Collected Poems Read online

  Is a pomegranate split

  A waterfall pouring in.

  Each half lifts

  Drifts out to sea,

  Eaten clean as January boats

  By frost and salt.

  One will sink, one go free:

  Withered fruit-husk without salt

  Or soul. Could be you

  And could be me, watching January waves

  Erupt like whales and thrones and tractors:

  Stones clash back into their places.

  You wait for a boat to come

  And snatch you from love’s pandemonium

  Of humping tide and screeching stones.

  But what shipwrecked you there?

  Want to know, and cease to wonder:

  The boat lurches into seas of danger

  Waves turning phosphorous, turn fire:

  Rowers begin work, and you not with them

  When the numbness in you burns

  Because you do not want to go, or stay.

  Pomegranate is a far-off fruit

  Scattered seeds fulfil no circle.

  Love cannot kill

  A broken heart, nor mend it.

  The sea defends its dead

  And those born from it,

  Believes in broken hearts

  Burns when it boils so.

  No boat can stay, must fall apart

  Floating through the open heart,

  Like fruit bursting

  At the shock of moonless water,

  And two more hearts pulled in to slaughter.

  NAKED

  Naked, naked, I never see you naked

  As if to be naked is to tell lies

  With the body that you show –

  Cover it and keep the truth.

  Hide naked, keep it close

  You never let me see you naked

  Unless half so by accident or tease.

  Hide it carefully: those lies are yours,

  Not mine, speak them loudly if they burn.

  Belong to someone else, not mine.

  I see you naked through them,

  Through love, naked beyond the truth

  That will not let you see yourself.

  Keep your body for someone else:

  The lies that hide you are less sure

  Than the truth that blinds me.

  GHOSTS: WHAT JASON SAID TO MEDEA

  It is time to part, before murder is done.

  We have robbed each other of all we had,

  Eaten bitter herbs of battleground and kitchen

  And soaked our souls in them,

  Digested the gall of trust so cannot give it back

  In that pure state it was before:

  Consumed ourselves by ignoble hatred.

  So let us part like ghosts

  And promise not to haunt each other –

  Or make ghosts of others.

  HUNGER

  I haven’t found my hunger yet. When will I know

  The hunger to eat these walls away?

  The smallest creature visible to the eye

  Ran the pallid whiteness up this page

  And when I crushed it, hungry at its freedom,

  I found a tiny spider made of brick.

  It had lived on brick, the bright red dust of brick

  That filled its dust-dot of a body and even the speck

  Of legs it ran upon. Its life was fed by dust,

  The dust of bricks, and it had slaked its hunger

  On bricks, no question asked or thought of,

  Eating through walls was its life, its vital hunger

  For the walls it ate through, even at times

  Without hunger. It was so realized

  I crushed it, a reddish smear

  On the page to remind me

  Of the hunger that I know about at last.

  HEPHZIBAH

  Why don’t I write or speak the name?

  No light at Hephzibah’s window,

  So do not use ‘love’ in vain

  Nor easily at this turn of the game.

  Her name ignites the wind, breeds

  Smoke in the snow of the heart

  Gluttons the marrow as I watch

  The bombed space

  Phosphorized to blindness.

  You cannot answer letters or my speeches,

  A different man when salt burns

  Till there is no more light.

  Signals change before the gale

  Wipes all traffic out.

  Cogs and linchpins tattoo Hephzibah

  So I can’t forget your name, or use it,

  But continually hear magic syllables

  Shriller than my curse

  As I speed through

  White headlights flooding the world.

  FULL MOON’S TONGUE

  She said, when the full moon’s tongue hung

  Over Earls Court chimneypots,

  And he circled slowly

  Round the square to find

  A suitable parking place –

  She said: ‘Let’s go away together.’

  ‘Keep clear,’ he said. ‘You’d better not.

  I’ll take you, but watch out,

  For I will bring you back

  If at all,

  In two pieces.’

  She said: ‘I’ll never want to come back

  If I go away with you.’

  ‘They all do,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll bring you back in two pieces

  And you’ll live like that forever

  And never join them up again.’

  ‘How cruel,’ she said, seeing what he meant.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘To take you apart completely

  From yourself and make two separate pieces

  Might be the one sure way of fixing

  A whole person out of you –

  Some do, some don’t.’

  He was exceptionally nonchalant.

  ‘I’m not sure now,’ she said,

  Screaming suddenly: ‘You bastard!

  Let me get out, I want to walk.’

  He stopped the car

  But could not park it,

  Someone with a similar problem

  Was hooting him to move,

  So she jumped free and walked away

  Leaving him bewildered,

  And in at least two pieces.

  You talk too much,

  Said one piece to another.

  SILENCE AND STILLNESS

  Silence and stillness

  Are most prized in a whirlwind.

  Panic is being caught

  Between millstones of stillness –

  Feel the bones of the body

  Living out the heart’s pain.

  The whirlwind will penetrate

  The stockade of a gaze erected

  That nothing can break through,

  While waiting for the force

  That will pull you into the body

  And draw all pain away.

  A lawn grows in the palm of one hand:

  Trees in the other combust

  To chase worms out.

  Nothing can soothe the battered soul,

  But love cauterizes madness.

  SMILE

  Can’t get him out –

  Sits right in the fireplace

  Curled up tight

  Olive logs send red flames

  Feeling the chimney spout.

  Cold and safe, legs indrawn,

  Wan smile, squats in his fireplace,

  Irons cold, hair neat

  Away and safe unless

  A crowbar can prise him whimpering free.

  He smiles wanly because no one has.

  If and when he would be normal,

  A dead man on the street, smiles

  In a mirror no one can smash:

  A moonless grimace of victory,

  Insane as the sun

  That cleanses better than any fire

  Or his prison it once burned in.

  CHAIN

&nbs
p; The chain is weakest at its strongest point:

  The strong link by its heart helps weaker parts,

  And so weak links grow tauter than they should.

  Thus, taking too much strength

  The whole chain crumbles

  Broken at both weak and stronger points.

  Water breaks the strongest chain

  When a stormtide drags the ship away.

  Power changes all equations –

  The strongest link a strand of hair,

  And weakest at its strongest point

  Shares its heart with weaker hearts.

  GULF OF BOTHNIA – ON THE WAY TO RUSSIA

  Midnight aches at the length of life

  The endless day

  Blocking the porthole-elbow of Bothnia:

  One grand eye lit in twelve o’clock yellow,

  Turquoise and carmine sun

  A wound gouged by the night-dragon

  Not yet asleep.

  Day bleeds to death

  Sea close enough to dip

  The pen and write in.

  No midsummer howitzer can give

  A morphine blast and send the sun

  To whatever will rise up at dawn for me.

  Space and midnight fill all emptiness,

  As lost love bleeds acidic dreams

  Into the solvent sea:

  Red like a Roman bath.

  EURASIAN JETNOTE

  Frontiers meet over steppe and meadow

  At burial mound, salt waste or winter hut,

  Beyond danubes and caspians

  Where sturgeon breed by reed and barge-hull–

  But wood outlives

  Asia or Europe, love shaped by heart-torn

  Internal bleeding of the stricken forest.

  Wood dies, and is born again.

  IRKUTSK

  In Irkutsk a swastika was scrawled

  On a wall so I took my handkerchief

  And spat and rubbed

  But it was tough chalk

  Wondering why those Red pedestrians

  Didn’t grind it off.

  I’d done the same in London

  Walking to the Tube

  And missing the train quite often,

  But here it was ineradicable Russian chalk

  Though I chafed it to the barest shadow,

  No one taking notice on their walk

  Down Karl Marx Street. I strolled

  Away to let them keep it.

  Apart from scraping out a concave mark

  The crippled cross would stay forever,

  And anyway why should I get arrested

  For damaging The People’s Property?

  BAIKAL LAKE-DUSK

  Black ice breaking without sound or reason:

  Water below moves its shoulders

  Like a giant craving to see snow.

  Ninety-degree cold preserves mosquito eggs

  As the fist of winter

  Pulls into the sun’s mittens.

  The domed sun touches the horizon,

  A totem in the lake sinking

  Till its feet touch bottom and reach fire.

  SHAMAN AT LISTVYANKA

  Stopped his cart

  Refused food

  Shook tin brass skulls copper

  Turned to the sun

  And pressed a horseshoe to his eyes

  Spun a waterspout of words

  Grave toes patterning the soil

  Under a tree clothed all in green,

  Chews beansprouts from his crown

  Spins to pipe dance

  Head between land and sky

  Hand five candle-fingers

  Fuelled by the gutters of his stomach.

  Spins to music

  Stick legs strut

  In wide skin trousers:

  Shouting melts and planctifies

  Fisherboats and floating logs:

  Recites alone and long

  On Baikal fish and stork in one:

  Sea that threatens fire-spiders

  Copperbacks and claws –

  Creep from the rimline lake

  Feet to feel and lips to taste,

  Have no heart but swarm

  To eat from him and die of it –

  As brass-hooved breakers

  Break and draw them back

  And he weaving

  Over sand to green land

  Melting and metalling

  In blacksmith power.

  Horses birds and torches flee

  From tundra magic keening,

  Flesh of man flying

  Skinflags unfurling

  In a merciless slipstream to the sun.

  Drop, hear drums

  Rend on the flight,

  He so far within

  Sly, taciturn and a bully when normal

  Knowing he must keep that self out

  Or power goes,

  Be an old man forever

  Carved in rock by the fire

  After the last telling.

  TOASTING

  Drink, blackout, gutter-bout

  Kick back nine swills of vodka

  That put an iron band around

  Thorned skullcap and fire

  Of words toasting Life

  Peace, Town or Cousin.

  Bottles, heaped grub, dead towers in tabletown:

  Wine descends in light and colour

  As if the Devil had a straw stuck there

  Greedily drawing liquid in

  As consciousness draws out.

  RAILWAY STATION

  Death is the apotheosis of the Bourgeois Ethic.

  Tolstoy when he felt it coming on

  Left his family and set out for Jerusalem.

  Death shared its railway station:

  He in a coma heard trains banging

  Where Anna violated life.

  The fourth bell drowned his final wrath.

  The Bolsheviks renamed the station after him

  Instead of Bourgeois Death.

  RIDE IT OUT

  Ride it out, ride it,

  Ride out this mare of sleeplessness

  Galloping above the traffic roar

  Of Gorki Street,

  Weaving between Red stars

  And the grind of cleaning wagons.

  Today all Moscow was in mourning

  Because there’s no queue at Lenin’s tomb.

  I told them but they wouldn’t believe me.

  Ride out this beast who won’t let me sleep,

  Drags me up great Gorki Street

  And into Pushkin Square,

  Leningrad a rose on the horizon

  Ringed by blood and water –

  Pull up the blankets

  And be small for a few hours of the night.

  THE POET

  The poet sings his poems on a bridge

  A bridge open to horizontal rain

  And the steely nudge of lightning,

  Or icy moths that bring slow death

  Croon him to sleep by snow-wings touching his eyes.

  Through this he sings

  No people coming close to watch when the snow

  Melts and elemental water forces smash

  Between cliff and rock under his swaying bridge.

  When the water thins, his sweat-drops burst

  On scorching rocks like sparks from a flower pod;

  Through all this he sits and sings his poems

  To those vague crowds on either bank

  He cannot make out or consider

  With such short sight, for after the first applauded

  Poem he let his glasses smash into the rocks below.

  The bridge belongs to him, his only property,

  Grows no food, supports no houses –

  Cheap to buy with the first mediocre poems.

  It spans a river that divides two territories –

  He knew it and made no mistake:

  Today he faces one and tomorrow the other

  But from blurred eyes they look the same to him:
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  Green fields and red-roofed houses

  Rising to mountains where wars can be fought

  Without a bitter end being reached –

  The same on either side.

  He does not write a poem every day

  But each pet territory takes its turn

  To hear his words in one set language burn

  And drive them back from each other.

  In any rash attack they cannot cross his bridge

  But broach the river and ravine

  Down at the estuary or far upstream.

  He listens to the stunning bloodrush of their arms

  And shakes his head, never grows older

  As he bends to his paper which one side or the other

  Contrives to set, with food, by his hands’ reach.

  Sometimes sly messengers approach at night

  Suggesting he writes and then recites

  Upon some momentary theme

  To suit one side and damn the other,

  At which he nods, tells jokes and riddles

  Agrees to everything and promises

  That for them he’ll tear the world apart

  With his great reading.

  He stays young, ignoring all requests and prophecies,

  But his bridge grows old, the beams and ropes brittle,

  And some night alien figures

  In a half-circle at each dim bridgehead

  Brandish knives and axes. Lanterns flash,

  Blades and points spark like spinning moons

  Gathering as he puts away pens and parchment,

  Closes his eyes, and does not wake for a week,

  Knowing he will once more dream

  The familiar childhood dream

  Of falling down the sheer side of the world

  And never wake up.

  But he owns and dominates his bridge.

  It is his bread and soul and only song –

  And if the people do not like it, they can cut him free.

  LEFT AS A DESERT

  Left as a desert:

  Deserted by one great experience

  That pulled its teeth and shackles out

  And left me as a desert

  Under which bones are buried

  Over which the sand drifts.

  Seven years gone like laden camels:

  The gravel and the wind

  Is piling this vast desert up

  To one sky and one colour

  And sky reflecting desert shapes.

  The solitary heart lurks on the off-chance

  That rain clouds will come and fertilize

  The great experience that made this desert.

  LOVE IN THE ENVIRONS OF VORONEZH