Collected Poems Read online

  Love in the environs of Voronezh

  It’s far away, a handsome town

  But what has it to do with love?

  Guns and bombers smashed it down.

  Yet love rebuilt it street by street

  The dead would hardly know it now

  And those who lived forgot retreat.

  There’s no returning to the heart:

  The dead to the environs go

  Away from resurrected stone.

  Reducible to soil and snow

  They hem the town in hard as bone:

  The outer zones of Voronezh.

  GOODBYE KURSK

  The thin moon sliced the heart out as it fell,

  Then effortlessly made its way

  To the earth’s true middle:

  The only cure is to fall in love.

  The moon gives back what it takes away.

  Blocks of flats blot out the moon.

  People live with happiness and work;

  I left my love too soon, too soon,

  So wait for me, it won’t seem long.

  She put sugar in my coffee

  Lit my cigarette

  Fed my eyes with the glow of lost desire

  Wept when I walked away.

  Write to me: it won’t seem long.

  Hull down: tanks are waiting.

  I hear them coming through the dust.

  FEBRUARY POEMS

  Forests have turned into desert

  Powdering the soul to ash,

  But sand sends out new blossoms

  Till flowers and trees grow strong again.

  In the desert that was once a forest

  Where eyes see only dust and fire,

  Tears dry even as one drinks

  On water freely flowing.

  Sandgrains fly up nostrils

  Turn cool in their protecting flesh,

  Salting blood to make a forest

  Before the soul can perish.

  A brittle seed feeds on the deepest sandgrain

  Where the sweated liquid of despair

  Makes a forest from the driest desert.

  ***

  Through a gap in snowlace curtains

  Winter turns to fire and sun:

  Heat makes the earth a board to spread on

  Dust drummed solid by a white sun descending.

  Needle-tips tattoo cat-scars on the sky,

  Drum-beating letters burn: no escape

  From the flat white iron of the sun,

  No fauna living but serpent skeletons

  Bleached so clean the weakest breath

  Can blow such bones as dust.

  The white-hot circle blacks out life:

  Lie flat and stroke the earth

  Before rain comes and rivers overflow.

  ***

  Hope, a longing for something new,

  Crushes the beetle of the past.

  When hope takes hold its ruthlessness

  Feeds on the purest fuel of injustice,

  And sharpens the spike for action.

  ***

  Whatever you want – bites the fingers.

  Be careful what you want:

  Wait for the chill river to separate the limits of desire,

  For icy banks to break the watercourse

  And sweep all venom clean.

  ***

  Let go, feet tear ladder-rungs

  Losing views of pepper dunes

  Beyond ampersand trees

  In the withered arm of the horizon.

  Between the toll of heartsick

  Into hole and hiding

  The eye of winter’s snake-sun

  Needles into the heart

  Paralyzing both hands to let go.

  ***

  Life begins when love’s game is ended.

  Live, and death starts biting:

  The game robs you of life.

  A week of rain, and the house is an island,

  A mudtrack after months of drought

  Leads to the paved road.

  A smell of spring freshens the brain,

  And water slops at the bank as I wade through.

  No black sky can finish off the never-ending game,

  Or engines drown the memory of peace.

  ***

  February forty times has arrowed towards spring,

  None left behind,

  Swirling fish that never vanish,

  Colourless or rainbow

  Twisting after strange journeys,

  Paralyzing vast aquariums.

  February is the tunnel’s end

  A zodiac into soaking loam

  When I watch the stars

  To say a loud goodbye of welcome to.

  ***

  Mimosa’s dead stench follows like a shadow

  Never consumed by the sun

  Or swilled by rain,

  Rots like memories that went with it.

  ***

  Be free, and endure happiness –

  Summer like a dream from the grave

  Rebuilds the heart.

  Winter will bring an elegiac falling of the snow

  And nurse the purest blossoms –

  And green-eyed August

  Spread the odour of a wheatfield’s death.

  Choices bite however the performance.

  Scattered seed can bring up crops and flowers

  To rub out happiness or suffering.

  ***

  Midnight comes at any hour.

  Eagles out of sunlight bring it,

  Shadows on the fields.

  The sun throws broken eagles

  Back against the stars.

  The moon eats and grows fat.

  The curtain opens to an empty sky.

  LOVERS SLEEP

  Flesh to flesh: there are two hearts between us

  Mine on one side, yours on the other

  Through which all thoughts must pass

  Mine intercepting those from you

  Yours beating strongly (I feel it doing so)

  Taking my thoughts into the labyrinth of yours

  From sleep of me to sleep of you

  Till flesh and heart join in the deepest cave.

  THE WEIGHT OF SUMMER

  Summer’s iron is on the trees

  A new weight to bear

  Leap-year sap rising through lead

  Forcing flower to give fruit

  Green flame shifting up iron trunks

  To poke out buds.

  Leaves hang all summer

  Shaken by rain and wind

  Shrived by a little heat:

  Such yearly swing must wear them

  To a death so flat by autumn

  That blood draws back

  And lets the leaves go.

  Trees suffer in frost and snow:

  Force-fed by soil, drained by age

  They brood and bide their time.

  How many summers can they take such weight?

  How long is life, how rich the earth,

  How weak the heart?

  ROSE

  A rose about to open

  Thinks air and sun

  Can turn it into

  Something it is not already.

  The pink slit of life shows

  Between tight green blades –

  Hasn’t it seen enough

  Without wanting everything?

  Behind its packed unopened petals

  Are roses still to flower

  And blossoms not yet dropped;

  Outside, those same are tempting it,

  Scorched and shrivelled on the grass.

  Rose about to open, why do you do it?

  What force pushes

  So subtly that it does not feel?

  What beckoning power beyond

  Draws it with perfume sweeter than

  The one that will be made?

  They promise nothing but the last decay:

  The will to come or stay is not their own.

  CREATION

  God di
d not write.

  He spoke.

  He made.

  His jackknife had a superblade –

  He sliced the earth

  And carved the water,

  Made man and woman

  By an act of slaughter.

  He scattered polished diamonds

  In the sky like dust

  And gave the world a push to set it spinning.

  What super-Deity got him beginning

  Whispered in his ear on how to do it

  Gave hints on what was to be done?

  Don’t ask.

  In his mouth he felt the sun

  Spat it out because it burned;

  From between his toes – the moon –

  He could not walk so kicked it free.

  His work was finished.

  He put a river round his neck,

  And vanished.

  SIGNAL BOX

  Level-crossing signal box

  With three and a half hours between trains.

  Bells stopped, gates shut and blocking the line:

  Levers taller than himself palisade the moon,

  He on the safer side.

  Elbows space aside and tunnels

  The last green spitter of sparks

  Up the stars and soaking turf towards London,

  Whispers along, snarling, a retreating song,

  Signals on gauges like slicked hair downarrowed:

  Line clear for the next open crossing.

  Guard in waistcoat and jacket

  (Good to children who just want to see)

  Iron dragons slip through his fingers a hundred times a day

  Responsibility too great to feel power,

  Warning others down the line of its approach,

  He sits by teaflask and prepares a book,

  Needs an opium-portion to become

  Captain of a rusting steamer

  Crawling the coastal buffs of Patagonia,

  Or Nemo in his flying boat

  Lording at the Pole or South Sea hideout.

  A good tale every night is better

  That the telly or a homely bed.

  Trains growl on steel snakes

  Straight and sleeping close,

  Locomotive kings of the dawn

  Behind signals from another cured of sleep:

  Wide gates open for the first black arrow

  A circle in its packed and moving forehead,

  As he closes his book

  And lets the day pour through.

  BARBARIANS

  Walls he sat by had fallen long ago:

  The city smoked after capture and rapine,

  No brick left upon another.

  These barbarians – this boy

  Sitting on the littered scrub –

  Belonged to a Scythian family

  Who found the city as if following

  A far-back shutter-flash,

  Crazed with hope after a famished trudge

  Over steppe whose herbs

  Scorched by the haze of the sun

  Pulled horses’ ribs so far in

  They were almost dead.

  By tale and memory this Scythian offshoot

  Saw a glittering metropolis,

  People and laden horses queueing to get out.

  No brick upon another. While the boy’s

  Mother scraped at rubbish

  He played at tapping stone with stone

  Cracked lips moving at the sky

  Waiting for her to find food,

  And idly placing one brick on another.

  SOMME

  A trench map from the Battle of the Somme:

  Doesn’t matter where it came from

  Has a dead fly stuck

  At the lefthand corner

  By a place called Longueval,

  Rusty from blood sucked

  Out of British or German soldiers

  Long since gone over the top

  Where many went to in those olden days.

  Whoever it was sat on an upturned

  Tin and smoked a pipe.

  Summer was finished beyond the parapet

  And winter not yet willing

  To let him through the mist

  Of that long valley he was told to cross,

  While the earth shook from gnat-bites of gunfire

  As if to shrug all men from its shoulders.

  A fly dropped on the opened map

  Feet of fur and bloated with soot

  Crawled over villages he hoped to see.

  Bemused he followed it

  Curious to know at which point it would stop

  And finally take off from,

  For that might be

  Where death would fall on him.

  Scorning the gamble

  He squashed the stolid fly

  Whose blood now decorates the map

  Pinned on my wall after fifty years gone by.

  Night came, he counted men into the trench

  And crouching on the last day of June

  In the earthen slit that stank

  Of soil and Woodbines, cordite and shit

  Held the wick close to his exhausted eyes,

  Shut the dim glow into its case

  And ceased to think.

  ALCHEMIST

  Lead melts. If I saw lead, I melted it

  Poured it into sand and made shapes.

  I melted all my soldiers,

  Watched that rifle wilt

  In an old tin can on a gas flame

  Like a straw going down

  From an invisible spark of summer.

  He stood to attention in the tin

  Rim gripped by fanatic pliers

  From the old man’s toolkit,

  Looked on by beady scientific eyes

  That vandalize a dapper grenadier.

  The head sagged, sweating under a greater

  Heat than Waterloo or Alma.

  He leaned against the side

  And lost an arm where no black grapeshot came.

  His tired feet gave way,

  A spreading pool to once proud groin,

  Waist and busby falling in, as sentry-go

  At such an India became too hard,

  And he lay without pillow or blanket

  Never to get up and see home again.

  Another one, two more, I threw them in:

  These went quicker, an elegant patrol

  Dissolved in that infernal pit.

  Eyes watering from fumes of painted

  Soldiers melting under their own smoke,

  The fire with me, hands hard at the plier grip

  At soldiers rendered to peaceful lead

  At the bottom of a tin.

  Swords into ploughshares:

  With the gas turned off I wondered

  What to do with so much marvellous dead lead

  That hardened like the surface of a pond.

  VIEW FROM MISK HILL NEAR NOTTINGHAM

  Armies have already met and gone.

  When the best has happened

  The worst is on its way.

  Beware of its return in summer.

  When fields are grey and should be green

  Rub scars with ash and sulphur.

  Full moon clears the land for its own view,

  Whose fangs would bereave this field

  Of hayrick and sheep.

  In the quiet evening birds fly

  Where armies are not fighting yet.

  He looks a long way on at where he’ll walk:

  A cratered highway with all hedges gone.

  Green land dips and smells of fire.

  Topography is wide down there.

  The moon waxes and then emaciates.

  Birds fatten on fields before migration:

  Smoke in summer hangs between earth and sky,

  On ground where armies have not fought

  But lay their ambush to dispute his passing.

  from Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979

  LUCIFER’S ASTRONOMY LE
SSON

  When Lucifer confessed his pride

  His plans and turbulence

  It was explained to him: the sun

  Is fixed in its relation to the stars.

  The stars are placed in their position

  To each other. The planets with no heat or light

  Get sufficient dazzle from the sun.

  Satellites enlace the planets.

  The earth, with its one moon

  Revolves and in so doing

  Takes a year to go lefthanded

  In a lone ellipse around the fire of Heaven.

  And now, a few celestial definitions:

  The words came fast, like nadir

  Zenith, equinox and solstice,

  But when threatened with meridian

  And (especially) declination

  Lucifer shouted: Stop!

  I’ve known this text from birth.

  The Guardian of Sidereal Time

  Is tired of the Party Line.

  Navigators get their fix on me –

  And so did God.

  Right through my heart

  The recognition-vectors

  Set to split-infinities of Time

  Came all too plain yet none too simple,

  Each emotion a position-line

  Pegged like witch-pins in the victim’s spleen.

  Sextant-eye and timepiece heart

  The brain set out in astronomic tables

  Plot the way to harbour mouths

  Where all life but Lucifer’s is understood.

  His geologic heart reversed

  By extra-galactic longing

  Was sensed by God.

  Rays leapt from Lucifer’s missiled sight:

  A magnetic four-way flow

  Confused the inner constant,

  And mysterious refractions

  Made him violent and obstinate,

  Shifty and uncouth.

  Habits lovable yet also vile

  Were ludicrous in minor deities,

  Holding mirrors to their chaos.

  Handsome though he was, God kicked him out.

  Lucifer keened in misery

  But in the kernel of his fall

  A final sentence frayed his lips:

  ‘God wills everyone to love like him.

  In his own image must we love,

  Or be stripped bare of everything but space.’

  LUCIFER: THE OFFICIAL VERSION OF HIS FALL

  Lucifer once ruled the nations

  Till, raddled with perverted notions

  He thought to ask God’s circling stars

  To form a flight of gentle stairs

  By which he’d scale the heavenly throne,

  Defile it with the rebel stain.

  He’d dominate the Mount of Meeting