War of the Beasts and the Animals

from Girls, Singing

*

Young aeronauts, floating to land

From under the gentle maternal wing

Of the heavens, leading by the arm

An injured airman, met by their mothers

And alongside, on the vapour streams

Rides a cripple on his wheels

In a gilded shirt made of tears.

The aeronauts crowd round the cripple

They know themselves in him

And bring their mothers to greet him

And give him bread and wine

Around his trolley they drape a wreath

Of buttercups, memorise his face

And their thrilled tears fall

Then slowly, slowly they tiptoe away

In sadness for their own youth.

*

In the white white sky

Where cold space dilates,

Wretched of the earth,

He rose, and sold his fate.

Take it if you want it

Invest all your bonds

In the ramshackle, the matchwood

Of my once-used hands.

I have no body now

Stamped skew on the page

You can see the blue hills

Through my rib cage.

With the rising of the moon

With the wearing of the rain

I bobbed in the steppe

Like a boat on a chain.

I’m hail, its advancing stutter

A movement sans legs, sans hooves

Come buy my life-clutter.

But give back the life I used.

This posthumous glory

I’d give it up in ten

(It swells like the dropsy)

For a fag like we smoked back then.

*

Mother and Father didn’t know him,

Nor his young bride

When the captain returned

From beneath the bruised ice

Somewhere they’re toasting victory

The piano plays quick and then slow

He dragged the tail end of winter

Left circles in the snow.

A bulb is alight in the Office

But the residents’ list is blank

Outside the expanse is throbbing

Battalions of dead in a flank

Everything’s on fire, he said

Where I was, everywhere I look

Lentils boiled up in the pan, he said,

With the empty spine of a book

No boats came into harbour

Only a whistle reached land

Now the submariner grieves

For a signaller who blew on his hands

My gut is weighty with water

I’m a fearsome frozen thing

So many tank turrets entangled

In the fine net of Spring

I put on the spare wheel

Burned papers, destroyed every trace

Allow me to register as resident

And pass to my dwelling place

But the courtroom is silent

His papers lie crushed in the ice

And I’ll never get to witness

Him standing – a stranger to his wife.

*

What is that sweeper, mother,

Who lives on the cellar floor?

His name shivers and splinters

I don’t remember it anymore.

He barely comes out to the yard,

Wretched man in his underground room,

To chip at the moaning ice

To scrape with a broom

When I dress for work in the morning

And leave the house at dawn

Or when I undress in the evening

And place my shoes in a drawer

In the womb of the narrow cellar

By the light of the night or the day

He lies there still as a blanket

And the abyss opens its eye.

Daughter, had we known

That our own lost Aleksei

In an unheated cellar

Half-forgotten, he lay –

And you yourself didn’t know

This man was your betrothed

And that on account of life

Being a feasting hall of souls

Even his un-Russian face

Lemon-sallow and strange –

Why it’s hardly surprising

When you and I are changed.

We’re shabby like tramcars

Grey-haired our crown

But he, like a waxen lantern,

Shines alone under the ground.

*

A train runs right across Russia

Along a mighty river’s bank

In third class they go barefoot

The stewards are drunk

In crusts of sweetly familiar grease

Chicken legs dance

Held upright in fists, like the trees

Shivering past

Through teeming carriages I go,

As a soul in paradise’s throng,

Wrapped in an army blanket

Singing my wild song

It’s a far riskier business

Than the conductor will allow

Because any right song

Always rises to a howl

In the purest voice, while women sigh,

To a whispered stream of obscenity,

I sing of poppies on the trackside

I sing of war’s pity

Piercing the carriage’s fug,

My voice, sharp like an awl

I made them miserable

They beat me in the vestibule

In the honest song there is such ferocity

That the heart is braced.

And all fortification

Stands like a tear on the face

*

Over the field the sobbing gun

Weeps for the man

Lying with chest undone

And waiting for his end.

Even the thunder of war

Is sorry: it’s forged too slow.

And a gun with a woman’s name

Laces the air with gruel –

She sends her mortars

To polish the clay

In the name of one she courted

But couldn’t save

Brushing the feathers from his tunic

On his fledgling flight

The steppe-eagle’s son guards his parent

Through the dark night.

*

Empty featherbeds cooling

With the inflow of a draught

At the hour when an empire’s ballerinas

Stand wearily at the barre

Stretching their engineered limbs

So one leg points to the hour

And combs lay on tables

And lamps are strung on wire

In the hospital corridors

The nurses converse, disperse

The pale green dawn

With quicksilver, imprisoned in glass

And here I am in prison

And here I am, sick to the gut

With the nameless powder I swallow

Dissolved in a cup.

Me, the butt of lags’ jokes,

Stubbed-out butt,

The mutt, scattering broilers

Loose from their hut.

I won’t live to break the law

Sleep presses my head

I remember the Greater Will

Like a glued boot does, a flood.

The further I walk, the less I know.

I’ve stopped mumbling: leave me alone

The boot swells with icy water

But the leg carries on.

*

Two classical athletes, Culture and Sport

Embrace at the column’s peak

And a little boy drops his panama

And stands quietly in the park

He’s outside for the first time, barefoot.

Feeling the universe’s cold hand

On his shoulder, and the sky

Distends like a toad’s gland

He’s run away – from his father’s military gait

From his mother’s silken tights

And he’s squared his chest to seem older

But today didn’t go right.

How he aches to be cultured, a sportsman

More bronzed, more related to glass.

Listen to the urns’ courtship

And the trees’ hollows gasp:

You want this park to like you,

You, and those plump little brides,

But can you be sure your betrothed

Is no frog, and doesn’t eat flies –

Or that the bulge of her goitre

In an unnatural blue

Is just a dome of sounds and lines

For the sky to breathe through?

Pop! Despair. The balloon disappears

Scraps of rubber fall and lie

Where a widow, crouched in the grass,

Shares a quiet cigarette with the boy.

*

Running, running

On our last legs

Across the prone empire

Along the longest drags

The tundra is never-ending

The dogs bark never-ending

The watchman is stood unbending

(though his job is dead-ending)

The curses are never-ending

The journey is never-ending

The heavenly valleys sounding

With machine gun fire resounding

From where the firmament is bending

And the body feels its own ending

But it’s like it’s been ground to chaff

And tastes in the throat like a laugh

Tickling and distending –

A kind of happy ending

And running, running to ground

Seems a lot like lying down.

*

By the church’s black fence

I sit with a crooked smile

On a standard issue bench

At Shrovetide

Heavenly birds are sitting

On my puffy knees

Bright-eyed, hopping and shitting

Such gentle scolds

Why am I holding

A box of metal and glass?

Why, for you to cast in coins

Whenever you pass.

In the church, nannies with babies

Inhale the heavy psalms

They emerge soft, like after the bathhouse,

And willingly give me alms

For my red brick body

Tight coil of my life

I’d be in the earth by now

If I hadn’t wanted to die.

But the doves rise with a crack

Their wings clatter, unfold.

Like a bush sprang from my back

Doves sprout on my shoulders.

And to the passing glance

I am both clothed and stripped bare

I am my own tomb and fence

My own mother, my own wife dear.