Floating capital Book

Fifty Poems contains all thirty-three pieces from The Visit , with some revisions and in a slightly different order, and a further seventeen written after that first books appeared...
Retreat


A minute pulsation of blood-red
Invades one corner of your wounded eye.
You hear it throb
In perfect harmony with our despair
And I'm no comfort to you any more.

*

Friends


'At one time we wanted nothing more
Than to wake up in each other's arms.'
Old enemy,
You want to live for ever
And I don't
Was the last pact we made
On our last afternoon together.

*

In Dreams


To live like this:
One hand in yours, the other
Murderously cold; one eye
Pretending to watch over you,
The other blind.
We live in dreams:
These sentimental afternoons,
These silent vows,
How we would starve without them.

*

Bedtime Story


From your cautiously parked car
We watch the lights go out
Along this reputable cul-de-sac.

Your garden furniture
Sleeps in a haze of cultivated blossom
And the two trees you have been working on
All summer
Doze beside your garden gate.

'So many families. So many friends.'
In love at last, you can imagine them
Pyjama'd and half-pissed
Extinguishing another perfect day.

*

Poet


'Light fails; the world sucks on the winter dark
And everywhere
Huge cities are surrendering their ghosts . . .'
The poet, listening for other lives
Like his, begins again: 'And it is all
Folly . . .'

*

Critique


In Cornwall, from the shelter of your bungalow
You found the sea 'compassionate'
And then 'monotonous',
Though never, in all fairness,
'Inconnue'. There was no hiding it.
Your poems wouldn't do.

We sat on for another hour or two,
Old literary pals,
You chewing on your J and B
And me with you dud manuscripts
Face downward on my knee.

'It's been a long time,' you said,
'I'll race you to the sea.'

*

Ghosts


The scrubbed, magnificently decked coffin
Skates, like a new ship, into the fiery deep.
On dry land,
The congregation rustles to its knees.

From my corner pew
I command an unobstructed view
Of your departure.
If you had been lying on your side
I might have caught your unsuspecting eye.

Out on the patio, at dusk,
The floral tributes. I could almost swear
That it was you I saw
Sniffing the wreath-scented air
And counting the bowed heads of your bereaved.

*

Rose


In the delicately shrouded heart
Of this white rose, a patient eye,
The eye of love,
Knows who i am, and where I've been
Tonight, and what I wish I'd done.

I have been watching this white rose
For hours, imagining
Each tremor of each petal to be like a breath
That silences and soothes.
'Look at it,' I'd say to you
If you were here: 'it is a sign
Of what is belief, and lonely
And in love.'

But you had gone and so I'll call it wise:
A patient breath, an eye, a rose
That opens up too easily and dies.

*

Anniversary


You have forgotten almost everything
We promised never to let go.
I even wonder if you know
Why at the dead of night you went with me
To face those blindly drifting gusts of snow,
Why it had to be that route we took
And not the other, why
After all that's gone between us
We still seem to be together.

In this dreadeningly harsh weather
It's a waste of breath trying to explain
Over again. You walk ahead
Unsteadily. I let you. A red coat
Disappearing into snow; the green branch
You were carrying abandoned:
Separate lives
Now distantly marooned.
You're small, and smaller still
With every move you make.
In ten seconds we will hear it break.

*

Returning


It isn't far. Come with me. There's a path
We used to take. There is a stream,
A thin ripple, really, of what stones
Dislodged from a dilapidated boundary
Between two now-forgotten fields;
There is a tree, a muddily abandoned sprawl
Off-balance - the one tall thing
You could see from where I walked with her.

What it all looks like now I wouldn't know,
But come with me. It was an early dusk
On that day too, and just as sickeningly cold,
And when I called to her: 'It isn't far,'
She said: 'You go.'
Somewhere ahead of us
I thought I could foresee
A silence, a new path,
A clean sweep of solitude, downhill.

Dear friend, I wish you could have seen
This place when it was at its best,
When I was,
But it isn't far. It isn't far. Come with me.

*

Remember This


You won't remember this, but I will:
A gradually tightening avenue of trees
And where it locks
What seems from here the most yearningly delicate
Intrusion of white leaves
May yet blacken the unclouded pool of sun
That summons you.
Keep going
Even though I mean to stay; keep going
Even though I can't any more imagine
What I'll find most hard to bear
On the way back from here,
On the way home
To where we first vowed we'd try again to say:
You won't remember this.

*

New Year


You are not with me, and for all I know
You may not have survived.
The weather's 'almost gone'
You used to say
And so it has.
Lost child
Look over there: this unprofitable
Three dozen yards of land, still fortified
Against non-residents, has had its day;
The trees you couldn't climb,
Fatigued, are clownishly spiked out
On an expressionless, half-darkened wall of sky.
Home far from home.

So far as I can see, none of it,
Nor of us, my love, minds much what's next to go:
Another lapse of the delighted heart
That's given up on you,
Another pleasantness to wait for, and then wait again,
Then wait; the infant lawns
You weren't supposed to walk on, semi-swamps
Of glitteringly drenched green.

*

Colours


Yes, I suppose you taught us something.
That bottle-green priest's dressing-gown,
For instance, that they tried to tog you up in
For your last overnight at the Infirmary.
'My Celtic shroud,' you called it
And when no one laughed: 'Before morning
Your dear daddy will be Ibrox blue.'

*

Familiars


If you were to look up now you would see
The moon, the bridge, the ambulance,
The road back into town.
The river weeds
You crouch in seem a yard shorter,
A shade more featherishly purple
Than they were this time last year;
The caverns of 'your bridge'
Less brilliantly jet-black than I remember them.

Even from up here, though, I can tell
It's the same unfathomable prayer:
If you were to look up now would you see
Your moon-man swimming through the moonlit air?

*

Larkinesque


Your solicitor and mine sit side by side
In front of us, in Courtroom Number Three.
It's cut and dried,
They've told us, a sure-fire decree:
No property disputes, no tug-of-love,
No bitching about maintenance. Well done.

All that remains
Is for the Judge to 'wrap it up', and that's how come
We sit here, also side by side
(Although to each of us we are 'the other side'),
And listen to Forbes-Robertson and Smythe,
Our champions, relax.
It turns out, natch,
They went tot he same school,
That neither of them ever thought
The other had it in him to . . . and yet,
Well, here they were, each peddling
Divorces for a crust. Too bloody true.
And did not each of them remember well
Old Spotty Moses and his 'magic snake',
Mott Harrison's appalling breath, Butch Akenside's
Flamboyant, rather pushy suicide?
Indeed. Where were they now? (Aside,
That is to say, from Akenside.) Ah well,

'And you, old man, did you, well, take the plunge?'
No bloody fear: Forbes-Robertson, it seems,
Keeps Labradors, and Smythe keeps his relationships
'Strictly Socratic'. When you'd seen
What they'd seen . . . and so on.

Their rhythms were becoming Larkinesque
And so would mine if I were made to do
This kind of thing more often. As it is,
The morning sun, far from 'unhindered', animates
The hands i used to write about with 'lyric force'.
Your hands
Now clutching a slim volume of dead writs.

*

House Work


How can I keep it steady?
Don't you see
The weakened plank, dead-centre?
And I can't believe that you can fail to hear
This slight but certain tremor underfoot
When you steal in, so lovingly invisible,
To polish my condemned, three-legged desk.

*

The Forties


'The self that has survived those trashy years',
Its 'austere virtue' magically intact. Well then,
He must have asked himself, is this
The 'this is it'; that encapsulable Life
I never thought to find
And didn't seek: beginning at the middle
So that in the end
The damage is outlived by the repair?

At forty-five
I'm father of the house now and at dusk
You'll see me take my 'evening stroll'
Down to the dozing lily pond:
From our rear deck, one hundred and eleven yards.
And there I'll pause, half-sober, without pain
And seem to listen; bu no longer 'listen out'.
And at my back,
Eight windows, a veranda, the neat plot
For your (why not?) 'organic greens',
The trellis that needs fixing, that I'll fix.