She sweeps to lovingly dispose
Of bigstar jellyfish and show-off crabs
That wriggle before the new damp
Jungle world of hoofprints, spoor
Half-chewed herbivore and worse –
Beaten after twilight years by her stout arms,
And an evolutionary smile.
STARS
Stars, seen through midnight windows
Of earth-grained eyes
Are fullstops ending invisible sentences,
Aphorisms, quips, mottoes of the gods
Indicate what might have been made clear
Had words stayed plain before them.
Criss-crossed endlessly for those who read,
Each light-year sentence testifies how far
Life spreads, and how those full stops
Go on living after necks cease aching.
In observing them, the bones relax:
Eyes close when we are dead
And they have stared all poets out.
Full stops are beautiful as stars,
Each glowing with the light of people vanished
From the continually red-burned earth
Fuelled by those whose outward eye drinks fever
And inward eye harnesses their shadows
To read what never had been written
Until, drunk with Charioteers, Animals and Goddesses,
Conjurers, Club-men, Fish and Magic Boxes
Full stops are joined with words shaped into poems
Ending with full stops as meaningful as stars.
YES
Yes — definitively to some wrongful deed
And ending like a quick knife to a knot,
Is a serpent-lover singing to be freed
From no and negative and nothing gained.
Hard to fix decisions as to yea and nay
While needing the when and how: near-questions
Aimed to draw that final sibilant and vow
To upright-positive and all to win.
Success for lovers and conspirators
Unlocks the sins that grace a thousand lips;
Dogs bark, and babies cry at meeting air:
(Whether yes or no is hardly to be known)
But if affirmative, are guessings at the guess
That darkness is nothing but a final yes.
DEAD MAN’S GRAVE
Three sons in silence by their father’s grave
Think of the live man
Not yet split in three by blackness –
Cannot cross the limbo zone,
Reach him who went a year ago through.
Mute before grass bending:
Headstones grey and white proliferate,
Stumps in a shell-shocked forest
Making question and exclamation mark;
They talk about flowers from a visit
When water in the vase was ice
On this plateau exposed to collieries
And winds bailing out Death’s
Deepest coffers it was so cold;
Of how frost to prove the dead not dead
Turned the water iron-white,
Swollen muscle garrotting the flowers
Till the vase exploded,
By trying its own strength out on itself –
Scattered petals to a dozen graves.
Three brothers stand in silence,
Feel the strength the father lost.
THE DROWNED SHROPSHIRE WOMAN
Narrow in the back
She played all day with fishes
Watched them go like arrows
Through aerated water
Between her legs and dodge
The fantail spread of fingers.
She was crossed in love:
Water hurtling loinwards and into heart
Found another hiding-place and pool
Where sharper arrows
Played upon her sorrow,
And sunlight on her stooping
Made more voracious fishes breed.
She was narrow in the back
And played all night at fishes,
Wading for the biggest of them all
By moon and guile
Out from the reedy bank,
Until by unlit dawn
A fisherman in silence
Drew his silent catchnet down.
Green fishes fled through lightgreen water
Flint heads with moulded eyes
Chipping at infiltrating light,
And switching to the
White legs of the Shropshire woman,
Played tag in the blue beams
Of her impenetrable eyes,
Between the whitening flesh
Of open fingers.
CAR FIGHTS CAT
In a London crescent curving vast
A cat sat –
Between two rows of molar houses,
Birdsky in each grinning gap.
Cat small — coal and snow
Road wide — a zone of tar set hard and fast:
Four-wheeled speedboats cutting a dash
For it
From time to time.
King Cat stalked warily midstream
As if silence were no warning on this empty road
Where even a man would certainly have crossed
With hands in pockets and been whistling.
Cat heard, but royalty and indolence
Weighed its paws to hobnailed boots
Held it from the dragon’s-teeth of safety first and last,
Until a Daimler scurrying from work
Caused cat to stop and wonder where it came from –
Instead of zig-zag scattering to hide itself.
Maybe a deaf malevolence descended
And cat thought car would pass in front,
So spun and walked all fur and confidence
Into the dreadful tyre-treads …
A wheel caught hold of it and
FEARSOME THUDS
Sounded from the night-time of black axles in
UNEQUAL FIGHT
That stopped the heart to hear it.
But cat shot out with limbs still solid,
Bolted, spitting fire and gravel
At unjust God who built such massive
Catproof motorcars in his graven image,
Its mind made up to lose and therefore learn,
By winging towards
The wisdom toothgaps of the canyon houses
LEGS AND BRAIN INTACT.
FROG IN TANGIER
A frog jumped
Feebly along the pool edge
Away from the trapnet of my feet.
I picked it up.
A pink wound shone
Between belly and that phosphorous
Faint zig-zag down its back,
Pain the colour of pomegranate
And orange agony,
Umbilical string hanging
A catchline towards water
Yet dragging like an anchor
That weighed the entire world
When it tried to jump.