In winter trees don’t move:
Half the lawn is coppered with leaves,
Scollops under the bare trees.
A snow-blue sheet, no sky:
A ginger cat from copper into green
Stalks careless birds.
Can’t tell when it reaches bushes,
Form and colour blending
For its survival.
Below,
Cars slide on macadam tracks
Called streets.
Almost a circle,
Vision pauses to detect
A winter warning from the east.
People
Clatter towards train and bus,
Traffic a departing Joseph-scarf.
Vibrations shiver up the slates
To aerial filigree of bars
For webbed feet to grip.
No rival dare approach
His view of dustbins
Under blistered sills.
Well-fed and grey,
Lord as much as can be done
From his high perch –
Swoops when he decides to go,
Down, not up,
A common pigeon of the Town.
Claptrap, I said. Don’t like this school.
Or probably much worse. If I’d learned
Nothing else I cursed like a sailor.
But five years old. Yet good, as good as gold:
They think I’m a fool?
Why am I here? They can say what they like.
They show me the swimming pool.
I get pushed in. It’s cold.
My arms ache. I hold the bar,
Then aim for the other side. Not far.
Definitely don’t like it. Suck my thumb.
Don’t suck your thumb!
Scratch my nose. Don’t do that!
She tells about The Wooden Horse of Troy.
Even I wouldn’t have hauled that toy
Through the city walls like that.
She gives out bricks. We have to build.
Two suns blind her glasses.
Build, she says, build!
So I build a town. It gets knocked down.
Shall I throw them? Watch that frown.
She reads of Abraham from the Bible.
God says: Tie your son up on a pile of stones
Then slit his throat to show you love me most.
Isaac doesn’t like it but his father
Lifts the knife. Just in time God tells him: Stop!
I believe you now, so drop the knife.
Make up your mind. Abraham cuts him free:
All that way for nothing.
My father did the same to me.
After school I longed to climb a tree.
But he held my hand
And at the bottom of the hill
He set me free.
The year comes to an end
Like a shutter in September.
Close the door on the new moon
And at the evening meal
Drink to the gift of life.
Mosquitoes come inside from cold,
Fragile letters on white walls
To mark the year’s end.
Water the garden, for there’s no frost yet
To melt in liquid on the flowers.
The spirit makes a full stop
When the New Year in Jerusalem begins.
Summer cool on every cheek turns suddenly to autumn,
And grates that smell of soot in England
Wait for the heat of winter,
And New Year to turn
Five more degrees upon the circle.
Fire is always hungry –
As long as someone feeds:
It eats as if to melt the earth
And those who live on it.
All hunger threatens me,
And fire devours forests
More fiercely than the passion forests hide:
And fumigates pure heaven.
That’s why I have a love for water,
A cool annihilating ocean
To devour the terrible devourer
And show the moon’s white face in passing.
You ask for a statement on Hiroshima.
All right:
If there’s blood on the returning arrow
Bend the wind and suck
Till it becomes a flower.
Soldiers planted them among the rocks
And plucked chrysanthemums.
Who wanted peace before Hiroshima?
Mothers water soil with their tears,
And gardens thrive.
Don’t let the Book of Memory close.
Stand among the flowers and read:
There will be no more ruins.
A statement on Hiroshima from me
Bleeds a peace
That brings more arrows.
Fanatical non-smoking teetotal fruitarian,
Bearded, early fifties,
Good walker, plays chess –
But finding life dull,
Wants to meet big bosomed
Class conscious
Fox hunting
County-type carnivore female
With view to conversation
Or conversion.
Coming down first thing I see
The house in a lake of frost and mist,
Bare trees as in a battlefield
From which bodies have been moved.
By afternoon Life’s all we’ve got,
No more over the horizon.
Mottled flame on a sure bed of coal
Burns out in the parlour grate,
Me at the desk creating lives:
No strength to break my own.
Say good things about the dead,
You’ll never see them again.
That tree I just pulled down
Was dry from top to bottom.
Five years ago the taproots hissed
And a bullfinch sat on its highest twig
To eat the sky.
The tree drew clouds to climbing buds.
The brittle trunk snapped in two places,
Fell horizontal in the bracken
Broken by soil too thin,
And ivy fed off its over-reaching.
Say good things about that tree.
A young one near at ten feet high:
Bullfinch talons hold it down,
The poison kiss of ivy laps its base.
I scare one off and rip the other,
Drag the dead tree clear for winter wood,
Thinking good things about the dead
That only the blind of soul won’t love.
Rows of vines, cleaned up and tended
Like military graveyards in the north;
A magpie horseshoes back in guilty flight
Or at a yellow cartridge in the scrub.
A bee clings early to a flower
As if it might be last year’s flame.
Warm grit under belly: a snake
Takes time to cross the sunny track.
Thyme and sage and olive died by winter
When they pledged undying love through storms and fevers
(Final and official when they said it)
Not knowing that undying love dies soonest.
A stiletto of light insidiosed
morning into the black room
pushed by a man stricken
with medieval pox
galvanized, Vitus-minded,
a jump-reaction to rip
the paysage like a painting into shreds
with halberded hands
when the shutters swing out.
A slight refraction of the haze
mars the hills and villages of dawn:
when I read the Divine Comedy at twenty
I didn’t know that thirty years will
pass before my fingers turn the page
to nightingale and stonechat voices
plaiting their song
into an anthem of the Casentino.
On days of leaving
Flowers come
Rain holds back
Clouds give the sun a chance.
Driving away,
Blue sky fills the rearward mirror
Before a bend is turned.
Paradise draws off, a glint of flowers
Ahead, clouds like robbers gather
To discuss the lay-out of a forest.
Go in, trees starken:
The only land is Travel,
Recalling sun and flowers never met.
When you live alone
No goldfish or canary to adorn
The baffle between room and sky;
When you live alone –
Reveille out of bed at the alarm:
A dim pantechnicon of dreams
Darkens up the cul-de-sac of sleeping
Suddenly a flower of smithereens;
Do ten-minute jumps so that the heart
Won’t burst at running for a bus:
Bathe;
Set breakfast: appetite’s topography
Of battlefield hurdles, to infiltrate
And leap the parapet to wideawake;
Dump supper et cetera;
Then do your day;
And when dusk threatens
A fresh skirmishing of dreams
You (like a soldier between campaigns)
Devise a meal before lights-out
And bivouac –
When you live like such –
The person that you are turns two
Divides into a body and a voice
One moment stentor and the other glib
(Morality contending: talks
To the stack of flesh that cannot speak)
But only to hear the voice’s tune
Flagging words both ears must listen to:
On the activating of what’s gone
The switching on from plasmic and bewitching times
Where you thought yourself in love but weren’t
Or when you said: I love, but didn’t
Or would, but couldn’t:
But no denying love’s starlined coordinates
Crossing the heart of positively did:
The onrush, the complete positioning
Of being in love, and loved,
When the one same voice and body sang
The breath of passion into memory,
Into death via love –
The faces, her face, the truth
Of love that lasts forever but could not:
Yet giving life along the way
Through mist’s uncertainties
Because it was and did.
Living by yourself, you talk,
Reshaping the heart
To fill the empty spaces
Out of spaces that you one time filled,
Making the alone-day,
Breaking the day like a stone.
Landfall after the storm, going home through
White waves crumbling along the shore
Like piano keys pressed by invisible fingers,
Blue sky unfeeling what the sea does
To your boat, winds and subtle currents
Insidiously concerting.
Getting safe home through the storm
Provides no harbour or grandmother’s face;
Waves turn you back as in a mirror breaking,
Each cliff falling on the soul
Like an animal with endless teeth.
No wonder Job loved God.
He lived. God let him live,
Gave seven score years beyond his testing.
Job knew excoriations on his skin
Catastrophe dimmed one eye then the other.
He bounced words against God
But never despaired.
In gratitude God let him live
With friends and fatted kine
And fourteen thousand sheep.
God tested him, and let him live.
Pearl died without a Book,
Silent words flitting like dust
Till the dust inside her settled.
No winds could fan the dying fire into life,
She felt the dust settling,
Eyes from her wasted head saw the dust falling
And through the dust she saw me,
Cleared it with a smile to say goodbye.
At twenty-two he was an older man,
Done sixty raids and dropped 500 tons on target
Or near enough. Come for a ride, son:
Hi-di-hi and ho-di-ho, war over and be going soon.
He opened a map and showed the side that mattered,
Thumbed a line from Syerston to Harwell.
Our bomber shouldered up the runway
Cut the silver Trent in May:
Three years in factories
Made a decade out of each twelve-month,
From the cockpit viewing Southwell Minster
Under a continent of candyfloss,
Fields wheatened green recalling
Chaff blown and remaining corn
To soften in my sweetheart’s mouth,
Then into a hedge and crush the dockleaves into greensmear.
The pilot banked his hundred wingspan south:
How much magnetic, how much true, how much compass –
Work the variation through,
Two hundred miles an hour and a following wind,
Harder to get home again over lace of roads and lanes
Plus or minus deviation for a course to steer
Red and black on spread map at the navigator’s table,
A smell for life of petrol, peardrops and rexine.
Run a pencil down from A to B –
Now on the fortieth anniversary I reinvigorate
The game which formed my life’s dead reckoning
Impossible to fathom as in that bomber I assumed I could –
Everything mechanical and easy to work,
Map in top-left pocket, crawling the long coffin
Between bombracks and centre section
No view of the world for forty feet,
Parachute forgotten but who goes back
At seventeen? Who thinks the air is not for him,
Merlin engines all his own, strip map beckoning
Through Death’s cathedral for a dwarf?
Everything is there to open: the rear gunner’s turret
For a technicolor backward view
A track made good of woods and the botch of Leicester
Railways of Rugby, the sandstone of Oxford
The peace of Abingdon and first view of the Thames,
Canals and rivers of new reality, calico tablecloth
Hiding all in me, unseen from my chosen seat.
Better not to know how I reached the far-back turret
Of downdraught and upcurrents, eyes on the past’s
Wide fan shaping my destination.
A button put me side-on to the slipstream,
An east-west variation of the view. People ignored
The buzzing of our passage, engines hiding the silence
Of a so-far buried life, looking over four guns
Ready to suck all spirits up like fishes to a net.
Cherish the distance between them and me
But get inside the theatre of what goes on,
Or open the door and tumble into space –
No one would know I’d gone or where, destroying
The homely panorama and my body.
Death would not burn the spirit but I’d be off
And out of the map, shoes, tunic and cap looted
By gravity: Hello! as I spin, so glad to know you
But I never will. There, I don’t belong,
My place forever looking down and in.
Alone, far back, to face the vanishing horizon squarely on.
Dim as it is, don’t go, corrupted by haze
Loving what I cannot reach. The theatre’s anatomy
And madness missed, don’t care about a full cast waiting
To come in order of appearance and perform their dreams,
Ambition’s engine, curtains holding back
Till the planet Lancaster divides the space
And I return over empty bombracks to get born again.
Humanity is good to bait fish with,
Salt fish that dries in the throat
And needs vodka to turn it down.
Such human quality pressed
A jackboot onto his vocation.
A mob was set on him whose rage
Needed no stoking.
A writer has eyes, hands, a heart
A pen that sometimes scratches
Like a rose-thorn at a gardener’s vein.
He borrows words
And lends them out at interest,
Turns from each season and
With no humility or ignorance
Tells a story to keep the world quiet.
For the first few hundred yards
They knew her as a shirtmaker
Urging them over smoky corpses,
And when they said enough was enough
She climbed the lip of the barricade
To lead them over.
The world
Was impossible to open with a bayonet
That could not stop a cannon-ball in flight:
Nor could her red flag light them
Through a more than human darkness.
Then, whoever she was, she became LIBERTY.
No one knew when, by wonderful inspiration
She stripped off her shirt
And showed her bosom as a reminder
Of what brought them out of darkness.
Liberty, clothe your breasts
With that red flag –
I’ll love you then.
Or let it guide the broken locomotive
Not the mob.
The boy with a pistol –
A cannon-ball took off his leg.
Your breasts gave liberty
But cured his worship.
Now he sells cheap pictures by the Louvre
Of Mona Lisa and The Wreck of the Medusa.
An Italian woman talking to her lover
On some far-off ocean
Mellifluously
From a villa in Liguria:
When are you coming back?
Shortwave static gruffed his voice.
I thought it would be soon, she said,
The scent of shrubs around her.
I love you, he said, but Neptune rules.
A sad laugh in her throat:
Yes, I understand,
So goodbye my handsome man,
I love you too.
The click of a telephone put down,
Sea noise rushing back.
Ah, love, I haven’t lost you yet.
I love the sad laugh in her throat,
Face and body never to be seen
Nor flowers surrounding her.
I congratulate my rival,
And swing the needle onto other voices.
First of all
The brambles had to be pulled out
By the roots.
With thick gardening gloves
Against the spikes
I burrowed around the tree bole
And clasped them tight
And tugged their stomachs
Out of cosy soil.
It wasn’t enough.
I had to walk away
Dragging the whole entanglement
From topmost branches,
Evergreen needles snowing me
As claws protested.
I got them down.
And yanked them loose
But it was slow work
Then cut away the ivy
Broke each brittle snake-branch
From sucker tracks
Halfway up and round the trunk,
Some fingers
More tenacious than an arm.
Next it was the nettles’ turn
Them I grasped low down;
The taller they were
The easier they came,
Bunches of stings
Cast out to die.
Every parasite has its protection
Stings or prickles
Growing in alliance,
Making it difficult to start.
At last it’s done:
The tree no longer burdened.
Space cleared:
The beauty of its trunk revealed:
The biggest anaconda of them all.
A tree with space
Grows ten years in two,
Breathing sky unhindered,
Vibrations
Running through both hands to say:
People need freedom like a tree.
(On 12 January 1987, at 2230GMT, I took down an Italian news agency message in morse sent out specially to ships. The text said that Noah’s Ark was no longer to be found on Mount Ararat, and gave details. The report originated in Tokyo, and the following lines are based on it.)
Earphones fed a message to the hand,
Hurried writing came through pat:
NOAH’S ARK IS NO LONGER FOUND ON MOUNT ARARAT.
Words in Italian, sparks of Aaron’s Rod
Rained across the page in morse
Like intelligence from God:
NOAH’S ARK IS NOT FOUND ON MOUNT ARARAT.
Morse flowed like splintered glass
The text unfinished, rattling on:
BUT IN ALL PROBABILITY YOU WILL FIND NOAH’S ARK
ON A HILL FIVE HUNDRED METRES HIGH
ON THE BANKS OF THE TIGRIS BETWEEN SYRIA AND TURKEY.
Rome International Radio informed all ships
Swaying the emerald Atlantic waves
Urgent news of Ararat,
And Marconi operators wrote the gen
And typed it with the morning news,
Sailors with shocked eyes and lips atremble said:
L’ARCA DI NOÈ NON SI TROVA SUL MONTE ARARAT!
Perhaps Noah’s Ark had been not lost
But one dark night dissected
And put on donkeys for a secret destination.
Hot-footed morse did not originate from God:
A Japanese expedition from an Electronics Firm
Led by YOSHIO KOU had combed
The scrub of Chaldees with a Bible and a map
Finally concluding that
NOAH’S ARK IS NO LONGER ON MOUNT ARARAT
Kids at school threw down their pens
Church and Synagogue were worried
And the Zurich bourse was flurried.
But fact and inspiration tell
How the Ark came on to Ararat because
The navigation of the Pilot was spot-on.
A dove and olive twig to guide the rudder:
And travelling all night above Lake Van
The snowy light was not one cloud of many
But glinting Araratic glaciers in the dawn.
Anchored by a terminal moraine
Noah ordered animals and humans to disperse.
God camouflaged the Ark from archaeologists
Who scour the land with lamp and map.
What YOSHIO KOU found by the Tigris
Was not an Ark but a canoe,
Though matters Biblical led him to state
NOAH’S ARK IS NO LONGER BEACHED ON ARARAT.
The story in the Bible’s better:
Of how the Ark on Day Seventeen
After the flood that God begat
Bumped against the banks of Ararat.
The Ark, in spite of YOSHIO KOU, lies under rocks
On tufic Ararat, below a Turkish post
That looks on Persia.
I saw it in a dream, and sent a message back
By telegraphic key
Feet tapping to its rhythm on the mat:
NOAH’S ARK’S STILL HIDDEN ON MOUNT ARARAT.