Collected Poems Read online

  From Okhotsk shores:

  Until frost-bitten both in one grey form

  Ghost became brother to an Arctic storm

  Beyond all laws.

  A price was paid to wilderness and fire:

  Flashbacks of his vision beamed

  On bleak Siberian snows

  Show recollection full of truth and liar:

  What one remembers never is what seemed

  But what some stranger throws

  Up like a ghost before your eyes,

  A picture that the ghost of you would see

  Had it the power to span

  The world from now to then and recognize

  What memory discarded and set free

  Before you turned and ran.

  Each morning my brother asks himself what words

  Remain to ply and weave, what dreams, what birds

  By twilight to make

  Warm nests behind the sockets of his eyes

  Opened by gentian-blue barbarian skies

  That stayed in his wake.

  A youth spent uprooting deciduous nerves

  Gave strength to the broad-winding river-curves

  Of his soul;

  Tenacious eyes sought leaf-mould for breath

  Each footstep released what life lived in death

  In that great coal-

  Forest that froze and murdered yet gave him air

  To create a miracle by silent prayer

  In my too-undying heart;

  My brother became me, memories welded with steel

  United in fever and flame, but never to heal,

  Only meeting to part.

  ON A DEAD BLUEBOTTLE

  Dog-fought to its death by folded paper:

  An overloaded bluebottle

  Crossed the window on a clumsy track

  Like a Junkers 52 aimed for Crete.

  Survivor of the rains,

  With the temerity to try it on

  Too long with autumn,

  It never knew what happened –

  Landed on a matchbox, dead but hardly damaged:

  Convenient for what it carried.

  One by one its passengers came out:

  White-hooded monks debouching

  From a still war-painted aircraft

  At its dispersal point;

  Wriggling over fuselage and wings

  As if inspecting flaws after a crash-landing

  Of skin and wing that covered

  A maggot-cargo from the summer weather,

  As if they had paid ticket, food and board

  And wanted refund for a trip cut short,

  Turned and drew back in lily-whiteness,

  Upright with peevish nagging

  At some travel agent robber.

  Horror was what I felt at filth on filth

  Too quickly feeding

  To feed the many filthy mouths within,

  Horror at the proof of life so powerful

  Unsuicidable

  Persistent in such ways too small to realize.

  For those in need of comfort

  That the human race will beat survival

  To the end of time

  This is it, I thought –

  These little bleeders twisting out their time

  Are Godsent guarantees

  That you and I have season-tickets

  For too long to contemplate:

  For in the middle of the final maggot

  One maggot will survive

  To start it all again.

  PICTURE OF LOOT

  Certain dark underground eyes

  Have been set upon

  The vast emporiums of London.

  Lids blink red

  At glittering shops

  Houses and museums

  Shining at night

  Chandeliers of historic establishments

  Showing interiors to Tartar eyes.

  Certain dark underground eyes

  Bearing blood-red sack

  The wineskins of centuries

  Look hungrily at London:

  How many women in London?

  A thousand thousand houses

  Filled with the world’s high living

  And fabulous knick-knacks;

  Each small glossy machine

  By bedside or on table or in bathroom

  Is the electrical soul of its owner

  The finished heart responding

  To needle or gentle current;

  And still more houses, endlessly stacked

  Asleep with people waiting

  To be exploded

  The world’s maidenhead supine for breaking

  By corpuscle Tartars

  To whom a toothbrush

  Is a miracle;

  What vast looting

  What jewels of fires

  What great cries

  And long convoys

  Of robbed and robbers

  Leaving the sack

  Of rich great London.

  A CHILD’S DRAWING

  A horse in a field drinking water:

  A child’s drawing (with a tree)

  Is how it looks to me

  From a bed and through the window.

  Village houses stacked behind

  But horse made beautiful

  Blown into shape

  Back bent to water.

  My view uncomplicated:

  Your eager nostrils drinking

  And unseen except by me

  Who sees me watching you drinking

  Even the slime and water

  At the bottom of your pool.

  Who – as well as making you –

  Put you face to face

  (Within the child’s drawing of a field

  Looking clear into the pool

  That children envy)

  And me here?

  No complaint,

  For you have field and tree and water

  And I my child’s drawing through the window.

  OPPOSITES

  Fire and water

  Chemically meet

  In mutual slaughter.

  Fire would the other cook:

  The evangelical conviction

  Of a Six-day Book.

  Water would the other kill:

  Philanthropy to bring

  High temperatures to nil.

  Yet ask what solid flesh may stay

  Fire with swamp

  Water with baked clay;

  Neither compound an utter loss:

  One left with dregs

  And one with dross.

  EXCERPTS FROM ‘THE RATS’

  1

  How did they begin? What oracular sound

  Reached us from platforms underground?

  What muzzle moved against the humid clay?

  What well-clawed feet scratched into ocular day?

  They waited, sleek-bellied rats

  Whose memories (kept dry in old tin hats)

  Were parchment-read and spread, then lit

  As torches to illuminate for these rats

  The runnels and the tunnels of each pit.

  Revenge was not the fashion: those who shoved

  Were put no fatal question, a balanced glove

  Ignored upon their shoulders, while in the mines

  Unchallenged diggers sent out signs

  Of geologic stairways built on bones:

  A noise of rodents nosing through the stones.

  Where are they now? With perfect guile

  They breathe good air and walk such streets above

  That glisten with fraternity and love;

  In plastic surgery of grim disguise

  They sport dark spectacles instead of eyes

  Who might be you or me or that false smile

  That gives out bread-and-butter in God’s name

  And silently observes responses – like a game.

  Where? No need to look around, my friend

  Or in big books that open at the end

  (Since legibility i
s no great tool).

  Nowhere. Stand on your head and play the fool.

  How? Put out your tongue and shut one eye:

  Good. Stay like that until you die.

  And then? The rats will still be underground

  Snug in their galleries, unsought, unfound

  Untried and tied to undermining tricks

  Until your houses shiver and collapse like sticks:

  They speak corruption, live among its flowers

  Proliferate black seeds in April showers.

  The heart stops breeding fields of verity

  Becomes an eggtimer overworked and spun

  By propaganda whose ignoble run

  Of words begets not progress but obesity.

  One day you’ll take your best friend’s hand

  And feel his fingers turning into sand.

  No one will lift the black patch from a warning

  Who cannot see the night from too much morning.

  So? You ask too many questions, son:

  Take off those glasses, and pick up that gun.

  2

  Those continentals, the funny English say,

  Until my brain rebels and with grey

  Just logic substitutes for ‘English’ a word

  Many might object to, a label too absurd

  To comprehend, a double syllable

  That to me will remain unkillable

  Like gutter children or an Arab nomad:

  Namely I rename an Angle ‘OGAD’.

  This brain-somersault has made

  It suddenly impossible to call

  An oak a limetree or a spade a spade

  After sixty months meandering

  In warm Majorca and coniferous glade

  Where many tongues in silent valleys mix

  To push my English to the further banks of Styx.

  The first grey sago-OGAD met by me

  Was on the high grey waves of OGAD sea,

  Stamping passports on the ferryboat

  Before the mouth of Dover’s dismal throat.

  Unprivileged aliens in their special queue

  Etched their names for white-faced men in blue,

  Unbribable stern servants of the realm

  Whose rat-like ashen fingers grip the helm

  Of OGADLAND, keep an inner circle speed

  To guard an obsolescent greed

  Of law and order firm behind seven veils

  Of self-important mists – and Channel gales.

  I lingered in this continental line

  Idealizing Britain-of-the Brine

  To my American wife with passport green,

  Until a tall Sicilian wept and cried

  That those grey OGAD cliffs so vaguely seen

  Would ever bar his way to Paradise –

  Because a leaden-weighted face of ice,

  Bilious from its last attack of spleen,

  Based his entry on a throw of dice.

  Weeping so, he’d do no wrong

  I say, but who am I when rubber stamps

  And lines of ANGLE-OGAD faces vet

  With blank dictatorship these so-called tramps?

  Such rats will face the floodtide yet.

  3

  Many pink-faced OGADS of the north

  I have met on Sundays leading forth

  Pink-faced OGAD-dogs on lengths of leather

  On typical wet days of OGAD weather.

  The second month came musically sweet

  And mild, blue skies glittering with birdsong

  And silver jetplanes frolicking like fleet

  Lambs not yet responsible. ‘What a

  Beautiful raincloud over there!’

  Black and grey, yet

  Surely a silver-lining lurks somewhere?

  How strangely like a mountain, round and jet;

  Moving with speed, yet silently, no rain

  Falling from its cabbage – no, cauliflower – head:

  And suddenly a mushroom grows instead!

  Such OGAD weather does not give clear vision

  Hides all above the level of the eyes

  Makes only power to see with fair precision

  Certain orders posted by the wise

  Of this dark OGAD world: ‘Keep off the grass’

  And ‘Queue this side of sign’. ‘Thou shalt not pass

  Unless your child or dog be on a lead’.

  ‘Keep to the left’. ‘Slow down’. ‘Reduce your speed’.

  ‘Don’t park your car upon this hallowed spot’.

  ‘Drop litter here’. (That animals begot?)

  ‘Step along there, room for two inside’.

  And not one democrat looked up and sighed:

  You need not lift your face towards the sky,

  All orders are placed level with the eye.

  These pithy messages must make good trade

  For those who paint them. A poet’s blade

  Can’t cut more ice, the brains

  Of dull bespectacled sad OGAD folk

  Are taught by television and a race for trains

  Each morning not to test the laden yoke

  By a gaze to heaven, when all earthy bread

  Is planted firmly at their feet instead.

  4

  Revolution is the word of God

  A firefly that lifts from soddened ground

  For one second at the end of spring.

  So go the workings of the unsound

  Mind in its beginnings, a minor sting

  That no rat notices, and turns no brown

  Last winter’s leaf to face the sky.

  In this live jungle must the mind leap down

  To feed on pickings of dark soil, and shy

  Its hawk-beak at the earth’s sweet guile:

  Then rise full-caloried to kill in style.

  These are the commandments of the rats:

  You shall be born into the melting-vats

  Without an eye to give or a tooth to lose

  And never want for schooling, work or shoes.

  Good: but each advertisement is a decree

  A hanged man on the propaganda tree

  (From ITV as well as BBC)

  To make it shoot up high and thin:

  A hundred thousand may begin

  To march one damp October dawn:

  You can’t thank Life that you were born,

  Says Rat beneath his atom-cloud: the melting-vats

  Demand obedience to no one but the rats.

  You shall love the rats who take the hours

  From your clumsy hands, who guide you over roads

  And traffic islands, take heavy loads

  From lighter brains, give paper flowers

  Of happiness, and stand you in a line

  For bus or train, transport you to a house

  And television set and OGAD wine:

  You too can be a rat divine

  A living civil servant of a louse

  Though first you must become a mouse.

  O hear me, soulless OGADS of the mist

  Older than the rocks on which you pissed

  The winter snows away for idle summer;

  Listen to the rawboned pitprop drummer

  Who versifies rebellion from the ice

  (In exile where he feeds on uncooked rice

  That one day will explode his walnut fist)

  Hear his warning over your contented mummer

  And the mewings of devoted mice:

  Catastrophe will be the last device.

  5

  So keep your whiskers weaving while you may

  Beneath blue helmets, antennae of the law

  Sensitively finding those who pray

  For criminal success by some shop door.

  The time to strike is now. Drop your club

  Upon the head that holds ideas to boast

  Your kill, who stands like an untamed cub

  For buses on the wrong side of the post.

  Keep your long rat-whiskers sleek

/>   The man with garden shears may die next week

  Next month, yet maybe come with fist and claw

  With fuses primed in a Beethoven score

  And dynamite ensconced in crated butter.

  You do not even hear them mutter.

  They watch you pace (from behind a shutter)

  See you preen your whiskers as you walk

  Twirl your truncheon, chew your rind of pork

  Watch a drunk negotiate the street

  (Correctly). You glance at the callbox of your power

  Blind to their refusal of defeat

  As they debate on when to name the hour.

  King Rodent reigns on OGAD demock-rats

  On water rats that watch each riverbank

  And bridge for criminals who do not thank

  King Rodent’s riddance of white leopard cats:

  They wait until the shadow’s leap

  Becomes an offer of a well-aired bed

  That does not promise them a life of sleep.

  King Happiness has waved his magic wand

  Shown you a smooth reflection in the pond

  Of television shows, recorded your own voice

  In the self-selections of your choice,

  Set up his directions on the street

  Turned mechanic to your motorbikes

  Poured patriot sauce upon your luncheon meat

  Sent you out on Sunday-morning hikes:

  Party-hatted happiness is here,

  Each tenet brayed by a Royal Chanticleer.

  6

  Death is not preferable (had you

  Considered it?) to this untrue-

  To-life and that man’s sweated brow.

  How could, an end called Death

  End this as easily as that

  Man thinks? Questions come

  From artesian springs

  Labyrinths of sea and soil

  Making question marks

  Out of eternal water

  Demanding bloody answers

  And a bloody year

  Of cleansing. Slaughter?

  Here comes the First Battalion

  Television Light Infantry

  With bayonets fixed –

  Break them down!

  Around the left flank come

  The Porno Paper Cavalry Corps

  Riding pink and yellow tanks –

  Cut them off!

  Under your feet spring

  The Rat-State Sapper Brigade:

  Dig them over like a garden

  Do not let their forces overwhelm you

  Rather go insane before they

  Force you to their ranks

  Or kill you.

  The pyrotechnic paranoia of the anti-rats:

  Clean against dark

  Light opposing Death

  Tearing slide-rule and scalpel, pen and typewriter,

  Scales of rat-justice, rat-precision,

  Libraries recording rat-right and rat-wrong

  Rats that nip away each toe

  And suck the soles of too thin feet