Collected Poems Page 9

  Frenetic bluebottles saw the air.

  Blackberries scratch with poison.

  Love is taken before knowing the mistake.

  The last thief grins

  At the look of life.

  There are many, so who cares?

  The trap is a loaded crossbow,

  Ratchet-pulley sinewed back

  From birth and set in wait.

  None walk upright from the bolt’s release.

  LEFT HANDED

  The left hand guards my life.

  I use. It uses. Sinister

  Alliances shape plans.

  Left hand is fed by the heart

  Strategically engined

  Between brain and fingers,

  Sometimes filtering intelligence.

  The left eye is in line with hand

  And pen. The left lung

  Rotted when I tried the right:

  Lesson one was spitting blood.

  Vulnerable left side lives in harmony

  And liberates the rules,

  Rides monsters who fear to eat themselves,

  So do not bite.

  NEW MOON

  Since men have waved flags on her

  Classified geology with peacock colours

  Sent cameras probing every angle

  The moon has turned lesbian;

  Shows brighter now in her woman hunger

  Goes with purpose to her lover

  In the Milky Way, nothing more from earth

  Yet better by far than shining palely

  A mirror for courtiers to gawp at –

  And that stricken poet who ached

  In her unrequiting love but now is free.

  OPHELIA

  When Ophelia lay a finger on the water

  The cold and shallow brook scorched flesh.

  She pulled it back.

  The fire was love.

  She was forget-me-not’s daughter,

  Each eye a pond of flowers.

  She climbed the arching cliff

  Where water sent its clouds of salt,

  Luminous across the sun.

  The nunnery was found:

  No one saw her body spin.

  A lunar sea-change sent it cleanly in.

  ALIOTH THE BIGOT

  A bigot walks fast.

  Get out of the way

  Or walk faster.

  He walked faster too

  Veered right

  To evade me.

  I increased my rate

  Hinging left to avoid

  The fire in his eyes.

  Collisionable material

  Should not promenade

  On the same street.

  We muttered sorry

  Then went on

  More speedily than ever.

  CHANGING COURSE

  Down the slope to the horizon

  Fix the black-dot sun before departure.

  When the day sets at the storm’s end

  Far along the moonbeams that flow in,

  Shut the barometer, hang the watch away

  Lay the sextant in its box.

  How deep the valley which enclosed

  The lifeboat washed against the shore.

  The heart says goodnight at dawn,

  And hopes the dark is best

  Which fears the day to come.

  ON FIRST SEEING JERUSALEM

  The way to knowing is to know

  How useless to talk of hills and colours

  Looking at Jerusalem.

  To know is to keep silent

  Yet in silence

  One no longer knows;

  Can never unknow what was known

  Or let silence slaughter reason.

  One knows, and always knows

  Unable to believe silence

  A better way of knowing.

  One sees Jerusalem, knows

  Yet does not, comes to life

  And knows that walls outlast whoever watches.

  The Temple was destroyed: one knows for sure.

  One joins the multitude and grieves.

  Knows it from within.

  One does not know. Let me see you

  Everyday as if for the first time

  Then I’ll know more:

  Which already has been said

  By wanderers who, coming home,

  Regret the loss of that first vision.

  The dust that knew it once is mute.

  Stones that know stay warm and silent.

  From pale dry hills I watch Jerusalem,

  Make silence with the stones:

  An ever-new arrival.

  NAILS

  Tel Aviv is built on sand:

  Sand spills from a broken paving stone

  And sandals cannot tread it back;

  Waves beat threateningly

  A sea to flow through traffic

  Climb hills and wash Jerusalem.

  Every white-eyed speckle of its salt

  Feasts on oranges and people,

  Envying their safety;

  And their rock through which

  Six million nails were hammered

  As deep as the world’s middle,

  And the sky that no floodtide can reach.

  LEARNING HEBREW

  With coloured pens and pencils

  And a child’s alphabet book

  I laboriously draw

  Each Hebrew letter

  Right to left

  And hook to foot,

  Lamed narrow at the top,

  The steel pen deftly thickening

  As it descends

  And turns three bends

  Into a black cascade of hair,

  Halting at the vowel-stone

  To one more letter.

  Script comes up like music

  Blessing life

  The first blue of the sea

  The season’s ripe fruit

  And the act of eating bread:

  Each sign hewn out of rock

  By hands deserving God as well as Beauty.

  I’m slow to learn

  Cloud-tail shapes and whale-heads

  Arks and ships in black, pure black

  The black of the enormous sky

  From behind a wall of rock:

  With their surety of law

  Such shapes make me illiterate

  And pain the heart

  As if a boulder bigger than the earth

  Would crush me:

  Struck blind I go on drawing

  To enlighten darkness.

  Such help I need:

  Lost in this slow writing,

  Clutch at a letter like a walking-stick

  Go into the cavern-mouth

  And sleep by phosphorescent letters

  Dreaming between aleph or tav

  Beginning and end

  Or the lit-up middle.

  Dreams thin away:

  In day the hand writes

  Hebrew letters cut in my rock

  Painted by a child on the page,

  For they are me and I am them

  But can’t know which.

  SYNAGOGUE IN PRAGUE

  Killers said

  Before they used their slide-rules

  ‘Death is the way to Freedom’:

  Seventy-seven thousand names

  Carved on these great walls

  Are a gaol Death cannot open.

  Eyes close in awe and sorrow

  As if that name was my mother

  That boy starved to death my son

  Those men gassed my brothers

  Or striving cousins.

  It might have been me and if it was

  I spend a day searching the words

  For my name.

  I’d be glad it was not me

  If the dead could see sky again,

  Reach that far-off river and swim in it.

  What can one say

  When shouting rots the brain?

  The dead god hanging in churches

  Was not allowed to hear />
  Of work calling for revenge

  To ease the pain of having let it happen

  And stop it being planned again.

  Letters calling for revenge on such a wall

  Would vandalize that encyphered synagogue,

  And seventy-seven thousand

  Stonily indented names

  Would still show through.

  Vengeance is Jehovah’s own;

  To prove He’s not abandoned us

  He gave the gift of memory,

  The fruit of all trees

  In the Land of Israel.

  ISRAEL

  Israel is light and mountains

  Bedrock and river

  Sand-dunes and gardens,

  Earth so enriched

  It can be seen from

  The middle of the sun.

  Without Israel

  Would be

  The pain

  Of God struck from the universe

  And the soul falling

  Endlessly through night.

  Israel

  Guards the Sabbath-candle of the world

  A storm-light marking

  Job’s Inn – open to all –

  An ark without lifeboats

  On land’s vast ocean.

  ON AN OLD FRIEND REACHING JERUSALEM

  No one may ask what I am doing here:

  Olive-leaves one side glisten tin

  The other is opaque like my dulled hair.

  I travelled far. I walked. I ate

  The train’s black smoke,

  Choked on Europe’s bitter sin.

  When forests grew from falling ash

  I gleaned the broken letters of my alphabet

  And sucked them back to life for bread.

  Christian roofs were painted red

  And four horizons closed their doors.

  Pulled apart by Europe’s sky

  My soul is polished by Jerusalem

  Where I fall fearlessly in love

  Ashen by the Western Wall,

  And through my tears no one dare ask

  What I am doing here.

  FESTIVAL

  The moon came up over Jerusalem

  Blood-red

  An hour later it was white

  Bled to death.

  The breath of memory revives

  On the Fifteenth Day of Ab.

  The spirit and the flesh

  Don’t clash when men and women

  Walk in orange groves

  To reinvigorate the moon.

  God knew the left hand

  And the right

  When Lot chose

  The Plain of Ha-Yarden

  And Abram – Canaan.

  An excruciating noise of car brakes

  Comes from the Valley of Hinnom.

  Jerusalem is ours.

  YAM KINNERET (THE SEA OF GALILEE)

  Galilee is a lake of reasonable size,

  Unless immensity is measured down

  In dreams, in darkness.

  Then it becomes an ocean.

  Distant sails are birds trapped

  On the unreflecting surface,

  As if savage fish below

  Pull at their wings.

  With casual intensity

  And such immensity

  Are new dreams made from old.

  EZEKIEL

  On the fifth day

  In the fourth month

  Of the thirtieth year

  Among the captives by the river

  A storm wind came out of the north.

  Ezekiel the priest saw visions:

  Saw Israel

  Had four faces

  Four wings

  Four faces:

  The face of a man

  The face of a lion

  The face of an ox

  The face of an eagle.

  That was the vision of Ezekiel.

  THE ROCK

  Moses drew water from a cliff.

  I set my cup

  Till it was filled.

  Water saved me, and I drank,

  Reflecting on

  The shape of flame

  Of how a fire needs

  Putting down

  By swords of water.

  IN ISRAEL, DRIVING TO THE DEAD SEA

  I drive a car. Cars don’t

  Figure much in poems.

  Poets do not like them,

  Which is strange to me.

  Poets do not make cars

  Never have, not

  One nut or bit of Plexiglass

  Passes through their fingers.

  No reason why they should.

  To make a bolt or screw

  Is not poetic. To fit a window:

  Is that necessary?

  Likewise an engine

  Makes a noise. It smells,

  And runs you off too fast.

  What’s more you have to sit

  As fixed at work as that

  Engine-slave who made it.

  Nevertheless I drive a car

  With pleasure. It makes my life poetic

  I float along and tame

  The road against all laws

  Of nature. I stay alive.

  Who says a poet shouldn’t drive

  On a highway which descends so low

  Yet climbs so high

  From Jerusalem to Jericho?

  EIN GEDI

  (After Shirley Kaufman’s essay: ‘The Poet and Place’)

  When David went from Jerusalem

  The itch of death was in the air.

  The salt sea bloomed.

  King Saul bit himself and followed.

  The cave had no windows to steam and view.

  David’s gloom was David’s soul, and hid him.

  Whether to go or stay became

  A cloak that fitted when he went.

  After the mournful grackle’s note

  Saul came searching for the kill

  But never felt the sword that cut his cloak.

  Darkness is our place.

  The cave gave David birth:

  Memory was born, and all his songs.

  EVE

  In Israel I looked out of the window

  And saw Eve.

  Her hair was so black

  I called her Midnight

  But no answer came.

  Her eyes were amber

  Jewels made at midday

  When she looked at me.

  She crossed Gehenna

  In her sandals.

  My daylight wanted her,

  A few-minute love-affair

  Lasted forever,

  As she entered her City.

  from Tides and Stone Walls, 1986

  RECEDING TIDE

  The tide is fickle.

  After going out it comes back.

  The moon sees to that.

  It’s what the tide reveals

  When it huffs and leaves

  That means so much,

  And what the tide covers

  On nibbling back

  That opens our eyes:

  Archipelagos left unexplored

  And rivers unsurveyed:

  But before the meaning’s known

  The regimental rush of waves

  Is preceded by

  The brutal skirmishing of dreams.

  BRICKS

  Bricks build walls

  They erect homes

  Both rise up

  Men make them out of earth and clay.

  Water tightens them

  Ovens bake them to withstand

  Bullets and dour weather.

  Rectilinear and hard

  Red or blue

  Porous or solid

  Beautifully stacked:

  They invite the mason’s hand

  To choose.

  Bombs are the enemy of bricks:

  Stroke them tenderly,

  And share their warmth.

  LANDSCAPE – SENNEN, CORNWALL

  How many died when the height was taken?

&nbs
p; Upslope the armoured horses went:

  Old refurbished iron-men

  Zig-zagging from rocks,

  And knights already fallen.

  The cunning defenders

  Jabbed soft underbellies,

  Brought riders down

  On gleaming daggers.

  Victors mourned

  As the defeated King rode

  Into rain beyond the hill.

  Blood makes history,

  And desolation

  A winter’s day.

  BOARDED-UP WINDOW

  If I rip these planks back

  Will I see

  Something new, or out of nature?

  Years ago I put them on

  Felt glee in my fist

  As I swung the hammer

  And saw each nail

  Biting into seasoned wood.

  I didn’t know what I boarded up:

  Sunlight on the beach

  Pebbles in my palms

  Grass in my teeth –

  An upturned rowing boat.

  Thumb and forefinger held the nail.

  I laughed at something new

  Or out of nature.

  They paid me – though not too well.

  If I have the strength (or tools)

  To lever off those planks

  My soul will dazzle me with grief,

  And out of my own nature blind me

  With what I boarded up.

  DERELICT BATHING CABINS AT SEAFORD

  Well, they would, wouldn’t they?

  They’d say anything.

  Doris and Betty got undressed.

  Bob and Fred did the same next door.

  The things that went on in these changing huts.

  Well, with the War over, what could you expect?

  They came back like new men.

  Well, they came back.

  They came, anyway.

  Sometimes it was you and my Fred.

  Then it might be me and your Bob.

  It was nice with us, though, wasn’t it?

  Nothing but a clean bit of fun.

  Sad they went in a year of each other –

  The dirty devils!

  Nothing but a clean bit of fun,

  When we changed into our costumes,

  The sea washed it off, though, didn’t it?

  We had some good swims as well.

  And now look how they’ve smashed ’em up.

  Poor old bathing huts.

  Never be the same again.

  The sea chucked all them pebbles in.

  Don’t suppose it liked the goings-on.

  Then the vandals ripped the doors off.

  They didn’t like it, either.

  Old times never come back,