A small man formed
One hour after forging into light,
Body-brain wrapped and blue eyes
Open to noise of rook and cuckoo
To stalk a rabbit in the meadow
Read a book, nothing less than
Blank before sudden turns
To evergreen or glint of water.
Hirsute and stern on bleak arrival
He lay down after a toiler’s day
Face to say: All right.
You gave me life, but death also.
Forehead creased on future worry
When hacking obstacles,
Indenting map-hair on moving palm
To say it doesn’t matter, go to sleep.
Struck a lifeline horoscope
Of luck, speedkid, handy with women –
Which years will balance
In give, take or ruination,
Seeing all but never everything.
Sleep beyond the iced bite of the moon,
Being what you are this moment
Free with innocence but lacking milk
Soon to become all you do not feel,
Advancing against
The normal hazarding inroads
That spin life into havoc:
Power to dissect visions
Like the yolk and mucus of an egg,
And build up certain freedoms from the moon.
A broad and solid oak exploded
Split by mystery and shock
Broken like bread
Like a flower shaken.
Acorn guts dropped out:
A dead gorilla unlocked from breeding trees,
Acorns with death in their baby eyes.
A hang-armed scarecrow in the wind:
What hit it? Got into it? Struck
So quietly between dawn and daylight?
With a dying grin and wooden wink
A lost interior cell relinquished its ghost:
In full spleen and abundant acorn
A horn of lightning gored it to the quick.
Trees move on Fenland
Uprooting men and houses on a march
To reach their enemy the sea.
Silent at the smell of watersalt
Treelines advance. The sea lies low,
Snake-noise riding on unruffled surf
While all trees wither and retreat.
Out of farm range or cottage eyes trees make war
Green heads, close as if to kiss
Roots to rip at quickening wood of tree-hearts
And tree-lungs, sap-running wood-flesh
Hurled at the moon, breaking oak
Like the dismemberment of ships,
At the truce of dawn wind trumpeting.
Sedate, dispassionate and beautiful
They know about panic and life and patience
Grow by guile into night’s
Companions and day’s evil
Setting landmarks and boundaries
That fight the worms.
Trees love, love love, love Death
Love a windscorched earth and copper sky
Love the burns of ice and fire
When lightning as a last hope is called in.
Boats on land they loathe the sea
And wait with all arms spread to catch the moon:
Pull back my skin and there is bark
Peel off my bark and there is skin:
I am a tree whose roots destroy me.
End of life and before death
Feathers dipping towards oaken frost
A bird heard that shot:
The ink sky burst,
Stone colliding with the sun
Echo stunned its wing
String hauled it down.
Gamekeeper or poacher
Cut its free flight to the sea.
Vice had tongue, veins, teeth
Dogs in panoply, pressure
To ring a sunspot fitting neat
The blacked-out circle of a gun.
Fiddle-tongue and spite
Hang as if asleep
Safe on his tipped world,
But lizard-shoulders hunch
Pulsate at a fly on slanting wall.
Belly smooth, feet stuck firm
A thousand volts of paralyzing tongue
Rifle out and kill;
Weapons in one stomach pit.
Death is quick when looked on,
Sweet as food when the lamps of paradise
Blacken a brain that one day
Hoped to know.
Sparking tongue ignites
A common wink and into oblivion:
The lizard unaware of upside down
Eats as it runs.
He meditates on the Empty Quarter:
Mosque of sand dissolving through eggtimer’s
Neck. Looks on camel-loads
Starting for Oman or Muscat
By invisible Mercator’s thread
That burns the hoof and shrivels
All humps of water. Empty Quarter lures,
He travels with his heaped caravan
Earth-tracks marked as lines
Of unstable land, golden sandgrit
Lifting up grey dunes near vulcan-
Trees and foul magnesium wells
That asps and camels drink from.
He throws off bells, beads, silk, guns
Knives and slippers, scattering all
No longer needed — camel meat
For scavengers, everything
But his own dishrags of flesh.
Naked and demented he hugs
A tree rooted in the widest waste
Catching dew from God at dawn
And dates dropping through rottenness,
Tastes the lone tree’s shade
No one can chop or whip him from,
Till one day ravelled in his own white flame
He abandons the Empty Quarter
And trudges back to terrify the world.
Burned out, burned out
Water of rivers hold me
On a course towards the sea.
Burned out was like a tree
Cut down and hollowed
No branches left
Seasoned by fire into a boat:
Burned out through love’s
Wilful spending
Yet sure it will float
Kindle a fresh blaze
Burn out again
On a stranger shore –
Unless pyromaniac emotions
Scorch me in midstream
And the sun turns black.
To keep them healthily in thrall
They build a little fire in the hall –
And burn their opulent home to ash.
A ruin is better than no love at all.
Dark and ageing timbers crash
Cats surround it at full moon.
Did they abandon love too soon
Full of happiness to see it fall?
Let it fall, in sight of all
It kept them long enough in thrall
As cupboards burn and timbers fall.
They’re still inside, nowhere to run
No windows through which they can crawl;
Only the trapped and burning see it fall.
It kept them like a snake in thrall.
A ruin is better than no love at all.
They smile unhappily to see it fall.
To burn out love is to burn a star from the sky
But can touch reach so far,
Feel the fire increase
Careful the heart but not the star will burn?
Star that pulsates like a fish:
My heart meets you in dark or light
To taste the waters of the star which says:
Trust once gone can never be restored –
Such love can surely be put out,
The power to break its fire with my fist.
Talking on the beach:
Love has broken its heart
Is a pomegranate split
A waterfall pouring in.
Each half lifts
Drifts out to sea,
Eaten clean as January boats
By frost and salt.
One will sink, one go free:
Withered fruit-husk without salt
Or soul. Could be you
And could be me, watching January waves
Erupt like whales and thrones and tractors:
Stones clash back into their places.
You wait for a boat to come
And snatch you from love’s pandemonium
Of humping tide and screeching stones.
But what shipwrecked you there?
Want to know, and cease to wonder:
The boat lurches into seas of danger
Waves turning phosphorous, turn fire:
Rowers begin work, and you not with them
When the numbness in you burns
Because you do not want to go, or stay.
Pomegranate is a far-off fruit
Scattered seeds fulfil no circle.
Love cannot kill
A broken heart, nor mend it.
The sea defends its dead
And those born from it,
Believes in broken hearts
Burns when it boils so.
No boat can stay, must fall apart
Floating through the open heart,
Like fruit bursting
At the shock of moonless water,
And two more hearts pulled in to slaughter.
Naked, naked, I never see you naked
As if to be naked is to tell lies
With the body that you show –
Cover it and keep the truth.
Hide naked, keep it close
You never let me see you naked
Unless half so by accident or tease.
Hide it carefully: those lies are yours,
Not mine, speak them loudly if they burn.
Belong to someone else, not mine.
I see you naked through them,
Through love, naked beyond the truth
That will not let you see yourself.
Keep your body for someone else:
The lies that hide you are less sure
Than the truth that blinds me.
It is time to part, before murder is done.
We have robbed each other of all we had,
Eaten bitter herbs of battleground and kitchen
And soaked our souls in them,
Digested the gall of trust so cannot give it back
In that pure state it was before:
Consumed ourselves by ignoble hatred.
So let us part like ghosts
And promise not to haunt each other –
Or make ghosts of others.
I haven’t found my hunger yet. When will I know
The hunger to eat these walls away?
The smallest creature visible to the eye
Ran the pallid whiteness up this page
And when I crushed it, hungry at its freedom,
I found a tiny spider made of brick.
It had lived on brick, the bright red dust of brick
That filled its dust-dot of a body and even the speck
Of legs it ran upon. Its life was fed by dust,
The dust of bricks, and it had slaked its hunger
On bricks, no question asked or thought of,
Eating through walls was its life, its vital hunger
For the walls it ate through, even at times
Without hunger. It was so realized
I crushed it, a reddish smear
On the page to remind me
Of the hunger that I know about at last.
Why don’t I write or speak the name?
No light at Hephzibah’s window,
So do not use ‘love’ in vain
Nor easily at this turn of the game.
Her name ignites the wind, breeds
Smoke in the snow of the heart
Gluttons the marrow as I watch
The bombed space
Phosphorized to blindness.
You cannot answer letters or my speeches,
A different man when salt burns
Till there is no more light.
Signals change before the gale
Wipes all traffic out.
Cogs and linchpins tattoo Hephzibah
So I can’t forget your name, or use it,
But continually hear magic syllables
Shriller than my curse
As I speed through
White headlights flooding the world.
She said, when the full moon’s tongue hung
Over Earls Court chimneypots,
And he circled slowly
Round the square to find
A suitable parking place –
She said: ‘Let’s go away together.’
‘Keep clear,’ he said. ‘You’d better not.
I’ll take you, but watch out,
For I will bring you back
If at all,
In two pieces.’
She said: ‘I’ll never want to come back
If I go away with you.’
‘They all do,’ he said.
‘I’ll bring you back in two pieces
And you’ll live like that forever
And never join them up again.’
‘How cruel,’ she said, seeing what he meant.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘To take you apart completely
From yourself and make two separate pieces
Might be the one sure way of fixing
A whole person out of you –
Some do, some don’t.’
He was exceptionally nonchalant.
‘I’m not sure now,’ she said,
Screaming suddenly: ‘You bastard!
Let me get out, I want to walk.’
He stopped the car
But could not park it,
Someone with a similar problem
Was hooting him to move,
So she jumped free and walked away
Leaving him bewildered,
And in at least two pieces.
You talk too much,
Said one piece to another.
Silence and stillness
Are most prized in a whirlwind.
Panic is being caught
Between millstones of stillness –
Feel the bones of the body
Living out the heart’s pain.
The whirlwind will penetrate
The stockade of a gaze erected
That nothing can break through,
While waiting for the force
That will pull you into the body
And draw all pain away.
A lawn grows in the palm of one hand:
Trees in the other combust
To chase worms out.
Nothing can soothe the battered soul,
But love cauterizes madness.
Can’t get him out –
Sits right in the fireplace
Curled up tight
Olive logs send red flames
Feeling the chimney spout.
Cold and safe, legs indrawn,
Wan smile, squats in his fireplace,
Irons cold, hair neat
Away and safe unless
A crowbar can prise him whimpering free.
He smiles wanly because no one has.
If and when he would be normal,
A dead man on the street, smiles
In a mirror no one can smash:
A moonless grimace of victory,
Insane as the sun
That cleanses better than any fire
Or his prison it once burned in.
The chain is weakest at its strongest point:
The strong link by its heart helps weaker parts,
And so weak links grow tauter than they should.
Thus, taking too much strength
The whole chain crumbles
Broken at both weak and stronger points.
Water breaks the strongest chain
When a stormtide drags the ship away.
Power changes all equations –
The strongest link a strand of hair,
And weakest at its strongest point
Shares its heart with weaker hearts.
Midnight aches at the length of life
The endless day
Blocking the porthole-elbow of Bothnia:
One grand eye lit in twelve o’clock yellow,
Turquoise and carmine sun
A wound gouged by the night-dragon
Not yet asleep.
Day bleeds to death
Sea close enough to dip
The pen and write in.
No midsummer howitzer can give
A morphine blast and send the sun
To whatever will rise up at dawn for me.
Space and midnight fill all emptiness,
As lost love bleeds acidic dreams
Into the solvent sea:
Red like a Roman bath.
Frontiers meet over steppe and meadow
At burial mound, salt waste or winter hut,
Beyond danubes and caspians
Where sturgeon breed by reed and barge-hull –
But wood outlives
Asia or Europe, love shaped by heart-torn
Internal bleeding of the stricken forest.
Wood dies, and is born again.
In Irkutsk a swastika was scrawled
On a wall so I took my handkerchief
And spat and rubbed
But it was tough chalk
Wondering why those Red pedestrians
Didn’t grind it off.
I’d done the same in London
Walking to the Tube
And missing the train quite often,
But here it was ineradicable Russian chalk
Though I chafed it to the barest shadow,
No one taking notice on their walk
Down Karl Marx Street. I strolled
Away to let them keep it.
Apart from scraping out a concave mark
The crippled cross would stay forever,
And anyway why should I get arrested
For damaging The People’s Property?
Black ice breaking without sound or reason:
Water below moves its shoulders
Like a giant craving to see snow.
Ninety-degree cold preserves mosquito eggs
As the fist of winter
Pulls into the sun’s mittens.
The domed sun touches the horizon,
A totem in the lake sinking
Till its feet touch bottom and reach fire.
Stopped his cart
Refused food
Shook tin brass skulls copper
Turned to the sun
And pressed a horseshoe to his eyes
Spun a waterspout of words
Grave toes patterning the soil
Under a tree clothed all in green,
Chews beansprouts from his crown
Spins to pipe dance
Head between land and sky
Hand five candle-fingers
Fuelled by the gutters of his stomach.
Spins to music
Stick legs strut
In wide skin trousers:
Shouting melts and planctifies
Fisherboats and floating logs:
Recites alone and long
On Baikal fish and stork in one:
Sea that threatens fire-spiders
Copperbacks and claws –
Creep from the rimline lake
Feet to feel and lips to taste,
Have no heart but swarm
To eat from him and die of it –
As brass-hooved breakers
Break and draw them back
And he weaving
Over sand to green land
Melting and metalling
In blacksmith power.
Horses birds and torches flee
From tundra magic keening,
Flesh of man flying
Skinflags unfurling
In a merciless slipstream to the sun.
Drop, hear drums
Rend on the flight,
He so far within
Sly, taciturn and a bully when normal
Knowing he must keep that self out
Or power goes,
Be an old man forever
Carved in rock by the fire
After the last telling.
Drink, blackout, gutter-bout
Kick back nine swills of vodka
That put an iron band around
Thorned skullcap and fire
Of words toasting Life
Peace, Town or Cousin.
Bottles, heaped grub, dead towers in tabletown:
Wine descends in light and colour
As if the Devil had a straw stuck there
Greedily drawing liquid in
As consciousness draws out.
Death is the apotheosis of the Bourgeois Ethic.
Tolstoy when he felt it coming on
Left his family and set out for Jerusalem.
Death shared its railway station:
He in a coma heard trains banging
Where Anna violated life.
The fourth bell drowned his final wrath.
The Bolsheviks renamed the station after him
Instead of Bourgeois Death.
Ride it out, ride it,
Ride out this mare of sleeplessness
Galloping above the traffic roar
Of Gorki Street,
Weaving between Red stars
And the grind of cleaning wagons.
Today all Moscow was in mourning
Because there’s no queue at Lenin’s tomb.
I told them but they wouldn’t believe me.
Ride out this beast who won’t let me sleep,
Drags me up great Gorki Street
And into Pushkin Square,
Leningrad a rose on the horizon
Ringed by blood and water –
Pull up the blankets
And be small for a few hours of the night.
The poet sings his poems on a bridge
A bridge open to horizontal rain
And the steely nudge of lightning,
Or icy moths that bring slow death
Croon him to sleep by snow-wings touching his eyes.
Through this he sings
No people coming close to watch when the snow
Melts and elemental water forces smash
Between cliff and rock under his swaying bridge.
When the water thins, his sweat-drops burst
On scorching rocks like sparks from a flower pod;
Through all this he sits and sings his poems
To those vague crowds on either bank
He cannot make out or consider
With such short sight, for after the first applauded
Poem he let his glasses smash into the rocks below.
The bridge belongs to him, his only property,
Grows no food, supports no houses –
Cheap to buy with the first mediocre poems.
It spans a river that divides two territories –
He knew it and made no mistake:
Today he faces one and tomorrow the other
But from blurred eyes they look the same to him:
Green fields and red-roofed houses
Rising to mountains where wars can be fought
Without a bitter end being reached –
The same on either side.
He does not write a poem every day
But each pet territory takes its turn
To hear his words in one set language burn
And drive them back from each other.
In any rash attack they cannot cross his bridge
But broach the river and ravine
Down at the estuary or far upstream.
He listens to the stunning bloodrush of their arms
And shakes his head, never grows older
As he bends to his paper which one side or the other
Contrives to set, with food, by his hands’ reach.
Sometimes sly messengers approach at night
Suggesting he writes and then recites
Upon some momentary theme
To suit one side and damn the other,
At which he nods, tells jokes and riddles
Agrees to everything and promises
That for them he’ll tear the world apart
With his great reading.
He stays young, ignoring all requests and prophecies,
But his bridge grows old, the beams and ropes brittle,
And some night alien figures
In a half-circle at each dim bridgehead
Brandish knives and axes. Lanterns flash,
Blades and points spark like spinning moons
Gathering as he puts away pens and parchment,
Closes his eyes, and does not wake for a week,
Knowing he will once more dream
The familiar childhood dream
Of falling down the sheer side of the world
And never wake up.
But he owns and dominates his bridge.
It is his bread and soul and only song –
And if the people do not like it, they can cut him free.
Left as a desert:
Deserted by one great experience
That pulled its teeth and shackles out
And left me as a desert
Under which bones are buried
Over which the sand drifts.
Seven years gone like laden camels:
The gravel and the wind
Is piling this vast desert up
To one sky and one colour
And sky reflecting desert shapes.
The solitary heart lurks on the off-chance
That rain clouds will come and fertilize
The great experience that made this desert.
Love in the environs of Voronezh
It’s far away, a handsome town
But what has it to do with love?
Guns and bombers smashed it down.
Yet love rebuilt it street by street
The dead would hardly know it now
And those who lived forgot retreat.
There’s no returning to the heart:
The dead to the environs go
Away from resurrected stone.
Reducible to soil and snow
They hem the town in hard as bone:
The outer zones of Voronezh.
The thin moon sliced the heart out as it fell,
Then effortlessly made its way
To the earth’s true middle:
The only cure is to fall in love.
The moon gives back what it takes away.
Blocks of flats blot out the moon.
People live with happiness and work;
I left my love too soon, too soon,
So wait for me, it won’t seem long.
She put sugar in my coffee
Lit my cigarette
Fed my eyes with the glow of lost desire
Wept when I walked away.
Write to me: it won’t seem long.
Hull down: tanks are waiting.
I hear them coming through the dust.
Forests have turned into desert
Powdering the soul to ash,
But sand sends out new blossoms
Till flowers and trees grow strong again.
In the desert that was once a forest
Where eyes see only dust and fire,
Tears dry even as one drinks
On water freely flowing.
Sandgrains fly up nostrils
Turn cool in their protecting flesh,
Salting blood to make a forest
Before the soul can perish.
A brittle seed feeds on the deepest sandgrain
Where the sweated liquid of despair
Makes a forest from the driest desert.
Through a gap in snowlace curtains
Winter turns to fire and sun:
Heat makes the earth a board to spread on
Dust drummed solid by a white sun descending.
Needle-tips tattoo cat-scars on the sky,
Drum-beating letters burn: no escape
From the flat white iron of the sun,
No fauna living but serpent skeletons
Bleached so clean the weakest breath
Can blow such bones as dust.
The white-hot circle blacks out life:
Lie flat and stroke the earth
Before rain comes and rivers overflow.
Hope, a longing for something new,
Crushes the beetle of the past.
When hope takes hold its ruthlessness
Feeds on the purest fuel of injustice,
And sharpens the spike for action.
Whatever you want — bites the fingers.
Be careful what you want:
Wait for the chill river to separate the limits of desire,
For icy banks to break the watercourse
And sweep all venom clean.
Let go, feet tear ladder-rungs
Losing views of pepper dunes
Beyond ampersand trees
In the withered arm of the horizon.
Between the toll of heartsick
Into hole and hiding
The eye of winter’s snake-sun
Needles into the heart
Paralyzing both hands to let go.
Life begins when love’s game is ended.
Live, and death starts biting:
The game robs you of life.
A week of rain, and the house is an island,
A mudtrack after months of drought
Leads to the paved road.
A smell of spring freshens the brain,
And water slops at the bank as I wade through.
No black sky can finish off the never-ending game,
Or engines drown the memory of peace.
February forty times has arrowed towards spring,
None left behind,
Swirling fish that never vanish,
Colourless or rainbow
Twisting after strange journeys,
Paralyzing vast aquariums.
February is the tunnel’s end
A zodiac into soaking loam
When I watch the stars
To say a loud goodbye of welcome to.
Mimosa’s dead stench follows like a shadow
Never consumed by the sun
Or swilled by rain,
Rots like memories that went with it.
Be free, and endure happiness –
Summer like a dream from the grave
Rebuilds the heart.
Winter will bring an elegiac falling of the snow
And nurse the purest blossoms –
And green-eyed August
Spread the odour of a wheatfield’s death.
Choices bite however the performance.
Scattered seed can bring up crops and flowers
To rub out happiness or suffering.
Midnight comes at any hour.
Eagles out of sunlight bring it,
Shadows on the fields.
The sun throws broken eagles
Back against the stars.
The moon eats and grows fat.
The curtain opens to an empty sky.
Flesh to flesh: there are two hearts between us
Mine on one side, yours on the other
Through which all thoughts must pass
Mine intercepting those from you
Yours beating strongly (I feel it doing so)
Taking my thoughts into the labyrinth of yours
From sleep of me to sleep of you
Till flesh and heart join in the deepest cave.
Summer’s iron is on the trees
A new weight to bear
Leap-year sap rising through lead
Forcing flower to give fruit
Green flame shifting up iron trunks
To poke out buds.
Leaves hang all summer
Shaken by rain and wind
Shrived by a little heat:
Such yearly swing must wear them
To a death so flat by autumn
That blood draws back
And lets the leaves go.
Trees suffer in frost and snow:
Force-fed by soil, drained by age
They brood and bide their time.
How many summers can they take such weight?
How long is life, how rich the earth,
How weak the heart?
A rose about to open
Thinks air and sun
Can turn it into
Something it is not already.
The pink slit of life shows
Between tight green blades –
Hasn’t it seen enough
Without wanting everything?
Behind its packed unopened petals
Are roses still to flower
And blossoms not yet dropped;
Outside, those same are tempting it,
Scorched and shrivelled on the grass.
Rose about to open, why do you do it?
What force pushes
So subtly that it does not feel?
What beckoning power beyond
Draws it with perfume sweeter than
The one that will be made?
They promise nothing but the last decay:
The will to come or stay is not their own.
God did not write.
He spoke.
He made.
His jackknife had a superblade –
He sliced the earth
And carved the water,
Made man and woman
By an act of slaughter.
He scattered polished diamonds
In the sky like dust
And gave the world a push to set it spinning.
What super-Deity got him beginning
Whispered in his ear on how to do it
Gave hints on what was to be done?
Don’t ask.
In his mouth he felt the sun
Spat it out because it burned;
From between his toes — the moon –
He could not walk so kicked it free.
His work was finished.
He put a river round his neck,
And vanished.
Level-crossing signal box
With three and a half hours between trains.
Bells stopped, gates shut and blocking the line:
Levers taller than himself palisade the moon,
He on the safer side.
Elbows space aside and tunnels
The last green spitter of sparks
Up the stars and soaking turf towards London,
Whispers along, snarling, a retreating song,
Signals on gauges like slicked hair downarrowed:
Line clear for the next open crossing.
Guard in waistcoat and jacket
(Good to children who just want to see)
Iron dragons slip through his fingers a hundred times a day
Responsibility too great to feel power,
Warning others down the line of its approach,
He sits by teaflask and prepares a book,
Needs an opium-portion to become
Captain of a rusting steamer
Crawling the coastal buffs of Patagonia,
Or Nemo in his flying boat
Lording at the Pole or South Sea hideout.
A good tale every night is better
That the telly or a homely bed.
Trains growl on steel snakes
Straight and sleeping close,
Locomotive kings of the dawn
Behind signals from another cured of sleep:
Wide gates open for the first black arrow
A circle in its packed and moving forehead,
As he closes his book
And lets the day pour through.
Walls he sat by had fallen long ago:
The city smoked after capture and rapine,
No brick left upon another.
These barbarians — this boy
Sitting on the littered scrub –
Belonged to a Scythian family
Who found the city as if following
A far-back shutter-flash,
Crazed with hope after a famished trudge
Over steppe whose herbs
Scorched by the haze of the sun
Pulled horses’ ribs so far in
They were almost dead.
By tale and memory this Scythian offshoot
Saw a glittering metropolis,
People and laden horses queueing to get out.
No brick upon another. While the boy’s
Mother scraped at rubbish
He played at tapping stone with stone
Cracked lips moving at the sky
Waiting for her to find food,
And idly placing one brick on another.
A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:
Doesn’t matter where it came from
Has a dead fly stuck
At the lefthand corner
By a place called Longueval,
Rusty from blood sucked
Out of British or German soldiers
Long since gone over the top
Where many went to in those olden days.
Whoever it was sat on an upturned
Tin and smoked a pipe.
Summer was finished beyond the parapet
And winter not yet willing
To let him through the mist
Of that long valley he was told to cross,
While the earth shook from gnat-bites of gunfire
As if to shrug all men from its shoulders.
A fly dropped on the opened map
Feet of fur and bloated with soot
Crawled over villages he hoped to see.
Bemused he followed it
Curious to know at which point it would stop
And finally take off from,
For that might be
Where death would fall on him.
Scorning the gamble
He squashed the stolid fly
Whose blood now decorates the map
Pinned on my wall after fifty years gone by.
Night came, he counted men into the trench
And crouching on the last day of June
In the earthen slit that stank
Of soil and Woodbines, cordite and shit
Held the wick close to his exhausted eyes,
Shut the dim glow into its case
And ceased to think.
Lead melts. If I saw lead, I melted it
Poured it into sand and made shapes.
I melted all my soldiers,
Watched that rifle wilt
In an old tin can on a gas flame
Like a straw going down
From an invisible spark of summer.
He stood to attention in the tin
Rim gripped by fanatic pliers
From the old man’s toolkit,
Looked on by beady scientific eyes
That vandalize a dapper grenadier.
The head sagged, sweating under a greater
Heat than Waterloo or Alma.
He leaned against the side
And lost an arm where no black grapeshot came.
His tired feet gave way,
A spreading pool to once proud groin,
Waist and busby falling in, as sentry-go
At such an India became too hard,
And he lay without pillow or blanket
Never to get up and see home again.
Another one, two more, I threw them in:
These went quicker, an elegant patrol
Dissolved in that infernal pit.
Eyes watering from fumes of painted
Soldiers melting under their own smoke,
The fire with me, hands hard at the plier grip
At soldiers rendered to peaceful lead
At the bottom of a tin.
Swords into ploughshares:
With the gas turned off I wondered
What to do with so much marvellous dead lead
That hardened like the surface of a pond.
Armies have already met and gone.
When the best has happened
The worst is on its way.
Beware of its return in summer.
When fields are grey and should be green
Rub scars with ash and sulphur.
Full moon clears the land for its own view,
Whose fangs would bereave this field
Of hayrick and sheep.
In the quiet evening birds fly
Where armies are not fighting yet.
He looks a long way on at where he’ll walk:
A cratered highway with all hedges gone.
Green land dips and smells of fire.
Topography is wide down there.
The moon waxes and then emaciates.
Birds fatten on fields before migration:
Smoke in summer hangs between earth and sky,
On ground where armies have not fought
But lay their ambush to dispute his passing.