I sing his scorched sweetness.
While others sing the mackerel’s demise
His ultimatum to be cooked instantly
And the shock of his decay announcement
I sing how he makes the rich summer seas
A million times richer
With the gift of his millions.
Work and Play
The swallow of summer, she toils all summer,
A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.
But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust
In shimmering exhaust
Searching to slake
Its fever in ocean
Will play and be idle or else it will bust.
The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,
She flings from the furnace, a rainbow of purples,
Dips her glow in the pond and is perfect.
But the serpent of cars that collapsed at the beach
Disgorges its organs
A scamper of colours
Which roll like tomatoes
Nude as tomatoes
With sand in their creases
To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech.
The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,
She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,
She draws a long thread and she knots it at corners.
But the holiday people
Are laid out like wounded
Flat as in ovens
Roasting and basting
With faces of torment as space burns them blue
Their heads are transistors
Their teeth grit on sand grains
Their lost kids are squalling
While man-eating flies
Jab electric shock needles but what can they do?
They can climb in their cars with raw bodies, raw faces
And start up the serpent
And headache it homeward
A car full of squabbles
And sobbing and stickiness
With sand in their crannies
Inhaling petroleum
That pours from the foxgloves
While the evening swallow
The swallow of summer, cartwheeling through crimson,
Touches the honey-slow river and turning
Returns to the hand stretched from under the eaves –
A boomerang of rejoicing shadow.
A Cranefly in September
She is struggling through grass-mesh – not flying,
Her wide-winged, stiff, weightless basket-work of limbs
Rocking, like an antique wain, a top-heavy ceremonial cart
Across mountain summits
(Not planing over water, dipping her tail)
But blundering with long strides, long reachings, reelings
And ginger-glistening wings
From collision to collision.
Aimless in no particular direction,
Just exerting her last to escape out of the overwhelming
Of whatever it is, legs, grass,
The garden, the county, the country, the world –
Sometimes she rests long minutes in the grass forest
Like a fairytale hero, only a marvel can help her.
She cannot fathom the mystery of this forest
In which, for instance, this giant watches –
The giant who knows she cannot be helped in any way.
Her jointed bamboo fuselage,
Her lobster shoulders, and her face
Like a pinhead dragon, with its tender moustache,
And the simple colourless church windows of her wings
Will come to an end, in mid-search, quite soon.
Everything about her, every perfected vestment
Is already superfluous.
The monstrous excess of her legs and curly feet
Are a problem beyond her.
The calculus of glucose and chitin inadequate
To plot her through the infinities of the stems.
The frayed apple leaves, the grunting raven, the defunct tractor
Sunk in nettles, wait with their multiplications
Like other galaxies.
The sky’s Northward September procession, the vast soft armistice,
Like an Empire on the move,
Abandons her, tinily embattled
With her cumbering limbs and cumbered brain.
The Stag
While the rain fell on the November woodland shoulder of Exmoor
While the traffic jam along the road honked and shouted
Because the farmers were parking wherever they could
And scrambling to the bank-top to stare through the tree-fringe
Which was leafless,
The stag ran through his private forest.
While the rain drummed on the roofs of the parked cars
And the kids inside cried and daubed their chocolate and fought
And mothers and aunts and grandmothers
Were a tangle of undoing sandwiches and screwed-round gossiping heads
Steaming up the windows,
The stag loped through his favourite valley.
While the blue horsemen down in the boggy meadow
Sodden nearly black, on sodden horses,
Spaced as at a military parade,
Moved a few paces to the right and a few to the left and felt rather foolish
Looking at the brown impassable river,
The stag came over the last hill of Exmoor.
While everybody high-kneed it to the bank-top all along the road
Where steady men in oilskins were stationed at binoculars,
And the horsemen by the river galloped anxiously this way and that
And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees,
Swinging across the wall of dark woodland,
The stag dropped into a strange country.
And turned at the river
Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-note
Of the voice that carried all the others,
Then while his limbs all cried different directions to his lungs, which only wanted to rest,
The blue horsemen on the bank opposite
Pulled aside the camouflage of their terrible planet.
And the stag doubled back weeping and looking for home up a valley and down a valley
While the strange trees struck at him and the brambles lashed him,
And the strange earth came galloping after him carrying the loll–tongued hounds to fling all over him
And his heart became just a club beating his ribs and his own hooves shouted with hounds’ voices,
And the crowd on the road got back into their cars
Wet-through and disappointed.
from Gaudete
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
Stumble through all the hedges in the country
Hither thither crying day and night
Till their throats will only grunt and whistle.
After some days, a stupor sadness
Collects them again in their field.
They will never stray any more.
From now on, they only want each other.
So much for calves.
As for the tiger
He lies still
Like left luggage
He is roaming the earth light, unseen.
He is safe.
Heaven and hell have both adopted him.
A Solstice
Drip-tree stillness. Spring-feeling elation
Of mid-morning oxygen. There is a yeasty simmering
Over the land – all compass points are trembling,
Bristling with starlings, hordes out of Siberia,
Bubbly and hopeful.
We stand in the mist-rawness
Of the sodden earth. Four days to Christmas.
We ca
n hear the grass seeping.
Now a wraith-smoke
Writhes up from a far field, condenses
On a frieze of goblin hedge-oaks, sizzling
Like power-pylons in mist.
We ease our way into this landscape.
Casual midnightish draughts, in the soaking stillness.
Itch of starlings is everywhere.
The gun
Is old, rust-ugly, single-barrelled, borrowed
For a taste of English sport. And you have come
From eighteen years Australian estrangement
And twelve thousand miles in thin air
To walk again on the small hills of the West,
In the ruby and emerald lights, the leaf-wet oils
Of your memory’s masterpiece.
Hedge-sparrows
Needle the bramble-mass undergrowth
With their weepy warnings.
You have the gun.
We harden our eyes. We are alert.
The gun-muzzle is sniffing. And the broad land
Tautens into wilder, nervier contrasts
Of living and unliving. Our eyes feather over it
As over a touchy detonator.
Bootprints between the ranks of baby barley
Heel and toe we go
Narrowed behind the broad gaze of the gun
Down the long woodside. I am your dog.
Now I get into the wood. I push parallel
And slightly ahead of you – the idea
Is to flush something for the gun’s amusement.
I go delicate. I don’t want to panic
My listeners into a crouch–freeze.
I want them to keep their initiative
And slip away, confident, impudent,
Out across your front.
Pigeons, too far,
Burst up from under the touch
Of our furthest listenings. A bramble
Claws across my knee, and a blackbird
Five yards off explodes its booby-trap
Shattering wetly
Black and yellow alarm-dazzlings, and a long string
Of fireworks down the wood. It settles
To a hacking chatter and that blade-ringing –
Like a flint on an axe-head.
I wait.
That startled me too.
I know I am a Gulliver now
Tied by my every slightest move
To a thousand fears. But I move –
And a jay, invisibly somewhere safe,
Starts pretending to tear itself in half
From the mouth backward. With three screams
It scares itself to silence.
The whole wood
Has hidden in the wood. Its mossy tunnels
Seem to age as we listen. A raven
Dabs a single charcoal toad-croak
Into the finished picture.
I come out
To join you in the field. We need a new plan
To surprise something.
But as I come over the wire
You are pointing, silent.
I look. One hundred yards
Down the woodside, somebody
Is watching us.
A strangely dark fox
Motionless in his robe of office
Is watching us. It is a shock.
Too deep in the magic wood, suddenly
We meet the magician.
Then he’s away –
A slender figurine, dark and witchy,
A rocking nose-down lollop, and the load of tail
Floating behind him, over the swell of faint corn
Into the long arm of woodland opposite.
The gun does nothing. But we gaze after
Like men who have been given a secret sign.
We are studying the changed expression
Of that straggle of scrub and poor trees
Which is now the disguise of a fox.
And the gun is thinking. The gun
Is working its hunter’s magic.
It is transforming us, there in the dull mist,
To two suits of cold armour –
Empty of all but a strange new humming,
A mosquito of primaeval excitements.
And as we start to walk out over the field
The gun smiles.
The fox will be under brambles.
He has set up all his antennae,
His dials are glowing and quivering,
Every hair adjusts itself
To our coming.
Will he wait in the copse
Till we’ve made our move, as if this were a game
He is interested to play?
Or has he gone through and away over further fields,
Or down and into the blueish mass and secrecy
Of the main wood?
Under a fat oak, where the sparse copse
Joins the main wood, you lean in ambush.
Well out in the field, talking to air
Like quiet cogs, I stroll to the top of the strip –
Then pierce it, clumsy as a bullock, a careless trampling
Like purposeless machinery, towards you,
Noisy enough for you to know
Where not to point your blind gun.
Somewhere between us
The fox is inspecting me, magnified.
And now I tangle all his fears with a silence,
Then a sudden abrupt advance, then again silence,
Then a random change of direction –
And almost immediately –
Almost before I’ve decided we are serious –
The blast wall hits me, the gun bang bursts
Like a paper bag in my face,
The whole day bursts like a paper bag –
But a new world is created instantly
With no visible change.
I pause. I call. You do not answer.
Everything is just as it had been.
The corroded blackberry leaves,
The crooked naked trees, fingering sky
Are all the usual careful shapes
Of the usual silence.
I go forward. And now I see you,
As if you had missed,
Leaning against your tree, casual.
But between us, on the tussocky ground,
Somebody is struggling with something.
An elegant gentleman, beautifully dressed,
Is struggling there, tangled with something,
And biting at something
With his flashing mouth. It is himself
He is tangled with. I come close
As if I might be of help.
It is himself he is biting,
Bending his head far back, and trying
To bite his shoulder. He has no time for me.
Blood beneath him is spoiling
The magnificent sooted russet
Of his overcoat, and the flawless laundering
Of his shirt. He is desperate
To get himself up on his feet,
And if he could catch the broken pain
In his teeth, and pull it out of his shoulder,
He still has some hope, because
The long brown grass is the same
As it was before, and the trees
Have not changed in any way,
And the sky continues the same –
It is doing the impossible deliberately
To set the gun-muzzle at his chest
And funnel that sky-bursting bang
Through a sudden blue pit in his fur
Into the earth beneath him.
He cannot believe it has happened.
His chin sinks forward, and he half-closes his mouth
In a smile
Of ultimate bitterness,
And half closes his eyes
In a fineness beyond pain –
And it is a dead fox in the dank woodland.
And you stand ove
r him
Meeting your first real Ancient Briton
In eighteen years.
And I stand awake – as one wakes
From what feels like a cracking blow on the head.
That second shot has ruined his skin.
We chop his tail off
Thick and long as a forearm, and black.
Then bundle him and his velvet legs
His bag of useless jewels,
The phenomenal technology inside his head,
Into a hole, under a bulldozed stump,
Like picnic rubbish. There the memory ends.
We must have walked away.
from Orts
The white shark
With its strength of madness
The mutt-faced hyena
Trailing its half-dance
The rat
With its file
The gull, vomiting its laughter
And gulping it in again
Like intestines hanging from the mouth
– the thorn
With its petals.
Only a Little Sleep, a Little Slumber
And suddenly you
Have not a word to say for yourself.
Only a little knife, a small incision,
A snickety nick in the brain
And you drop off, like a polyp.
Only a crumb of fungus,
A pulp of mouldy tinder
And you flare, fluttering, black out like a firework.
Who are you, in the nest among the bones?
You are the shyest bird among birds.
‘I am the last of my kind.’
The Owl Flower
Big terror descends.
A drumming glare, a flickering face of flames.
Something writhes apart into a signal,
Fiendish, a filament of incandescence.
As it were a hair.
In the maelstrom’s eye,
In the core of the brimming heaven-blossom,
Under the tightening whorl of plumes, a mote
Scalds in dews.
A leaf of the earth
Applies to it, a cooling health.
A coffin spins in the torque.
Wounds flush with sap, headful of pollen,
Wet with nectar
The dead one stirs.
A mummy grain is cracking its grimace
In the cauldron of tongues.
The ship of flowers
Nudges the wharf of skin.
The egg-stone
Bursts among broody petals –
And a staggering thing
Fired with rainbows, raw with cringing heat,
Blinks at the source.
The Risen
He stands, filling the doorway
In the shell of earth.
He lifts wings, he leaves the remains of something,