Selected Poems of Thom Gunn Read online

  Such richness can make you drunk. Sometimes

  on fogless days by the Pacific,

  there is a cold hard light without break

  that reveals merely what is – no more

  and no less. That limiting candour,

  that accuracy of the beaches,

  is part of the ultimate richness.

  Considering the Snail

  The snail pushes through a green

  night, for the grass is heavy

  with water and meets over

  the bright path he makes, where rain

  has darkened the earth’s dark. He

  moves in a wood of desire,

  pale antlers barely stirring

  as he hunts. I cannot tell

  what power is at work, drenched there

  with purpose, knowing nothing.

  What is a snail’s fury? All

  I think is that if later

  I parted the blades above

  the tunnel and saw the thin

  trail of broken white across

  litter, I would never have

  imagined the slow passion

  to that deliberate progress.

  The Feel of Hands

  The hands explore tentatively,

  two small live entities whose shapes

  I have to guess at. They touch me

  all, with the light of fingertips

  testing each surface of each thing

  found, timid as kittens with it.

  I connect them with amusing

  hands I have shaken by daylight.

  There is a sudden transition:

  they plunge together in a full

  formed single fury; they are grown

  to cats, hunting without scruple;

  they are expert but desperate.

  I am in the dark. I wonder

  when they grew up. It strikes me that

  I do not know whose hands they are.

  My Sad Captains

  One by one they appear in

  the darkness: a few friends, and

  a few with historical

  names. How late they start to shine!

  but before they fade they stand

  perfectly embodied, all

  the past lapping them like a

  cloak of chaos. They were men

  who, I thought, lived only to

  renew the wasteful force they

  spent with each hot convulsion.

  They remind me, distant now.

  True, they are not at rest yet,

  but now that they are indeed

  apart, winnowed from failures,

  they withdraw to an orbit

  and turn with disinterested

  hard energy, like the stars.

  UNCOLLECTED

  (1960s)

  From an Asian Tent

  Alexander thinks of his father

  Father, I scarcely could believe you dead.

  The pelts, fur trophies, and hacked skulls that you

  Drunkenly hooked up while the bone still bled

  I pulled down, and I hung the place instead

  With emblems of an airy Hellene blue.

  You held me once before the army’s eyes;

  During their endless shout, I tired and slid

  Down past your forearms to the cold surprise

  Your plated shoulder made between my thighs.

  This happened. Or perhaps I wish it did.

  Remembering that you never reached the East,

  I have made it mine to the obscurest temple;

  Yet each year look more like the man I least

  Choose to resemble, bully, drunk, and beast.

  Are you a warning, Father, or an example?

  from

  POSITIVES

  (1965)

  The Old Woman

  Something approaches, about

  which she has heard a good deal.

  Her deaf ears have caught it, like

  a silence in the wainscot

  by her head. Her flesh has felt

  a chill in her feet, a draught

  in her groin. She has watched it

  like moonlight on the frayed wood

  stealing toward her

  floorboard by floorboard. Will it hurt?

  Let it come, it is

  the terror of full repose,

  and so no terror.

  from

  TOUCH

  (1967)

  The Goddess

  When eyeless fish meet her on

  her way upward, they gently

  turn together in the dark

  brooks. But naked and searching

  as a wind, she will allow

  no hindrance, none, and bursts up

  through potholes and narrow flues

  seeking an outlet. Unslowed

  by fire, rock, water or clay,

  she after a time reaches

  the soft abundant soil, which

  still does not dissipate her

  force – for look! sinewy thyme

  reeking in the sunlight; rats

  breeding, breeding, in their nests;

  and the soldier by a park

  bench with his greatcoat collar

  up, waiting all evening for

  a woman, any woman

  her dress tight across her ass

  as bark in moonlight. Goddess,

  Proserpina: it is we,

  vulnerable, quivering,

  who stay you to abundance.

  Touch

  You are already

  asleep. I lower

  myself in next to

  you, my skin slightly

  numb with the restraint

  of habits, the patina of

  self, the black frost

  of outsideness, so that even

  unclothed it is

  a resilient chilly

  hardness, a superficially

  malleable, dead

  rubbery texture.

  You are a mound

  of bedclothes, where the cat

  in sleep braces

  its paws against your

  calf through the blankets,

  and kneads each paw in turn.

  Meanwhile and slowly

  I feel a is it

  my own warmth surfacing or

  the ferment of your whole

  body that in darkness beneath

  the cover is stealing

  bit by bit to break

  down that chill.

  You turn and

  hold me tightly, do

  you know who

  I am or am I

  your mother or

  the nearest human being to

  hold on to in a

  dreamed pogrom.

  What I, now loosened,

  sink into is an old

  big place, it is

  there already, for

  you are already

  there, and the cat

  got there before you, yet

  it is hard to locate.

  What is more, the place is

  not found but seeps

  from our touch in

  continuous creation, dark

  enclosing cocoon round

  ourselves alone, dark

  wide realm where we

  walk with everyone.

  Misanthropos

  to Tony Tanner and Don Doody

  The Last Man

  I

  He avoids the momentous rhythm

  of the sea, one hill suffices him

  who has the entire world to choose from.

  He melts through the brown and green silence

  inspecting his traps, is lost in dense

  thicket, or appears among great stones.

  He builds no watch tower. He lives like

  the birds, self-contained they hop and peck;

  he could conceal himself for a week;

  and he learns like them to keep movement

  on the undipped wing of the present.

 
; But sometimes when he wakes, with the print

  of stone in his side, a relentless

  memory of monstrous battle is

  keener than counsel of the senses.

  He opens, then, a disused channel

  to the onset of hatred, until

  the final man walks the final hill

  without thought or feeling, as before.

  If he preserves himself in nature,

  it is as a lived caricature

  of the race he happens to survive.

  He is clothed in dirt. He lacks motive.

  He is wholly representative.

  II

  At last my shout is answered! Are you near,

  Man whom I cannot see but can hear?

  Here.

  The canyon hides you well, which well defended.

  Sir, tell me, is the long war ended?

  Ended.

  I passed no human on my trip, a slow one.

  Is it your luck, down there, to know one?

  No one.

  What have I left, who stood among mankind,

  When the firm base is undermined?

  A mind.

  Yet, with a vacant landscape as its mirror,

  What can it choose, to ease the terror?

  Error

  Is there no feeling, then, that I can trust,

  In spite of what we have discussed?

  Disgust.

  III

  Earlier, travelling on the roads where grass

  Softened the gutters for the marsh bird’s nest,

  He walked barefoot already, and already

  His uniform was peeling from his back.

  And coming to this hill across the plain,

  He sloughed it bit by bit. Now that, alone,

  He cannot seek himself as messenger,

  Or bear dispatches between elm and oak,

  It is a clumsy frock he starts to fashion

  From skins of mole and rabbit; he considers

  That one who wears it is without a role.

  But the curled darling who survives the war

  Has merely lost the admirers of those curls

  That always lavished most warmth on his neck;

  Though no one sees him, though it is the wind

  Utters ambiguous orders from the plain,

  Though nodding foxgloves are his only girls,

  His poverty is a sort of uniform.

  With a bone needle he pursues himself,

  Stitching the patchwork spread across his lap,

  A courier after identity, and sees

  A pattern grow among the disarray.

  IV

  The moon appears, distinct where all is dim,

  And steady in the orbit it must go.

  He lies in shadow, then light reaches him.

  While, there! the Milky Way follows below,

  A luminous field that swings across the sky.

  The ancient rhythm almost comforts, slow

  Bright mild recurrence that he might move by,

  Obedient in the act of breath, and lit,

  Mere life, by matter travelling sure and high.

  But this is envy for the inanimate,

  The youth of things. On the dead globe he sees

  Markings as one might on the earth from it,

  Where relics of emergent matter freeze.

  Down here, two more births followed on the first:

  Life, consciousness, like linked catastrophes.

  Their sequence in him cannot be reversed

  Except in death, thus, when the features set.

  Meanwhile, he must live, as he looks, immersed

  In consciousness that plots its own end yet;

  And since the plotter through success would lose

  Knowledge of it, he must without regret

  Accept the inheritance he did not choose,

  As he accepted drafting for that war

  That was not of his choosing. He must use

  The heaviness, the flaw, he always bore.

  The imperfect moon swims forward on its course;

  Yet, bathed by shade now, he imagines more –

  The clearest light in the whole universe.

  V

  Green overtaking green, it’s

  endless; squat grasses creep up,

  briars cross, heavily weighed

  branches overhang, thickets

  crowd in on the brown earth gap

  in green which is the path made

  by his repeated tread, which,

  enacting the wish to move,

  is defined by avoidance

  of loose ground, of rock and ditch,

  of thorn-brimmed hollows, and of

  poisoned beds. The ground hardens.

  Bare within limits. The trick

  is to stay free within them.

  The path branches, branches still,

  returning to itself, like

  a discovering system,

  or process made visible.

  It rains. He climbs up the hill.

  Drops are isolate on leaves,

  big and clear. It is cool, and

  he breathes the barbarous smell

  of the wet earth. Nothing moves

  at the edges of the mind.

  Memoirs of the World

  VI

  It has turned cold. I have been gathering wood,

  Numb-fingered, hardly feeling what I touched,

  Turning crisp leaves to pick up where I could

  The damp sticks from beneath them. I have crouched

  Piling them up to dry, all afternoon,

  And have heard all afternoon, over and over,

  Two falling notes – a sweet disconsolate tune,

  As if the bird called, from its twiggy cover,

  Nót now, nót now, nót now.

  I dislodge sticks for kindling, one by one,

  From brambles. Struck by shade, I stand and see,

  Half blinding me, the cold red setting sun

  Through the meshed branches of a leafless tree.

  It calls old sunsets to my mind, one most

  Which coloured, similarly, the white-grey, blackened

  Iron and slabbed concrete of a sentry post

  With its cold orange. Let me live, one second,

  Nót now, nót now, nót now.

  Most poignant and most weakening, that recall.

  Although I lived from day to day, too, there.

  Yet the comparison makes me sensible

  Of the diminishing warmth and light, which were,

  Or seem to have been, diminished less than now.

  The bird stops. Hardening in the single present,

  I know, hearing wind rattle in a bough,

  I have always harked thus after an incessant

  Nót now, nót now, nót now.

  VII

  Who was it in dark glasses?

  Nobody in the street could

  see if my eyes were open.

  I took them off for movies

  and sleep. I waited, I stood

  an armed angel among men.

  Between the dart of colours

  I wore a darkening and

  perceived an exact structure,

  a chart of the world. The coarse

  menace of line was deepened,

  and light was slightly impure.

  Yet as I lingered there was,

  I noticed, continual

  and faint, an indecision,

  a hunger in the senses.

  I would devour the thin wail

  of foghorns, or abandon

  my whole self time after time

  to the chipped glossy surface

  of some doorjamb, for instance,

  cramming my nail with its grime,

  stroking humps where colourless

  paint had filled faults to substance.

  I was presence without full

  being: from the streetcorner,

  in the mere fact of movement,

  w
as I entering the role

  of spy or spied on, master

  or the world’s abject servant?

  VIII

  Dryads, reposing in the bark’s hard silence,

  Circled about the edges of my fire,

  Exact in being, absolute in balance,

  Instruct me how to find here my desire:

  To separate the matter from its burning,

  Where, in the flux that your composures lack,

  Each into other constantly is turning.

  In the glowing fall of ash – rose, grey, and black,

  I search for meaning, studying to remember

  What the world was, and meant. Therefore I try

  To reconstruct it in a dying ember,

  And wonder, does fire make it live or die?

  And evil everywhere or nowhere, stealing

  Out of my reach, on air, shows like a spark.

  I think I grasp it. The momentary feeling

  Is merely pain, evil’s external mark.

  The neighbouring cinders redden now together,

  Like earlier worlds to search, where I am shown

  Only myself, although I seek another,

  A man who burnt from sympathy alone.

  IX

  A serving man. Curled my hair,

  wore gloves in my cap. I served

  all degrees and both sexes.

  But I gave readily from

  the largess of high spirits,

  a sturdy body and strong

  fingers. Nor was I servile.

  No passer-by could resist

  the fragrant impulse nodding

  upon my smile. I laboured

  to become a god of charm,

  an untirable giver.