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The Penguin Book of English Verse

Page 134

by Paul Keegan


  Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:

  Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,

  Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,

  Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,

  Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverising,

  – All the terrible chemistry of their kitchens.

  Their distant husbands lean across mahogany

  And delicately manipulate the market,

  While safe at home, the tender and the gentle

  Are killing tiny mice, dead snap by the neck,

  Asphyxiating flies, evicting spiders,

  Scrubbing, scouring aloud, disturbing cupboards,

  Committing things to dustbins, twisting, wringing,

  Wrists red and knuckles white and fingers puckered,

  Pulpy, tepid. Steering screaming cleaners

  Around the snags of furniture, they straighten

  And haul out sheets from under the incontinent

  And heavy old, stoop to importunate young,

  Tugging, folding, tucking, zipping, buttoning,

  Spooning in food, encouraging excretion,

  Mopping up vomit, stabbing cloth with needles,

  Contorting wool around their knitting needles,

  Creating snug and comfy on their needles.

  Their huge hands! their everywhere eyes! their voices

  Raised to convey across the hullabaloo,

  Their massive thighs and breasts dispensing comfort,

  Their bloody passages and hairy crannies,

  Their wombs that pocket a man upside down!

  And when all’s over, off with overalls,

  Quickly consulting clocks, they go upstairs,

  Sit and sigh a little, brushing hair,

  And somehow find, in mirrors, colours, odours,

  Their essences of lilies and of roses.

  THOM GUNN The Idea of Trust

  The idea of trust, or,

  the thief. He

  was always around,

  ‘pretty’ Jim.

  Like a lilac bush or

  a nice picture on the wall.

  Blue eyes of an

  intense vagueness

  and the well-arranged

  bearing of an animal.

  Then one day he

  said something!

  he said

  that trust is

  an intimate conspiracy.

  What did that

  mean? Anyway next day

  he was gone, with

  all the money and dope

  of the people he’d lived with.

  I begin

  to understand. I see him

  picking through their things

  at his leisure, with

  a quiet secret smile

  choosing and taking,

  having first discovered

  and set up his phrase to

  scramble

  that message of

  enveloping trust.

  He’s getting

  free. His eyes

  are almost transparent.

  He has put on

  gloves. He fingers

  the little privacies of those

  who acted as if there

  should be no privacy.

  They took that

  risk.

  Wild lilac

  chokes the garden.

  DONALD DAVIE from In the Stopping Train 1977

  I have got into the slow train

  again. I made the mistake

  knowing what I was doing,

  knowing who had to be punished.

  I know who has to be punished:

  the man going mad inside me;

  whether I am fleeing

  from him or towards him.

  This journey will punish the bastard:

  he’ll have his flowering gardens

  to stare at through the hot window;

  words like ‘laurel’ won’t help.

  He abhors his fellows,

  especially children; let there

  not for pity’s sake

  be a crying child in the carriage.

  So much for pity’s sake.

  The rest for the sake of justice:

  torment him with his hatreds

  and love of fictions.

  The punishing slow pace

  punishes also places along the line

  for having, some of them, Norman

  or Hanoverian stone-work:

  his old familiars, his

  exclusive prophylactics.

  He’ll stare his fill at their

  emptiness on this journey.

  Jonquil is a sweet word.

  Is it a flowering bush?

  Let him helplessly wonder

  for hours if perhaps he’s seen it.

  Has it a white and yellow

  flower, the jonquil? Has it

  a perfume? Oh his art could

  always pretend it had.

  He never needed to see,

  not with his art to help him.

  He never needed to use his

  nose, except for language.

  Torment him with his hatreds,

  torment him with his false

  loves. Torment him with time

  that has disclosed their falsehood.

  Time, the exquisite torment!

  His future is a slow

  and stopping train through places

  whose names used to have virtue.

  *

  A stopping train, I thought,

  was a train that was going to stop.

  Why board it then, in the first place?

  Oh no, they explained, it is stopping

  and starting, stopping and starting.

  How could it, they reasoned gently,

  be always stopping unless

  also it was always starting?

  I saw the logic of that;

  grown-ups were good at explaining.

  Going to stop was the same

  as stopping to go. What madness!

  It made a sort of sense, though.

  It’s not, I explained, that I mind

  getting to the end of the line.

  Expresses have to do that.

  No, they said. We see…

  But do you? I said. It’s not

  the last stop that is bad…

  No, they said, it’s the last

  start, the little one; yes,

  the one that doesn’t last.

  Well, they said, you’ll learn

  all about that when you’re older.

  Of course they learned it first.

  Oh naturally, yes.

  NORMAN MACCAIG Notations of Ten Summer Minutes

  A boy skips flat stones out to sea – each does fine

  till a small wave meets it head on and swallows it.

  The boy will do the same.

  The schoolmaster stands looking out of the window

  with one Latin eye and one Greek one.

  A boat rounds the point in Gaelic.

  Out of the shop comes a stream

  of Omo, Weetabix, BiSoDol tablets and a man

  with a pocket shaped like a whisky bottle.

  Lord V. walks by with the village in his pocket.

  Angus walks by

  spending the village into the air.

  A melodeon is wheezing a clear-throated jig

  on the deck on the Arcadia. On the shore hills Pan

  cocks a hairy ear; and falls asleep again.

  The ten minutes are up, except they aren’t.

  I leave the village, except I don’t.

  The jig fades to silence, except it doesn’t.

  W. S. GRAHAM Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch

  Which I was given because

  I loved him and we had

  Terrible times together.

  O tarnished ticking time

  Piece with your bent hand,

  You must be used to being

  Looked at suddenly
/>
  In the middle of the night

  When he switched the light on

  Beside his bed. I hope

  You told him the best time

  When he lifted you up

  To meet the Hilton gaze.

  I lift you up from the mantel

  Piece here in my house

  Wearing your verdigris.

  At least I keep you wound

  And put my ear to you

  To hear Botallack tick.

  You realize your master

  Has relinquished you

  And gone to lie under

  The ground at St Just.

  Tell me the time. The time

  Is Botallack o’clock.

  This is the dead of night.

  He switches the light on

  To find a cigarette

  And pours himself a Teachers.

  He picks me up and holds me

  Near his lonely face

  To see my hands. He thinks

  He is not being watched.

  The images of his dream

  Are still about his face

  As he spits and tries not

  To remember where he was.

  I am only a watch

  And pray time hastes away.

  I think I am running down.

  Watch, it is time I wound

  You up again. I am

  Very much not your dear

  Last master but we had

  Terrible times together.

  ROBERT GARIOCH The Maple and the Pine

  For maple and for pine

  I socht, thae sevin year;

  maple I wad presume

  raither nor sycamore.

  5

  Thof I wes wantan skeel

  I wadnae hain on care,

  my harns aa my pride:

  for thon I had nae fear.

  Maple for back and ribs,

  10

  neck and heid and scroll;

  for belly the Swiss pine,

  seasont, dry and auld,

  the southside of the tree

  frae norart in a dell,

  15

  sawn on the quarter, cut

  midwart throu the bole.

  Amati my outline,

  I coft nae feenisht thing

  forbye, guidit my haun

  20

  or I cuid streitch the strings;

  wi gauge and callipers

  and sense of thicknessin

  I mainaged aa things weill

  frae template til bee’s-sting.

  25

  A wolf had won inbye

  for aa my besiness,

  gowlan aneath my bowe

  whan I wad pley my piece;

  wolf-notes cam girnan throu

  30

  the tone. In sair distress

  I brak it owre my knee,

  sic wes my heaviness.

  1978 GEOFFREY HILL from An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England

  9 The Laurel Axe

  Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods

  with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine

  out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green;

  the avenues are spread with brittle floods.

  Platonic England, house of solitudes,

  rests in its laurels and its injured stone,

  replete with complex fortunes that are gone,

  beset by dynasties of moods and clouds.

  It stands, as though at ease with its own world,

  the mannerly extortions, languid praise,

  all that devotion long since bought and sold,

  the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize,

  tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed in

  cabinets of amethyst and frost.

  12 The Eve of St Mark

  Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,

  godmother, nod and nod from the half-gloom;

  broochlight intermittent between the fronds,

  the owl immortal in its crystal dome.

  Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,

  the clock discounts us with a telling chime.

  Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,

  burnish upon the threshold of the dream:

  churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls

  of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied.

  Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king

  preserve in sepia waterglass the souls

  of distant cousins, virgin till they died,

  and the lost delicate suitors who could sing.

  THOMAS KINSELLA Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore

  Noon

  The black flies kept nagging in the heat.

  Swarms of them, at every step, snarled

  off pats of cow dung spattered in the grass.

  Move, if you move, like water.

  The punts were knocking by the boathouse, at full tide.

  Volumes of water turned the river curve

  hushed under an insect haze.

  Slips of white,

  trout bellies, flicked in the corner of the eye

  and dropped back onto the deep mirror.

  Respond. Do not interfere. Echo.

  Thick green woods along the opposite bank

  climbed up from a root-dark recess

  eaved with mud-whitened leaves.

  *

  In a matter of hours all that water is gone,

  except for a channel near the far side.

  Muck and shingle and pools where the children

  wade, stabbing flatfish.

  Afternoon

 

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