The cold sheets taut, undented,
All the meaningless lights-outs.
History
The child is father to the man, they say,
And sometimes you can have the fancy
That all the creatures of history are children.
We are the only sad, wise grown-ups now.
To have lived in their day!
On a sledge, say, in St Petersburg, in 1904.
Or on the old ranch, out west,
Before Pearl Harbor, chasing the kicking maverick,
Watching the still wet foal find its legs.
Those simple, carefree times!
Borrowers
Who’d have credited it fifty years ago?
This genie in our wallet:
Yes, O master, it shall be so.
Was it a trick perhaps, we thought at first,
But, ‘Live now, pay later,’ came the cry
And, not to be left out, we took it up
With interest. Look at us living now.
So does that mean for those who came before
The rule was: Pay now, live later?
So it seems. Poor fools.
Life was always over the rainbow then.
And some of them paid the highest price
And never lived later at all,
Lying where they do
In Africa, Burma, Italy or France
Or where all the dreamed-of treasure lies,
If not over the rainbow, under the sea.
Credit where it’s due, but they never knew
The sweet scam of living on it.
Judy Garland made them cry,
Madonna made us buy.
And the ones still left from those sad days
Shuffle now round Happy Homes, or,
Worse, wait bedless in some corridor,
Their cheated faces saying, I paid, I paid—for this.
So how shall it be for us
When our day of reckoning comes?
Having had our run of plastic bliss
Shall we all topple nobly,
Smiling fair’s-fair smiles,
Into the black pit? Singing as we go,
Oh but we lived, boy, how we lived,
Bye-bye.
The Virtuoso
Sometimes, now it’s impossible,
Now it’s all useless,
He pines not for the great days,
The tours, the concert halls,
The roar of orchestras and applause,
But for days, long ago,
When he’d make his way
To the Academy. Some crisp morning
In autumn that seemed there
Just for him. Leaves on the cobbles.
The sun glittering along alleyways.
People passing, muffled, gloved,
In little clouds of steam.
His own hands, of course, were mittened,
And held, before he left (his mother
Filled the bowl), in hot water.
He’d hug them, even so,
Under his armpits. On Wilhelmstrasse
The tram bells rang.
Mornings he’d feared and loved.
One of those mornings (it was all still a dream)
When he’d climb those stone stairs,
Enter that tall, stern, merciless chamber,
Take up his instrument,
Take up his bow,
And (why this morning, what
Was magic about this morning?)
Everything sang.
We Both Know
We both know, we both knew.
It hovers now around us when we meet
Like some trick of light.
And those images of what might have been
Can’t be so different now
From images of things that really were,
Memory and longing amounting to the same.
Our eyes meet. We never say, we never will.
Is this the sweetest, surest thing, in fact?
A poise, a tact unknown to the young.
We burned but never were consumed,
This soft ash keeping in the fire.
Breadcrumbs
Once, just glancing through the window
(Why should it have fixed him in his place?)
He saw his wife, with breadcrumbs for the birds,
Standing at the kitchen door.
Just a woman in a doorway with a breadboard,
A streak of sunlight, on a dull day, touching her hair,
But also his wife.
She never looked up to catch his stare.
Now that she’s gone from his life
And he doesn’t know what to do with the years,
He walks round galleries, and before
Those pictures painted by the Dutch—
Bits of yards, bits of rooms, a door, a figure,
Bits of nothing much—
He finds it hard to choke the tears.
The Trespasser
He never could quite grasp it,
A boy in school assembly:
‘Forgive us our trespasses …’
What kind of word was that?
He only understood the sense
That had to do with property,
Or with not being on it.
Trespassers were people
Who weren’t supposed to be there.
And wasn’t that, he knew by then,
Exactly where he was at?
An intruder in this place:
Common mishap of us all.
And wasn’t that the simple trick of it,
To know that you’d be always
On the wrong side of the fence?
He knew it even as he mumbled
Through those morning prayers,
Meek expression on his face.
It led him to a life (as he would call
It later) of ‘adventure’:
Con man and wife-stealer to the gentry,
Maestro of the sham,
Always creeping over someone else’s carpet,
Always stealing down someone else’s stairs
(Always stealing anyway).
Not a ‘stranger in this world’, as some
Weird people liked to say,
Oh no, but just a trespasser.
Chekhov at Melikhovo
Of course, a doctor, he knew.
He’d never grow old.
All through those quick June nights
The yellow light burned in his window
While the moths danced in and out
And the scent of hay and honeysuckle
Failed to distract him.
As if he needed, for his true mania,
These mere remissions in the summer fever,
This cool, dark flavour of brevity.
And he’d sleep, anyway, like a dead weight,
Like some useless thing,
Through the long boring fire of day.
Watched
Once, there were our parents to watch over us
And God, of course (we were told), looking down,
And it was a comfort bigger than we knew then,
Not to know the loneliness which we know now
Of our own devices.
To be watched. Isn’t that the trick?
Isn’t that the knack of those characters
Up there on the screens,
To whom we glue our eyes?
They are watched—we ourselves confirm it.
They have us to turn to, us to thank.
If only life had an audience, a theatre for each one of us.
Watched. Saved.
Extinction
What do ten vanished species of moth or mollusc
Matter to you or me?
The world will have gone before it is gone.
Or the hieroglyphics of the ancients?
Or even the quaint anachronism of a still-current phrase?
‘Changing horses in midstream.’
Leave all
that to the specialists and saddos.
We’re not special, you and I,
Or sad.
The world will have gone before it is gone.
The Anatomist
Of course he remembers it,
The funeral, the procession, the crowds
And (as if by command) a weeping sky.
In those days even the weather adopted style.
Of course he remembers. The great weight
Of importance, like those pressing clouds,
That somehow he had to shoulder now—
‘Brave little man’, as they called him.
Only six, but how could he forget?
His mother’s hand clutching his (everyone
Noticed that), as if he had to steady her.
And later, in private, her hugs, her tears,
As if he were some leftover part of him.
But she married again inside two years.
And that, really, was the whole story:
The young wife, from the beginning,
There to adorn her husband’s glory.
And that’s why there’d been that gap not just
Of decades but of pretty well everything
Between himself and him. Six years!
‘But aren’t you proud?’ they’d say. ‘You must
Be proud to have been his son.’ And yes,
He’d say, for decency’s and simplicity’s sake.
Though pride never really came into it,
Except, maybe, on that grey, wet morning,
The plumed horses stamping and steaming
(How like a fairy tale it would one day seem).
But mostly what he felt was the great, grey yawning
Of his own decades stretched before him.
How could they be anything but lesser, small?
Not pride, not pride at all.
And when, later, they came, the biographers
And researchers, asking for his memories,
His ‘child’s-eye view’, he had the perfect
Excuse. It was never exactly like lying.
I was only six, he’d stress, and he was always—though
Don’t get me wrong—a rather distant figure.
He didn’t say: What I remember is a man dying.
That house, that dreadful room, that bed.
It was a long slow illness, you know,
Not a ‘valiant battle’ like the papers said.
What I actually remember is a wasting, shrinking
Body, what happens (but I was only small)
To any mortal human animal.
Later, as it turned out (raised by a grudging
Aunt, who had her secret viewpoint too),
He took up medicine. Or not medicine so much
As that strictly scientific stuff: anatomy, pathology.
Became not undistinguished in his way.
Students would whisper now and then
(There was nothing he could do about the name):
Yes, he’s the son. But he would always say,
Offering them his prefatory remark or two:
What, ladies and gentlemen, is our study?
It’s the study, ladies and gentlemen,
Of how we’re all the same.
Civilization
Would you have it any other way?
This cosy collusion in the trivial,
Much fuss and much indecision,
Then much preening
Over a new pair of shoes.
You want drum rolls and proclamations
And noble leanings?
Would you have it any other way?
Unlooked-for
These moments that come like gifts,
Ordinary moments that aren’t so ordinary at all.
Like the sun on a cool day
Suddenly warming your neck.
My God, this is all you could wish,
Simple unlooked-for heaven.
While a thousand engineered occasions,
A thousand worked-at culminations fail.
Once, perhaps, you’d hardly have noticed.
You’d have rolled your shoulders, pettishly,
Under this unsolicited kiss.
Just life, for God’s sake,
It’s just what life brings,
Plenty more of this.
Now you’re not so foolish.
You do the second, the double-blessed thing,
You heed it, mark it,
This unremarkable bliss.
Affection
And affection too.
Not love, it’s true, no fires within,
Just simple affection, flickering from skin to skin.
Not lust or seduction or desire or possession,
Just simple affection,
Warming the air in between.
There Without Us
We’ve all been to such places,
Where the brambles shudder in the wind
And the branches creak up above
And rain batters the leaves.
We went there once when that sudden squall
Held up our summer walk,
And waited, watching everything
As you eye the furniture in a stranger’s room,
And thought: we’re here now and might never have been
And soon won’t be, and places such as these,
Pierced with birds and secret life,
Must hardly ever get or need a human visitor.
It must be there still, while this rain beats
On the window. We think of it suddenly:
That place where we stood once
Under sighing trees—
The smell of roots and deep earth,
As if our nostrils were required for it—
And think of all such places
That are there without us now,
All the places where we’ve been but haven’t.
Homings
Salmon still passage through the estuaries,
Geese arrow the heavens,
Turtles tunnel the oceans.
When shall we tell them we have ravaged their mysteries?
Whom shall we choose as our spokesman?
Priam
Maybe we all end up like Priam,
Not one of the heroes wreathed in glory,
Just the man who gets to be king of Troy,
Father of a hot-headed, cock-happy boy
Who steals a wife and starts a war.
The usual wretched soap-opera story.
But at your level it has to mean more,
So just when you’ve made your pile and settled down
And built your topless towers of Ilium,
You’ve a siege on your hands and now, what’s more,
This crazy horse outside your front door.
Was it for this you strove and pushed your luck,
Just to get pulled back into the muck?
Who, given the choice, would be a king?
But you were, and you took it.
Now here’s this weirdest thing:
A lull, a silence everywhere. A horse.
You look around, you stroke your royal chin. Of course.
Maybe you had your glory all the time,
And this is what it means: you win.
A horse. It’s not your common sort of offering.
Maybe it stands for you, for Priam in his kingly prime.
Best take a look, best take it in.
The Bookmark
All the books you meant to read
Or reread or try again,
Having tried once long ago and failed:
There they sit, spurned, on your shelves.
And one wet weekend you actually reach
For an old crinkly-spined paperback and settle down,
But something stops you before you’ve begun:
The bus ticket falling from page thirty-one.
A bus ticket, yellowed and frail,
Like the pages themselves.
And what do you do?
You read the bus ticket, not the book,
Marvelling at its weird historicality,
The story it seems to want to tell.
Bus tickets don’t come like that any more,
Nor at that price. You wonder what
The journey was for such a fictional fare.
From where to where? And when?
But mostly you puzzle who the person was
Who bought this ticket and instead of doing
All the annihilating things that are done
To bus tickets, slipped it casually
Yet fatefully, like a message in a bottle,
Between the pages of a never reopened novel.
You’re lost in the bus ticket, you forget the book.
You know, of course, it must have been you.
Touch
Where do we really live?
Where is the centre of command?
In our eyes? Our brains?
In this thing that beats in our chest?
Or is it in our hands?
Those canny little twins,
So good at fending for themselves,
We can almost forget they’re there.
Nothing speaks more
Of our time here than our hands.
Look how they weather and gnarl.
A hand is like a face (and sometimes lovelier)
And what can a face do, make, mend?
A hand has a mind, a memory surer
Than that stuff in our heads:
Ask any musician or draughtsman.
And what, in a word, do all wise masters teach
Their daunted apprentices?
Your hands will do it, give it time,
Your hands will tell you what to do.
Aren’t we all apprentices to our hands?
And isn’t the true mastery in touch?
Think of it, now you’ve come this far.
Look at your faithful hands.
Aren’t you the faithful one, led like the blind
By those things before your eyes?
Think of all the moments, all the tests.
How many times, over and over,
Have those dumb creatures
Instructed you in the art of life?
How to reach out and do exactly what is needed.
How to comfort, caress, cherish, punish, beg.