Collected Poems

A tired horse treads

The moonpocked face

Of a ploughed field

Cuts furrows blindly

Through drifting rain

On chestnut trees, soaked hedges

Energy sucked out with evening;

Seven nails in each steel shoe

Are empty scars of twenty-eight nights

When the white horse dreams

Of galloping through star-clouds,

A moon of nails flying from its path.

Clouds play with their water

Distort shekels between grass

Enriched by the city that flattens

Surrounding land with rubbish;

Binoculars ring the distance like a gun:

From a sea of shining slate

Churches lift and chimneys lurch,

Modern blocks block visions,

The Robin Hood Rifles drilled in fours

Practised azimuths on far-off points,

Eyes watering at southern hills

A half-day’s march away:

‘They’ll have to swim the Trent, thou knows,

God-damn their goldfish eyes!’

Musket balls rush, break glass,

Make rammel. The Nottingham Lambs

Smashed more than a foreign army,

Came through twitchells to spark the rafters

Paint pillars with the soot of anarchy.

The Trent flowed in its scarlet coat

Too far off to deal with fire:

The council got our Castle in the end

Protected by Captain Albert Ball VC

Who thrust into a cloud-heap above Loos

Hoping for his forty-second kill.

In school they said: ‘You’re born

For Captain Albert Ball

To be remembered. Otherwise he’d die!’

A private soldier, he became Icarus:

‘Dearest Folks, I’m back again

In my old hut. My garden’s fine.

This morning I went up, attacked five Huns

Above the Line. Got one, and forced two down

But had to run, my ammunition gone.

Came back OK. Two hits on my machine.’

Fate mixed him to a concrete man

An angel overlooking

On the lawn of Nottingham’s squat fort.

My memory on the terrace

Remembers barges on the Leen

Each sail a slice of paper, writing

Packed in script of tunic-red.

For eighteen years I blocked the view

No push to send me flying.

Another brain shot down in sleep:

Rich Master Robin Hood outside the walls

Where he belongs robs me of time

And does not give it to the poor.

The whimsical statue stood

With hat and Sherwood weapons

Till a Nottingham Lamb removed the arrow

Someone later nicked the bow

Then they stole the man himself

And rolled his statue down the hill

One football Saturday

And splashed it in the Trent:

If you see it moving, take it:

If it doesn’t move, steal it bit by bit

But do not let it rest till Death’s sonic boom

Blows the sun through every Castle room.

Smoke all evening, too thin to move

Stubble aflame

Up a hillside when I drove

Across the flat half-mile between

Iden and the Isle of Oxney. A line

Of white, lipped in red set a corner

Of the battlefield on fire,

And cloud like a grey cloak was pulled along

By some heart-broken mourner going home.

At the North Pole everywhere is south.

Turn where you will

Polaris in eternal zenith

Studs the world’s roof.

Under that ceiling

A grey rocket crosses

A continent of ice,

Evading Earth by flirting with it.

Who will know what planet he escaped from?

A cone of cosmic ash pursued its course

On automatic pilot set to earth

Bringing Death — or a new direction

To be fed into my brain

Before collision.

A man plays bagpipes on Fifth Avenue.

Gaelic-wail stabbing at passersby

Who wish its pliant beckoning

Would draw them through their fence of discontent

To a field of freedom they can die in.

They stand, and then walk on.

A man with thick grey beard

Goes wild between traffic,

Arms wagging semaphore;

Raves warnings clear and loud

To those ignoring him.

A blind man rattles a money-can,

Dog flat between his legs

Listens to the demanding

Tin that has so little in

Both ears register

Each bit that falls.

An ambulance on a corner:

They put a man on a stretcher

Who wants air. A woman says:

‘Is it a heart-attack?

Is the poor guy dead?’

She worries for him:

Dying is important when it comes.

‘I suppose it is,’ I guess,

‘I hope it’s not too late’ –

She had one last year:

‘Fell in the street, just like that.’

Her lips move with fear.

The man is slid into the van.

Just like that.

Hard to come and harder go

For the bagpipe player in the snow

The wild man with his traffic sport

The old man with his dog

And the young who hurry:

Dying, a lot of it goes on.

There was a lady of Bapaume

Whose eyes were colourless and dead –

Until the falling sun turned red;

Her lovers from across the foam

Walked at dawn towards her bed:

Fell in fields and sunken lanes

Died in chalk-dust far from home.

A rash of scattered poppy-stains:

Nowadays they pass her wide –

That mistress of chevaux-de-frise

Is still alive and can’t conceal

Her mournful and erotic zeal:

The lady of Bapaume had charms –

Bosom large, but minus arms.

No soldiers rise these days and go

Towards the bloodshot indigo.

Motorways veer by the place

On which, with neither love nor grace,

They drive to holidays in Spain.

There was a lady of Bapaume

Whose lovers ate the wind and rain.

Names fade,

Suave air of Picardy erodes

The regimental badge

Or cross

Or David’s Star

Of gunner this and private that.

The chosen captains and their bombardiers

And those known but as nothing unto God

Who brought them out of slime and clay

Are taken back again.

God knew each before they knew themselves

If ever they did

Before mothers lips sang

Brothers showed

Sisters taught

Fathers put them out to school or work.

But only God may know them when the stones are gone

If any can –

If God remembers what God once had done.

Birth, the first attack, begins at dawn.

It’s also the last, whistle at sky-fall,

Illogical, unsynchronized, inept.

Children, pushed over the top

And kettledrummed across churned furrows

Kitted out with dreams and instinct,

Hope to learn before reaching the horizon.

Those in front call back advice:

‘Going to advance, send reinforcements.’

But who trust the old, when they as young

Spurned cautionary wisdom

That never harmonized with youth?

‘Going to a dance, send three-and-fourpence.’

Some fall quietly under each rabid burst of shell

Love of life unnoticed

In willingness to give it

Or the feckless letting-go.

Leaves drop in the zero-hour of spring

Young heat mangled by car or motorbike.

Broken sight looks in, no view beyond

Though terror rocks the heart to sleep

The signal-sky gives bad advice:

Get up, look outside, day again.

Insight warped by energy, blinded by ignorance.

The battlefield too wide,

Bullets rage at friends and parents

Strangers stunned in the lime-pits of oblivion.

Who blame for this sublime attack?

Did Brigadier-General God in his safe bunker plan?

He horsebacks by, devoted cheers.

Choleric face knows too much to tell –

It’s dangerous for any smile to show.

Whoever is cursed must be believed in

For Baal is dead. Get up. Push on.

Want to live forever?

Go through. No psychic wound can split

Or leg be lost at that onrushing slope.

Halfway, more craven, sometimes too clever,

Old campaigners want a hole to flatten in

Before rot of the brain encircles

Or Death’s concealed artillery

Plucks fingers from the final parapet.

Silence kills as quickly, you can bet.

Live on. Death pulls others in

Not you, or me, or us (not yet).

Earth underfoot is kind but waiting,

Green sea flows on the right flank,

Black rain foils the leftward sun,

Poppy clouds and mustard fields

Tricked out with dead ground, full woods,

Lateral valleys flecked with cornflowers.

Roses flake their fleshy petals down.

Time falls away. Battle deceptively recedes,

Peace lulls to the final killing ground,

Familiar voices coming up behind.

The protest against Death

Is a raised fist, the face

Of corruption bewails its declining

Gift of life. I go when chosen for taking.

The sky bruises the aching fist. Air mellows

The corroded face. You did not choose me.

I parted myself long ago when I sat

On a branch overlooking boathouse

And bulrushes, and the lake water

On which nothing moved

Except the breath of words

Saying no seven times all told.

I didn’t stay to hear the answer

Turned blind in Death’s donkey-circle

Till the rag around my fist

Was bloodsoaked from hitting the trees.

A busy rabbit young and small

Cornered our vegetable plot,

Chewing green treasure,

Tail upright from line to line

In rabbit-fashion,

An all-providing God set out

Row on row of grub,

Scarpered back to thistles

Till heavy-treading vengeance went away.

The fur-lined malefactor fed a fortnight

On lettuce carrots peas,

Slyly keeping news from friends below.

Laden gun half-aimed, I stalked:

That gorging salad-engine’s tender paws

Which sensed the weight of lead shot in my pocket,

And soft-footed off before I reached the hedge.

My shadow half-close,

Approaching blackout had low odds

On lead-slug hitting his well-padded neck.

It never did

Though if that produce had been all

Between us and hunger

The senses would have sharpened

And my gun been God Almighty.

Drawn by the white glitter of a lamp

A slick-winged moth got in

My midnight room and ran quick

Around the switches of a radio.

Antennae searched the compact powerpacks

And built-in aerials, feet on metal paused

At METER-SELECT, MINIMUM-MAX

TUNER, VOLUME, TONE

Licked up shortwave stations onto neat

Click-buttons with precision feet.

Unable to forego the next examination

My own small private moth seemed all

Transistor-drunk on fellow-feeling,

A voluptuous discovery pulled

From some far bigger life.

A thin and minuscule antenna

Felt memory backtuning as it crawled

Familiar mechanism, remembering an instrument

Once cherished,

Forgotten but loved for old times’ sake.

I switched the wireless on, and the moth

To prove its better senses

Mocked me with open wings and circled the light,

Making its own theatre, which outran all music.

Fishes never change their habits:

A million years seem like a day

As far as fishes’ habits go.

Beware of those who change them half as fast

Like people every year or so

So fast you cannot find

A firm limb or settled eye.

The constancy of fishes is unique.

They multiply but keep their habits

In deep and solitary state;

Feel unique and all alone

Not being touched and hardly touching

Even to keep the species spreading –

Unique is never-changing habits.

Fishes are flexible and fit the water,

And though continually moving

Never change their habits.

Thistles grow in spite of flowers,

Brittle taproots drawing succour till the autumn.

Seeds flop from the hedge

And at puberty suck their fill by beans and carrots.

Entrenching blade hacks soil,

And fingers under thistle-spikes grip,

And easily out it’s tossed to the sun’s bake.

A dry and useless thistle pricks –

Fingers gather and inflate with pus:

For weeks the memory of pain.

Flowers wilt, leaves feloniously snatched,

Birds sucked away — autumn happens.

Frenetic bluebottles saw the air.

Blackberries scratch with poison.

Love is taken before knowing the mistake.

The last thief grins

At the look of life.

There are many, so who cares?

The trap is a loaded crossbow,

Ratchet-pulley sinewed back

From birth and set in wait.

None walk upright from the bolt’s release.

The left hand guards my life.

I use. It uses. Sinister

Alliances shape plans.

Left hand is fed by the heart

Strategically engined

Between brain and fingers,

Sometimes filtering intelligence.

The left eye is in line with hand

And pen. The left lung

Rotted when I tried the right:

Lesson one was spitting blood.

Vulnerable left side lives in harmony

And liberates the rules,

Rides monsters who fear to eat themselves,

So do not bite.

Since men have waved flags on her

Classified geology with peacock colours

Sent cameras probing every angle

The moon has turned lesbian;

Shows brighter now in her woman hunger

Goes with purpose to her lover

In the Milky Way, nothing more from earth

Yet better by far than shining palely

A mirror for courtiers to gawp at –

And that stricken poet who ached

In her unrequiting love but now is free.

When Ophelia lay a finger on the water

The cold and shallow brook scorched flesh.

She pulled it back.

The fire was love.

She was forget-me-not’s daughter,

Each eye a pond of flowers.

She climbed the arching cliff

Where water sent its clouds of salt,

Luminous across the sun.

The nunnery was found:

No one saw her body spin.

A lunar sea-change sent it cleanly in.

A bigot walks fast.

Get out of the way

Or walk faster.

He walked faster too

Veered right

To evade me.

I increased my rate

Hinging left to avoid

The fire in his eyes.

Collisionable material

Should not promenade

On the same street.

We muttered sorry

Then went on

More speedily than ever.

Down the slope to the horizon

Fix the black-dot sun before departure.

When the day sets at the storm’s end

Far along the moonbeams that flow in,

Shut the barometer, hang the watch away

Lay the sextant in its box.

How deep the valley which enclosed

The lifeboat washed against the shore.

The heart says goodnight at dawn,

And hopes the dark is best

Which fears the day to come.

The way to knowing is to know

How useless to talk of hills and colours

Looking at Jerusalem.

To know is to keep silent

Yet in silence

One no longer knows;

Can never unknow what was known

Or let silence slaughter reason.

One knows, and always knows

Unable to believe silence

A better way of knowing.

One sees Jerusalem, knows

Yet does not, comes to life

And knows that walls outlast whoever watches.

The Temple was destroyed: one knows for sure.

One joins the multitude and grieves.

Knows it from within.

One does not know. Let me see you

Everyday as if for the first time

Then I’ll know more:

Which already has been said

By wanderers who, coming home,

Regret the loss of that first vision.

The dust that knew it once is mute.

Stones that know stay warm and silent.

From pale dry hills I watch Jerusalem,

Make silence with the stones:

An ever-new arrival.

Tel Aviv is built on sand:

Sand spills from a broken paving stone

And sandals cannot tread it back;

Waves beat threateningly

A sea to flow through traffic

Climb hills and wash Jerusalem.

Every white-eyed speckle of its salt

Feasts on oranges and people,

Envying their safety;

And their rock through which

Six million nails were hammered

As deep as the world’s middle,

And the sky that no floodtide can reach.

With coloured pens and pencils

And a child’s alphabet book

I laboriously draw

Each Hebrew letter

Right to left

And hook to foot,

Lamed narrow at the top,

The steel pen deftly thickening

As it descends

And turns three bends

Into a black cascade of hair,

Halting at the vowel-stone

To one more letter.

Script comes up like music

Blessing life

The first blue of the sea

The season’s ripe fruit

And the act of eating bread:

Each sign hewn out of rock

By hands deserving God as well as Beauty.

I’m slow to learn

Cloud-tail shapes and whale-heads

Arks and ships in black, pure black

The black of the enormous sky

From behind a wall of rock:

With their surety of law

Such shapes make me illiterate

And pain the heart

As if a boulder bigger than the earth

Would crush me:

Struck blind I go on drawing

To enlighten darkness.

Such help I need:

Lost in this slow writing,

Clutch at a letter like a walking-stick

Go into the cavern-mouth

And sleep by phosphorescent letters

Dreaming between aleph or tav

Beginning and end

Or the lit-up middle.

Dreams thin away:

In day the hand writes

Hebrew letters cut in my rock

Painted by a child on the page,

For they are me and I am them

But can’t know which.

Killers said

Before they used their slide-rules

‘Death is the way to Freedom’:

Seventy-seven thousand names

Carved on these great walls

Are a gaol Death cannot open.

Eyes close in awe and sorrow

As if that name was my mother

That boy starved to death my son

Those men gassed my brothers

Or striving cousins.

It might have been me and if it was

I spend a day searching the words

For my name.

I’d be glad it was not me

If the dead could see sky again,

Reach that far-off river and swim in it.

What can one say

When shouting rots the brain?

The dead god hanging in churches

Was not allowed to hear

Of work calling for revenge

To ease the pain of having let it happen

And stop it being planned again.

Letters calling for revenge on such a wall

Would vandalize that encyphered synagogue,

And seventy-seven thousand

Stonily indented names

Would still show through.

Vengeance is Jehovah’s own;

To prove He’s not abandoned us

He gave the gift of memory,

The fruit of all trees

In the Land of Israel.

Israel is light and mountains

Bedrock and river

Sand-dunes and gardens,

Earth so enriched

It can be seen from

The middle of the sun.

Without Israel

Would be

The pain

Of God struck from the universe

And the soul falling

Endlessly through night.

Israel

Guards the Sabbath-candle of the world

A storm-light marking

Job’s Inn — open to all –

An ark without lifeboats

On land’s vast ocean.

No one may ask what I am doing here:

Olive-leaves one side glisten tin

The other is opaque like my dulled hair.

I travelled far. I walked. I ate

The train’s black smoke,

Choked on Europe’s bitter sin.

When forests grew from falling ash

I gleaned the broken letters of my alphabet

And sucked them back to life for bread.

Christian roofs were painted red

And four horizons closed their doors.

Pulled apart by Europe’s sky

My soul is polished by Jerusalem

Where I fall fearlessly in love

Ashen by the Western Wall,

And through my tears no one dare ask

What I am doing here.

The moon came up over Jerusalem

Blood-red

An hour later it was white

Bled to death.

The breath of memory revives

On the Fifteenth Day of Ab.

The spirit and the flesh

Don’t clash when men and women

Walk in orange groves

To reinvigorate the moon.

God knew the left hand

And the right

When Lot chose

The Plain of Ha-Yarden

And Abram — Canaan.

An excruciating noise of car brakes

Comes from the Valley of Hinnom.

Jerusalem is ours.

Galilee is a lake of reasonable size,

Unless immensity is measured down

In dreams, in darkness.

Then it becomes an ocean.

Distant sails are birds trapped

On the unreflecting surface,

As if savage fish below

Pull at their wings.

With casual intensity

And such immensity

Are new dreams made from old.

On the fifth day

In the fourth month

Of the thirtieth year

Among the captives by the river

A storm wind came out of the north.

Ezekiel the priest saw visions:

Saw Israel

Had four faces

Four wings

Four faces:

The face of a man

The face of a lion

The face of an ox

The face of an eagle.

That was the vision of Ezekiel.

Moses drew water from a cliff.

I set my cup

Till it was filled.

Water saved me, and I drank,

Reflecting on

The shape of flame

Of how a fire needs

Putting down

By swords of water.

I drive a car. Cars don’t

Figure much in poems.

Poets do not like them,

Which is strange to me.

Poets do not make cars

Never have, not

One nut or bit of Plexiglass

Passes through their fingers.

No reason why they should.

To make a bolt or screw

Is not poetic. To fit a window:

Is that necessary?

Likewise an engine

Makes a noise. It smells,

And runs you off too fast.

What’s more you have to sit

As fixed at work as that

Engine-slave who made it.

Nevertheless I drive a car

With pleasure. It makes my life poetic

I float along and tame

The road against all laws

Of nature. I stay alive.

Who says a poet shouldn’t drive

On a highway which descends so low

Yet climbs so high

From Jerusalem to Jericho?

When David went from Jerusalem

The itch of death was in the air.

The salt sea bloomed.

King Saul bit himself and followed.

The cave had no windows to steam and view.

David’s gloom was David’s soul, and hid him.

Whether to go or stay became

A cloak that fitted when he went.

After the mournful grackle’s note

Saul came searching for the kill

But never felt the sword that cut his cloak.

Darkness is our place.

The cave gave David birth:

Memory was born, and all his songs.

In Israel I looked out of the window

And saw Eve.

Her hair was so black

I called her Midnight

But no answer came.

Her eyes were amber

Jewels made at midday

When she looked at me.

She crossed Gehenna

In her sandals.

My daylight wanted her,

A few-minute love-affair

Lasted forever,

As she entered her City.