New Poems, 1986–1990
CAMOUFLAGE
In winter trees don’t move:
Half the lawn is coppered with leaves,
Scollops under the bare trees.
A snow-blue sheet, no sky:
A ginger cat from copper into green
Stalks careless birds.
Can’t tell when it reaches bushes,
Form and colour blending
For its survival.
DAWN PIGEON
Below,
Cars slide on macadam tracks
Called streets.
Almost a circle,
Vision pauses to detect
A winter warning from the east.
People
Clatter towards train and bus,
Traffic a departing Joseph-scarf.
Vibrations shiver up the slates
To aerial filigree of bars
For webbed feet to grip.
No rival dare approach
His view of dustbins
Under blistered sills.
Well-fed and grey,
Lord as much as can be done
From his high perch –
Swoops when he decides to go,
Down, not up,
A common pigeon of the Town.
EARLY SCHOOL
Claptrap, I said. Don’t like this school.
Or probably much worse. If I’d learned
Nothing else I cursed like a sailor.
But five years old. Yet good, as good as gold:
They think I’m a fool?
Why am I here? They can say what they like.
They show me the swimming pool.
I get pushed in. It’s cold.
My arms ache. I hold the bar,
Then aim for the other side. Not far.
Definitely don’t like it. Suck my thumb.
Don’t suck your thumb!
Scratch my nose. Don’t do that!
She tells about The Wooden Horse of Troy.
Even I wouldn’t have hauled that toy
Through the city walls like that.
She gives out bricks. We have to build.
Two suns blind her glasses.
Build, she says, build!
So I build a town. It gets knocked down.
Shall I throw them? Watch that frown.
She reads of Abraham from the Bible.
God says: Tie your son up on a pile of stones
Then slit his throat to show you love me most.
Isaac doesn’t like it but his father
Lifts the knife. Just in time God tells him: Stop!
I believe you now, so drop the knife.
Make up your mind. Abraham cuts him free:
All that way for nothing.
My father did the same to me.
After school I longed to climb a tree.
But he held my hand
And at the bottom of the hill
He set me free.
5744
The year comes to an end
Like a shutter in September.
Close the door on the new moon
And at the evening meal
Drink to the gift of life.
Mosquitoes come inside from cold,
Fragile letters on white walls
To mark the year’s end.
Water the garden, for there’s no frost yet
To melt in liquid on the flowers.
The spirit makes a full stop
When the New Year in Jerusalem begins.
Summer cool on every cheek turns suddenly to autumn,
And grates that smell of soot in England
Wait for the heat of winter,
And New Year to turn
Five more degrees upon the circle.
FIRE
Fire is always hungry –
As long as someone feeds:
It eats as if to melt the earth
And those who live on it.
All hunger threatens me,
And fire devours forests
More fiercely than the passion forests hide:
And fumigates pure heaven.
That’s why I have a love for water,
A cool annihilating ocean
To devour the terrible devourer
And show the moon’s white face in passing.
HIROSHIMA
You ask for a statement on Hiroshima.
All right:
If there’s blood on the returning arrow
Bend the wind and suck
Till it becomes a flower.
Soldiers planted them among the rocks
And plucked chrysanthemums.
Who wanted peace before Hiroshima?
Mothers water soil with their tears,
And gardens thrive.
Don’t let the Book of Memory close.
Stand among the flowers and read:
There will be no more ruins.
A statement on Hiroshima from me
Bleeds a peace
That brings more arrows.
SMALL AD
Fanatical non-smoking teetotal fruitarian,
Bearded, early fifties,
Good walker, plays chess –
But finding life dull,
Wants to meet big bosomed
Class conscious
Fox hunting
County-type carnivore female
With view to conversation
Or conversion.
WORK
Coming down first thing I see
The house in a lake of frost and mist,
Bare trees as in a battlefield
From which bodies have been moved.
By afternoon Life’s all we’ve got,
No more over the horizon.
Mottled flame on a sure bed of coal
Burns out in the parlour grate,
Me at the desk creating lives:
No strength to break my own.
DEAD TREE
Say good things about the dead,
You’ll never see them again.
That tree I just pulled down
Was dry from top to bottom.
Five years ago the taproots hissed
And a bullfinch sat on its highest twig
To eat the sky.
The tree drew clouds to climbing buds.
The brittle trunk snapped in two places,
Fell horizontal in the bracken
Broken by soil too thin,
And ivy fed off its over-reaching.
Say good things about that tree.
A young one near at ten feet high:
Bullfinch talons hold it down,
The poison kiss of ivy laps its base.