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
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.