There is a Presence here.
O
As if wind (I write like the wind)
Gainsaid any human part in this
As if the room had been flayed to its very bones:
What would remain?
As if the ear of the earth
Its huge funnel, described in Russian in 1837
The year of the death of Pushkin, but notpushkin
Received and transmitted the very same
And even Blok, like Mother Goose,
Says in wreaths of white rose with Christ at their head
And that is how it was.
But who believes a goose.
N
They lie, shot, in ravines filled with stars and bird cherry,
They lie in marshland, like dry stalks, like sprats in cans
They lie under banks, beneath lakes and autobahns
Beneath freerange grazing
Beneath sheep fields, where sheep go wild
Gainsaying any human part to this,
They lie under multistories
And runways
Where fingers of grass slit the paper-thin ice
Where blue signal lamps are cleverly placed
Where powerful bodies fly without our hands.
Where is my body, says the middle stratum
The earth’s middle class: dead and still unresurrected.
M
And poetry speaks and knows what it says: I said
You are gods, I said, and all of you are children of the most High
But you shall die like fools:
Like one of the princes and generals
(politicians and aristocrats
and representatives of the swelling bourgeoisie)
Like mortals
Like nothing could be easier
Than the falling and the falling apart.
You die all the time
Like it was a normal thing to do.
Why don’t you take yourselves in hand?
Why don’t you make an effort,
Says poetry from under the ground, breathing through the hollow reeds.
L
Glory glory let’s gather up this man
(scrape up the body like a lump of strawberry jam)
An eternal flame burns, it consumes the fallen
The unconsidered, undiscovered, the gone-before
Don’t give up your cells to fire, your forty thousand cells
Or your nerve endings, or the fine nets of capillary walls
The ribbed palate, the pelvic down, the dusty pelvic floor
The slight partitions between the mind and ear
How will we gather them for Judgment Day?
Your bones didn’t know they would be saved.
Sacks of seed, everything the body consumed
Iron – in our age becomes part of the exhumed
Body parts parts of another’s body, which has lain here since another age
Together they make a new body
A not-yet-existent person.
K
Poetry, a many-eyed absurd
Nature of manymouths
Found in many bodies at the same time
Having lived in many other bodies before that
And now lying in confinement
Like something about to be born
(But at any moment an expedition of archaeologists
a curious shepherd
a dozen students in shorts
might pull you from the earth,
prematurely, not carried to full term,
and stick their fingers in your toothless gob)
Judging by the phosphorus content in the bone
English-speaking Poetry had a diet of fish.
J
They said, and it was confirmed by a graduate of the Theological
Institute, who quoted a doctoral thesis in support:
We will be resurrected as thirty-three-year-olds
Even those who died aged seventy or aged nine.
The body will know how to be resurrected
This is the body’s privilege:
To eat and drink what it wants
To wander footsore many stadia
To wear upon its skin clothes, wounds, tears
To walk in water and evaporate into the air
To remain unrecognised, to make itself recognised
To resemble a gardener,
A wanderer,
Itself and someone else,
To roast fish on a spit for friends
To rise to heaven and be seated on the right hand of God
As befits the son.
I
Lying on that table
I hear the faint sound of a vacuum cleaner
I feel the breeze on the far edge of my body.
And everything that was in me stands tall like an army
On the very border with air
As if we could still begin a war, and lose it again.
Quick, and then slow
Like a clever dog, first it tilts its head
Then it understands, and it runs to you
So the soul probes its own housing
Curls up inside, the lining of crumbling faded velvet,
Or strokes its leathery lid.
Under the black-and-blue clouds, baroque-sombre
You are reconstituted
Like fish on a fishmonger’s slab,
Your bones, your muscles – picked apart
By a doctor’s prized thumbs
And there you lie, dumb.
H
In an English book
A woman, exhausted by labour pains
And ready to slip out of life, as one might slip through a gate
Is exhorted by another woman to never yield!
An effort, she says, is necessary.
This woman talks in the third person
As if she were discussing the heroine in a novel
Which she could yet be
If only she would rouse herself,
And not run away or release her grip
Show the weakness of her sex.
This is a world of effort, this woman explains.
We must never yield when so much depends on us.
The unheroine makes an uncourageous effort
Trickles
(like underground water through a sieve)
Attaches herself to the dead
Her own body a tessera
Between dead white men
G
Break the frozen earth,
Touch the dead song
Part her chalken lips
Touch with your finger
The bony tubers of tooth.
In one of those dark, underground passageways
An observant little girl finds
What she should never have found:
Large, impossible to avoid
Taking up all the breathing space,
And just to pass along the passage
(running, eyes tight shut)
She now has to push her way through:
A body – someone’s – has consumed all the space,
Frozen solid, dead, no one’s body now.
Wings pressed tightly
Beak and claws drawn in
Damp-downed, eyelids shut
Kiss its transparent feathers:
Swallow, I believe, help thou my unbelief.
And suddenly she heard a tiny flutter in the swallow’s breast:
A faint beat at first, but then louder and louder.
The swallow’s heart had started beating again.
The swallow wasn’t dead, merely stunned from the cold
And now it had been warmed and come back to life.
F
No,
Not the way they sinned
But the way their flesh greened and their curls loosened.
No, not the way it hardens
But the way it’s led by the breeze
Drawing bare branches through aerial blue waters
When I am a weary spidery little insect
Even then it’s a pity to die:
I’d rather wander on a sea of milk.
Young soldiers
In bell-bottomed trousers
Living like tree stumps along the street in spring.
Who are you, resurrected man?
Well, he says, well. You know how things are.
Body of poetry, you are strewn everywhere
Like fired plastic bullets,
That don’t decompose.
Death – the shadow at your back
Resurrection – the brightest shade of black
Up flies the word, you can’t catch it back
E
The least said the soonest.
Word is not a sparrow.
Are not five sparrows
(finches, larks and other such)
Are not five sparrows
Sold for two pennies?
Your price was higher.
You are better than many birds.
And spring is so thin, so miserably wan
Like a nurse, slippers on her bare feet,
Slipping out of theatre, into the hospital yard
For a quick smoke.