In The Poetry

Swimming in the Woods

Her long body in the spangled shade of the wood
was a swimmer moving through a pool:
fractal, finned by leaf and light;
the loose plates of lozenge and rhombus
wobbling coins of sunlight.
When she stopped, the water stopped,
and the sun re-made her as a tree,
banded and freckled and foxed.

Besieged by symmetries, condemned
to these patterns of love and loss,
I stare at the wet shape on the tiles
till it fades; when she came and sat next to me
after her swim and walked away
back to the trees, she left a dark butterfly.

Something About

A poem set in Dublin, St Stephen’s Green

Something About

those huge black canvases in Newman’s
church, St Stephen’s Green — restoration
botched perhaps — Raphael Cartoons,
copies, loved by Newman, quite gone out.

Something about,
outside, Joyce’s head, too silver sharp,
too shrunk, facing stone steps he argued up
of the house where Hopkins sweated, found his heart,
his shaping spirit, turned ‘widow of an insight
lost’ (which we know something about).

Something about
a pigeon flight above the little lake, dark then white
as they turn as one bird and repeat
black into white (as ruined paint will not)
nine times precisely and like one bird depart.

Strange the fate –
insight spoiled, wanting rhymes too neat,
whichever way we think, wherever look –
to snuffle like setters in a winter garden
excitedly nosing old leaves, mortally certain
there is (certainly was — night’s odorous traffic)

something, somewhere, about.

O Taste and See

Because of a kiss on the forehead
in the long Night’s infirmary,
through the red wine let light shine deep.

Because of the thirtysix just men
that so stealthily roam this earth
raise high the glass and do not weep.

Who says the world is not a wedding?
Couples, in their oases, lullabye.
Let glass be full before they sleep.

Toast all that which seems to vanish
like a rainbow stared at, those bright
truant things that will not keep;

and ignorance of the last night
of our lives, its famished breathing.
Then, in the red wine, taste the light.

In a lot of the poems the idea of death comes as a friend – I was thinking of that Roman emperor, one of the cruellest of them, who used to visit his poor prisoners in cramped dungeons in great pain. So they would beg him for death, but he would say, “Oh no, oh no, we are not yet friends enough.” He meant they were not yet friends enough to give them death. The Frog Prince has a feeling of hope in death.

The Frog Prince

I am a frog
I live under a spell
I live at the bottom
of a green well.

And here I must wait
Until a maiden places me
On her royal pillow
And kisses me
In her father’s palace.

The story is familiar
Everybody knows it well
But do other enchanted people feel as nervous
As I do? The stories do not tell,

Ask if they will be happier
When the changes come
As already they are fairly happy
in a frog’s doom?

I have been a frog now
For a hundred years
And in all this time
I have not shed many tears,

I am happy, I like the life,
Can swim for many a mile
(When I have hopped to the river)

And am for ever agile.

And the quietness,
Yes, I like to be quiet
I am habituated
To a quiet life,

But always when I think these thoughts
As I sit in my well
Another thought comes to me and says:
It is part of the spell

To be happy
To work up contentment
To make much of being a frog
To fear disenchantment.

Says, it will be heavenly
To be set free,
Cries, Heavenly the girl who disenchants
And the royal times, heavenly
And I think it will be.

Come then, royal girl and royal times,

Come quickly,
I can be happy until you come
But I cannot be heavenly,

Only disenchanted people

Can be heavenly.

This was written when I was out in Montana near a town called Wolf Creek, and it’s another love poem.

The River at Wolf

Coming east we left the animals
pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake
their hair and skin and feathers
their eyes in the dark: red and green.
Your finger drawing my mouth.

Blessed are they who remember

Thay what they now have they once longed for.

A day a year ago last summer
God filled me with himself, like gold, inside,
deeper inside than marrow.

This close to God this close to you:
walking into the river at Wolf with
the animals. The snake’s
green skin, lit from inside. Our second life.

The Waste Land

II. A Game of Chess

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carv

A Flying Song

Last night I saw the sword Excalibur
It flew above the cloudy palaces
And as it passed I clearly read the words
Which were engraven on its blade
And one side of the sword said Take Me
The other side said Cast Me Away

I met my lover in a field of thorns
We walked together in the April air
And when we lay down by the waterside
My lover whispered in my ear
The first thing that she said was Take Me
The last thing that she said was Cast Me Away

I saw a vision of my mother and father
They were sitting smiling under summer trees
They offered me the gift of life
I took this present very carefully
And one side of my life said Take Me
The other side said Cast Me Away

The following poem is dedicated to a whole generation of women – that would have been my grandmother’s generation – who did hand-painting on china and many of us in my generation have their hand-painted china in our china cupboards that we get out on special occasions and so on. And I’ve always been fascinated by that generation and their handwork and so on and this poem is a little tribute to them.

The China Painters

They have set aside their black tin boxes,

scratched and dented,

spattered with drops of pink and blue;

and their dried-up, rolled-up tubes

of alizarin crimson, chrome green,

zinc white, and ultramarine;

their vials half full of gold powder;

stubs of wax pencils;

frayed brushes with tooth-bitten shafts;

and have gone in fashion and with grace

into the clouds of loose, lush roses,

narcissus, pansies, columbine,

on teapots, chocolate pots,

saucers and cups, the good Haviland dishes

spread like a garden

on the white lace Sunday cloth,

as if their souls were bees

and the world had been nothing but flowers.

Wittgenstein’s Dream

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,
I get so dreadfully morose at five,
I went in and put Nature on my hatstand
And considering the Sinking of the Eveninglands
And laughed at what translation may contrive
And worked at mathematics and was bored.

There was fire above, the sun in its descent,
There were letters there whose words seemed scarcely cooked,
There was speech and decency and utter terror,
In twice four hundred pages just one error
In everything I ever wrote – I looked
In meaning for whatever wasn’t meant.

Some amateur was killing Schubert dead,
Some of the pains the English force on me,
Somewhere with cow-bells Austria exists,
But then I saw the gods pin up their lists
But was not on them – we live stupidly
But are redeemed by what cannot be said.

Perhaps a language has been made which works,
Perhaps it’s tension in the cinema,
Perhaps ‘perhaps’ is an inventive word,
A sort of self-intending thing, a bird,
A problem for an architect, a star,
A plan to save Vienna from the Turks.

After dinner I read myself to sleep,
After which I dreamt the Eastern Front
After an exchange of howitzers,
The Angel of Death was taking what was hers,
The finger missed me but the guns still grunt
The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.

And then I woke in my own corner bed
And turned away and cried into the wall
And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.
I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,
I heard myself. ‘Tell them’, I said to all,
‘I’ve had a wonderful life. I’m dead.’

Songs of a Quiet Woman

lurching delicate as a snow queen down this street of greys
unfocussed exactly enough to miss the businessmen
goggling at my stocking deciding
(as I twitch primly into the tram seat my handbag
nestled on my lap like a puppy) deciding
this will be a day of minor survivals:
etching a bloody mouth in fluorescent mirrors
or idly lacquering a hand of claws:
small weapons for a small war

*

there is one streetlight which always
blinks off whenever I walk near it
coming home late and secretarial
to the hint of cats and cooking -
silently inside me something flexes
something unsurprised

*

men of course lately they are kind to me
although an acid starting in my sweat
erodes me like an argument:
snatched by hesitation in a shop
eloquent and secret with the smell of him
I feel sureness swelling like a bruise
forcing blood into lips breathless and reverent
this pearl in the corruption of my belief

*

(yes please no trouble thankyou mother
it’s been a pleasure because I do not know
how to be angry or ugly mother -
granny addled with sherry under bombs
in Winchester never raised her voice
or said a word back to your father
no matter what woman or what insults:
her eighty year old skin is white and powdered
and now she pisses in the basin mother
and I know the proper way to lay tables)

*

to other things I turn the eye of god.
the tv’s gorgon eye has glazed me over
and nothing touches me at all:
not famine fire fear or revolution.
only a shellshocked child in Beirut
firmly stroked to stillness by a nun.
he stared at her with eyes as black as hunger.
I wept then for the simple magic of hands

*

the routine of coffee the complicity
of cigarettes and gossip
this gentle leaning over narrow tables
into the sly glass of recognition:
I know I am dishonest in my dress
(she says to me) I know I am dishonest
but all I ever knew was how to lie