Selected Poems of Thom Gunn Read online

  A tutor’s indignation works on air,

  Altering nothing; action bustles where,

  Towards the pool by which they lately stood,

  The husband comes discussing with his bailiff

  Poachers, the broken fences round the wood.

  Pighead! The poacher is at large, and lingers,

  A dead mouse gripped between his sensitive fingers:

  Fences already keep the live game out:

  See how your property twists her parasol,

  Hesitates in the tender trap of doubt.

  Here they repair, here daily handle lightly

  The brief excitements that disturb them nightly;

  Sap draws back inch by inch, and to the ground

  The words they uttered rustle constantly:

  Silent, they watch the growing, weightless mound.

  They leave at last a chosen element,

  Resume the motions of their discontent;

  She takes her sewing up, and he again

  Names to her son the deserts on the globe,

  And leaves thrust violently upon the pane.

  The Silver Age

  Do not enquire from the centurion nodding

  At the corner, with his head gentle over

  The swelling breastplate, where true Rome is found.

  Even of Livy there are volumes lost.

  All he can do is guide you through the moonlight.

  When he moves, mark how his eager striding,

  To which we know the darkness is a river

  Sullen with mud, is easy as on ground.

  We know it is a river never crossed

  By any but some few who hate the moonlight.

  And when he speaks, mark how his ancient wording

  Is hard with indignation of a lover.

  ‘I do not think our new Emperor likes the sound

  Of turning squadrons or the last post.

  Consorts with Christians, I think he lives in moonlight.’

  Hurrying to show you his companions guarding,

  He grips your arm like a cold strap of leather,

  Then halts, earthpale, as he stares round and round.

  What made this one fragment of a sunken coast

  Remain, far out, to be beaten by the moonlight?

  Elvis Presley

  Two minutes long it pitches through some bar:

  Unreeling from a corner box, the sigh

  Of this one, in his gangling finery

  And crawling sideburns, wielding a guitar.

  The limitations where he found success

  Are ground on which he, panting, stretches out

  In turn, promiscuously, by every note.

  Our idiosyncrasy and our likeness.

  We keep ourselves in touch with a mere dime:

  Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs

  He turns revolt into a style, prolongs

  The impulse to a habit of the time.

  Whether he poses or is real, no cat

  Bothers to say: the pose held is a stance,

  Which, generation of the very chance

  It wars on, may be posture for combat.

  The Allegory of the Wolf Boy

  The causes are in Time; only their issue

  Is bodied in the flesh, the finite powers.

  And how to guess he hides in that firm tissue

  Seeds of division? At tennis and at tea

  Upon the gentle lawn, he is not ours,

  But plays us in a sad duplicity.

  Tonight the boy, still boy open and blond,

  Breaks from the house, wedges his clothes between

  Two moulded garden urns, and goes beyond

  His understanding, through the dark and dust:

  Fields of sharp stubble, abandoned by machine

  To the whirring enmity of insect lust.

  As yet ungolden in the dense, hot night

  The spikes enter his feet: he seeks the moon,

  Which, with the touch of its infertile light,

  Shall loose desires hoarded against his will

  By the long urging of the afternoon.

  Slowly the hard rim shifts above the hill.

  White in the beam he stops, faces it square,

  And the same instant leaping from the ground

  Feels the familiar itch of close dark hair;

  Then, clean exception to the natural laws,

  Only to instinct and the moon being bound,

  Drops on four feet. Yet he has bleeding paws.

  Jesus and his Mother

  My only son, more God’s than mine,

  Stay in this garden ripe with pears.

  The yielding of their substance wears

  A modest and contented shine:

  And when they weep with age, not brine

  But lazy syrup are their tears.

  ‘I am my own and not my own.’

  He seemed much like another man,

  That silent foreigner who trod

  Outside my door with lily rod:

  How could I know what I began

  Meeting the eyes more furious than

  The eyes of Joseph, those of God?

  I was my own and not my own.

  And who are these twelve labouring men?

  I do not understand your words:

  I taught you speech, we named the birds,

  You marked their big migrations then

  Like any child. So turn again

  To silence from the place of crowds.

  ‘I am my own and not my own.’

  Why are you sullen when I speak?

  Here are your tools, the saw and knife

  And hammer on your bench. Your life

  Is measured here in week and week

  Planed as the furniture you make,

  And I will teach you like a wife

  To be my own and all my own.

  Who like an arrogant wind blown

  Where he may please, needs no content?

  Yet I remember how you went

  To speak with scholars in furred gown.

  I hear an outcry in the town;

  Who carried that dark instrument?

  ‘One all his own and not his own.’

  Treading the green and nimble sward

  I stare at a strange shadow thrown.

  Are you the boy I bore alone,

  No doctor near to cut the cord?

  I cannot reach to call you Lord,

  Answer me as my only son.

  ‘I am my own and not my own.’

  To Yvor Winters, 1955

  I leave you in your garden.

  In the yard

  Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared

  With boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour:

  Dog-generations you have trained the vigour

  That few can breed to train and fewer still

  Control with the deliberate human will.

  And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,

  The accumulations that compose the self –

  Poem and history: for if we use

  Words to maintain the actions that we choose,

  Our words, with slow defining influence,

  Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments.

  Continual temptation waits on each

  To renounce his empire over thought and speech,

  Till he submit his passive faculties

  To evening, come where no resistance is;

  The unmotivated sadness of the air

  Filling the human with his own despair.

  Where now lies power to hold the evening back?

  Implicit in the grey is total black:

  Denial of the discriminating brain

  Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein

  Of necromancy. All as relative

  For mind as for the sense, we have to live

  In a half-world, not ours nor history’s,

  And learn the false from half-true premisses.

  But sitting in
the dusk – though shapes combine,

  Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line,

  You keep both Rule and Energy in view,

  Much power in each, most in the balanced two:

  Ferocity existing in the fence

  Built by an exercised intelligence.

  Though night is always close, complete negation

  Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion,

  Night from the air or the carnivorous breath,

  Still it is right to know the force of death,

  And, as you do, persistent, tough in will,

  Raise from the excellent the better still.

  Vox Humana

  Being without quality

  I appear to you at first

  as an unkempt smudge, a blur,

  an indefinite haze, mere-

  ly pricking the eyes, almost

  nothing. Yet you perceive me.

  I have been always most close

  when you had least resistance,

  falling asleep, or in bars;

  during the unscheduled hours,

  though strangely without substance,

  I hang, there and ominous.

  Aha, sooner or later

  you will have to name me, and,

  as you name, I shall focus,

  I shall become more precise.

  O Master (for you command

  in naming me, you prefer)!

  I was, for Alexander,

  the certain victory; I

  was hemlock for Socrates;

  and, in the dry night, Brutus

  waking before Philippi

  stopped me, crying out ‘Caesar!’

  Or if you call me the blur

  that in fact I am, you shall

  yourself remain blurred, hanging

  like smoke indoors. For you bring,

  to what you define now, all

  there is, ever, of future.

  from

  MY SAD CAPTAINS

  (1961)

  In Santa Maria del Popolo

  Waiting for when the sun an hour or less

  Conveniently oblique makes visible

  The painting on one wall of this recess

  By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,

  I see how shadow in the painting brims

  With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out

  But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,

  Until the very subject is in doubt.

  But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

  And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,

  Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,

  Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.

  O wily painter, limiting the scene

  From a cacophony of dusty forms

  To the one convulsion, what is it you mean

  In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

  No Ananias croons a mystery yet,

  Casting the pain out under name of sin.

  The painter saw what was, an alternate

  Candour and secrecy inside the skin.

  He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent

  Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats,

  Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,

  For money, by one such picked off the streets.

  I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel

  To the dim interior of the church instead,

  In which there kneel already several people,

  Mostly old women: each head closeted

  In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.

  Their poor arms are too tired for more than this

  – For the large gesture of solitary man,

  Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

  Innocence

  to Tony White

  He ran the course and as he ran he grew,

  And smelt his fragrance in the field. Already,

  Running he knew the most he ever knew,

  The egotism of a healthy body.

  Ran into manhood, ignorant of the past:

  Culture of guilt and guilt’s vague heritage,

  Self-pity and the soul; what he possessed

  Was rich, potential, like the bud’s tipped rage.

  The Corps developed, it was plain to see,

  Courage, endurance, loyalty and skill

  To a morale firm as morality,

  Hardening him to an instrument, until

  The finitude of virtues that were there

  Bodied within the swarthy uniform

  A compact innocence, child-like and clear,

  No doubt could penetrate, no act could harm.

  When he stood near the Russian partisan

  Being burned alive, he therefore could behold

  The ribs wear gently through the darkening skin

  And sicken only at the Northern cold,

  Could watch the fat burn with a violet flame

  And feel disgusted only at the smell,

  And judge that all pain finishes the same

  As melting quietly by his boots it fell.

  Modes of Pleasure

  New face, strange face, for my unrest.

  I hunt your look, and lust marks time

  Dark in his doubtful uniform,

  Preparing once more for the test.

  You do not know you are observed:

  Apart, contained, you wait on chance,

  Or seem to, till your callous glance

  Meets mine, as callous and reserved.

  And as it does we recognize

  That sharing an anticipation

  Amounts to a collaboration –

  A warm game for a warmer prize.

  Yet when I’ve had you once or twice

  I may not want you any more:

  A single night is plenty for

  Every magnanimous device.

  Why should that matter? Why pretend

  Love must accompany erection?

  This is a momentary affection,

  A curiosity bound to end,

  Which as good-humoured muscle may

  Against the muscle try its strength

  – Exhausted into sleep at length –

  And will not last long into day.

  The Byrnies

  The heroes paused upon the plain.

  When one of them but swayed, ring mashed on ring:

  Sound of the byrnie’s knitted chain,

  Vague evocations of the constant Thing.

  They viewed beyond a salty hill

  Barbaric forest, mesh of branch and root

  – A huge obstruction growing still,

  Darkening the land, in quietness absolute.

  That dark was fearful – lack of presence –

  Unless some man could chance upon or win

  Magical signs to stay the essence

  Of the broad light that they adventured in.

  Elusive light of light that went

  Flashing on water, edging round a mass,

  Inching across fat stems, or spent

  Lay thin and shrunk among the bristling grass.

  Creeping from sense to craftier sense,

  Acquisitive, and loss their only fear,

  These men had fashioned a defence

  Against the nicker’s snap, and hostile spear.

  Byrnie on byrnie! as they turned

  They saw light trapped between the man-made joints,

  Central in every link it burned,

  Reduced and steadied to a thousand points.

  Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one

  The great grey rigid uniform combined

  Safety with virtue of the sun.

  Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.

  Reminded, by the grinding sound,

  Of what they sought, and partly understood,

  They paused upon the open ground,

  A little group above the foreign wood.

  Claus von Stauffenberg

  of the bomb-plot on Hitl
er, 1944

  What made the place a landscape of despair,

  History stunned beneath, the emblems cracked?

  Smell of approaching snow hangs on the air;

  The frost meanwhile can be the only fact.

  They chose the unknown, and the bounded terror,

  As a corrective, who corrected live

  Surveying without choice the bounding error:

  An unsanctioned present must be primitive.

  A few still have the vigour to deny

  Fear is a natural state; their motives neither

  Of doctrinaire, of turncoat, nor of spy.

  Lucidity of thought draws them together.

  The maimed young Colonel who can calculate

  On two remaining fingers and a will,

  Takes lessons from the past, to detonate

  A bomb that Brutus rendered possible.

  Over the maps a moment, face to face:

  Across from Hitler, whose grey eyes have filled

  A nation with the illogic of their gaze,

  The rational man is poised, to break, to build.

  And though he fails, honour personified

  In a cold time where honour cannot grow,

  He stiffens, like a statue, in mid-stride

  – Falling toward history, and under snow.

  Flying Above California

  Spread beneath me it lies – lean upland

  sinewed and tawny in the sun, and

  valley cool with mustard, or sweet with

  loquat. I repeat under my breath

  names of places I have not been to:

  Crescent City, San Bernardino

  – Mediterranean and Northern names.