Poems 1960-2000 (4 page)

Look, children, the wood is full of tigers,

scorching the bluebells with their breath.

You reach for guns. Will you preserve the flowers

at such cost? Will you prefer the death

of prowling stripes to a mush of trampled stalks?

Through the eyes, then – do not spoil the head.

Tigers are easier to shoot than to like.

Sweet necrophiles, you only love them dead.

There now, you’ve got three – and with such fur, too,

golden and warm and salty. Very good.

Don’t expect them to forgive you, though.

There are plenty more of them. This is their wood

(and their bluebells, which you have now forgotten).

They’ve eaten all the squirrels. They want you,

and it’s no excuse to say you’re only children.

No one is on your side. What will you do?

There have been all those tigers, of course,

and a leopard, and a six-legged giraffe,

and a young deer that ran up to my window

before it was killed, and once a blue horse,

and somewhere an impression of massive dogs.

Why do I dream of such large, hot-blooded beasts

covered with sweating fur and full of passions

when there could be dry lizards and cool frogs,

or slow, modest creatures, as a rest

from all those panting, people-sized animals?

Hedgehogs or perhaps tortoises would do,

but I think the pangolin would suit me best:

a vegetable animal, who goes

disguised as an artichoke or asparagus-tip

in a green coat of close-fitting leaves,

with his flat shovel-tail and his pencil-nose:

the scaly anteater. Yes, he would fit

more aptly into a dream than into his cage

in the Small Mammal House; so I invite him

to be dreamt about, if he would care for it.

They are throwing the ball

to and fro between them,

in and out of the picture.

She is in the painting

hung on the wall

in a narrow gold frame.

He stands on the floor

catching and tossing

at the right distance.

She wears a white dress,

black boots and stockings,

and a flowered straw hat.

She moves in silence

but it seems from her face

that she must be laughing.

Behind her is sunlight

and a tree-filled garden;

you might think to hear

birds or running water,

but no, there is nothing.

Once or twice he has spoken

but does so no more,

for she cannot answer.

So he stands smiling,

playing her game

(she is almost a child),

not daring to go,

intent on the ball.

And she is the same.

For what would result

neither wishes to know

if it should fall.

Stepping down from the blackberry bushes

he stands in my path: Bogyman.

He is not as I had remembered him,

though he still wears the broad-brimmed hat,

the rubber-soled shoes and the woollen gloves.

No face; and that soft mooning voice

still spinning its endless distracting yarn.

But this is daylight, a misty autumn

Sunday, not unpopulated

by birds. I can see him in such colours

as he wears – fawn, grey, murky blue –

not all shadow-clothed, as he was that night

when I was ten; he seems less tall

(I have grown) and less muffled in silence.

I have no doubt at all, though, that he is

Bogyman. He is why children

do not sleep all night in their tree-houses.

He is why, when I had pleaded

to spend a night on the common, under

a cosy bush, and my mother

surprisingly said yes, she took no risk.

He was the risk I would not take; better

to make excuses, to lose face,

than to meet the really faceless, the one

whose name was too childish for us

to utter – ‘murderers’ we talked of, and

‘lunatics escaped from Earlswood’.

But I met him, of course, as we all do.

Well, that was then; I survived; and later

survived meetings with his other

forms, bold or pathetic or disguised – the

slummocking figure in a dark

alley, or the lover turned suddenly

icy-faced; fingers at my throat

and ludicrous violence in kitchens.

I am older now, and (I tell myself,

circling carefully around him

at the far edge of the path, pretending

I am not in fact confronted)

can deal with such things. But what, Bogyman,

shall I be at twice my age? (At

your age?) Shall I be grandmotherly, fond

suddenly of gardening, chatty with

neighbours? Or strained, not giving in,

writing for
Ambit
and hitch-hiking to

Turkey? Or sipping Guinness in

the Bald-Faced Stag, in wrinkled stockings? Or

(and now I look for the first time

straight at you) something like you, Bogyman?

Clarendon Whatmough sits in his chair

telling me that I am hollow.

The walls of his study are dark and bare;

he has his back to the window.

Are you priest or psychiatrist, Clarendon Whatmough?

I do not have to believe you.

The priest in the pub kept patting my hand

more times than I thought needful.

I let him think me a Catholic, and

giggled, and felt quite sinful.

You were not present, Clarendon Whatmough:

I couldn’t have flirted with you.

Christopher is no longer a saint

but I still carry the medal

with his image on, which my mother sent

to protect me when I travel.

It pleases her – and me: two

unbelievers, Clarendon Whatmough.

But when a friend was likely to die

I wanted to pray, if I could

after so many years, and feeling shy

of churches walked in the wood.

A hypocritical thing to do,

would you say, Clarendon Whatmough?

Or a means of dispelling buried guilt,

a conventional way to ease

my fears? I tell you this: I felt

the sky over the trees

crack open like a nutshell. You

don’t believe me, Clarendon Whatmough:

or rather, you would explain that I

induced some kind of reaction

to justify the reversal of my

usual lack of conviction.

No comment from Clarendon Whatmough.

He tells me to continue.

Why lay such critical emphasis

on this other-worldly theme?

I could tell you my sexual fantasies

as revealed in my latest dream.

Do, if you wish, says Clarendon Whatmough:

it’s what I expect of you.

Clarendon Whatmough doesn’t sneer;

he favours a calm expression,

prefers to look lofty and austere

and let me display an emotion

then anatomise it. Clarendon Whatmough,

shall I analyse you?

No: that would afford me even less

amusement than I provide.

We may both very well be centreless,

but I will not look inside

your shadowy eyes; nor shall you

now, in my open ones, Clarendon Whatmough.

I leave you fixed in your formal chair,

your ambiguous face unseeing,

and go, thankful that I’m aware

at least of my own being.

Who is convinced, though, Clarendon Whatmough,

of your existence? Are you? 

When I came in that night I found

the skin of a dog stretched flat and

nailed upon my wall between the

two windows. It seemed freshly killed –

there was blood at the edges. Not

my dog: I have never owned one,

I rather dislike them. (Perhaps

whoever did it knew that.) It

was a light brown dog, with smooth hair;

no head, but the tail still remained.

On the flat surface of the pelt

was branded the outline of the

peninsula, singed in thick black

strokes into the fur: a coarse map.

The position of the town was

marked by a bullet-hole; it went

right through the wall. I placed my eye

to it, and could see the dark trees

outside the house, flecked with moonlight.

I locked the door then, and sat up

all night, drinking small cups of the

bitter local coffee. A dog

would have been useful, I thought, for

protection. But perhaps the one

I had been given performed that

function; for no one came that night,

nor for three more. On the fourth day

it was time to leave. The dog-skin

still hung on the wall, stiff and dry

by now, the flies and the smell gone.

Could it, I wondered, have been meant

not as a warning, but a gift?

And, scarcely shuddering, I drew

the nails out and took it with me. 

The events of the
Aeneid
were not enacted

on a porridge-coloured plain; although my

greyish pencilled-over Oxford text

is monochrome, tends to deny

the flaming pyre, that fearful tawny light,

the daily colour-productions in the sky

(dawn variously rosy); Charon’s boat

mussel-shell blue on the reedy mud

of Styx; the wolf-twins in a green cave;

huge Triton rising from the flood

to trumpet on his sky-coloured conch;

and everywhere the gleam of gold and blood.

Cybele’s priest rode glittering into battle

on a bronze-armoured horse: his great bow

of gold, his cloak saffron, he himself

splendid in
ferrugine et ostro
–

rust and shellfish. (We laugh, but Camilla

for this red and purple gear saw fit to go

to her death.) The names, indeed, are as foreign

in their resonances as the battle-rite:

luteus
with its vaguely medical air;

grim
ater
; or the two versions of white:

albus
thick and eggy;
candidus

clear as a candle-flame’s transparent light.

It dazzled me, that white, when I was young;

that and
purpureus
– poppy-red,

scarlet, we were firmly taught, not purple

in the given context; but inside my head

the word was both something more than visual

and also exactly what it said.

Poppies and lilies mixed (the mystical

and the moral?) was what I came upon.

My eyes leaping across the juxtaposed

adjectives, I saw them both as one,

and brooded secretly upon the image:

purple shining lilies, bright in the sun.

We weave haunted circles about each other,

advance and retreat in turn, like witch-doctors

before a fetish. Yes, you are right to fear

me now, and I you. But love, this ritual

will exhaust us. Come closer. Listen. Be brave.

I am going to talk to you quietly

as sometimes, in the long past (you remember?),

we made love. Let us be intent, and still. Still.

There are ways of approaching it. This is one:

this gentle talk, with no pause for suspicion,

no hesitation, because you do not know

the thing is upon you, until it has come –

now, and you did not even hear it.

                                                        Silence

is what I am trying to achieve for us.

A nothingness, a non-relatedness, this

unknowing into which we are sliding now

together: this will have to be our kingdom.

Rain is falling. Listen to the gentle rain. 

After they had not made love

she pulled the sheet up over her eyes

until he was buttoning his shirt:

not shyness for their bodies – those

they had willingly displayed – but a frail

endeavour to apologise.

Later, though, drawn together by

a distaste for such ‘untidy ends’

they agreed to meet again; whereupon

they giggled, reminisced, held hands

as though what they had made was love –

and not that happier outcome, friends.

Listen to that:

it is the sea rushing across the garden

swamping the apple tree, beating against the house,

carrying white petals; the sea from France

coming to us.

                      It is the April wind

I tell myself, but cannot rise to look.

You were talking about your blind friend –

how you had to share a room with her once

on holiday, and in the night you woke:

she was staring at you. Was she really blind?

You leaned over her bed for a long time,

watching her, trying to understand,

suppressing unworthy, unendurable

speculations (if she could see

what kind of creature was she?) until

her eyes went swivelling in a dream

as ours do, closed. Yes: blind.

Then I came to bed and, thinking of her

for whom eyelids have no particular purpose,

closed mine. And now there is this sound

of a savage tide rushing towards me.

Do you, in the front of the house, hear it?

I cannot look out. I am blind now.

If I walk downstairs, hand on the banister

(as she did once – admiring, she told us,

our Christmas lights), if I open the door

it will swish and swill over my feet:

the sea. Listen.