Selected Poems of Thom Gunn Read online

  ‘Duncan’ (pp. 181–82) is not just a tribute to a friend and poet but an ars poetica. It both describes and exemplifies the interplay of process and formality in Gunn’s own poetry. A few pages after it comes ‘The Gas-poker’, prefaced by ‘My Mother’s Pride’, the two poems suggesting that at last he had managed to come to terms with the love and the tragedy that had shaped his thought and work. The middle section of the book, ‘Gossip’, is a set of light free-verse poems a little in the manner of Frank O’Hara, a section very much in contrast to the weighty summations and sequences in the last section, though it includes a self-portrait of some beauty: ‘The Artist as an Old Man’ (pp. 188–89). The final section of the book is a series of poems, heavily influenced by Elizabethan poetry, about love. It is presided over by that very Elizabethan deity, the bullying god Gunn refers to as ‘Boss Cupid’. The last section covers all kinds of love, from the paradisal love of Dante for Beatrice to the desires of a serial killer who ate the men he was attracted to. Gunn had never attempted summations before but he does so in this book, and in the final sequence, almost the last thing he wrote, he presents himself as King David dancing before God. The three monologues of ‘Dancing David’ cover the key periods of David’s life, and the book concludes with dancing David taking his final bow: ‘A brief bow following on the final leap’ (p. 197).

  Few of the book’s first readers can have guessed that this was to be Gunn’s farewell – like Prospero drowning his books. Though Gunn was seventy and had just retired from teaching, he was still energetic and physically fit; he retained his ebullient good nature and sense of fun. But once he had lost the order imposed by a regular job, his habit of self-discipline seemed to fail him. His need for youth, both in himself and in those he encountered sexually, became an affliction. He found that, though he could compose by will, the resulting poems were lifeless: ‘I’ve got no juice,’ he told me in 2003, which turned out to be the last time I saw him. For many years he had taken drugs recreationally, but he had always remained conscious of the necessity for rational self-control. To fuel his nights of cruising and leather bars, he now began taking ‘speed’ or methamphetamine, tremendously dangerous for an elderly man’s heart. He knew, or had decided, that his literary life was over, so he felt no need to preserve himself for adventures of the intellect. As we gather from some of the poems in Boss Cupid, he became more and more attached to the homeless young gay men who haunted the streets of San Francisco, many of them addicts. Increasingly this became a problem for his housemates. For one thing there was noise off and on throughout the night. For another the boys were hard to communicate with, occasionally robbed Gunn and generally disturbed the life of the house. Gunn himself seemed unconscious of the fact that he was alienating his friends, people he had lived with for half his life – in Kitay’s case for two-thirds of it.

  On 10 April 2004, his friends heard someone drop by in the early morning. They could hear the television in Gunn’s bedroom all day long, so imagined he was in the room with a boy. But no one ever seemed to leave the room. Eventually one friend, Bob Bair, decided to risk a confrontation. He went into the room and found Gunn dead on the floor beside the bed, mouth open and eyes staring. At some stage the boy he had been with must have slipped out into the street. According to the coroner’s report, Gunn died of a drug overdose, with methamphetamine, heroin and alcohol in his system.

  I tell this story in detail here because it seems so out of character for Thom Gunn. But that is not quite it, exactly. Rather, it shows how he might have led his life but in the event did not. He adored his mother but she killed herself and let him find her body. He continued to make excuses for her until the end, but he must have felt at some level betrayed and abandoned. That feeling shows in the attraction he felt for boys who had been similarly abandoned; as somebody once said to me, he mothered those boys. But his mother had left him a way of coping without her. Sharing her love of literature and her respect for it, he found he was able to convert experience into words, rhythms and the ‘concord of sweet sounds’. In his work as a poet, as in most of what he did – his teaching, for instance – he was extremely self-disciplined and orderly, but he must have seen that a time would come when he no longer had the energy to sustain a poem or a sexual relationship. He planned his work for as long as he could, and then (long before he needed to have done so) he gave up. In a sense he killed himself, not in an act of willed suicide like his mother’s, but by letting himself go, courting death – he always enjoyed risk – and doing it so rashly that at some time, as he must have known, his body would give up the struggle. It was a chosen death, but chosen by a man who had earlier chosen life.

  Thom Gunn’s reputation peaked early, his first book appearing when he was twenty-four. He was the leather-jacketed, existentialist hero the late 1950s required. But fashion overtook him. He detested the confessional mode, preferring an almost anonymous tone like that of the Elizabethans he loved. His increasing Americanisation lost him much of his English audience, but he never won a wide following in the United States. This did not discourage him. Tall, lean and handsome, he loved posing and dressed at times like a dandyish buccaneer; but he was also rather a modest man, his behaviour marked by consideration for others. He ran the risk, indeed, of underestimating his own importance. But this enabled him to regard the creation of a wellmade poem as something that mattered more than his ego did, the result being a body of work more consistently well written than that of any of his contemporaries. He also remembered the lessons he had learnt from his mother and from the poets and teachers he most admired: that poems are concerned with life and that to put an experience truthfully into words is to begin to understand it, the understanding being a moral act. As a result, when his world was shaken by crisis, as it was by AIDS in the 1980s, his art was ready for it.

  CLIVE WILMER

  SELECTED POEMS

  from

  FIGHTING TERMS

  (1954)

  The Wound

  The huge wound in my head began to heal

  About the beginning of the seventh week.

  Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:

  For joy I did not move and dared not speak,

  Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient skill.

  And constantly my mind returned to Troy.

  After I sailed the seas I fought in turn

  On both sides, sharing even Helen’s joy

  Of place, and growing up – to see Troy burn –

  As Neoptolemus, that stubborn boy.

  I lay and rested as prescription said.

  Manoeuvred with the Greeks, or sallied out

  Each day with Hector. Finally my bed

  Became Achilles’ tent, to which the lout

  Thersites came reporting numbers dead.

  I was myself: subject to no man’s breath:

  My own commander was my enemy.

  And while my belt hung up, sword in the sheath,

  Thersites shambled in and breathlessly

  Cackled about my friend Patroclus’ death.

  I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.

  But, when I thought, rage at his noble pain

  Flew to my head, and turning I could feel

  My wound break open wide. Over again

  I had to let those storm-lit valleys heal.

  Carnal Knowledge

  Even in bed I pose: desire may grow

  More circumstantial and less circumspect

  Each night, but an acute girl would suspect

  That my self is not like my body, bare.

  I wonder if you know, or, knowing, care?

  You know I know you know I know you know.

  I am not what I seem, believe me, so

  For the magnanimous pagan I pretend

  Substitute a forked creature as your friend.

  When darkness lies without a roll or stir

  Flaccid, you want a competent poseur.

  I know you know I know you know I kn
ow.

  Cackle you hen, and answer when I crow.

  No need to grope: I’m still playing the same

  Comical act inside the tragic game.

  Yet things perhaps are simpler: could it be

  A mere tear-jerker void of honesty?

  You know I know you know I know you know.

  Leave me. Within a minute I will stow

  Your greedy mouth, but will not yet to grips.

  ‘There is a space between the breast and lips.’

  Also a space between the thighs and head,

  So great, we might as well not be in bed.

  I know you know I know you know I know.

  I hardly hoped for happy thoughts, although

  In a most happy sleeping time I dreamt

  We did not hold each other in contempt.

  Then lifting from my lids night’s penny weights

  I saw that lack of love contaminates.

  You know I know you know I know you know.

  Abandon me to stammering, and go;

  If you have tears, prepare to cry elsewhere –

  I know of no emotion we can share.

  Your intellectual protests are a bore

  And even now I pose, so now go, for

  I know you know.

  Lerici

  Shelley was drowned near here. Arms at his side

  He fell submissive through the waves, and he

  Was but a minor conquest of the sea:

  The darkness that he met was nurse not bride.

  Others make gestures with arms open wide,

  Compressing in the minute before death

  What great expense of muscle and of breath

  They would have made if they had never died.

  Byron was worth the sea’s pursuit. His touch

  Was masterful to water, audience

  To which he could react until an end.

  Strong swimmers, fishermen, explorers: such

  Dignify death by thriftless violence –

  Squandering with so little left to spend.

  Tamer and Hawk

  I thought I was so tough,

  But gentled at your hands,

  Cannot be quick enough

  To fly for you and show

  That when I go I go

  At your commands.

  Even in flight above

  I am no longer free:

  You seeled me with your love,

  I am blind to other birds –

  The habit of your words

  Has hooded me.

  As formerly, I wheel

  I hover and I twist,

  But only want the feel,

  In my possessive thought,

  Of catcher and of caught

  Upon your wrist.

  You but half civilize,

  Taming me in this way.

  Through having only eyes

  For you I fear to lose,

  I lose to keep, and choose

  Tamer as prey.

  Incident on a Journey

  One night I reached a cave: I slept, my head

  Full of the air. There came about daybreak

  A red-coat soldier to the mouth, who said

  ‘I am not living, in hell’s pains I ache,

  But I regret nothing.’

  His forehead had a bloody wound whose streaming

  The pallid staring face illuminated.

  Whether his words were mine or his, in dreaming

  I found they were my deepest thoughts translated.

  ‘I regret nothing:

  ‘Turn your closed eyes to see upon these walls

  A mural scratched there by an earlier man,

  And coloured with the blood of animals:

  Showing humanity beyond its span,

  Regretting nothing.

  ‘No plausible nostalgia, no brown shame

  I had when treating with my enemies.

  And always when a living impulse came

  I acted, and my action made me wise.

  And I regretted nothing.

  ‘I as possessor of unnatural strength

  Was hunted, one day netted in a brawl;

  A minute far beyond a minute’s length

  Took from me passion, strength, and life, and all.

  But I regretted nothing.

  ‘Their triumph left my body in the dust;

  The dust and beer still clotting in my hair

  When I rise lonely, will-less. Where I must

  I go, and what I must I bear.

  And I regret nothing.

  ‘My lust runs yet and is unsatisfied,

  My hate throbs yet but I am feeble-limbed;

  If as an animal I could have died

  My death had scattered instinct to the wind,

  Regrets as nothing.’

  Later I woke. I started to my feet.

  The valley light, the mist already going.

  I was alive and felt my body sweet,

  Uncaked blood in all its channels flowing.

  I would regret nothing.

  from

  THE SENSE OF MOVEMENT

  (1957)

  On the Move

  The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows

  Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds

  That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,

  Has nested in the trees and undergrowth.

  Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both,

  One moves with an uncertain violence

  Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense

  Or the dull thunder of approximate words.

  On motorcycles, up the road, they come:

  Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boys,

  Until the distance throws them forth, their hum

  Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.

  In goggles, donned impersonality,

  In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,

  They strap in doubt – by hiding it, robust –

  And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

  Exact conclusion of their hardiness

  Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts

  They ride, direction where the tyres press.

  They scare a flight of birds across the field:

  Much that is natural, to the will must yield.

  Men manufacture both machine and soul,

  And use what they imperfectly control

  To dare a future from the taken routes.

  It is a part solution, after all.

  One is not necessarily discord

  On earth; or damned because, half animal,

  One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes

  Afloat on movement that divides and breaks.

  One joins the movement in a valueless world,

  Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,

  One moves as well, always toward, toward.

  A minute holds them, who have come to go:

  The self-defined, astride the created will

  They burst away; the towns they travel through

  Are home for neither bird nor holiness,

  For birds and saints complete their purposes.

  At worst, one is in motion; and at best,

  Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,

  One is always nearer by not keeping still.

  At the Back of the North Wind

  All summer’s warmth was stored there in the hay;

  Below, the troughs of water froze: the boy

  Climbed nightly up the rungs behind the stalls

  And planted deep between the clothes he heard

  The kind wind bluster, but the last he knew

  Was sharp and filled his head, the smell of hay.

  Here wrapped within the cobbled mews he woke.

  Passing from summer, climbing down through winter

  He broke into an air that kept no season:

  Denying change, for it was always there.

  It nipped the memory numb, scal
ding away

  The castle of winter and the smell of hay.

  The ostlers knew, but did not tell him more

  Than hay is what we turn to. Other smells,

  Horses, leather, manure, fresh sweat, and sweet

  Mortality, he found them on the North.

  That was her sister, East, that shrilled all day

  And swept the mews dead clean from wisps of hay.

  Autumn Chapter in a Novel

  Through woods, Mme Une Telle, a trifle ill

  With idleness, but no less beautiful,

  Walks with the young tutor, round their feet

  Mob syllables slurred to a fine complaint,

  Which in their time held off the natural heat.

  The sun is distant, and they fill out space

  Sweatless as watercolour under glass.

  He kicks abruptly. But we may suppose

  The leaves he scatters thus will settle back

  In much the same position as they rose.