for what he can get, quarters to
buy sweet things, one after another,
he goes from store to store, from
candy store to ice cream store to
bakery to produce market, unending
quest for the palate’s pleasure. Then
out to panhandle again,
more quarters, more sweet things.
My errands are toothpaste,
vitamin pills and a book of stamps.
No self-indulgence there.
But who’s this coming up? It’s
John, no Chuck, how
could his name have slipped my mind.
Chuck gives a one-sided smile, he stands
as if fresh from a laundromat,
a scrubbed cowboy, Tom Sawyer
grown up, yet stylish, perhaps
even careful, his dark hair
slicked back in the latest manner.
When he shakes my hand I feel
a dry finger playfully bending inward
and touching my palm in secret.
‘It’s a long time
since we got together,’ says John.
Chuck, that is. The warm teasing
tickle in the cave of our handshake
took my mind off toothpaste,
snatched it off, indeed.
How handsome he is in
his lust and energy, in his
fine display of impulse.
Boldly ‘How about now?’ I say
knowing the answer. My boy
I could eat you whole. In the long pause
I gaze at him up and down and
from his blue sneakers back to the redawning
one-sided smile. We know our charm.
We know delay makes pleasure great.
In our eyes, on our tongues,
we savour the approaching delight
of things we know yet are fresh always.
Sweet things. Sweet things.
June
In these two separate rooms we sit,
I at my work, you at yours.
I am at once buried in it
And sensible of all outdoors.
The month is cool, as if on guard,
High fog holds back the sky for days,
But in their sullen patch of yard
The Oriental Poppies blaze.
Separate in the same weather
The parcelled buds crack pink and red,
And rise from different plants together
To shed their bud-sheaths on the bed,
And stretch their crumpled petals free,
That nurse the box of hardening seed,
In the same hour, as if to agree
On what could not have been agreed.
San Francisco Streets
I’ve had my eye on you
For some time now.
You’re getting by it seems,
Not quite sure how.
But as you go along
You’re finding out
What different city streets
Are all about.
Peach country was your home.
When you went picking
You ended every day
With peach fuzz sticking
All over face and arms,
Intimate, gross,
Itching like family,
And far too close.
But when you came to town
And when you first
Hung out on Market Street
That was the worst:
Tough little group of boys
Outside Flagg’s Shoes.
You learned to keep your cash.
You got tattoos.
Then by degrees you rose
Like country cream –
Hustler to towel boy,
Bath house and steam;
Tried being kept a while –
But felt confined,
One brass bed driving you
Out of your mind.
Later on Castro Street
You got new work
Selling chic jewelry.
And as sales clerk
You have at last attained
To middle class.
(No one on Castro Street
Peddles his ass.)
You gaze out from the store.
Watching you watch
All the men strolling by
I think I catch
Half-veiled uncertainty
In your expression.
Good looks and great physiques
Pass in procession.
You’ve risen up this high –
How, you’re not sure.
Better remember what
Makes you secure.
Fuzz is still on the peach,
Peach on the stem.
Your looks looked after you.
Look after them.
Transients and Residents
a sequence interrupted
‘Albert Hotel,
Transients and Residents’
– NEW YORK, 1970
‘Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the Passages of Joy.’
SAMUEL JOHNSON
THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES’
Falstaff
I always hope to find you circling here
Round the bar’s table, playing your old game,
In one hand pool cue, in the other beer.
Vast in your foul burnoose, you’d be the same:
Bullying your little entourage of boys
– Goodlooking but untrustworthy – and later
Ordering them home where, turning up the noise,
You’d party through the night. Neighbourhood satyr,
Old friend, for years you bullied all of us
And did so, you were sure, for our own good.
You took no notice if we made a fuss
Or didn’t enjoy ourselves the way we should.
I think of one place you were living at
And all the parties that you used to throw
(That must be when you wore a feathered hat,
Several burnooses, so to speak, ago);
You cooked each evening for some twenty heads,
Not just for streetboys then, for everyone
Who came in want of food or drugs or beds.
The bonus was your boisterous sense of fun.
And though as years have passed your bullying love
Became more desperate (sometimes indeed
Stripped by a ruthlessness you weren’t above
It showed itself more nakedly as need);
And though the parties that you gave took place
In other people’s houses now, until
They kicked you out for taking all the space;
And though the drugs themselves got questionable –
Too many evenings in the bar have passed
Full of mere chatter and the pumping sound
Of disco on the juke box since you last
Roared down it for next player or next round.
If you are sick – that’s what they say in here
Almost as if by way of an excuse –
The cancer must have rendered you, my dear.
Damnably thin beneath the foul burnoose.
Crystal
He arrives, and makes deliveries, after 3:00,
Then strolls to a ramp that leads up from the dance,
And sits apart, quiet, hands clasped round a knee,
Smelling the fresh-sawed planks, no doubt. Not tense –
Fixed, merely. While he watches us, his face
Is almost readable, his recessed shape
Gleams like a friendly visitor’s from space.
As in a sense it is, now. To escape
The sheer impurity of the other lives,
He has always been extreme, he puts his soul
Into each role in turn, where he survives
Till it is incarnation more than role.
Now it is Dealer. 5
2, tall, scarred,
His looks get nobler every year, I find,
Almost heroic.
I once saw in the yard
A half-grown foxglove that he brings to mind
Here, so magnificently self-enwrapped.
Its outer leaves were toothed and all alike.
With a rough symmetry they overlapped
Circling around the budded central spike,
Still green. Dense with its destiny, it waited
Till it might fling itself up into flower.
Now he sits similarly concentrated,
And edged, and similarly charged with power,
Certain of that potential, which his mood
Fairly feeds on, but which is still contained.
The foxglove flowers in its damp solitude
Before its energy fades, and in the end
The chemical in the man will fade as well.
Meanwhile he watches how the dancing feet
Move to the rhythms of the fresh wood-smell;
Inside the crowded night he feels complete.
Crosswords
Your cup of instant coffee by the bed
Cold as the Sixties … and you chat with me.
For days your excellent strict mind has fed
Only on crossword puzzles and TV.
Though the least self-indulgent man I know
You lie propped up here like an invalid
Pursuing your recuperation, slow,
Relentless, from the world you used to need.
You have seen reason to remove your ground
Far from the great circle where you toiled,
Where they still call their wares and mill around
Body to body, unpausing and unspoiled.
You smell of last week. You do not move much.
You lay your things beside you on the bed
In a precarious pile one sudden touch
Would bring down on you: letters read and reread,
Pens, opera programmes, cigarettes and books.
I think you disturb nothing but the mind.
There: I catch one of those familiar looks
Of thinking through. You reach, you almost find.
Beneath a half-frown your eyes concentrate,
Focused on what you saw or dreamt you saw,
Alight with their attentiveness, and wait.
Yes, you are active still, you can’t withdraw.
Now we take up again the much-discussed
The never-settled topics, (a) change, (b)
Limits of judgment, and of course (c) trust.
We talk, explore, agree and disagree.
… I think that you just put me in the wrong.
You want to win, old jesuit. So do I.
You never liked it easy for too long.
I once found that this bed on which you lie
Is just a blanket-covered length of board.
For you, hardness authenticates, and when
Things get too easy, well you make them hard.
… We compromise. Then off we go again,
On our renewed cross-country walking tour,
Off with a swinging stride uphill. Stop, though,
Before there’s time to disagree once more.
I want to tell you what you no doubt know:
How glad I am to be back at your school
Where it’s through contradictions that I learn.
Obsessive and detached, ardent and cool,
You make me think of rock thrown free to turn
At the globe’s side, both with and not with us,
Keeping yourself in a companionable
Chilled orbit by the simultaneous
Repulsion and attraction to it all.
Interruption
Though ready in my chair I do not write.
The desk lamp crook’d above me where I lean
Describes a circle round me with its light
– Singling me out; the room falls back unseen.
So, my own island. I can hear the rain
Coming on stealthily, and the rustle grows
Into a thin taptapping on the pane
I stare against, where my reflection glows.
Beyond by day shows that damp square of earth
On which I act out my experiments
– Sowing a seed and watching for the birth:
A tiny pair of leaves, pale rudiments
That might in time grow stronger to assume
A species’ characteristics, till I see
Each fresh division soaring into bloom,
Beauty untouched by personality.
My mind shifts inward from such images.
What am I after – and what makes me think
The group of poems I have entered is
Interconnected by a closer link
Than any snapshot album’s?
I can try
At least to get my snapshots accurate.
(The thought that I take others’ pictures, I,
Far too conceited to find adequate
Pictures they take of me!) Starting outside,
You save yourself some time while working in:
Thus by the seen the unseen is implied.
I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men.
You may from this conclude I like the things
That help me if not lose then leave behind,
What else, the self.
I trust the seedling wings,
Yet taking off on them I leave to find.
I find what? In the letters that I send
I imitate unconsciously the style
Of the recipients: mimicking each friend,
I answer expectations, and meanwhile
Can analyse, or drawl a page of wit,
And range, depending on the friend addressed,
From literary to barely literate.
I manage my mere voice on postcards best.
By luck, skill, purchase, robbery, or gift.
From foxglove, lily, pink, and bergamot
I raise leafed unity, a blossoming drift
Where I once found weed waiting out a drought.
But this side of the glass, dry as at noon,
I see the features that my lamp picks out –
Colourless, unjoined, like a damaged moon.
Talbot Road
(where I lived in London 1964–5)
in memory of Tony White
1
Between the pastel boutiques
of Notting Hill and the less defined
windier reaches of the Harrow Road,
all blackened brick, was the street
built for burghers, another Belgravia,
but eventually fallen
to labourers (‘No Coloured or Irish
Need Apply’) and then like the veins
of the true-born Englishman
filling with a promiscuous mix:
Pole, Italian, Irish, Jamaican,
rich jostling flow. A Yugoslav restaurant
framed photographs of exiled princes,
but the children chattered with a London accent.
I lived on Talbot Road
for a year. The excellent room
where I slept, ate, read, and wrote,
had a high ceiling, on the borders
stucco roses were painted blue.
You could step through the window
to a heavy balcony and even
(unless the drain was blocked)
sup there on hot evenings.
That’s what I call complete access –
to air, to street, to friendship:
for, from it, I could see, blocks away,
the window where Tony, my old friend,
toiled at translation. I too tried
to render obscure passages into clear English,
as I try now.
2
Glamorous and difficult friend,
he
lper and ally. As students
enwrapt by our own romanticism,
innocent poet and actor we had posed
we had played out parts to each other
I have sometimes thought
like studs in a whorehouse.
– But he had to deal
with the best looks of his year.
If ‘the rich are different from us’,
so are the handsome. What
did he really want? Ah that question …
Two romances going on in London,
one in Northampton, one in Ireland,
probably others. Friends and lovers
all had their own versions of him.
Fantastical duke of dark corners,
he never needed to lie:
you had learned not to ask questions.
The fire of his good looks.
But almost concealed by the fringe of fire,
behind the mighty giving of self,
at the centre of the jollity, there was
something withheld, slow, something –
what? what? A damp smoulder of discontent.
He would speculate about ‘human relations’
which we were supposed to view
– vide Forster, passim, etc. –
as an end, a good in themselves.
He did not find them so.
Finally it came to this,
the poses had come undone so far:
he loved you more for your faults
than for anything you could give him.
When once in a pub I lost my temper,
I shouldered my way back from the urinal
and snapped, ‘I was too angry to piss.’
The next day he exclaimed with delight,
‘Do you know that was the first time
you have ever been angry with me?’
As some people wait for a sign of love,
he had waited how many years
for a sign of anger,
for a sign of other than love.
3
A London returned to after twelve years.
On a long passage between two streets
I met my past self lingering there
or so he seemed
a youth of about nineteen glaring at me
from a turn of desire. He held his look