New Selected Poems Page 2

  With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep,

  Names for the animals you took to bed,

  Tales to distract, legends to protect,

  Later an idiom for you to keep

  And living, learn, must learn from you, dead,

  To make our broken images rebuild

  Themselves around your limbs, your broken

  Image, find for your sake whose life our idle

  Talk has cost, a new language. Child

  Of our time, our times have robbed your cradle.

  Sleep in a world your final sleep has woken.

  17 May 1974

  Suburban Woman

  I

  Town and country at each other’s throat –

  between a space of truce until one night

  walls began to multiply, to spawn

  like lewd whispers of the goings-on,

  the romperings, the rape on either side,

  the smiling killing, that you were better dead

  than let them get you. But they came, armed

  with blades and ladders, with slimed

  knives, day after day, week by week –

  a proxy violation. She woke

  one morning to the usual story: withdrawing,

  neither side had gained, but there, dying,

  caught in cross-fire, her past lay, bleeding

  from wounds each meant for each, which needing

  each other for other wars they could not inflict

  one on another. Haemorrhaging to hacked

  roads, in back gardens, like a pride

  of lions toiled for booty, tribal acres died

  and her world with them. She saw their power to sever

  with a scar. She is the sole survivor.

  II

  Morning: mistress of talcums, spun

  and second cottons, run tights

  she is, courtesan to the lethal

  rapine of routine. The room invites.

  She reaches to fluoresce the dawn.

  The kitchen lights like a brothel.

  III

  The chairs dusted and the morning

  coffee break behind, she starts pawning

  her day again to the curtains, the red

  carpets, the stair rods, at last to the bed,

  the unmade bed where once in an underworld

  of limbs, her eyes freckling the night like jewelled

  lights on a cave wall, she, crying, stilled,

  bargained out of nothingness her child,

  bartered from the dark her only daughter.

  Waking, her cheeks dried, to a brighter

  dawn she sensed in her as in April earth

  a seed, a life ransoming her death.

  IV

  Late, quiet across her garden

  sunlight shifts like a cat

  burglar, thieving perspectives,

  leaving her in the last light

  alone, where, as shadows harden,

  lengthen, silent she perceives

  veteran dead-nettles, knapweed

  crutched on walls, a summer’s seed

  of roses trenched in ramsons, and stares

  at her life falling with her flowers,

  like military tribute or the tears

  of shell-shocked men, into arrears.

  V

  Her kitchen blind down – a white flag –

  the day’s assault over, now she will shrug

  a hundred small surrenders off as images

  stillborn, unwritten metaphors, blank pages

  and on this territory, blindfold, we meet

  at last, veterans of a defeat

  no truce will heal, no formula prevent

  breaking out fresh again; again the print

  of twigs stalking her pillow will begin

  a new day and all her victims then –

  hopes unreprieved, hours taken hostage –

  will newly wake, while I, on a new page

  will watch, like town and country, word, thought

  look for ascendancy, poise, retreat

  leaving each line maimed, my forces used.

  Defeated we survive, we two, housed

  together in my compromise, my craft.

  Who are of one another the first draft.

  The Laws of Love

  for Mary Robinson

  At first light the legislator

  Who schooled you, creator

  Of each force, each element,

  Its secret law, its small print

  Nature – while dawn, baptismal as waters

  Which broke early in dark, began –

  First saw the first of your daughters

  Become in your arms a citizen.

  How easy for you to have made

  For her a perfumed stockade,

  How easy for you to impose

  Laws and structures, torts for those

  Fragments which matter less and less

  As all fragments, and we must bless

  The child, its murderer, defend

  This chaos somehow which must end

  With order. But who can separate

  Hatred from its opposite

  Or judge which is the other’s source

  Today, unless perhaps that force

  Which makes your Moy in its ridge pool

  Prime teenage trout for butchery,

  While at the same time fulfil

  The blood-tie of the tide, as we

  Once new found sisters, each grown miser

  With new found blood began to trade

  Salmond for Shakespeare, none the wiser

  Then but now I see it focus

  Slowly a miracle, a closing wound.

  That sisters kill, that sisters die, must mock us

  Now, unless, with separate speech we find

  For them new blood, for them now plead

  Another world for whose horizons,

  For whose anguish no reprieve

  Exists unless new citizens,

  And, as we found, laws of love –

  We two whose very first worlds fell

  Like wishes down a wishing well,

  Ungranted, had we known, unwanted

  Yet still there as the well is, haunted.

  O Fons Bandusiae

  Horace 3: XIII

  Bold as crystal, bright as glass,

  Your waters leap while we appear

  Carrying to your woodland shrine

  Gifts below your worthiness:

  Grape and flower, Bandusia,

  Yellow hawksbeard, ready wine.

  And tomorrow we will bring

  A struggling kid, his temples sore

  With early horns, as sacrifice.

  Tomorrow his new trumpeting

  Will come to nothing, when his gore

  Stains and thaws your bright ice.

  Canicula, the lamp of drought,

  The summer’s fire, leaves your grace

  Inviolate in the woods where

  Every day you spring to comfort

  The broad bull in his trace,

  The herd out of the shepherd’s care.

  With every fountain, every spring

  Of legend, I will set you down

  In praise and immortal spate:

  These waters which drop gossiping

  To ground, this wet surrounding stone

  And this green oak I celebrate.

  Cyclist with Cut Branches

  Country hands on the handlebars,

  A bicycle bisecting cars

  Lethal and casual

  In rush hour traffic, I remember

  Seeing, as I watched that September

  For you as usual.

  Like rapid mercury abused

  By summer heat where it is housed

  In slender telling glass,

  My heart taking grief’s temperature,

  That summer, lost its powers to cure,

  Its gift to analyse.

  Jasmine and the hyacinth,

&n
bsp; The lintel mortar and the plinth

  Of spring across his bars,

  Like globed grapes at first I thought,

  Then at last more surely wrought

  Like winter’s single stars

  Until I glimpsed not him but you

  Like an animal the packs pursue

  To covert in a forest,

  And knew the branches were not spring’s

  Nor ever summer’s ample things,

  But decay’s simple trust.

  And since we had been like them cut

  But from the flowering not the root

  Then we had thanks to give –

  That they and we had opened once,

  Had found the light, had lost its glance

  And still had lives to live.

  Song

  Where in blind files

  Bats outsleep the frost

  Water slips through stones

  Too fast, too fast

  For ice; afraid he’d slip

  By me I asked him first.

  Round as a bracelet

  Clasping the wet grass,

  An adder drowsed by berries

  Which change blood to cess.

  Dreading delay’s venom

  I risked the first kiss.

  My skirt in my hand,

  Lifting the hem high

  I forded the river there.

  Drops splashed my thigh.

  Ahead of me at last

  He turned at my cry:

  ‘Look how the water comes

  Boldly to my side;

  See the waves attempt

  What you have never tried.’

  He late that night

  Followed the leaping tide.

  from IN HER OWN IMAGE

  1980

  Anorexic

  Flesh is heretic.

  My body is a witch.

  I am burning it.

  Yes I am torching

  her curves and paps and wiles.

  They scorch in my self denials.

  How she meshed my head

  in the half-truths

  of her fevers

  till I renounced

  milk and honey

  and the taste of lunch.

  I vomited

  her hungers.

  Now the bitch is burning.

  I am starved and curveless.

  I am skin and bone.

  She has learned her lesson.

  Thin as a rib

  I turn in sleep.

  My dreams probe

  a claustrophobia,

  a sensuous enclosure.

  How warm it was and wide

  once by a warm drum,

  once by the song of his breath

  and in his sleeping side.

  Only a little more,

  only a few more days

  sinless, foodless,

  I will slip

  back into him again

  as if I had never been away.

  Caged so

  I will grow

  angular and holy

  past pain,

  keeping his heart

  such company

  as will make me forget

  in a small space

  the fall

  into forked dark,

  into python needs

  heaving to hips and breasts

  and lips and heat

  and sweat and fat and greed.

  In Her Own Image

  It is her eyes:

  the irises are gold

  and round they go

  like the ring on my wedding finger,

  round and round

  and I can’t touch

  their histories or tears.

  To think they were once my satellites!

  They shut me out now.

  Such light years!

  She is not myself

  anymore she is not

  even in my sky

  anymore and I

  am not myself.

  I will not disfigure

  her pretty face.

  Let her wear amethyst thumbprints,

  a family heirloom,

  a sort of burial necklace

  and I know just the place:

  Where the wall glooms,

  where the lettuce seeds,

  where the jasmine springs

  no surprises

  I will bed her.

  She will bloom there,

  second nature to me,

  the one perfection

  among compromises.

  Making Up

  My naked face;

  I wake to it.

  How it’s dulsed and shrouded!

  It’s a cloud,

  a dull pre-dawn.

  But I’ll soon

  see to that.

  I push the blusher up,

  I raddle

  and I prink,

  pinking bone

  till my eyes

  are

  a rouge-washed

  flush on water.

  Now the base

  pales and wastes.

  Light thins

  from ear to chin,

  whitening in

  the ocean shine

  mirror set

  of my eyes

  that I fledge

  in old darks.

  I grease and full

  my mouth.

  It won’t stay shut:

  I look

  in the glass.

  My face is made,

  it says:

  Take nothing, nothing

  at its face value:

  Legendary seas,

  nakedness,

  that up and stuck

  lassitude

  of thigh and buttock

  that they prayed to –

  it’s a trick.

  Myths

  are made by men.

  The truth of this

  wave-raiding

  sea-heaving

  made-up

  tale

  of a face

  from the source

  of the morning

  is my own:

  Mine are the rouge pots,

  the hot pinks,

  the fledged

  and edgy mix

  of light and water

  out of which

  I dawn.

  Tirade for the Mimic Muse

  I’ve caught you out. You slut. You fat trout.

  So here you are fumed in candle-stink.

  Its yellow balm exhumes you for the glass.

  How you arch and pout in it!

  How you poach your face in it!

  Anyone would think you were a whore –

  An ageing out-of-work kind-hearted tart.

  I know you for the ruthless bitch you are:

  Our criminal, our tricoteuse, our Muse –

  Our Muse of Mimic Art.

  Eye-shadow, swivel brushes, blushers,

  Hot pinks, rouge pots, sticks,

  Ice for the pores, a mud mask –

  All the latest tricks.

  Not one of them disguise

  That there’s a dead millennium in your eyes.

  You try to lamp the sockets of your loss:

  The lives that famished for your look of love.

  Your time is up. There’s not a stroke, a flick

  Can make your crime cosmetic.

  With what drums and dances, what deceits

  Rituals and flatteries of war,

  Chants and pipes and witless empty rites

  And war-like men

  And wet-eyed patient women

  You did protect yourself from horrors,

  From the lizarding of eyelids

  From the whiskering of nipples,

  From the slow betrayals of our bedroom mirrors –

  How you fled

  The kitchen screw and the rack of labour,

  The wash thumbed and the dish cracked,

  The scream of beaten women,

  The crime of babies battered,

&n
bsp; The hubbub and the shriek of daily grief

  That seeks asylum behind suburb walls –

  A world you could have sheltered in your skirts –

  And well I know and how I see it now,

  The way you latched your belt and itched your hem

  And shook it off like dirt.

  And I who mazed my way to womanhood

  Through all your halls of mirrors, making faces,

  To think I waited on your trashy whim!

  Hoping your lamp and flash,

  Your glass, might show

  This world I needed nothing else to know

  But love and again love and again love.

  In a nappy stink, by a soaking wash

  Among stacked dishes

  Your glass cracked,

  Your luck ran out. Look. My words leap

  Among your pinks, your stench pots and sticks.

  They scatter shadow, swivel brushes, blushers.

  Make your face naked.

  Strip your mind naked.

  Drench your skin in a woman’s tears.

  I will wake you from your sluttish sleep.

  I will show you true reflections, terrors.

  You are the Muse of all our mirrors.

  Look in them and weep.

  from NIGHT FEED

  1982

  Night Feed

  This is dawn.

  Believe me

  This is your season, little daughter.

  The moment daisies open,