Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

by Thom Gunn

A fine snug house when all is said and done.

  But night makes me uneasy: floor by floor

  Rooms never guessed at open from the gloom

  First as thin smoky lines, ghost of a door

  Or lintel that develops like a print

  Darkening into full embodiment

  – Boudoir and oubliette, room on room on room.

  And I have met or I believed I met

  People in some of them, though they were not

  The kind I need. They looked convincing, yet

  There always was too much of the phantom to them.

  Meanwhile, and even when I walked right through them,

  I was talking, talking to myself. Of what?

  Fact was, the echo of each word drowned out

  The next word spoken, and I cannot say

  What it was I was going on about.

  It could be I was asking, Do these rooms

  Spring up at night-time suddenly, like mushrooms,

  Or have they all been hiding here all day?

  4

  Dream sponsors:

  Charles Manson, tongue

  playing over dry lips,

  thinking a long thought;

  and the Furies, mad

  puppety heads appearing

  in the open transom above

  a forming door, like heads

  of kittens staring angrily

  over the edge of their box:

  ‘Quick, fetch Medusa,’

  their shrewish voices,

  ‘Show him Medusa.’

  Maybe I won’t turn away,

  maybe I’m so cool

  I could outstare her.

  5

  The door opens.

  There are no snakes.

  The head

  is on the table.

  On the table

  gold hair struck

  by light from

  the naked bulb,

  a dazzle in which

  the ground of dazzle

  is consumed, the

  hair burning

  in its own gold.

  And her eyes

  gaze at me,

  pale blue, but

  blank as the eyes

  of zombie or angel,

  with the stunned

  lack of expression

  of one

  who has beheld

  the source of everything

  and found it

  the same as nothing.

  In her dazzle I

  catch fire

  self-delighting

  self-sufficient

  self-consuming

  till

  I burn out

  so heavy

  I sink into

  darkness into

  my foundations.

  6

  Down in the cellars, nothing is visible

  no one

  Though there’s a sound about me of many breathing

  Light slap of foot on stone and rustle of body

  Against body and stone.

  And when later

  I finger a stickiness along the ridges

  Of a large central block that feels like granite

  I don’t know if it’s my own, or I shed it,

  Or both, as if priest and victim were only

  Two limbs of the same body.

  The lost traveller.

  For this is the seat of needs

  so deep, so old

  That even where eye never perceives body

  And where the sharpest ear discerns only

  The light slap and rustle of flesh on stone

  They, the needs, seek ritual and ceremony

  To appease themselves

  (Oh, the breathing all around me)

  Or they would tear apart the life that feeds them.

  7

  I am the man on the rack.

  I am the man who puts the man on the rack.

  I am the man who watches the man who puts the man on the rack.

  8

  Might it not have been

  a thought-up film

  which suddenly ceases

  the lights go up

  I can see only

  this pearl-grey chamber

  false and quiet

  no audience here

  just the throned one

  nothing outside the bone

  nothing accessible

  the ambush and taking of

  meaning were nothing

  were

  inventions of Little Ease

  I sit

  trapped in bone

  I am back again

  where I never left, I sit

  in my first instant, where

  I never left

  petrified at my centre

  9

  I spin like a solitary star, I swoon.

  But there breaks into my long solitude

  A bearded face, it’s Charlie, close as close,

  His breath that stinks of jail – of pain and fungus,

  So close that I breathe nothing else.

  Then I recall as if it were my own

  Life on the hot ranch, and the other smells.

  Of laurel in the sun, fierce, sweet; of people

  – Death-sweat or lust-sweat they smelt much the same.

  He reigned in sultry power over his dream.

  I come back to the face pushed into mine.

  Tells me he’s bound to point out, man,

  That dreams don’t come from nowhere: it’s your dream

  He says, you dreamt it. So there’s no escape.

  And now he’s squatting at a distance

  To wait the taunt’s effect, paring his nails,

  From time to time glancing up sideways at me,

  A sly mad look. Yes, but he’s not mad either.

  He’s gone too far, Charlie you’ve overdone it.

  Something inside my head turns over.

  I think I see how his taunt can be my staircase,

  For if I brought all of this stuff inside

  There must be an outside to bring it from.

  Outside the castle, somewhere, there must be

  A real Charles Manson, a real woman crying,

  And laws I had no hand in, like gravity.

  About midnight. Where earlier there had seemed

  A shadowy arch projected on the bone-like stone,

  I notice, fixing itself,

  Easing itself in place even as I see it,

  A staircase leading upward.

  Is that rain

  Far overhead, that drumming sound?

  Boy, what a climb ahead.

  At the bottom, looking back, I find

  He is, for now at any rate, clean gone.

  10

  My coldness wakes me,

  mine, and the kitchen chair’s.

  How long have I sat here? I

  went to sleep in bed.

  Entering real rooms perhaps,

  my own spectre, cold,

  unshivering as a flight of

  flint steps that leads nowhere,

  in a ruin, where the wall

  abruptly ends, and the steps too

  and you stare down at the broken

  slabs far below, at the ivy

  glinting over bone-chips which must

  at one time have been castle.

  11

  Down panic, down. The castle is still here,

  And I am in the kitchen with a beer

  Hearing the hurricane thin out to rain.

  Got to relax if I’m to sleep again.

  The castle is here, but not snug any more,

  I’m loose, I rattle in its hollow core.

  And as for that parade of rooms – shed, jail,

  Cellar, each snapping at the next one’s tail –

  That raced inside my skull for half the night,

  I hope I’m through with that. I flick the light.

  And though the dungeon will be there for good

  (What laid those stones?) at leas
t I found I could,

  Thrown down, escape by learning what to learn;

  And hold it that held me.

  Till I return.

  And so to bed, in hopes that I won’t dream.

  … …

  I drift, doze, sleep. But toward dawn it does seem,

  While I half-wake, too tired to turn my head,

  That someone stirs behind me in the bed

  Between two windows on an upper floor.

  Is it a real man muttering? I’m not sure.

  Though he does not seem phantom-like as yet,

  Thick, heavily breathing, with a sweet faint sweat.

  So humid, we lie sheetless – bare and close,

  Facing apart, but leaning ass to ass.

  And that mere contact is sufficient touch,

  A hinge, it separates but not too much.

  An air moves over us, as calm and cool

  As the green water of a swimming pool.

  What if this is the man I gave my key

  Who got in while I slept? Or what if he,

  Still, is a dream of that same man?

  No, real.

  Comes from outside the castle, I can feel.

  The beauty’s in what is, not what may seem.

  I turn. And even if he were a dream

  – Thick sweating flesh against which I lie curled –

  With dreams like this, Jack’s ready for the world.

  1973–4

  An Amorous Debate

  Leather Kid and Fleshly

  Birds whistled, all

  Nature was doing something while

  Leather Kid and Fleshly

  lay on a bank and

  gleamingly discoursed

  like this:

  ‘You are so strong,’ she said, ‘such

  a firm defence of hide against

  the ripple of skin, it

  excites me, all those

  reserves suggested, though I do hope

  that isn’t a prosthetic device

  under your glove is it?’

  ‘Let’s fuck,’ he said.

  She snuggled close, zipping

  him open, unbuckling away

  till he lay before her

  a very

  Mars unhorsed but

  not doing much of

  anything without his horse.

  ‘Strange,’ she said, ‘you

  are still encased in your

  defence. You have

  a hard cock but there is

  something like the

  obduracy of leather

  still in your countenance

  and your skin, it is like

  a hide under hide.’

  Then she laid the fierce

  pale river of her body

  against his, squashing

  her lily breasts against

  his hard male nipples, inserting

  her thighs between his till

  he fired a bit and

  embracing her with some feeling

  moved his head to suck at

  the nearest flesh to

  his mouth which turned out

  to be his own arm.

  Then a tremor passed

  through his body, the sheen

  fell from him, he

  became wholly sensitive

  as if his body had

  rolled back its own foreskin.

  (He began to sweat.)

  And they melted one

  into the other

  forthwith

  like the way the Saône

  joins the Rhône at Lyon.

  Autobiography

  The sniff of the real, that’s

  what I’d want to get

  how it felt

  to sit on Parliament

  Hill on a May evening

  studying for exams skinny

  seventeen dissatisfied

  yet sniffing such

  a potent air, smell of

  grass in heat from

  the day’s sun

  I’d been walking through the damp

  rich ways by the ponds

  and now lay on the upper

  grass with Lamartine’s poems

  life seemed all

  loss, and what was more

  I’d lost whatever it was

  before I’d even had it

  a green dry prospect

  distant babble of children

  and beyond, distinct at

  the end of the glow

  St Paul’s like a stone thimble

  longing so hard to make

  inclusions that the longing

  has become in memory

  an inclusion

  Yoko

  All today I lie in the bottom of the wardrobe

  feeling low but sometimes getting up

  to moodily lumber across rooms

  and lap from the toilet bowl, it is so sultry

  and then I hear the noise of firecrackers again

  all New York is jaggedy with firecrackers today

  and I go back to the wardrobe gloomy

  trying to void my mind of them.

  I am confused, I feel loose and unfitted.

  At last deep in the stairwell I hear a tread,

  it is him, my leader, my love.

  I run to the door and listen to his approach.

  Now I can smell him, what a good man he is,

  I love it when he has the sweat of work on him,

  as he enters I yodel with happiness,

  I throw my body up against his, I try to lick his lips,

  I care about him more than anything.

  After we eat we go for a walk to the piers.

  I leap into the standing warmth, I plunge into

  the combination of old and new smells.

  Here on a garbage can at the bottom, so interesting,

  what sister or brother I wonder left this message I sniff.

  I too piss there, and go on.

  Here a hydrant there a pole

  here’s a smell I left yesterday, well that’s disappointing

  but I piss there anyway, and go on.

  I investigate so much that in the end

  it is for form’s sake only, only a drop comes out.

  I investigate tar and rotten sandwiches, everything, and go on.

  And here a dried old turd, so interesting

  so old, so dry, yet so subtle and mellow.

  I can place it finely, I really appreciate it,

  a gold distant smell like packed autumn leaves in winter

  reminding me how what is rich and fierce when excreted

  becomes weathered and mild

  but always interesting

  and reminding me of what I have to do.

  My leader looks on and expresses his approval.

  I sniff it well and later I sniff the air well

  a wind is meeting us after the close July day

  rain is getting near too but first the wind.

  Joy, joy,

  being outside with you, active, investigating it all,

  with bowels emptied, feeling your approval

  and then running on, the big fleet Yoko,

  my body in its excellent black coat never lets me down,

  returning to you (as I always will, you know that)

  and now

  filling myself out with myself, no longer confused,

  my panting pushing apart my black lips, but unmoving,

  I stand with you braced against the wind.

  from

  THE PASSAGES OF JOY

  (1982)

  Expression

  For several weeks I have been reading

  the poetry of my juniors.

  Mother doesn’t understand,

  and they hate Daddy, the noted alcoholic.

  They write with black irony

  of breakdown, mental institution,

  and suicide attempt, of which the experience

  does not always seem first-hand.

  It is ve
ry poetic poetry.

  I go to the Art Museum

  and find myself looking for something,

  though I’m not sure what it is.

  I reach it, I recognize it,

  seeing it for the first time.

  An ‘early Italian altar piece’.

  The outlined Virgin, her lips

  a strangely modern bow of red,

  holds a doll-sized Child in her lap.

  He has the knowing face of an adult,

  and a precocious forelock curling

  over the smooth baby forehead. She

  is massive and almost symmetrical.

  He does not wriggle, nor is he solemn.

  The sight quenches, like water

  after too much birthday cake.

  Solidly there, mother and child

  stare outward, two pairs of matching eyes

  void of expression.

  Sweet Things

  He licks the last chocolate ice cream

  from the scabbed corners of his mouth.

  Sitting in the sun on a step

  outside the laundromat,

  mongoloid Don turns his crewcut head

  and spies me coming down the street.

  ‘Hi!’ He says it with the mannered

  enthusiasm of a fraternity brother.

  ‘Take me cross the street!?’ part

  question part command. I hold

  the sticky bunch of small fingers in mine

  and we stumble across. They sell

  peaches and pears over there,

  the juice will dribble down your chin.

  He turns before I leave him,

  saying abruptly with the same

  mixture of order and request

  ‘Gimme a quarter!?’ I

  don’t give it, never have, not to him,

  I wonder why not, and as I

  walk on alone I realize

  it’s because his unripened mind

  never recognizes me, me

  for myself, he only says hi