Collected Poems Read online

  His flesh bled gravel

  In the sleepless cool of the night,

  Gypsum and alabaster glowed at the moon:

  Although I fell

  Although you threw me to the heathens

  Although you scattered me among

  The far stars of the universe;

  Moulded me in ice, let heat dissolve me,

  Melted me in fire, let ice find me,

  My day is at hand, and the effect of every vision.

  Say to me where my sanctuary is,

  Scatter me back up the galactic chimney of the Fall.

  Lucifer walked between crimson cliffs

  Found garnets in the soil that matched

  The stone embedded in his forehead

  Scooped them to the foldings of his cloak

  And walked another forty days.

  Granite islands glistened in vast seas of sand.

  The mountains of Arabia were blue:

  The effect of every vision was at hand.

  The Sinaitic wind beyond Ophir

  Cleaned shattered tanks and guns.

  Lucifer pressed the metal that his fire had holed and melted,

  A camel rooted thorns between the wheels.

  When dark drew on to Egypt

  The effect of every vision was at hand.

  LUCIFER IN SINAI – 4

  Lucifer was the mirror of God’s pride

  Until his vanity

  Created

  Infamous

  Fractures

  Ending his reign yet marking his

  Return to God.

  Infamy

  Stems

  From believing pride to be

  One’s possession, which sets you to

  Retaliate against the weals of fate.

  God has no pride. Lucifer’s mistake

  In thinking so was responsible for the

  Vanquishing of

  Entire

  Nations.

  THE LAST

  When God said

  Let there be Man

  He also said

  Let there be Lucifer.

  Lucifer became

  And in becoming

  Was the only threat to God.

  Lucifer is part of God

  And part of Man:

  Unity is limitless

  Small and indivisible.

  Lucifer thought

  God ruled through Lucifer

  But God rules alone.

  Man rules, if and when,

  Through Lucifer.

  Lucifer walks in circles,

  With God forever present

  And forever silent.

  GOODBYE LUCIFER

  Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye:

  I say goodbye to everything;

  When the end arrives and knocks its time

  My body won’t dictate the tune

  Nor my soul sing dead.

  Goodbye, Utopia

  Whose minute never came.

  Goodbye –

  In case I cannot say it then

  Or death’s too slow for me to care.

  Goodbye, Lucifer, goodbye

  People music language maps

  Goodbye to love

  And rivers alluvially curving.

  Goodbye the sky.

  Goodbye, Lucifer and all reflections,

  Farewell to bodies and machinery

  Goodbye the spirit of the universe

  Goodbye.

  from Sun Before Departure, 1974–1982

  HORSE ON WENLOCK EDGE

  A tired horse treads

  The moonpocked face

  Of a ploughed field

  Cuts furrows blindly

  Through drifting rain

  On chestnut trees, soaked hedges

  Energy sucked out with evening;

  Seven nails in each steel shoe

  Are empty scars of twenty-eight nights

  When the white horse dreams

  Of galloping through star-clouds,

  A moon of nails flying from its path.

  NOTTINGHAM CASTLE

  Clouds play with their water

  Distort shekels between grass

  Enriched by the city that flattens

  Surrounding land with rubbish;

  Binoculars ring the distance like a gun:

  From a sea of shining slate

  Churches lift and chimneys lurch,

  Modern blocks block visions,

  The Robin Hood Rifles drilled in fours

  Practised azimuths on far-off points,

  Eyes watering at southern hills

  A half-day’s march away:

  ‘They’ll have to swim the Trent, thou knows,

  God-damn their goldfish eyes!’

  Musket balls rush, break glass,

  Make rammel. The Nottingham Lambs

  Smashed more than a foreign army,

  Came through twitchells to spark the rafters

  Paint pillars with the soot of anarchy.

  The Trent flowed in its scarlet coat

  Too far off to deal with fire:

  The council got our Castle in the end

  Protected by Captain Albert Ball VC

  Who thrust into a cloud-heap above Loos

  Hoping for his forty-second kill.

  In school they said: ‘You’re born

  For Captain Albert Ball

  To be remembered. Otherwise he’d die!’

  A private soldier, he became Icarus:

  ‘Dearest Folks, I’m back again

  In my old hut. My garden’s fine.

  This morning I went up, attacked five Huns

  Above the Line. Got one, and forced two down

  But had to run, my ammunition gone.

  Came back OK. Two hits on my machine.’

  Fate mixed him to a concrete man

  An angel overlooking

  On the lawn of Nottingham’s squat fort.

  My memory on the terrace

  Remembers barges on the Leen

  Each sail a slice of paper, writing

  Packed in script of tunic-red.

  For eighteen years I blocked the view

  No push to send me flying.

  Another brain shot down in sleep:

  Rich Master Robin Hood outside the walls

  Where he belongs robs me of time

  And does not give it to the poor.

  The whimsical statue stood

  With hat and Sherwood weapons

  Till a Nottingham Lamb removed the arrow

  Someone later nicked the bow

  Then they stole the man himself

  And rolled his statue down the hill

  One football Saturday

  And splashed it in the Trent:

  If you see it moving, take it:

  If it doesn’t move, steal it bit by bit

  But do not let it rest till Death’s sonic boom

  Blows the sun through every Castle room.

  OXNEY

  Smoke all evening, too thin to move

  Stubble aflame

  Up a hillside when I drove

  Across the flat half-mile between

  Iden and the Isle of Oxney. A line

  Of white, lipped in red set a corner

  Of the battlefield on fire,

  And cloud like a grey cloak was pulled along

  By some heart-broken mourner going home.

  NORTH STAR ROCKET

  At the North Pole everywhere is south.

  Turn where you will

  Polaris in eternal zenith

  Studs the world’s roof.

  Under that ceiling

  A grey rocket crosses

  A continent of ice,

  Evading Earth by flirting with it.

  Who will know what planet he escaped from?

  A cone of cosmic ash pursued its course

  On automatic pilot set to earth

  Bringing Death – or a new direction

  To be fed into my brain

  Before collision.

>   FIFTH AVENUE

  A man plays bagpipes on Fifth Avenue.

  Gaelic-wail stabbing at passersby

  Who wish its pliant beckoning

  Would draw them through their fence of discontent

  To a field of freedom they can die in.

  They stand, and then walk on.

  A man with thick grey beard

  Goes wild between traffic,

  Arms wagging semaphore;

  Raves warnings clear and loud

  To those ignoring him.

  A blind man rattles a money-can,

  Dog flat between his legs

  Listens to the demanding

  Tin that has so little in

  Both ears register

  Each bit that falls.

  An ambulance on a corner:

  They put a man on a stretcher

  Who wants air. A woman says:

  ‘Is it a heart-attack?

  Is the poor guy dead?’

  She worries for him:

  Dying is important when it comes.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ I guess,

  ‘I hope it’s not too late’ –

  She had one last year:

  ‘Fell in the street, just like that.’

  Her lips move with fear.

  The man is slid into the van.

  Just like that.

  Hard to come and harder go

  For the bagpipe player in the snow

  The wild man with his traffic sport

  The old man with his dog

  And the young who hurry:

  Dying, a lot of it goes on.

  THE LADY OF BAPAUME

  There was a lady of Bapaume

  Whose eyes were colourless and dead –

  Until the falling sun turned red;

  Her lovers from across the foam

  Walked at dawn towards her bed:

  Fell in fields and sunken lanes

  Died in chalk-dust far from home.

  A rash of scattered poppy-stains:

  Nowadays they pass her wide –

  That mistress of chevaux-de-frise

  Is still alive and can’t conceal

  Her mournful and erotic zeal:

  The lady of Bapaume had charms –

  Bosom large, but minus arms.

  No soldiers rise these days and go

  Towards the bloodshot indigo.

  Motorways veer by the place

  On which, with neither love nor grace,

  They drive to holidays in Spain.

  There was a lady of Bapaume

  Whose lovers ate the wind and rain.

  STONES IN PICARDY

  Names fade,

  Suave air of Picardy erodes

  The regimental badge

  Or cross

  Or David’s Star

  Of gunner this and private that.

  The chosen captains and their bombardiers

  And those known but as nothing unto God

  Who brought them out of slime and clay

  Are taken back again.

  God knew each before they knew themselves

  If ever they did

  Before mothers lips sang

  Brothers showed

  Sisters taught

  Fathers put them out to school or work.

  But only God may know them when the stones are gone

  If any can –

  If God remembers what God once had done.

  AUGUST

  Birth, the first attack, begins at dawn.

  It’s also the last, whistle at sky-fall,

  Illogical, unsynchronized, inept.

  Children, pushed over the top

  And kettledrummed across churned furrows

  Kitted out with dreams and instinct,

  Hope to learn before reaching the horizon.

  Those in front call back advice:

  ‘Going to advance, send reinforcements.’

  But who trust the old, when they as young

  Spurned cautionary wisdom

  That never harmonized with youth?

  ‘Going to a dance, send three-and-fourpence.’

  Some fall quietly under each rabid burst of shell

  Love of life unnoticed

  In willingness to give it

  Or the feckless letting-go.

  Leaves drop in the zero-hour of spring

  Young heat mangled by car or motorbike.

  Broken sight looks in, no view beyond

  Though terror rocks the heart to sleep

  The signal-sky gives bad advice:

  Get up, look outside, day again.

  Insight warped by energy, blinded by ignorance.

  The battlefield too wide,

  Bullets rage at friends and parents

  Strangers stunned in the lime-pits of oblivion.

  Who blame for this sublime attack?

  Did Brigadier-General God in his safe bunker plan?

  He horsebacks by, devoted cheers.

  Choleric face knows too much to tell –

  It’s dangerous for any smile to show.

  Whoever is cursed must be believed in

  For Baal is dead. Get up. Push on.

  Want to live forever?

  Go through. No psychic wound can split

  Or leg be lost at that onrushing slope.

  Halfway, more craven, sometimes too clever,

  Old campaigners want a hole to flatten in

  Before rot of the brain encircles

  Or Death’s concealed artillery

  Plucks fingers from the final parapet.

  Silence kills as quickly, you can bet.

  Live on. Death pulls others in

  Not you, or me, or us (not yet).

  Earth underfoot is kind but waiting,

  Green sea flows on the right flank,

  Black rain foils the leftward sun,

  Poppy clouds and mustard fields

  Tricked out with dead ground, full woods,

  Lateral valleys flecked with cornflowers.

  Roses flake their fleshy petals down.

  Time falls away. Battle deceptively recedes,

  Peace lulls to the final killing ground,

  Familiar voices coming up behind.

  TERRORIST

  The protest against Death

  Is a raised fist, the face

  Of corruption bewails its declining

  Gift of life. I go when chosen for taking.

  The sky bruises the aching fist. Air mellows

  The corroded face. You did not choose me.

  I parted myself long ago when I sat

  On a branch overlooking boathouse

  And bulrushes, and the lake water

  On which nothing moved

  Except the breath of words

  Saying no seven times all told.

  I didn’t stay to hear the answer

  Turned blind in Death’s donkey-circle

  Till the rag around my fist

  Was bloodsoaked from hitting the trees.

  RABBIT

  A busy rabbit young and small

  Cornered our vegetable plot,

  Chewing green treasure,

  Tail upright from line to line

  In rabbit-fashion,

  An all-providing God set out

  Row on row of grub,

  Scarpered back to thistles

  Till heavy-treading vengeance went away.

  The fur-lined malefactor fed a fortnight

  On lettuce carrots peas,

  Slyly keeping news from friends below.

  Laden gun half-aimed, I stalked:

  That gorging salad-engine’s tender paws

  Which sensed the weight of lead shot in my pocket,

  And soft-footed off before I reached the hedge.

  My shadow half-close,

  Approaching blackout had low odds

  On lead-slug hitting his well-padded neck.

  It never did

  Though if that produce had been all

  Between us and hu
nger

  The senses would have sharpened

  And my gun been God Almighty.

  MOTH

  Drawn by the white glitter of a lamp

  A slick-winged moth got in

  My midnight room and ran quick

  Around the switches of a radio.

  Antennae searched the compact powerpacks

  And built-in aerials, feet on metal paused

  At METER-SELECT, MINIMUM-MAX

  TUNER, VOLUME, TONE

  Licked up shortwave stations onto neat

  Click-buttons with precision feet.

  Unable to forego the next examination

  My own small private moth seemed all

  Transistor-drunk on fellow-feeling,

  A voluptuous discovery pulled

  From some far bigger life.

  A thin and minuscule antenna

  Felt memory backtuning as it crawled

  Familiar mechanism, remembering an instrument

  Once cherished,

  Forgotten but loved for old times’ sake.

  I switched the wireless on, and the moth

  To prove its better senses

  Mocked me with open wings and circled the light,

  Making its own theatre, which outran all music.

  FISHES

  Fishes never change their habits:

  A million years seem like a day

  As far as fishes’ habits go.

  Beware of those who change them half as fast

  Like people every year or so

  So fast you cannot find

  A firm limb or settled eye.

  The constancy of fishes is unique.

  They multiply but keep their habits

  In deep and solitary state;

  Feel unique and all alone

  Not being touched and hardly touching

  Even to keep the species spreading –

  Unique is never-changing habits.

  Fishes are flexible and fit the water,

  And though continually moving

  Never change their habits.

  THISTLES

  Thistles grow in spite of flowers,

  Brittle taproots drawing succour till the autumn.

  Seeds flop from the hedge

  And at puberty suck their fill by beans and carrots.

  Entrenching blade hacks soil,

  And fingers under thistle-spikes grip,

  And easily out it’s tossed to the sun’s bake.

  A dry and useless thistle pricks –

  Fingers gather and inflate with pus:

  For weeks the memory of pain.

  RELEASE

  Flowers wilt, leaves feloniously snatched,

  Birds sucked away – autumn happens.