Poems 1960-2000 (11 page)

It is not one thing, but more one thing than others:

the carved spoon broken in its case, a slate split on the roof,

dead leaves falling upon dead grass littered

with feathers, and the berries ripe too soon.

All of a piece and all in pieces, the dry mouth failing

to say it. I am sick with symbols.

Here is the thing itself: it is a drought.

I must learn it and live it drably through.

This truth-telling is well enough

looking into the slaty eyes of the visitants

acknowledging the messages they bring

but they plod past so familiarly

mouldy faces droning about acceptance

that one almost looks for a real monster

spiny and gaping as the fine mad fish

in the corner of that old shipwreck painting

rearing its red gullet out of the foam.

Strange room, from this angle:

white door open before me,

strange bed, mechanical hum, white lights.

There will be stranger rooms to come.

As I almost slept I saw the deep flower opening

and leaned over into it, gratefully.

It swimmingly closed in my face. I was not ready.

It was not death, it was acceptance.

                               *

Our thin patient cat died purring,

her small triangular head tilted back,

the nurse’s fingers caressing her throat,

my hand on her shrunken spine; the quick needle.

That was the second death by cancer.

The first is not for me to speak of.

It was telephone calls and brave letters

and a friend’s hand bleeding under the coffin.

                                *

Doctor, I am not afraid of a word.

But neither do I wish to embrace that visitor,

to engulf it as Hine-Nui-te-Po

engulfed Maui; that would be the way of it.

And she was the winner there: her womb crushed him.

Goddesses can do these things.

But I have admitted the gloved hands and the speculum

and must part my ordinary legs to the surgeon’s knife.

Nellie has only one breast

ample enough to make several.

Her quilted dressing-gown softens

to semi-doubtful this imbalance

and there’s no starched vanity

in our abundant ward-mother:

her silvery hair’s in braids, her slippers

loll, her weathered smile holds true.

When she dresses up in her black

with her glittering marcasite brooch on

to go for the weekly radium treatment

she’s the bright star of the taxi-party –

whatever may be growing under her ribs.

                               *

Doris hardly smokes in the ward –

and hardly eats more than a dreamy spoonful –

but the corridors and bathrooms

reek of her Players Number 10,

and the drug-trolley pauses

for long minutes by her bed.

Each week for the taxi-outing

she puts on her skirt again

and has to pin the slack waistband

more tightly over her scarlet sweater.

Her face, a white shadow through smoked glass,

lets Soho display itself unregarded.

                               *

Third in the car is Mrs Golding

who never smiles. And why should she?

The senior consultant on his rounds

murmurs in so subdued a voice

to the students marshalled behind

that they gather in, forming a cell,

a cluster, a rosette around him

as he stands at the foot of my bed

going through my notes with them,

half-audibly instructive, grave.

The slight ache as I strain forward

to listen still seems imagined.

‘How are you this morning?’ ‘Fine,

very well, thank you.’ I smile too.

And possibly all that murmurs within me

is the slow dissolving of stitches.

I am out in the supermarket choosing –

this very afternoon, this day –

picking up tomatoes, cheese, bread,

things I want and shall be using

to make myself a meal, while they

eat their stodgy suppers in bed:

Janet with her big freckled breasts,

her prim Scots voice, her one friend,

and never in hospital before,

who came in to have a few tests

and now can’t see where they’ll end;

and Coral in the bed by the door

who whimpered and gasped behind a screen

with nurses to and fro all night

and far too much of the day;

pallid, bewildered, nineteen.

And Mary, who will be all right

but gradually. And Alice, who may.

Whereas I stand almost intact,

giddy with freedom, not with pain.

I lift my light basket, observing

how little I needed in fact;

and move to the checkout, to the rain,

to the lights and the long street curving.

Clear is the man and of a cold life

who needn’t fear the slings and arrows;

cold is the man, and perhaps the moorish bows

will avoid him and the wolf turn tail.

                                *

Sitting in the crypt under bare arches

at a quite ordinary table with a neat cloth,

a glass of wine before him, ‘I’m never sure,’

he said, ‘that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning.’

Upstairs musicians were stretching their bows

for a late quartet which would also save us from nothing.

This ex-church was bombed to rubble,

rebuilt. It is not of that he was thinking.

And policemen decorate the underground stations

to protect us from the impure of heart;

the traveller must learn to suspect his neighbour,

each man his own watchdog. Nor of that.

Of a certain high felicity, perhaps,

imagining its absence; of the chances.

(If echoes fall into the likeness of music

that, like symmetry, may be accidental.)

‘Avoid archaism for its own sake –

viols, rebecks: what is important

is simply that the instruments should be able

to play the notes.’ A hard-learnt compromise.

But using what we have while we have it

seems, at times, enough or more than enough.

And here were old and newer things for our pleasure –

the sweet curves of the arches; music to come.

Which this one set before him with his own death –

far from probably imminent, not soon likely –

ticking contrapuntally like a pace-maker

inside him. Were we, then, lighter, colder?

Had we ignored a central insistent theme?

Possibly even the birds aren’t happy:

it may be that they twitter from rage or fear.

So many tones; one can’t be sure of one’s reading.

Just as one can’t quite despise Horace

on whom the dreaded tree never did quite fall;

timid enjoyer that he was, he died

in due course of something or other. And meanwhile

sang of his Lalage in public measures,

enjoyed his farm and his dinners rather more,

had as much, no doubt, as any of us to lose.

And the black cypress stalks after us all.

Neighbours lent her a tall feathery dog

to make her expedition seem natural.

She couldn’t really fancy a walk alone,

drawn though she was to the shawled whiteness,

the flung drifts of wool. She was not a walker.

Her winter pleasures were in firelit rooms –

entertaining friends with inventive dishes

or with sherry, conversation, palm-reading:

‘You’ve suffered,’ she’d say. ‘Of course, life is suffering…’

holding a wrist with her little puffy hand

older than her face. She was writing a novel.

But today there was the common smothered in snow,

blanked-out, white as meringue, the paths gone:

a few mounds of bracken spikily veiled

and the rest smooth succulence. They pocked it,

she and the dog; they wrote on it with their feet –

her suede boots, his bright flurrying paws.

It was their snow, and they took it.

                                                       That evening

the poltergeist, the switcher-on of lights

and conjuror with ashtrays, was absent.

The house lay mute. She hesitated a moment

at bedtime before the Valium bottle;

then, to be on the safe side, took her usual;

and swam into a deep snowy sleep

where a lodge (was it?) and men in fur hats,

and the galloping…and something about…

1.30 p.m.

Outside the National Gallery

a man checks bags for bombs or weapons –

not thoroughly enough: he’d have missed

a tiny hand-grenade in my make-up purse,

a cigarette packet of gelignite.

I walk in gently to Room III

not to disturb them: Piero’s angels,

serene and cheerful, whom surely nothing could frighten,

and St Michael in his red boots

armed against all comers.

Brave images. But under my heart

an explosive bubble of tenderness gathers

and I shiver before the chalky Christ:

what must we do to save

the white limbs, pale tree, trusting verticals?

Playing the old bargaining game

I juggle with prices, offer a finger

for this or that painting, a hand or an eye

for the room’s contents. What for the whole building?

And shouldn’t I jump aside if the bomb flew,

cowardly as instinct makes us?

‘Goodbye’ I tell the angels, just in case.

4 p.m.

It’s a day for pictures:

this afternoon, in the course of duty,

I open a book of black-and-white photographs,

rather smudgy, the text quaintly translated

from the Japanese: Atomic Bomb Injuries.

All the familiar shots are here:

the shadow blast-printed on to a wall,

the seared or bloated faces of children.

I am managing not to react to them.

Then this soldier, who died from merely helping,

several slow weeks afterwards.

His body is a Scarfe cartoon –

skinny trunk, enormous toes and fingers,

joints huge with lymphatic nodes.

My throat swells with tears at last.

Almost I fall into that inheritance,

long resisted and never my own doctrine,

a body I would not be part of.

I all but say it: ‘What have we done?

How shall we pay for this?’

But having a job to do I swallow

tears, guilt, these pallid secretions;

close the book; and carry it away

to answer someone’s factual enquiry.

7 p.m.

In the desert the biggest tank battle

since World War II smashes on.

My friends are not sure whether their brothers

in Israel are still alive.

All day the skies roar with jets.

And I do not write political poems.

Through my pillow, through mattress, carpet, floor and ceiling,

sounds ooze up from the room below:

footsteps, chinking crockery, hot-water pipes groaning,

the muffled clunk of the refrigerator door,

and voices. They are trying to be quiet,

my son and his friends, home late in the evening.

Tones come softly filtered through the layers of padding.

I hear the words but not what the words are,

as on my radio when the batteries are fading.

Voices are reduced to a muted music:

Andrew’s bass, his friend’s tenor, the indistinguishable

light murmurs of the girls; occasional giggling.

Surely wood and plaster retain something

in their grain of all the essences they absorb?

This house has been lived in for ninety years,

nine by us. It has heard all manner of talking.

Its porous fabric must be saturated

with words. I offer it my peaceful breathing.

These winds bully me:

I am to lie down in a ditch

quiet under the thrashing nettles

and pull the mud up to my chin.

Not that I would submit so

to one voice only;

but by the voices of these several winds

merged into a flowing fringe of tones

that swirl and comb over the hills

I am compelled.

I shall lie sound-proofed in the mud,

a huge caddis-fly larva,

a face floating upon Egyptian unguents

in a runnel at the bottom of England.

We give ten pence to the old woman

and climb through nettles to the beehive hut.

You’ve been before. You’re showing me prehistory,

ushering me into a stone cocoon.

I finger the corbelled wall and squat against it

bowing my back in submission to its curves.

The floor’s washed rock: not even a scorchmark

as trace of the once-dwellers. But they’re here,

closer than you, and trying to seduce me:

the arched stones burn against my shoulders,

my knees tingle, the cool air buzzes…

I drag my eyelids open and sleep-walk out.

‘We’re skeletons underneath’ I’ve heard you say,

looking into coffins at neat arrangements

laid out in museums. We’re skeletons.

I take the bones of your hand lightly in mine

through the dry flesh and walk unresisting,

willing to share it, over the peopled soil.