges to everything, frightened you.

Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.

The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.

You did not know the language, your soul was empty

Of the signs, and the welding light

Made your blood shrivel. Bosch

Held out a spidery hand and you took it

Timidly, a bobby-sox American.

You saw right down to the Goya funeral grin

And recognized it, and recoiled

As your poems winced into chill, as your panic

Clutched back towards college America.

So we sat as tourists at the bullfight

Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered,

Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier

Just below us, straightening his bent sword

And vomiting with fear. And the horn

That hid itself inside the blowfly belly

Of the toppled picador punctured

What was waiting for you. Spain

Was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver

You dared not wake with, the puckering amputations

No literature course had glamorized.

The juju land behind your African lips.

Spain was what you tried to wake up from

And could not. I see you, in moonlight,

Walking the empty wharf at Alicante

Like a soul waiting for the ferry,

A new soul, still not understanding,

Thinking it is still your honeymoon

In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,

Happy, and all your poems still to be found.

The Earthenware Head

Who modelled your head of terracotta?

Some American student friend.

Life-size, the lips half-pursed, raw-edged

With crusty tooling – a naturalistic attempt

At a likeness that just failed. You did not like it.

I did not like it. Unease magnetized it

For a perverse rite. What possessed us

To take it with us, in your red bucket bag?

November fendamp haze, the river unfurling

Dark whorls, ferrying slender willow yellows.

The pollard willows wore comfortless antlers,

Switch-horns, leafless. Just past where the field

Broadens and the path strays up to the right

To lose the river and puzzle for Grantchester,

A chosen willow leaned towards the water.

Above head height, the socket of a healed bole-wound,

A twiggy crotch, nearly an owl’s porch,

Made a mythic shrine for your double.

I fitted it upright, firm. And a willow tree

Was a Herm, with your head, watching East

Through those tool-stabbed pupils. We left it

To live the world’s life and weather forever.

You ransacked Thesaurus in your poem about it,

Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety

From its orphaned fate.

But it would not leave you. Weeks later

We could not seem to hit on the tree. We did not

Look too hard – just in passing. Already

You did not want to fear, if it had gone,

What witchcraft might ponder it. You never

Said much more about it.

                                           What happened?

Maybe nothing happened. Perhaps

It is still there, representing you

To the sunrise, and happy

In its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightly

As if my touch had only just left it.

Or did boys find it – and shatter it? Or

Did the tree too kneel finally?

Surely the river got it. Surely

The river is its chapel. And keeps it. Surely

Your deathless head, fired in a furnace,

Face to face at last, kisses the Father

Mudded at the bottom of the Cam,

Beyond recognition or rescue,

All our fears washed from it, and perfect,

Under the stained mournful flow, saluted

Only in summer briefly by the slender

Punt-loads of shadows flitting towards their honey

And the stopped clock.

                                          Evil.

That was what you called the head. Evil.

The Tender Place

Your temples, where the hair crowded in,

Were the tender place. Once to check

I dropped a file across the electrodes

Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded

Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.

Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed

The thunderbolt into your skull.

In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,

They hovered again

To see how you were, in your straps.

Whether your teeth were still whole.

The hand on the calibrated lever

Again feeling nothing

Except feeling nothing pushed to feel

Some squirm of sensation. Terror

Was the cloud of you

Waiting for these lightnings. I saw

An oak limb sheared at a bang.

You your Daddy’s leg. How many seizures

Did you suffer this god to grab you

By the roots of the hair? The reports

Escaped back into clouds. What went up

Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper

And the nerve threw off its skin

Like a burning child

Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you

A rigid bent bit of wire

Across the Boston City grid. The lights

In the Senate House dipped

As your voice dived inwards

Right through the bolt-hole basement.

Came up, years later,

Over-exposed, like an X-ray –

Brain-map still dark-patched

With the scorched-earth scars

Of your retreat. And your words,

Faces reversed from the light,

Holding in their entrails.

Black Coat

I remember going out there,

The tide far out, the North Shore ice-wind

Cutting me back

To the quick of the blood – that outer-edge nostalgia,

The good feeling. My sole memory

Of my black overcoat. Padding the wet sandspit.

I was staring at the sea, I suppose.

Trying to feel thoroughly alone,

Simply myself, with sharp edges –

Me and the sea one big tabula rasa,

As if my returning footprints

Out of that scrim of gleam, that horizon-wide wipe,

Might be a whole new start.

My shoe-sole shapes

My only sign.

My minimal but satisfying discussion

With the sea.

Putting my remarks down, for the thin tongue

Of the sea to interpret. Inaudibly.

A therapy,

Instructions too complicated for me

At the moment, but stowed in my black box for later.

Like feeding a wild deer

With potato crisps

As you do in that snapshot where you exclaim

Back towards me and my camera.

So I had no idea I had stepped

Into the telescopic sights

Of the paparazzo sniper

Nested in your brown iris.

Perhaps you had no idea either,

So far off, half a mile maybe,

Looking towards me. Watching me

Pin the sea’s edge down.

No idea

How that double image,

Your eye’s inbuilt double exposure

Which was the projection

Of your two-way heart’s diplopic error,

The body of the ghost and me the blurred see-through

Came into single focus,

Sharp-edged, stark as a target,

Set up like a decoy

Against that freezing sea

From which your dead father had just crawled.

I did not feel

How, as your lenses tightened,

He slid into me.

Being Christlike

You did not want to be Christlike. Though your Father

Was your God and there was no other, you did not

Want to be Christlike. Though you walked

In the love of your Father. Though you stared

At the stranger your Mother.

What had she to do with you

But tempt you from your Father?

When her great hooded eyes lowered

Their moon so close

Promising the earth you saw

Your fate and you cried

Get thee behind me. You did not

Want to be Christlike. You wanted

To be with your Father

In wherever he was. And your body

Barred your passage. And your family

Which were your flesh and blood

Burdened it. And a god

That was not your Father

Was a false god. But you did not

Want to be Christlike.

The God

You were like a religious fanatic

Without a god – unable to pray.

You wanted to be a writer.

Wanted to write? What was it within you

Had to tell its tale?

The story that has to be told

Is the writer’s God, who calls

Out of sleep, inaudibly: ‘Write.’

Write what?

Your heart, mid-Sahara, raged

In its emptiness.

Your dreams were empty.

You bowed at your desk and you wept

Over the story that refused to exist,

As over a prayer

That could not be prayed

To a non-existent God. A dead God

With a terrible voice.

You were like those desert ascetics

Who fascinated you,

Parching in such a torturing

Vacuum of God

It sucked goblins out of their finger-ends,

Out of the soft motes of the sun-shaft,

Out of the blank rock face.

The gagged prayer of their sterility

Was a God.

So was your panic of emptiness – a God.

You offered him verses. First

Little phials of the emptiness

Into which your panic dropped its tears

That dried and left crystalline spectra.

Crusts of salt from your sleep.

Like the dewy sweat

On some desert stones, after dawn.

Oblations to an absence.

Little sacrifices. Soon

Your silent howl through the night

Had made itself a moon, a fiery idol

Of your God.

Your crying carried its moon

Like a woman a dead child. Like a woman

Nursing a dead child, bending to cool

Its lips with tear-drops on her finger-tip,

So I nursed you, who nursed a moon

That was human but dead, withered and

Burned you like a lump of phosphorus.

Till the child stirred. Its mouth-hole stirred.

Blood oozed at your nipple,

A drip feed of blood. Our happy moment!

The little god flew up into the Elm Tree.

In your sleep, glassy eyed,

You heard its instructions. When you woke

Your hands moved. You watched them in dismay

As they made a new sacrifice.

Two handfuls of blood, your own blood,

And in that blood gobbets of me,

Wrapped in a tissue of story that had somehow

Slipped from you. An embryo story.

You could not explain it or who

Ate at your hands.

The little god roared at night in the orchard,

His roar half a laugh.

You fed him by day, under your hair-tent,

Over your desk, in your secret

Spirit house, you whispered,

You drummed on your thumb with your fingers,

Shook Winthrop shells for their sea-voices,

And gave me an effigy – a Salvia

Pressed in a Lutheran Bible.

You could not explain it. Sleep had opened.

Darkness poured from it, like perfume.

Your dreams had burst their coffin.

Blinded I struck a light

And woke upside down in your spirit-house

Moving limbs that were not my limbs,

And telling, in a voice not my voice,

A story of which I knew nothing,

Giddy

With the smoke of the fire you tended

Flames I had lit unwitting

That whitened in the oxygen jet

Of your incantatory whisper.

You fed the flames with the myrrh of your mother

The frankincense of your father

And your own amber and the tongues

Of fire told their tale. And suddenly

Everybody knew everything.

Your God snuffed up the fatty reek.

His roar was like a basement furnace

In your ears, thunder in the foundations.

Then you wrote in a fury, weeping,

Your joy a trance-dancer

In the smoke in the flames.

‘God is speaking through me,’ you told me.

‘Don’t say that,’ I cried, ‘Don’t say that.

That is horribly unlucky!’

As I sat there with blistering eyes

Watching everything go up

In the flames of your sacrifice

That finally caught you too till you

Vanished, exploding

Into the flames

Of the story of your God

Who embraced you

And your mummy and your daddy –

Your Aztec, Black Forest

God of the euphemism Grief.

The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother

That is not your mother but her body.

She leaped from our window

And fell there. Those are not dogs

That seem to be dogs

Pulling at her. Remember the lean hound

Running up the lane holding high

The dangling raw windpipe and lungs

Of a fox? Now see who

Will drop on all fours at the end of the street

And come romping towards your mother,

Pulling her remains, with their lips

Lifted like dog’s lips

Into new positions. Protect her

And they will tear you down

As if you were more her.

They will find you every bit

As succulent as she is. Too late

To salvage what she was.

I buried her where she fell.

You played around the grave. We arranged

Sea-shells and big veined pebbles

Carried from Appledore

As if we were herself. But a kind

Of hyena came aching upwind.

They dug her out. Now they batten

On the cornucopia

Of her body. Even

Bite the face off her gravestone,

Gulp down the grave ornaments,

Swallow the very soil.

                                        So leave her.

Let her be their spoils. Go wrap

Your head in the snowy rivers

Of the Brooks Range. Cover

Your eyes with the writhing airs

Off the Nullarbor Plains. Let them

Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit

Over their symposia.

                                      Think her better

Spread with holy care on a high grid

For vultures

To take back into the sun. Imagine

These bone-crushing mouths the mouths

That labour for the beetle

Who will roll her back into the sun.

The Other

She had too much so with a smile you took some.

Of everything she had you had

Absolutely nothing, so you took some.

At first, just a little.

Still she had so much she made you feel

Your vacuum, which nature abhorred,

So you took your fill, for nature’s sake.

Because her great luck made you feel unlucky

You had redressed the balance, which meant

Now you had some too, for yourself.

As seemed only fair. Still her ambition

Claimed the natural right to screw you up

Like a crossed-out page, tossed into a basket.

Somebody, on behalf of the gods,

Had to correct that hubris.

A little touch of hatred steadied the nerves.

Everything she had won, the happiness of it,

You collected

As your compensation

For having lost. Which left her absolutely

Nothing. Even her life was

Trapped in the heap you took. She had nothing.

Too late you saw what had happened.

It made no difference that she was dead.

Now that you had all she had ever had

You had much too much.

                                              Only you

Saw her smile, as she took some.

At first, just a little.

The Locket

Sleeping and waking in the Song of Songs

You were half-blissful. But on occasion

Casually as a yawn, you’d open

Your death and contemplate it.

Your death

Was so utterly within your power

It was as if you had trapped it. Maybe by somehow

Giving it some part of you, for its food.

Now it was your curio pet,

Your familiar. But who else would have nursed it

In a locket between her breasts!

Smiling, you’d hold it up.

You’d swing it on its chain, to tease life.

It lent you uncanny power. A secret, blueish,

Demonic flash

When you smiled and gently bit the locket.

I have read how a fiery cross

Can grow and brighten in the dreams of a spinster.

But a crooked key turned in your locket.

It had sealed your door in Berlin

With the brand of the burnt. You knew exactly

How your death looked. It was a long-cold oven

Locked with a swastika.

The locket kept splitting open.

I would close it. You would smile.

Its lips kept coming apart – just a slit.

The clasp seemed to be faulty.

Who could have guessed what it was trying to say?

Your beauty, a folktale wager,

Was a quarter century posthumous.

While I juggled our futures, it kept up its whisper

To my deafened ear: fait accompli.

Shibboleth

Your German

Found its royal licence in the English

Your mother had bought (peering into the future)

By mail order, from Fortnum and Mason. Your Hebrew

Survived on bats and spiders

In the guerrilla priest-hole

Under your tongue. Nevertheless,

At the long-weekend Berkshire county table,

In a dizzy silence, your cheekbones

(From the Black Sea, where the roses bloom thrice)

Flushed sootier –

Stared at by English hounds

Whose tails had stopped wagging. When the lips lifted,

The trade-routes of the Altai

Tangled in your panic, tripped you. It was

The frontier glare of customs.

The gun-barrels

Of the imperious noses

Pointed at something pinioned. Then a drawl:

‘Lick of the tar-brush?’

There you saw it,

Your lonely Tartar death,

Surrounded and ‘dumb like the bound

Wolf on Tolstoy’s horse’.

Snow

Snow falling. Snowflakes clung and melted

In the sparkly black fox fur of your hat.

Soft chandeliers, ghostly wreckage

Of the Moscow Opera. Flakes perching and

Losing their hold on the heather tips. An unending

Walk down the cobbled hill into the oven

Of empty fire. Among the falling

Heavens. A short walk

That could never end was

Never ending. Down, on down

Under the thick, loose flocculence

Of a life

Burning out in the air. Between char-black buildings

Converted to closed cafés and Brontë gift-shops.

Beyond them, the constellations falling

Through the Judaean thorns, into the fleeces

Of the Pennine sheep. Deepening

Over the faces of your school-friends,

Beside their snowed-under tanks, locked into the Steppe

Where the mud had frozen again

While they drank their coffee. You escaped

Deeper into the falling flakes. They were clinging

To the charcoal crimped black ponyskin

Coat you wore. Words seemed warm. They

Melted in our mouths

Whatever was trying to cling.

                                                 Leaning snow

Folded you under its cloak and ushered you away

Down the hill. Back to where you came from.

I watched you. Feeling the snow’s touch.

Already, it was burying your footprints,

Drawing its white sheet over everything,

Closing the air behind you.

Folktale

He did not know she had risen out of cinders.

She knew he had nothing.

So they ransacked each other. What he wanted

Was the gold, black-lettered pelt

Of the leopard of Ein-Gedi.

She wanted only the runaway slave.

What he wanted was Turgenev’s antimacassar.

She wanted escape without a passport.

What he wanted was Bach’s aerobatic

Gutturals in Arabic.

She wanted the enemy without his gun.

He wanted the seven treasures of Asia –

Skin, eyes, lips, blood, hair knotted roughly

In seven different flags.

She wanted the silent heraldry

Of the purple beech by the noble wall.

He wanted Cabala the ghetto demon

With its polythene bag full of ashes.

She wanted only shade from the noon’s

Broken-armed Catherine Wheel

Under an island leaf. She wanted

A love-knot Eden-cool as two lob-worms

And a child of acorn.

He wanted a mother of halva.

She wanted the hill-stream’s tabula rasa.

He wanted the thread-end of himself.

So they ransacked each other for everything

That could not be found. And their fingers met

And were wrestling, like flames

In the crackling thorns

Of everything they lacked –

                                                as midnight struck.

Opus 131

Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor

Opened the great door

In the air, and through it

Flooded horror. The door in the hotel room

And the curtain at the window and even

The plain homely daylight blocking the window

Were in the wrong dimension

To shut it out. The counterpoint pinned back

The flaps of the body. Naked, faceless,

The heart panted there, like a foetus.

Where was the lifeline music? What had happened

To consolation, prayer, transcendence –

To the selective disconnecting

Of the pain centre? Dark insects

Fought with their instruments

Scampering through your open body

As if you had already left it. Beethoven

Had broken down. You strained listening

Maybe for divorce to be resolved

In the arithmetic of vibration

To pure zero, for the wave-particles

To pronounce on the unimportance

Of the menopause. Beethoven

Was trying to repair

The huge constellations of his silence

That flickered and glinted in the wind.

But the notes, with their sharp faces,

Were already carrying you off,

Each with a different bit, into the corners

Of the Universe.

Descent

You had to strip off Germany

The crisp shirt with its crossed lightnings

And go underground.

You were forced to strip off Israel

The bodice woven of the hairs of the cactus

To be bullet-proof, and go deeper.

You had to strip off Russia

With those ear-rings worn in honour

Of Eugene Onegin. And go deeper.

You had to strip off British Columbia

And the fish-skin mock-up waterproof

From the cannery, with its erotic motif

Of porcupine quills, that pierced you

And came with you, working deeper

As you moved deeper.

Finally you had to strip off England

With your wedding rings

And go deeper.

                             Then suddenly you were abandoned

By the gem-stones, rubies, emeralds, all you had hoarded

In a fold of paper

At the back of a drawer – you had thought

These would protect you in the end,

Urim and Thummim. Cowardly

They scattered in the splinters of weeping

As your own hands, stronger than your choked outcry,

Took your daughter from you. She was stripped from you,

The last raiment

Clinging round your neck, the sole remnant

Between you and the bed

In the underworld

                                  Where Inanna

Has to lie naked, between strata

That can never be opened, except as a book.

The Error

When her grave opened its ugly mouth

Why didn’t you just fly,

Wrap yourself in your hair and make yourself scarce,

Why did you kneel down at the grave’s edge

To be identified

Accused and convicted

By all who held in their hands

Pieces of the gravestone grey granite

Proof of their innocence?

You must have misheard a sentence.

You were always mishearing

Into Hebrew or German

What was muttered in English.

Her grave mouthed its riddle right enough.

But maybe you heard in the air somewhere

An answer to one of your own

Unspoken enigmas. Misheard,

Mistook, and kneeled meekly.

Maybe they wouldn’t stone you

If you became a nun

And selflessly incinerated yourself

In the shrine of her death.

Because that is what you did. From that moment

Shops, jobs, baby daughter, the German au pair

Had to become mere shapes

In the offered-up flames, a kind of writhing

That enfolded you and devoured

Your whole life.

I watched you feeding the flames.

Why didn’t you wrap yourself in a carpet

Get to a hospital

Drop the whole mistake – simply call it

An error in translation?

Instead you fed those flames

Six full calendar years –

Every tarred and brimstone

Day torn carefully off,

One at a time, not one wasted, patient

As if you were feeding a child.

You were not feeding a child.

All you were doing was being strong,

Waiting for your ashes

To be complete and to cool.

Finally they made a small cairn.

Lines about Elias

for Thom Gunn

Did music help him? Indeed it helped him.

His crude music, instruments

Imitated uncannily but weirdly

Restored the order of music

Within the terror of the Camp.

They could have been baboons

In some demented phase of tribal breakdown

During a famine, or under the effects

Of a poisonous dust from space.

Yet his music, for its few moments

Ushered them into a formation

Where the Camp did not exist

Where their sorrowful bodies did not exist.

So the scabies on his belly the sores and

Inflammations which made Elias

That ferocious clown crow

And ridiculed him, ripping down his trousers

Fighting with him in the mud

They did not touch his music

Did not adhere to any note of it

Or disturb his performance

Through which his fellow-prisoners escaped

Their rags, their last few horrible hours, their next few

Frightful possibly fatal days, sooner

Or later nearly certainly fatal days

Standing aside from them, stepping a little

Out of the time corridor, standing in a group

Just outside it, where the air was still,

In the solidarity of souls, where music uttered

The dumbness of naked bodies

As if it were the inside of the earth

And everything else –

The hours where their soft surfaces

Tore against the hard –

Were merely rags

It happened to wear, and could ignore.

Music poured out of nowhere

Strange food

And made them for those moments unaware

Of their starvation and indifferent

To their humanity

While the guards too, shedding and

Escaping their humanity

Lowered themselves into the sound

As into a communal bath

Where all were anonymous new-born

Innocent all equally

Innocent equally defenceless

The guards indeed more defenceless

More terribly naked needing

The music more

A Dove

Snaps its twig-tether – mounts –

Dream-yanked up into vacuum

Wings snickering.

Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up.

They career through tree-mazes –

Nearly uncontrollable love-weights.

Or now

Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered

By solemn powers

Through insane, stately convulsions.

Porpoises

Of dove-lust and blood splendour

With arcs

And plungings, and spray-slow explosions.

Now violently gone

Riding the snake of the long love-whip

Among flarings of mares and stallions

Now staying

Coiled on a bough

Bubbling molten, wobbling top-heavy

Into one and many.

INDEXES

INDEX OF TITLES

Anniversary 1

Apple Dumps 1

Apple Tragedy 1

Astrological Conundrums 1

Autumn Notes, from 1

Bawdry Embraced, Song from 1

Bayonet Charge 1

Beacon, The 1

Bear, The 1

Bedtime Anecdote 1

Being Christlike 1

Birth of Rainbow 1

Black Beast, The 1

Black Coat 1

Bones 1

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days 1

Bringing in New Couples 1

Bull Moses, The 1

Cadenza 1

Canal’s Drowning Black, The 1

Casualty, The 1

Cat and Mouse 1

Chaucer 1

Childish Prank, A 1

Children 1

Chinese History of Colden Water 1

Cleopatra to the Asp 1

Cock-Crows 1

Coming Down Through Somerset 1

Conjuring in Heaven 1

Contender, The 1

Cormorant, A 1

Cranefly in September, A 1

Crow and the Birds 1

Crow Blacker than Ever 1

Crow Hill 1

Crow on the Beach 1

Crow’s Account of the Battle 1

Crow’s Battle Fury 1

Crow’s Elephant Totem Song 1

Crow’s Fall 1

Crow’s First Lesson 1

Crow’s Last Stand 1

Crow’s Vanity 1

Crow Tyrannosaurus 1

Crow Wakes 1

Curlews 1

Dawn’s Rose 1

Day He Died, The 1

Deaf School 1

Dehorning 1

Descent 1

Dogs Are Eating Your Mother, The 1

Do not Pick up the Telephone 1

Dove, A 1

Dust As We Are 1

Earthenware Head, The 1

Earth-Numb 1

Eclipse 1

Eel, An 1

Egg-Head 1

Emily Brontë 1

Error, The 1

Esther’s Tomcat 1

Evening Thrush 1

Examination at the Womb-Door 1

Executioner, The 1

Fallgrief’s Girlfriends 1

Famous Poet 1

February 1

February 17th 1

Fern 1

Fire-Eater 1

Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement, A 1

Folktale 1

Football at Slack 1

For Billy Holt 1

For the Duration 1

Fourth of July 1

Fragment of an Ancient Tablet 1

Full Moon and Little Frieda 1

Ghost Crabs 1

Gnat-Psalm 1

God, A 1

God, The 1

Go Fishing 1

Gog 1

Green Wolf, The 1

Grosse Fuge 1

Guide, The 1

Gulkana, The 1

Hare, The 1

Harvest Moon, The 1

Hawk Roosting 1

Hen, The 1

Heptonstall 1

Heptonstall Old Church 1

Her Husband 1

His Legs Ran About 1

Honey Bee, The 1

Horrible Religious Error, A 1

Horses, The 1

Howling of Wolves, The 1

How Water Began to Play 1

In Laughter 1

In the Likeness of a Grasshopper 1

In the M5 Restaurant 1

Jaguar, The 1

Japanese River Tales 1

Kafka 1

Knight, The 1

Kreutzer Sonata 1

Lake, The 1

Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers, The 1

Leaf Mould 1

Leaves 1

life is Trying to be Life 1

Lineage 1

Lines about Elias 1

Littleblood 1

Little Whale Song 1

Locket, The 1

Long Tunnel Ceiling, The 1

Lovepet, The 1

Lovesong 1

Low Water 1

Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water, The 1

March Calf, A 1

Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar, The 1

Match, A 1

Mayday on Holderness 1

Meeting 1

Memory 1

Memory, A 1

Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan 1

Moors 1

Motorbike, A 1

Mount Zion 1

New Foal 1

New Moon in January 1

Night Arrival of Sea-Trout 1

Notes for a Little Play 1

November 1

October Dawn 1

October Salmon 1

Old Oats 1

On the Reservations 1

Ophelia 1

Opus 1 2

Orts 1

Other, The 1

Otter, An 1

Out 1

Owl’s Song 1

Performance 1

Pibroch 1

Pike 1

Poets 1

Prometheus on His Crag, from 1

Prospero and Sycorax 1

Public Bar TV 1

Rain 1

Rain-Charm for the Duchy 1

Ravens 1

Reckless Head 1

Recklings 1

Relic 1

Remembering Teheran 1

Retired Colonel, The 1

Revenge Fable 1

Rhododendrons 1

Risen, The 1

River in March, The 1

River, The 1

Robin Song 1

Roe-Deer 1

Sacrifice 1

Salmon Eggs 1

Scapegoats and Rabies 1

Scream, The 1

Second Glance at a Jaguar 1

Seven Dungeon Songs, from 1

Sheep 1

Shibboleth 1

Six Young Men 1

Sketching a Thatcher 1

Skylarks 1

Small Events 1

Smile, The 1

Snow 1

Snowdrop 1

Soliloquy 1

Song 1

Song from Bawdry Embraced 1

Song of a Rat 1

Speech out of Shadow 1

Stanbury Moor 1

Stations 1

Stealing Trout on a May Morning 1

Still Life 1

Stone, The 1

Strangers 1

Strawberry Hill 1

Sunstroke 1

Sunstruck 1

Sunstruck Foxglove 1

Swifts 1

Telegraph Wires 1

Tender Place, The 1

Tern 1

That Moment 1

That Morning 1

That Star 1

Theology 1

Thistles 1

Thought-Fox, The 1

Thrushes 1

Tiger-Psalm 1

To Paint a Water Lily 1

Tractor 1

Tree 1

Trees 1

Tutorial 1

TV Off 1

Two Legends 1

Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies 1

Vampire 1

View of a Pig 1

Violet at Lough Aughresberg, A 1

Walt 1

Warriors of the North, The 1

Water 1

When Men Got to the Summit 1

Where I Sit Writing My Letter 1

Widdop 1

Wilfred Owen’s Photographs 1

Wind 1

Witches 1

Wodwo 1

Woman Unconscious, A 1 

You Hated Spain 1

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

A bang – a burning 155

Above – the well-known lips, delicately downed 114

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket 87

A fallen immortal found this valley 160

After the fiesta, the beauty contests, the drunken wrestling 133

After the five-month drought 285

Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men 55

A great bird landed here 171

A green level of lily leaves 31

A hoist up and I could lean over 32

A lamb could not get born. Ice wind 186

A leaf’s otherness 10

All darkness comes together, rounding an egg 124

And he is an owl 60

A priest from a different land 170

A primrose petal’s edge 151

Are a stage 160

A splinter, flicked 75

A stoat danced on the lawns here 26

As we came through the gate to look at the few new lambs 184

As you bend to touch 227

At nightfalll, as the sea darkens 58

At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say 155

A trap 232

Bad-tempered bullying bunch, the horned cows 176

Began under the groan of the oldest forest 107

Better disguised than the leaf-insect 51

Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill 157

Beyond a twilight of limes and willows 140

Bird-bones is on the roof. Seventy-eight 182

Blackness 168

Black village of gravestones 78

Black was the without eye 89

Bloody Mary’s venomous flames can curl 19

Bones is a crazy pony 214

Born at the bottom of the heap. And as he grew upwards 271

Bred wild leopards – among the pale depth fungus 166

Bringing their frozen swords, their salt-bleached eyes 75

Burning 113

Calves harshly parted from their mamas 154

Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies 102

Collision with the earth has finally come 149

Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately 56

Creation quaked voices 93

Crowd the horizons, poised, wings 204

Dawn – a smouldering fume of dry frost 193

Dawn. The river thins 249

Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat 27

Dead, she became space-earth 198

Death is also trying to be life 196

Did music help him? Indeed it helped him 313

Dripped a chill virulence 161

Fallen from heaven, lies across 243

Farmers in the fields, housewives behind steamed windows 15

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts 134

Fills up 122

First – the sun coming closer, growing by the minute 116

For half an hour, through a magnifying glass 228

Frightening the blood in its tunnel 42

From what dog’s dish or crocodile’s rotten 20

God tried to teach Crow how to talk 92

Going up for the assault that morning 275

Has conquered. He has surrendered everything 123

Has not yet been cut 207

Hearing shingle explode, seeing it skip 99

He did not know she had risen out of the cinders 309

He hears lithe trees and last leaves swatting the glass 208

He loved her and she loved him 114

Here before me, snake-head 258

Here is the fern’s frond, unfurling a gesture 61

He sang 104

He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety 262

He smiles in a mirror, shrinking the whole 13

He stands, filling the doorway 128

Honeysuckle hanging her fangs 262

How it hung 211

I am the hunted king 103

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark 7

I felt a strange fear when the war-talk 273

I flash-glimpsed in the headlights – the high moment 188

I found this jawbone at the sea’s edge 29

I had exploded, a bombcloud, lob-headed, my huge fingers 53

I know well 153

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest 3

In Hardcastle Crags, that echoey museum 158

In the beginning was Scream 90

In the dawn-dirty light, in the biggest snow of the year 181

In the huge, wide-open, sleeping eye of the mountain 64

I park the car half in the ditch and switch off and sit 45

I remember going out there 298

I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp 150

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed 29

Is melting an old frost moon 107

I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits 167

Is without world 84

I was just walking about 267

I whispered to the holly 50

I woke to a shout: ‘I am Alpha and Omega’ 70

Join water, wade in underbeing 255

Jumbled iceberg hills, away to the North 250

Just before the curtain falls in the river 260

Light words forsook them 165

Like a propped skull 49

Looking close in the evil mirror Crow saw 101

‘Mad laughter’, your sister – her grey perm 289

Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls 91

Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias 223

My father sat in his chair recovering 72

My mother in her feathers of flame 291

My neighbour moves less and less, attempts less 63

My post-war father was so silent 269

new to the blood 206

No, the serpent did not 70

Not that she had no equal, not that she was 9

Not your eyes, but what they disguise 197

Now is the globe shrunk tight 40

Now the river is rich, but her voice is low 132

Now you have stabbed her good 71

October is marigold, and yet 14

Of the main-road canal bridge 169

O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you 4

O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains 119

On a flaked ridge of the desert 59

Once I said lightly 149

Once upon a time 105

Once was every woman the witch 39

On moors where people get lost and die of air 48

On the sheep-cropped summit, under hot sun 33

Opus 131 in C Sharp Minor 310

Our sad coats assemble at the counter 203

Outcrop stone is miserly 55

Pain was pulled down over his eyes like a fool’s hat 208

Pike, three inches long, perfect 41

Prometheus on His Crag 218

Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain 175

Right from the start he is dressed in his best — his blacks and his whites 131

Rouses in its cave 205

Russia and America circle each other 25

She gives him his eyes, she found them 127

She had too much so with a smile you took some 305

She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying 147

She knows, like Ophelia 206

Skinful of bowls he bowls them 60

Sleeping and waking in the Song of Songs 306

Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning 154

Snaps its twig-tether – mounts 315

Snow falling. Snowflakes clung and melted 308

So finally there was nothing 104

Soldiers are marching singing down the lane 65

So on the seventh day 112

Spain frightened you. Spain 294

Spluttering near out, before it touches the moors 52

Stare at the monster: remark 5

Suddenly he awoke and was running – raw 16

Suddenly his poor body 61

Suddenly hooligan baby starlings 225

Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor 270

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn 39

That Elf 238

That is not your mother but her body 304

That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech 215

That star 204

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun 4

The breaker humps its green glass 226

The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it 43

The celluloid of a photograph holds them well 17

The chestnut splits its padded cell 144

The deaf children were monkey-nimble, fish-tremulous and sudden 195

The farms are oozing craters in 25

The father capers across the yard cobbles 290

The flame-red moon, the harvest moon 142

The freedom of Saturday afternoons 162

The grass-blade is not without 152

The Hen 236

The Honey Bee 227

The hot shallows and seas we bring our blood from 27

The lark begins to go up 78

The longships got this far. Then 164

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land 36

The morass is bulging and aborting 48

The old man’s blood had spoken the word: ‘Enough’ 52

The pig lay on a barrow dead 34

The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap 76

There was a man 111

There was a person 110

There was the sun on the wall – my childhood’s 121

There was this man and he was the strongest 99

There was this terrific battle 95

The salmon were just down there 256

The sea cries with its meaningless voice 83

These grasses of light 158

The sheep has stopped crying 136

The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely ripened 259

The swallow – rebuilding 152

The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs 223

The tiger kills hungry. The machine-guns 201

The tractor stands frozen – an agony 179

The violinist’s shadow vanishes 57

The wind on Crow Hill was her darling 173

The wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles 24

They lift 163

This evening 246

This evening, motherly summer moves in the pond 23

This house has been far out at sea all night 14

This is the maneater’s skull 150

This morning blue vast clarity of March sky 187

‘This water droplet, charity of the air’ 12

Those stars are the fleshed forebears 30

Till they seemed to trip and trap 126

Tonight 247

Underwater eyes, an eel’s 37

‘Up in the pools,’ they’d said, and ‘Two miles upstream’ 244

Was it an animal was it a bird? 117

Was the silkiest day of the young year 190

Water wanted to live 118

Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed 151

We came where the salmon were so many 265

We had a motorbike all through the war 194

‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote’ 293

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over 87

What do they think of themselves 278

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white 97

Whenever I am got under my gravestone 7

When everything that can fall has fallen 125

When God, disgusted with man 110

When her grave opened its ugly mouth 312

When it comes down to it 217

When Parnell’s Irish in the House 28

When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald 98

When the gnats dance at evening 85

When the patient, shining with pain 109

When the pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour 93

When the serpent emerged, earth-bowel brown 101

Where is the Black Beast? 94

Where the pool unfurls its undercloud 249

Where there was nothing 172

Who lived at the top end of our street 35

Who modelled your head of terracotta? 295

Who owns these scrawny little feet? Death 90

Who put this pit-head wheel 280

Who’s killed the leaves? 142

Wind out of freezing Europe. A mean snow 178

Yesterday he was nowhere to be found 285

You did not want to be Christlike. Though your Father 300

You had to strip off Germany 311

You hosts are almost glad he gate-crashed: see 11

Your bony white bowed back, in a singlet 191

Your German 307

Your temples, where the hair crowded in 297

Your tree – your oak 155

You were like a religious fanatic 300

About the Author

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.

Copyright

This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA

All rights reserved
© Ted Hughes, 1995

The right of Ted Hughes to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978–0–571–26303–5