New and Selected Poems (24 page)

The tide-swell grinds crystal, under cliffs.

Against the opened furnace of the West –

A branch of apple-blossom.

A bullock of sooted bronze

Cools on an emerald

That is crumbling to granite embers.

Milk and blood are frail

In the shivering wind off the sea.

       Only a purple flower – this amulet

       (Once Prospero’s) – holds it all, a moment,

       In a rinsed globe of light.

Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,

After May snow. After a winter

Worst in human memory, a freeze

Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,

And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly

A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled

With the sweatings of earth

And with the sweatings-out of winter

Feverish under the piled

Maywear of the lawn.

                                    Now two

Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,

She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he

Drunk with her, float in eddies

Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,

Settling to nod her long spring tongue down

Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s

Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.

He settling behind her, among plain glistenings

Of the new grass, edging and twitching

To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing

Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open

Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching

To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –

Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly

Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her

Off any escape. She turns that

To her purpose, and veers down

Onto another Dandelion, attaching

Her weightless yacht to its crest.

Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter

Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,

A sealed book, absorbed in itself.

She ignores him

Where he edges to left and to right, flitting

His wings open, titillating her fur

With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,

His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,

Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,

Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –

And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops

On an elastic to settle accurately

Under her tail again as she clamps to

This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,

Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted

To what’s required

Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin

That performs piercings

Out of the still-bare ash,

The whole air just like him, just breathing

Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first

Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth

Opening its petals, the whole sky

Opening a flower

Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.

Suddenly hooligan baby starlings

Rain all round me squealing,

Shouting how it’s tremendous and everybody

Has to join in and they’re off this minute!

Probably the weird aniseed corpse-odour

Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,

As it disturbs me. Now they all rise

Flutter-floating, oddly eddying,

Squalling their dry gargles. Then, mad, they

Hurl off, on a new wrench of excitement,

Leaving me out.

                           I pluck apple-blossom,

Cool, blood-lipped, wet open.

And I’m just quieting thoughts towards my letter

When they all come storming back,

Giddy with hoarse hissings and snarls

And clot the top of an ash sapling –

Sizzling bodies, snaky black necks craning

For a fresh thrill – Where next? Where now? Where? – they’re off

All rushing after it

Leaving me fevered, and addled.

They can’t believe their wings.

Snow-bright clouds boil up.

As you bend to touch

The gypsy girl

Who waits for you in the hedge

Her loose dress falls open.

Midsummer ditch-sickness!

Flushed, freckled with earth-fever,

Swollen lips parted, her eyes closing,

A lolling armful, and so young! Hot

Among the insane spiders.

You glimpse the reptile under-speckle

Of her sunburned breasts

And your head swims. You close your eyes.

Can the foxes talk? Your head throbs.

Remember the bird’s tolling echo,

The dripping fern-roots, and the butterfly touches

That woke you.

Remember your mother’s

Long, dark dugs.

Her silky body a soft oven

For loaves of pollen.

For half an hour, through a magnifying glass,

I’ve watched the spiders making love undisturbed,

Ignorant of the voyeur, horribly happy.

First in the lower left-hand corner of the window

I saw an average spider stirring. There

In a midden of carcases, the shambles

Of insects dried in their colours,

A trophy den of uniforms, reds, greens,

Yellow-striped and detached wing-frails, last year’s

Leavings, parched a winter, scentless – heads,

Bodices, corsets, leg-shells, a crumble of shards

In a museum of dust and neglect, there

In the crevice, concealed by corpses in their old wrappings,

A spider has come to live. She has spun

An untidy nearly invisible

Floss of strands, a few aimless angles

Camouflaged as the grey dirt of the rain-stains

On the glass. I saw her moving. Then a smaller,

Just as ginger, similar all over,

Only smaller. He had suddenly appeared.

Upside down, she was doing a gentle

Sinister dance. All legs clinging

Except for those leading two, which tapped on the web,

Trembling it, I thought, like a fly, to attract

The immobile, upside-down male, near the frame,

Only an inch from her. He moved away,

Turning ready to flee, I guessed. Maybe

Fearful of her intentions and appetites:

Doubting. But her power, focussing,

Making no error after the millions of years

Perfecting this art, turned him round

At a distance of two inches, and hung him

Upside down, head under, belly towards her.

Motionless, except for a faint

And just-detectable throb of his hair-leg tips.

She came closer, upside down, gently,

And enmeshed his forelegs in hers.

So, I imagined, here is the famous murder.

I got closer to watch. Something

Difficult to understand, difficult

To properly observe was going on.

Her two hands seemed swollen, like tiny crab-claws.

Those two nippers she folds up under her nose

To bring things to her pincers, they were moving,

Glistening. He convulsed now and again.

Her abdomen pod twitched – spasmed slightly

Little mean ecstasies. Was she pulling him to pieces?

Something much more delicate, a much more

Delicate agreement was in process.

Under his abdomen he had a nozzle –

Presumably his lumpy little cock,

Just as ginger as the rest of him, a teat,

An infinitesimal nipple. Probably

Under a microscope it is tooled and designed

Like some micro-device in a space rocket.

To me it looked crude and simple. Far from simple,

Though, were her palps, her boxing-glove nippers –

They were like the mechanical hands

That manipulate radio-active matter

On the other side of safe screen glass.

But hideously dexterous. She reached out one,

I cannot imagine how she saw to do it,

And brought monkey-fingers from under her crab-nippers

And grasped his nipple cock. As soon as she had it

A bubble of glisteny clear glue

Ballooned up from her nipper, the size of her head,

Then shrank back, and as it shrank back

She wrenched her grip off his cock

As if it had locked there, and doubled her fistful

Of shining wet to her jaw-pincers

And rubbed her mouth and underskin with it,

Six, seven stiff rubs, while her abdomen twitched,

Her tail-tip flirted, and he hung passive.

Then out came her other clutcher, on its elbow,

And grabbed his bud, and the gloy-thick bubble

Swelled above her claws, a red spur flicked

Inside it, and he jerked in his ropes.

Then the bubble shrank and she twisted it off

And brought it back to stuff her face-place

With whatever it was. Very still,

Except for those stealths and those twitchings

They hung upside down, face to face,

Holding forelegs. It was still obscure

Just what was going on. It went on.

Half an hour. Finally she backed off.

He hung like a dead spider, just as he’d hung

All the time she’d dealt with him.

I thought it must be over. So now, I thought,

I see the murder. I could imagine now

If he stirred she’d think he was a fly,

And she’d be feeling ravenous. And so far

She’d shown small excitement about him

With all that concentration on his attachment,

As if he upside down were just the table

Holding the delicacy. She moved off.

Aimlessly awhile she moved round,

Till I realized she was concentrating

On a V of dusty white, a delta

Of floss that seemed just fuzz. Then I could see

How she danced her belly low in the V.

I saw her fitting, with accurate whisker-fine feet,

Blobs of glue to the fibres, and sticking others

To thicken and deepen the V, and knot its juncture.

Then she danced in place, belly down, on this –

Suddenly got up and hung herself

Over the V. Sitting in the cup of the V

Was a tiny blob of new whiteness.

A first egg? Already? Then very carefully

She dabbed at the blob, and worked more woolly fibres

Into the V, to either side of it,

Diminishing it as she dabbed. I could see

I was watching mighty nature

In a purposeful mood, but not what she worked at.

Soon, the little shapeless dot of white

Was a dreg of speck, and she left it. She returned

Towards her male, who hung still in position.

She paused and laboriously cleaned her hands,

Wringing them in her pincers. And suddenly

With a swift, miraculously-accurate snatch

Took something from her mouth, and dumped it

On an outermost cross-strand of web –

A tiny scrap of white – refuse, I thought,

From their lovemaking. So I stopped watching.

Ten minutes later they were at it again.

Now they have vanished. I have scrutinized

The whole rubbish tip of carcases

And the window-frame crannies beneath it.

They are hidden. Is she devouring him now?

Or are there still some days of bliss to come

Before he joins her antiques. They are hidden

Probably together in the fusty dark,

Holding forearms, listening to the rain, rejoicing

As the sun’s edge, behind the clouds,

Comes clear of our shadow.