Let no one say I was cleaning this gun:
I killed myself because
I wanted the sun
But got the moon.
Sanity came back too soon.
I did not even clean the gun:
Put in two bullets for the moon and sun
Spun the chamber in a final game.
The sun and moon were both the same.
Borrow got here, so did I
Nothing in front but sea and sky.
Blue, traditional, unplanned,
Then white with envy at safe land:
Were such cold acres ever seen
Than vast and climbing for this rock?
Big as the fish that got away,
Bigger, but no one ever died from shock
At so much water, such wide space:
Vostok III and Vostok IV
Slap proportion in the face.
Rapier-thin horizons claw
At blasé tissue of bland eye:
While Man is climbing at the moon
The sea foams white on every shore,
Moonstruck where the start began
Moonlit in the wake of Man
Who turns his back on Finisterre.
Woods are for observing from a distance
On your father’s arms:
Woods are for being frightened of –
Bogie-men swing among those close-packed trees.
Woods are then for making fires in
Running before the wrath of cop or farmer:
Smoke and the smell of dandelions
In place of blood.
Later for loving girls in:
Untidy bushes lick damp hair,
Secret, dark and out of sight
With nothing now to replace blood.
Some use woods for attacking and defending
The black scream of unnatural possession,
Tree roots linchpinned into earth
By shudders and the soil of death.
By summer shunned in fear of lightning
The bitter roaming flash of snaked lightning;
In winter shelter us from rain or snow:
Tree-packs hold our fate like cards.
Woods are then forgotten two-score years
Power lapsing into midnight dreams,
The core of body and soul
Scooped by the knife of living.
The wood became jungle, and you its shadow:
Woods a purple rage of wakened dogs,
To be kept out of, snubbed
Hemmed into night, not known.
Woods returned, tamed, not for
Making love or fires in.
Familiar; suspicious of their shelter
You stay at home in rain or snow –
The woods are seen but not remembered
A far-off shadow, cloud or dream;
Your power vanishes with their’s –
No more to be defended, or attacked.
Safe from horizontal rain
And gale-blown boxing-gloves thumping the walls
The wireless plays a drama
Of a poet stricken at a priest’s house
Reached only by footpath,
A poet descending Jacob’s ladder made of sand
Washed by mountain torrents,
Spouting rhetoric of fire as he fell –
While kilocycles off frequency
Morse code mewed by strophe and antistrophe
Behind the stark undoing of the poet
Lost in narrow seams of God and Sin and Death,
Corroded by the opposite of what he would be.
The code comes in again, a querulous demand
Plucked by a far-off guitar with one string left
That chance may hear,
And through the poet’s white despair
The rhythmic images cry distraction,
Till I read their symbols
That beyond my bosom-comfort
A ship by chance of time committed
To elemental wrath in asking for anchorage
From blind and twisting waves:
Five score sailors on the sea
Never to be compared to a suffering poet in his anguish.
A housewife sweeps her doorstep
Pavement yard and walls
Each leaf of wilting privet
Polishes the window
To do away with dust and bloodmarks
In case one speck shows sin.
Kills all trace by art and elbow as if dirt
Smears the dark side of her mirror face –
As proof of jungle ape and missing link
That drags back to when we hopped
From the saltpan slime of Lake Bacteria,
That first jelly-blob deviously edging
Towards moondust and the feat of sleep,
Sunstroke, blight of spoiled nerves,
Weapons and a new flint-hack for food –
And then the bright machinegun.
She sweeps to lovingly dispose
Of bigstar jellyfish and show-off crabs
That wriggle before the new damp
Jungle world of hoofprints, spoor
Half-chewed herbivore and worse –
Beaten after twilight years by her stout arms,
And an evolutionary smile.
Stars, seen through midnight windows
Of earth-grained eyes
Are fullstops ending invisible sentences,
Aphorisms, quips, mottoes of the gods
Indicate what might have been made clear
Had words stayed plain before them.
Criss-crossed endlessly for those who read,
Each light-year sentence testifies how far
Life spreads, and how those full stops
Go on living after necks cease aching.
In observing them, the bones relax:
Eyes close when we are dead
And they have stared all poets out.
Full stops are beautiful as stars,
Each glowing with the light of people vanished
From the continually red-burned earth
Fuelled by those whose outward eye drinks fever
And inward eye harnesses their shadows
To read what never had been written
Until, drunk with Charioteers, Animals and Goddesses,
Conjurers, Club-men, Fish and Magic Boxes
Full stops are joined with words shaped into poems
Ending with full stops as meaningful as stars.
Yes — definitively to some wrongful deed
And ending like a quick knife to a knot,
Is a serpent-lover singing to be freed
From no and negative and nothing gained.
Hard to fix decisions as to yea and nay
While needing the when and how: near-questions
Aimed to draw that final sibilant and vow
To upright-positive and all to win.
Success for lovers and conspirators
Unlocks the sins that grace a thousand lips;
Dogs bark, and babies cry at meeting air:
(Whether yes or no is hardly to be known)
But if affirmative, are guessings at the guess
That darkness is nothing but a final yes.
Three sons in silence by their father’s grave
Think of the live man
Not yet split in three by blackness –
Cannot cross the limbo zone,
Reach him who went a year ago through.
Mute before grass bending:
Headstones grey and white proliferate,
Stumps in a shell-shocked forest
Making question and exclamation mark;
They talk about flowers from a visit
When water in the vase was ice
On this plateau exposed to collieries
And winds bailing out Death’s
Deepest coffers it was so cold;
Of how frost to prove the dead not dead
Turned the water iron-white,
Swollen muscle garrotting the flowers
Till the vase exploded,
By trying its own strength out on itself –
Scattered petals to a dozen graves.
Three brothers stand in silence,
Feel the strength the father lost.
Narrow in the back
She played all day with fishes
Watched them go like arrows
Through aerated water
Between her legs and dodge
The fantail spread of fingers.
She was crossed in love:
Water hurtling loinwards and into heart
Found another hiding-place and pool
Where sharper arrows
Played upon her sorrow,
And sunlight on her stooping
Made more voracious fishes breed.
She was narrow in the back
And played all night at fishes,
Wading for the biggest of them all
By moon and guile
Out from the reedy bank,
Until by unlit dawn
A fisherman in silence
Drew his silent catchnet down.
Green fishes fled through lightgreen water
Flint heads with moulded eyes
Chipping at infiltrating light,
And switching to the
White legs of the Shropshire woman,
Played tag in the blue beams
Of her impenetrable eyes,
Between the whitening flesh
Of open fingers.
In a London crescent curving vast
A cat sat –
Between two rows of molar houses,
Birdsky in each grinning gap.
Cat small — coal and snow
Road wide — a zone of tar set hard and fast:
Four-wheeled speedboats cutting a dash
For it
From time to time.
King Cat stalked warily midstream
As if silence were no warning on this empty road
Where even a man would certainly have crossed
With hands in pockets and been whistling.
Cat heard, but royalty and indolence
Weighed its paws to hobnailed boots
Held it from the dragon’s-teeth of safety first and last,
Until a Daimler scurrying from work
Caused cat to stop and wonder where it came from –
Instead of zig-zag scattering to hide itself.
Maybe a deaf malevolence descended
And cat thought car would pass in front,
So spun and walked all fur and confidence
Into the dreadful tyre-treads …
A wheel caught hold of it and
FEARSOME THUDS
Sounded from the night-time of black axles in
UNEQUAL FIGHT
That stopped the heart to hear it.
But cat shot out with limbs still solid,
Bolted, spitting fire and gravel
At unjust God who built such massive
Catproof motorcars in his graven image,
Its mind made up to lose and therefore learn,
By winging towards
The wisdom toothgaps of the canyon houses
LEGS AND BRAIN INTACT.
A frog jumped
Feebly along the pool edge
Away from the trapnet of my feet.
I picked it up.
A pink wound shone
Between belly and that phosphorous
Faint zig-zag down its back,
Pain the colour of pomegranate
And orange agony,
Umbilical string hanging
A catchline towards water
Yet dragging like an anchor
That weighed the entire world
When it tried to jump.
Had it been pierced by a snake?
Clipped by a wind-thrown tree
Cut by scorpion, bird or pruning hook?
Or was it a festering frog-cancer
That gathered and burst after a life
Of statue-cunning,
Too much patience before
Each silent nerve-leap
Onto a dreamy insect?
I hoped the magic water
Would seal its wound
Stitch back outflowing life.
It swam deep under,
Air bubbles snapping
Like fleas abandoning a mouse,
Messages from its stopped body
Breaking at trees and sky.
It was a leaf suspended
Four legs and green spade-head,
Flayed rushblades clear
Above the indeterminate green
Basin of the pool;
Calmed between earth and air
Dying in its native water
From my allowing a leap
Into the safety of its death
When it wanted peace
And a long quiet end
Lasting a lifetime.
It hung in the float-still water,
Next day gone:
Mud-guns exploded
By assaulting minnow-snouts.
From nightcaves underwater
Daylight filters like a ghost
To scare marauding goldfish
Chewing mosquito eggs –
And to illuminate
A hundred minnows savaging my spit.
Tears stop, and suffering
Goes the next level down,
Deeper when tears won’t start.
Pain outlives, the hollow soul burns
Till cured by nothing less
Than the same death for me.
You are world-finished
Blacked out, sea-driven
Beyond soil and nowhere,
Empty caves filled
By your heavy death-weighing:
The sea and moon fought
And their vicious clamour killed
The survivor who is empty
And the winner who is dead.
The witnessed scenery changes
To sunbaked cliffs and spun dry trees:
Parched and monotonous hill country.
No one has the will to stop the train,
Though all can now observe what’s to be seen:
A priest embalming a dissected brain.
Hardly visible from the railway
A deep ravine throws out its endless bile.
We cross the river, and notice to the left
Various vertical caves in Gothic style
Which afforded refuge to the Christians,
Sparse and lean (a rouble to the guide)
Against the Mongols and the Persians
Who swam the Caspian like cats against no tide;
Who one time sent three gifts from Samarkand
Of frugal sunlight to an ancient feast:
Now reaping a reward with scarlet swords
From the full belly of the fecund East.
Our train proceeds, unfolds an arrowmark of bones,
The valley widens, easy to foretell
That crossing the military road we soon
Reach the city and look up the best hotel.