New and Selected Poems (4 page)

This evening, motherly summer moves in the pond.

I look down into the decomposition of leaves –

The furnace door whirling with larvae.

                       From Hull’s sunset smudge

Humber is melting eastward, my south skyline:

A loaded single vein, it drains

The effort of the inert North – Sheffield’s ores.

Bog pools, dregs of toadstools, tributary

Graves, dunghills, kitchens, hospitals.

The unkillable North Sea swallows it all.

Insects, drunken, drop out of the air.

                                                 Birth-soils,

The sea-salts, scoured me, cortex and intestine,

To receive these remains.

As the incinerator, as the sun,

As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.

Flowerlike, I loved nothing.

Dead and unborn are in God comfortable.

What a length of gut is growing and breathing –

This mute eater, biting through the mind’s

Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,

With creepy-crawly and the root,

With the sea-worm, entering its birthright.

The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity.

The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.

There are eye-guarded eggs in these hedgerows,

Hot haynests under the roots in burrows.

Couples at their pursuits are laughing in the lanes. 

The North Sea lies soundless. Beneath it

Smoulder the wars: to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet.

‘Mother, Mother!’ cries the pierced helmet.

Cordite oozings of Gallipoli,

Curded to beastings, broached my palate,

The expressionless gaze of the leopard,

The coils of the sleeping anaconda,

The nightlong frenzy of shrews.

The wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles;

Nibelung wolves barbed like black pineforest

Against a red sky, over blue snow; or that long grin

Above the tucked coverlet – none suffice.

A photograph: the hairless, knuckled feet

Of the last wolf killed in Britain spoiled him for wolves:

The worst since has been so much mere Alsatian.

Now it is the dream cries ‘Wolf!’ where these feet

Print the moonlit doorstep, or run and run

Through the hush of parkland, bodiless, headless;

With small seeming of inconvenience

By day, too, pursue, siege all thought;

Bring him to an abrupt poring stop

Over engravings of gibbet-hung wolves,

As at a cage where the scraggy Spanish wolf

Danced, smiling, brown eyes doggily begging

A ball to be thrown. These feet, deprived,

Disdaining all that are caged, or storied, or pictured,

Through and throughout the true world search

For their vanished head, for the world

Vanished with the head, the teeth, the quick eyes –

Now, lest they choose his head,

Under severe moons he sits making

Wolf-masks, mouths clamped well onto the world.

The farms are oozing craters in

Sheer sides under the sodden moors:

When it is not wind it is rain,

Neither of which will stop at doors:

One will damp beds and the other shake

Dreams beneath sleep it cannot break.

Between the weather and the rock

Farmers make a little heat;

Cows that sway a bony back,

Pigs upon delicate feet

Hold off the sky, trample the strength

That shall level these hills at length.

Buttoned from the blowing mist

Walk the ridges of ruined stone.

What humbles these hills has raised

The arrogance of blood and bone,

And thrown the hawk upon the wind,

And lit the fox in the dripping ground.

Russia and America circle each other;

Threats nudge an act that were without doubt

A melting of the mould in the mother,

Stones melting about the root,

The quick of the earth burned out:

The toil of all our ages a loss

With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought

(Not to be thought ridiculous)

Shies from the world-cancelling black

Of its playing shadow: it has learned

That there’s no trusting (trusting to luck)

Dates when the world’s due to be burned;

That the future’s no calamitous change

But a malingering of now,

Histories, towns, faces that no

Malice or accident much derange.

And though bomb be matched against bomb,

Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure –

Earth gone in an instant flare –

Did a lesser death come

Onto the white hospital bed

Where one, numb beyond her last of sense,

Closed her eyes on the world’s evidence

And into pillows sunk her head?

A stoat danced on the lawns here

To the music of the maskers;

Drinking the staring hare dry, bit

Through grammar and corset. They nailed to a door

The stoat with the sun in its belly,

But its red unmanageable life

Has licked the stylist out of their skulls

Has sucked that age like an egg and gone off

Along ditches where flies and leaves

Overpower our tongues, got into some grave –

Not a dog to follow it down –

Emerges, thirsting, in far Asia, in Brixton.

The hot shallows and seas we bring our blood from

Slowly dwindled; cooled

To sewage estuary, to trout-stocked tarn.

Even the Amazon’s taxed and patrolled

To set laws by the few jaws –

Piranha and jaguar.

Columbus’ huckstering breath

Blew inland through North America

Killing the last of the mammoths.

The right maps have no monsters.

Now the mind’s wandering elementals,

Ousted from their traveller-told

Unapproachable islands,

From their heavens and their burning underworld,

Wait dully at the traffic crossing,

Or lean over headlines, taking nothing in.

Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat

As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes,

Continual wars and wives are what

Have tattered his ears and battered his head.

Like a bundle of old rope and iron

Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear

His eyes, green as ringstones: he yawns wide red,

Fangs fine as a lady’s needle and bright.

A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,

Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks

While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.

After hundreds of years the stain’s there

On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom:

That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still

Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,

Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,

Is unkillable. From the dog’s fury,

From gunshot fired point-blank he brings

His skin whole, and whole

From owlish moons of bekittenings

Among ashcans. He leaps and lightly

Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon.

Nightly over the round world of men,

Over the roofs go his eyes and outcry.

When Parnell’s Irish in the House

Pressed that the British Navy’s cat-

O-nine-tails be abolished, what

Shut against them? It was

Neither Irish nor English nor of that

Decade, but of the species.

Predictably, Parliament

Squared against the motion. As soon

Let the old school tie be rent

Off their necks, and give thanks, as see gone

No shame but a monument –

Trafalgar not better known.

‘To discontinue it were as much

As ship not powder and cannonballs

But brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing which

A witty profound Irishman calls

For a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watch

The gentry fingering its stained tails.

Whereupon …

                        quietly, unopposed,

The motion was passed.

I found this jawbone at the sea’s edge:

There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed

To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust

Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:

In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,

Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose

Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws

Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:

This is the sea’s achievement; with shells,

Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these

Indigestibles, the spars of purposes

That failed far from the surface. None grow rich

In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh

But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads –

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

Those stars are the fleshed forebears

Of these dark hills, bowed like labourers,

And of my blood.

The death of a gnat is a star’s mouth: its skin,

Like Mary’s or Semele’s, thin

As the skin of fire:

A star fell on her, a sun devoured her.

My appetite is good

Now to manage both Orion and Dog

With a mouthful of earth, my staple.

Worm-sort, root-sort, going where it is profitable.

A star pierces the slug,

The tree is caught up in the constellations.

My skull burrows among antennae and fronds.