Authors: Fleur Adcock
(1983)
I want to have ice-skates and a hoop
and to have lived all my life in the same house
above Stock; and to skate on Lily Tarn
every winter, because it always freezes –
or always did freeze when you were a girl.
I want to believe your tales about Wordsworth –
‘Listen to what the locals say,’ you tell me:
‘He drank in every pub from here to Ullswater,
and had half the girls. We all know that.’
I want not to know better, out of books.
I sit in the pub with my posh friends, talking
literature and publishing as usual.
Some of them really do admire Wordsworth.
But they won’t listen to you. I listen:
how can I get you to listen to me?
I can’t help not being local;
but I’m here, aren’t I? And this afternoon
Jane and I sat beside Lily Tarn
watching the bright wind attack the ice.
None of you were up there skating.
Last I became a raft of green bubbles
meshed into the miniature leaves
of that small pondweed (has it a name?)
that lies green-black on the stream’s face:
a sprinkle of round seeds, if you mistake it,
or of seed-hulls holding air among them.
I was those globules; there they floated –
all there was to do was to float
on the degenerate stream, suburbanised,
the mill-stream where it is lost among houses
and hardly moving, swilling just a little
to and fro if the wind blows it.
But it did move, and I moved on, drifting
until I entered the river
where I was comported upon a tear’s fashion
blending into the long water
until you would not see that there had been
tear or bubble or any round thing ever.
Tawny-white as a ripe hayfield.
But it is heavy with frost, not seed.
It frames him for you as he sits by the window,
his hair white also, a switch of silver.
He pours you another glass of wine,
laughs at your shy anecdotes, quietly caps them,
is witty as always; glows as hardly ever,
his back to the rectangles of glass.
The snow holds off. Clouds neither pass nor lower
their flakes on to the hill’s pale surface.
Tell him there is green beneath it still:
he will almost, for this afternoon, believe you.
Angry Mozart: the only kind for now.
Tinkling would appal on such an evening,
summer, when the possible things to do
are: rip all weeds out of the garden,
butcher the soft redundancy of the hedge
in public; and go, when the light slackens,
to stamp sharp echoes along the street
mouthing futilities: ‘A world where…’
as if there were a choice of other worlds
than this one in which it is the case
that nothing can stamp out leukaemia.
humming off on a low blue flame
of heroin, a terminal kindness.
Wild rock howls on someone’s record.
Fog sifts over the young moon.
Then in the end she didn’t marry him
and go to Guyana; the politics of the thing
had to be considered, and her daughter,
too English by now. But she found the ring,
her mourned and glittering hoop of diamonds,
not lost in a drain after all
but wrenched and twisted into a painful oblong
jammed between the divan-bed and the wall.
It was going to be a novel
about his friend, the seventeen-year-old
with the pale hair (‘younger brother’;
that day on the river-bank).
Until
he thought perhaps a sonnet-sequence:
more stripped-down, more crystalline.
Or just one sonnet even, one
imaging of the slight bones
almost visible through that skin,
a fine articulation of golden wire.
The bones were what he most held to,
talking about them often: of how
if David (we could call him)
were to have been drenched with acid
and his skin burnt off, the luminous flesh
burnt, it would make no difference.
The slow acid of age
with its lesser burning
he may also have touched on.
Doom and sunshine stream over the garden.
The mindless daffodils are nodding
bright primped heads at the Tory sky:
such blue elation of spring air!
Such freshness! – the oxides and pollutants
hardly yet more than a sweet dust.
Honesty, that mistaken plant,
has opened several dozen purple buds,
about which the bees are confident.
It might be 1970; it might be 1914.
Odd how the seemingly maddest of men –
sheer loonies, the classically paranoid,
violently possessive about their secrets,
whispered after from corners, terrified
of poison in their coffee, driven frantic
(whether for or against him) by discussion of God,
peculiar, to say the least, about their mothers –
return to their gentle senses in bed.
Suddenly straightforward, they perform
with routine confidence, neither afraid
that their partner will turn and bite their balls off
nor groping under the pillow for a razor-blade;
eccentric only in their conversation,
which rambles on about the meaning of a word
they used in an argument in 1969,
they leave their women grateful, relieved, and bored.
He gurgled beautifully on television,
playing your death, that Shakespearian actor.
Blood glugged under his tongue, he gagged on
words, as you did. Hotspur, Hotspur:
it was an arrow killed you, not a prince,
not Hal clashing over you in his armour,
stabbing featly for the cameras, and your face
unmaimed. You fell into the hands of Shakespeare,
were given a lovely fluency,
undone, redone, made his creature.
In life you never found it easy
to volley phrases off into the future.
And as for your death-scene, that hot day
at Shrewsbury you lifted your visor:
a random arrow smashed into your eye
and mummed your tongue-tied mouth for ever.
The tadpoles won’t keep still in the aquarium;
Ben’s tried seven times to count them –
thirty-two, thirty-three, wriggle, wriggle –
all right, he’s got better things to do.
Heidi stares into the tank, wearing
a snail on her knuckle like a ring.
She can see purple clouds in the water,
a sky for the tadpoles in their world.
Matthew’s drawing a worm. Yesterday
he put one down Elizabeth’s neck.
But these are safely locked in the wormery
eating their mud; he’s tried that too.
Laura sways with her nose in a daffodil,
drunk on pollen, her eyes tight shut.
The whole inside of her head is filling
with a slow hum of fizzy yellow.
Tom squashes his nose against the window.
He hopes it may look like a snail’s belly
to the thrush outside. But is not attacked:
the thrush is happy on the bird-table.
The wind ruffles a chaffinch’s crest
and gives the sparrows frilly grey knickers
as they squabble over their seeds and bread.
The sun swings in and out of clouds.
Ben’s constructing a wigwam of leaves
for the snails. Heidi whispers to the tadpoles
‘Promise you won’t start eating each other!’
Matthew’s rather hoping they will.
A wash of sun sluices the window,
bleaches Tom’s hair blonder, separates
Laura from her daffodil with a sneeze,
and sends the tadpoles briefly frantic;
until the clouds flop down again
grey as wet canvas. The wind quickens,
birds go flying, window-glass rattles,
pellets of hail are among the birdseed.
It has to be learned afresh
every new start or every season,
revised like the languages that faltered
after I left school or when I stopped
going every year to Italy. Or
like how to float on my back, swimming,
not swimming, ears full of sea-water;
like the taste of the wine at first communion
(because each communion is the first);
like dancing and how to ride a horse –
can I still? Do I still want to?
The sun is on the leaves again;
birds are making rather special noises;
and I can see for miles and miles
even with my eyes closed.
So yes: teach it to me again.
Dreamy with illness
we are Siamese twins
fused at the groin
too languid to stir.
We sprawl transfixed
remote from the day.
The window is open.
The curtain flutters.
Epics of sound-effects
ripple timelessly:
a dog is barking
in vague slow bursts;
cars drone; someone
is felling a tree.
Forests could topple
between the axe-blows.
Draughts idle over
our burning faces
and my fingers over
the drum in your ribs.
You lick my eyelid:
the fever grips us.
We shake in its hands
until it lets go.
Then you gulp cold water
and make of your mouth
a wet cool tunnel.
I slake my lips at it.
Late at night we wrench open a crab;
flesh bursts out of its cup
in pastel colours. The dark fronds attract me:
Poison, you say, Dead Men’s Fingers –
don’t put them in your mouth, stop!
They brush over my tongue, limp and mossy,
until you snatch them from me, as you snatch
yourself, gently, if I come too close.
Here are the permitted parts of the crab,
wholesome on their nests of lettuce
and we are safe again in words.
All day the kitchen will smell of sea.
Today the Dog of Heaven swallowed the sun.
Birds twanged for the dusk and fell silent,
one puzzled flock after another –
African egrets; parakeets; Chinese crows.
But firecrackers fended the beast off:
he spat it out, his hot glorious gobful.
Now it will be ours again tomorrow
for the birds here to rediscover at dawn.
What they chirrup to it will ring like praise
from blackbirds, thrushes, eleven kinds of finches,
that certain tribesmen in the south of China
have not unlearnt their pre-republican ways.
Dear posterity, it’s 2 a.m.
and I can’t sleep for the smothering heat,
or under mosquito nets. The others
are swathed in theirs, humid and sweating,
long white packets on rows of chairs
(no bunks. The building isn’t finished).
I prowled in the dark back room for water
and came outside for a cigarette
and a pee in waist-high leafy scrub.
The moon is brilliant: the same moon,
I have to believe, as mine in England
or theirs in the places where I’m not.
Knobbly trees mark the horizon,
black and angular, with no leaves:
blossoming flame trees; and behind them
soft throbbings come from the village.
Birds or animals croak and howl;
the river rustles; there could be snakes.
I don’t care. I am standing here,
posterity, on the face of the earth,
letting the breeze blow up my nightdress,
writing in English, as I do,
in all this tropical non-silence.
Now let me tell you about the elephants.
It will be typed, of course, and not all in capitals: it will use upper and lower case
in the normal way; and where a space is usual it will have a space.
It will probably be on white paper, or possibly blue, but almost certainly not pink.
It will not be decorated with ornamental scroll-work in coloured ink,
nor will a photograph of the poet be glued above his or her name,
and still less a snap of the poet’s children frolicking in a jolly game.
The poem will not be about feeling lonely and being fifteen
and unless the occasion of the competition is a royal jubilee it will not be about the queen.
It will not be the first poem the author has written in his life
and will probably not be about the death of his daughter, son or wife
because although to write such elegies fulfils a therapeutic need
in large numbers they are deeply depressing for the judges to read.
The title will not be ‘Thoughts’ or ‘Life’ or ‘I Wonder Why’
or ‘The Bunny-Rabbit’s Birthday Party’ or ‘In Days of Long Gone By’.
’Tis and ’twas, o’er and e’er, and such poetical contractions will not be found
in the chosen poem. Similarly clichés will not abound:
dawn will not herald another bright new day, nor dew sparkle like diamonds in a dell,
nor trees their arms upstretch. Also the poet will be able to spell.
Large meaningless concepts will not be viewed with favour: myriad is out;
infinity is becoming suspect; aeons and galaxies are in some doubt.
Archaisms and inversions will not occur; nymphs will not their fate bemoan.
Apart from this there will be no restrictions upon the style or tone.
What is required is simply the masterpiece we’d all write if we could.
There is only one prescription for it: it’s got to be good.