Coming Down Through Somerset
I flash-glimpsed in the headlights – the high moment
Of driving through England – a killed badger
Sprawled with helpless legs. Yet again
Manoeuvred lane-ends, retracked, waited
Out of decency for headlights to die,
Lifted by one warm hindleg in the world-night
A slain badger. August dust-heat. Beautiful,
Beautiful, warm, secret beast. Bedded him
Passenger, bleeding from the nose. Brought him close
Into my life. Now he lies on the beam
Torn from a great building. Beam waiting two years
To be built into new building. Summer coat
Not worth skinning off him. His skeleton – for the future.
Fangs, handsome concealed. Flies, drumming,
Bejewel his transit. Heatwave ushers him hourly
Towards his underworlds. A grim day of flies
And sunbathing. Get rid of that badger.
A night of shrunk rivers, glowing pastures,
Sea-trout shouldering up through trickles. Then the sun again
Waking like a torn-out eye. How strangely
He stays on into the dawn – how quiet
The dark bear-claws, the long frost-tipped guard hairs!
Get rid of that badger today.
And already the flies.
More passionate, bringing their friends. I don’t want
To bury and waste him. Or skin him (it is too late).
Or hack off his head and boil it
To liberate his masterpiece skull. I want him
To stay as he is. Sooty gloss-throated,
With his perfect face. Paws so tired,
Power-body relegated. I want him
To stop time. His strength staying, bulky,
Blocking time. His rankness, his bristling wildness,
His thrillingly painted face.
A badger on my moment of life.
Not years ago, like the others, but now.
I stand
Watching his stillness, like an iron nail
Driven, flush to the head,
Into a yew post. Something has to stay.
8 August 1975
The Day He Died
Was the silkiest day of the young year,
The first reconnaissance of the real spring,
The first confidence of the sun.
That was yesterday. Last night, frost.
And as hard as any of all winter.
Mars and Saturn and the Moon dangling in a bunch
On the hard, littered sky.
Today is Valentine’s day.
Earth toast-crisp. The snowdrops battered.
Thrushes spluttering. Pigeons gingerly
Rubbing their voices together, in stinging cold.
Crows creaking, and clumsily
Cracking loose.
The bright fields look dazed.
Their expression is changed.
They have been somewhere awful
And come back without him.
The trustful cattle, with frost on their backs,
Waiting for hay, waiting for warmth,
Stand in a new emptiness.
From now on the land
Will have to manage without him.
But it hesitates, in this slow realization of light,
Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun,
With roots cut
And a great blank in its memory.
A Memory
Your bony white bowed back, in a singlet,
Powerful as a horse,
Bowed over an upturned sheep
Shearing under the East chill through-door draught
In the cave-dark barn, sweating and freezing –
Flame-crimson face, drum-guttural African curses
As you bundled the sheep
Like tying some oversize, overweight, spilling bale
Through its adjustments of position
The attached cigarette, bent at its glow
Preserving its pride of ash
Through all your suddenly savage, suddenly gentle
Masterings of the animal
You were like a collier, a face-worker
In a dark hole of obstacle
Heedless of your own surfaces
Inching by main strength into the solid hour,
Bald, arch-wrinkled, weathered dome bowed
Over your cigarette comfort
Till you stretched erect through a groan
Letting a peeled sheep leap free
Then nipped the bud of stub from your lips
And with glove-huge, grease-glistening carefulness
Lit another at it
from
EARTH-NUMB
Earth-Numb
Dawn – a smouldering fume of dry frost.
Sky-edge of red-hot iron.
Daffodils motionless – some fizzled out.
The birds – earth-brim simmering.
Sycamore buds unsticking – the leaf out-crumpling, purplish.
The pheasant cock’s glare-cry. Jupiter ruffling softly.
Hunting salmon. And hunted
And haunted by apparitions from tombs
Under the smoothing tons of dead element
In the river’s black canyons.
The lure is a prayer. And my searching –
Like the slow sun.
A prayer, like a flower opening.
A surgeon operating
On an open heart, with needles –
And bang! the river grabs at me
A mouth-flash, an electrocuting malice
Like a trap, trying to rip life off me –
And the river stiffens alive,
The black hole thumps, the whole river hauls
And I have one.
A piling voltage hums, jamming me stiff –
Something terrified and terrifying
Gleam-surges to and fro through me
From the river to the sky, from the sky into the river
Uprooting dark bedrock, shatters it in air,
Cartwheels across me, slices thudding through me
As if I were the current –
Till the fright flows all one way down the line
And a ghost grows solid, a hoverer,
A lizard green slither, banner heavy –
Then the wagging stone pebble head
Trying to think on shallows –
Then the steel spectre of purples
From the forge of water
Gagging on emptiness
As the eyes of incredulity
Fix their death-exposure of the celandine and the cloud.
A Motorbike
We had a motorbike all through the war
In an outhouse – thunder, flight, disruption
Cramped in rust, under washing, abashed, outclassed
By the Brens, the Bombs, the Bazookas elsewhere.
The war ended, the explosions stopped.
The men surrendered their weapons
And hung around limply.
Peace took them all prisoner.
They were herded into their home towns.
A horrible privation began
Of working a life up out of the avenues
And the holiday resorts and the dance-halls.
Then the morning bus was as bad as any labour truck,
The foreman, the boss, as bad as the S.S.
And the ends of the street and the bends of the road
And the shallowness of the shops and the shallowness of the beer
And the sameness of the next town
Were as bad as electrified barbed wire
The shrunk-back war ached in their testicles
And England dwindled to the size of a dog-track.
So there came this quiet young man
And he bought our motorbike for twelve pounds.
And he got it going, with difficulty.
He kicked it into life – it erupted
Out of the six-year sleep, and he was delighted.
A week later, astride it, before dawn,
A misty frosty morning,
He escaped
Into a telegraph pole
On the long straight west of Swinton.
Deaf School
The deaf children were monkey-nimble, fish-tremulous and sudden.
Their faces were alert and simple
Like faces of little animals, small night lemurs caught in the flash-light.
They lacked a dimension,
They lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound and responses to sound.
The whole body was removed
From the vibration of air, they lived through the eyes,
The clear simple look, the instant full attention.
Their selves were not woven into a voice
Which was woven into a face
Hearing itself, its own public and audience,
An apparition in camouflage, an assertion in doubt –
Their selves were hidden, and their faces looked out of hiding.
What they spoke with was a machine,
A manipulation of fingers, a control-panel of gestures
Out there in the alien space
Separated from them –
Their unused faces were simple lenses of watchfulness
Simple pools of earnest watchfulness
Their bodies were like their hands
Nimbler than bodies, like the hammers of a piano,
A puppet agility, a simple mechanical action
A blankness of hieroglyph
A stylized lettering
Spelling out approximate signals
While the self looked through, out of the face of simple concealment
A face not merely deaf, a face in darkness, a face unaware,
A face that was simply the front skin of the self concealed and separate
Life is Trying to be Life
Death also is trying to be life.
Death is in the sperm like the ancient mariner
With his horrible tale.
Death mews in the blankets – is it a kitten?
It plays with dolls but cannot get interested.
It stares at the windowlight and cannot make it out.
It wears baby clothes and is patient.
It learns to talk, watching the others’ mouths.
It laughs and shouts and listens to itself numbly.
It stares at people’s faces
And sees their skin like a strange moon, and stares at the grass
In its position just as yesterday.
And stares at its fingers and hears: ‘Look at that child!’
Death is a changeling
Tortured by daisy chains and Sunday bells
It is dragged about like a broken doll
By little girls playing at mothers and funerals.
Death only wants to be life. It cannot quite manage.
Weeping it is weeping to be life
As for a mother it cannot remember.
Death and Death and Death, it whispers
With eyes closed, trying to feel life
Like the shout in joy
Like the glare in lightning
That empties the lonely oak.
And that is the death
In the antlers of the Irish Elk. It is the death
In the cave-wife’s needle of bone. Yet it still is not death –
Or in the shark’s fang which is a monument
Of its lament
On a headland of life.
Speech out of Shadow
Not your eyes, but what they disguise
Not your skin, with just that texture and light
But what uses it as cosmetic
Not your nose – to be or not to be beautiful
But what it is the spy for
Not your mouth, not your lips, not their adjustments
But the maker of the digestive tract
Not your breasts
Because they are diversion and deferment
Not your sexual parts, your proffered rewards
Which are in the nature of a flower
Technically treacherous
Not the webs of your voice, your poise, your tempo
Your drug of a million micro-signals
But the purpose.
The unearthly stone in the sun.
The glare
Of the falcon, behind its hood
Tamed now
To its own mystifications
And the fingerings of men.