Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (27 page)

When your slim shape from photographs

Stands at my door and gently asks

If I have any work to do

Or will I come to bed with you.

An Exequy

In wet May, in the months of change,

In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange

Dreams pursue me in my sleep,

Black creatures of the upper deep –

Though you are five months dead, I see

You in guilt’s iconography,

Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child,

The stranded monster with the mild

Appearance, whom small waves
tease,

(Andromeda upon her knees

In orthodox deliverance)

And you alone of pure substance,

The unformed form of life, the earth

Which Piero’s brushes brought to birth

For all to greet as myth, a thing

Out of the box of imagining.

This introduction serves to sing

Your mortal death as Bishop King

Once hymned in tetrametric
rhyme

His young wife, lost before her time;

Though he lived on for many years

His poem each day fed new tears

To that unreaching spot, her grave,

His lines a baroque architrave

The Sunday poor with bottled flowers

Would by-pass in their morning hours,

Esteeming ragged natural life

(‘Most dearly loved, most gentle wife’),

Yet, looking back when at the gate

And seeing grief in formal state

Upon a sculpted angel group,

Were glad that men of god could stoop

To give the dead a public stance

And freeze them in their mortal dance.

The words and faces proper to

My misery are private – you

Would never share your heart with those

Whose only talent’s
to suppose,

Nor from your final childish bed

Raise a remote confessing head –

The channels of our lives are blocked,

The hand is stopped upon the clock,

No one can say why hearts will break

And marriages are all opaque:

A map of loss, some posted cards,

The living house reduced to shards,

The abstract hell of memory,

The pointlessness of poetry –

These are the instances which tell

Of something which I know full well,

I owe a death to you – one day

The time will come for me to pay

When your slim shape from photographs

Stands at my door and gently asks

If I have any work to do

Or will I come to bed with you.

O scala enigmata
,

I’ll climb up to that attic where

The curtain of your life was drawn

Some time between despair and dawn –

I’ll never know with what halt steps

You mounted to this plain eclipse

But each stair now will station me

A black responsibility

And point me to that shut-down room,

‘This be your due appointed tomb.’

I think of us in Italy:

Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we

Move in a trance through Paradise,

Feeding at last our starving eyes,

Two people of the English blindness

Doing each masterpiece the kindness

Of discovering it – from Baldovinetti

To Venice’s most obscure jetty.

A true unfortunate traveller, I

Depend upon your nurse’s eye

To pick the altars
where no Grinner

Puts us off our tourists’ dinner

And in hotels to bandy words

With Genevan girls and talking birds,

To wear your feet out following me

To night’s end and true amity,

And call my rational fear of flying

A paradigm of Holy Dying –

And, oh my love, I wish you were

Once more with me, at night somewhere

In narrow streets applauding wines,

The moon above the Apennines

As large as logic and the stars,

Most middle-aged of avatars,

As bright as when they shone for truth

Upon untried and avid youth.

The rooms and days we wandered through

Shrink in my mind to one – there you

Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm

Which life could
not provide is balm

In death. Unseen by me, you look

Past bed and stairs and half-read book

Eternally upon your home,

The end of pain, the left alone.

I have no friend, or intercessor,

No psychopomp or true confessor

But only you who know my heart

In every cramped and devious part –

Then take my hand and lead me out,

The sky is overcast by doubt,

The time has come, I listen for

Your words of comfort at the door,

O guide me through the shoals of fear –

‘Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.’

(1975)

Crusoe in England

A new volcano has erupted,

the papers say, and last week I was reading

where some ship saw an island being born:

at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;

and then a black fleck – basalt, probably –

rose in the
mate’s binoculars

and caught on the horizon like a fly.

They named it. But my poor old island’s still

un-rediscovered, un-renamable.

None of the books has ever got it right.

Well, I had fifty-two

miserable, small volcanoes I could climb

with a few slithery strides –

volcanoes dead as ash heaps.

I used to sit on the edge of
the highest one

and count the others standing up,

naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.

I’d think that if they were the size

I thought volcanoes should be, then I had

become a giant;

and if I had become a giant,

I couldn’t bear to think what size

the goats and turtles were,

or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers

– a glittering hexagon of rollers

closing and closing in, but never quite,

glittering and glittering, though the sky

was mostly overcast.

My island seemed to be

a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere’s

left-over clouds arrived and hung

above the craters – their parched throats

were hot to touch.

Was that why it rained
so much?

And why sometimes the whole place hissed?

The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,

hissing like teakettles.

(And I’d have given years, or taken a few,

for any sort of kettle, of course.)

The folds of lava, running out to sea,

would hiss. I’d turn. And then they’d prove

to be more turtles.

The beaches were all lava, variegated,

black, red, and white, and gray;

the marbled colors made a fine display.

And I had waterspouts. Oh,

half a dozen at a time, far out,

they’d come and go, advancing and retreating,

their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches

of scuffed-up white.

Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,

sacerdotal beings of glass . . . I watched

the water spiral up in them like smoke.

Beautiful, yes, but not much company.

I often gave way to self-pity.

‘Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.

I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there

a moment when I actually chose this?

I don’t remember, but there could have been.’

What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway?

With my legs dangling
down familiarly

over a crater’s edge, I told myself

‘Pity should begin at home.’ So the more

pity I felt, the more I felt at home.

The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun

rose from the sea,

and there was one of it and one of me.

The island had one kind of everything:

one tree snail, a bright violet-blue

with a thin shell,
crept over everything,

over the one variety of tree,

a sooty, scrub affair.

Snail shells lay under these in drifts

and, at a distance,

you’d swear that they were beds of irises.

There was one kind of berry, a dark red.

I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.

Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;

and so I made home-brew.
I’d drink

the awful, fizzy, stinging stuff

that went straight to my head

and play my home-made flute

(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)

and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.

Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?

I felt a deep affection for

the smallest of my island industries.

No, not exactly, since the
smallest was

a miserable philosophy.

Because I didn’t know enough.

Why didn’t I know enough of something?

Greek drama or astronomy? The books

I’d read were full of blanks;

the poems – well, I tried

reciting to my iris-beds,

‘They flash upon that inward eye,

which is the bliss . . .’ The bliss of what?

One of the first
things that I did

when I got back was look it up.

The island smelled of goat and guano.

The goats were white, so were the gulls,

and both too tame, or else they thought

I was a goat, too, or a gull.

Baa, baa, baa
and
shriek, shriek, shriek,

baa . . . shriek . . . baa . . .
I still can’t shake

them from my ears; they’re hurting now.

The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies

over a ground of hissing rain

and hissing, ambulating turtles

got on my nerves.

When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded

like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.

I’d shut my eyes and think about a tree,

an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.

I’d heard of cattle getting
island-sick.

I thought the goats were.

One billy-goat would stand on the volcano

I’d christened
Mont d’Espoir
or
Mount Despair

(I’d time enough to play with names),

and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.

I’d grab his beard and look at him.

His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up

and expressed nothing, or a little malice.

I got
so tired of the very colors!

One day I dyed a baby goat bright red

with my red berries, just to see

something a little different.

And then his mother wouldn’t recognize him.

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food

and love, but they were pleasant rather

than otherwise. But then I’d dream of things

like slitting a baby’s
throat, mistaking it

for a baby goat. I’d have

nightmares of other islands

stretching away from mine, infinities

of islands, islands spawning islands,

like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs

of islands, knowing that I had to live

on each and every one, eventually,

for ages, registering their flora,

their fauna, their geography.

Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it

another minute longer, Friday came.

(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)

Friday was nice.

Friday was nice, and we were friends.

If only he had been a woman!

I wanted to propagate my kind,

and so did he, I think, poor boy.

He’d pet the baby goats sometimes,

and race with
them, or carry one around.

– Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

And then one day they came and took us off.

Now I live here, another island,

that doesn’t seem like one, but who decides?

My blood was full of them; my brain

bred islands. But that archipelago

has petered out. I’m old.

I’m bored, too, drinking my real tea,

surrounded by uninteresting lumber.

The knife there on the shelf –

it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.

It lived. How many years did I

beg it, implore it, not to break?

I knew each nick and scratch by heart,

the bluish blade, the broken tip,

the lines of wood-grain on the handle . . .

Now it won’t look at me at all.

The living
soul has dribbled away.

My eyes rest on it and pass on.

The local museum’s asked me to

leave everything to them:

the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,

my shedding goatskin trousers

(moths have got in the fur),

the parasol that took me such a time

remembering the way the ribs should go.

It still will work but, folded
up,

looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.

How can anyone want such things?

  
– And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles

seventeen years ago come March.

(1976)