Selected Poems of Thom Gunn Page 7

  Needing me, needing me, ‘Quick!’

  they would call: I came gladly.

  Even as I served them sweets

  I served myself a trencher

  of human flesh in some dark

  sour pantry, and munched from it.

  My diet, now, is berries,

  water, and the gristle of

  rodents. I brought myself here,

  widening the solitude

  till it was absolute. But

  at times I am ravenous.

  X

  All that snow pains my eyes, but I stare

  on, stare on, lying in my shelter,

  feverish, out at the emptiness.

  A negative of matter, it is

  a dead white surface at random crossed

  by thin twigs and bird tracks on the crust

  like fragments of black netting: hard, cold,

  windswept. But now my mind loses hold

  and, servant to an unhinged body,

  becoming of it, sinks rapidly

  beneath the stitched furs I’m swaddled in,

  beneath the stink of my trembling skin,

  till it enters the heart of fever,

  as its captive, unable to stir.

  I watch the cells swimming in concert

  like nebulae, calm, without effort,

  great clear globes, pink and white. – But look at

  the intruder with blurred outline that

  glides in among the shoals, colourless,

  with tendrils like an anemone’s

  drifting all around it like long fur,

  gently, unintelligently. Where

  it touches it holds, in an act of

  enfolding, possessing, merging love.

  There is coupling where no such should be.

  Surely it is a devil, surely

  it is life’s parody I see, which

  enthrals a universe with its rich

  heavy passion, leaving behind it

  gorgeous mutations only, then night.

  It ends. I open my eyes to snow.

  I can sleep now; as I drowse I know

  I must keep to the world’s bare surface,

  I must perceive, and perceive what is:

  for though the hold of perception must

  harden but diminish, like the frost,

  yet still there may be something retained

  against the inevitable end.

  XI

  Epitaph for Anton Schmidt

  The Schmidts obeyed, and marched on Poland.

  And there an Anton Schmidt, Feldwebel,

  Performed uncommon things, not safe,

  Nor glamorous, nor profitable.

  Was the expression on his face

  ‘Reposeful and humane good nature’?

  Or did he look like any Schmidt,

  Of slow and undisclosing feature?

  I know he had unusual eyes,

  Whose power no orders might determine,

  Not to mistake the men he saw,

  As others did, for gods or vermin.

  For five months, till his execution,

  Aware that action has its dangers,

  He helped the Jews to get away

  – Another race at that, and strangers.

  He never did mistake for bondage

  The military job, the chances,

  The limits; he did not submit

  To the blackmail of his circumstances.

  I see him in the Polish snow,

  His muddy wrappings small protection,

  Breathing the cold air of his freedom

  And treading a distinct direction.

  Elegy on the Dust

  XII

  The upper slopes are busy with the cricket;

  But downhill, hidden in the thicket,

  Birds alternate with sudden piercing calls

  The rustling from small animals

  Retreating, venturing, as they hunt and breed

  Interdependent in that shade.

  Beneath it, glare and silence cow the brain

  Where, troughed between the hill and plain,

  The expanse of dust waits: acres calm and deep,

  Swathes folded on themselves in sleep

  Or waves that, as if frozen in mid-roll,

  Hang in ridged rows. They cannot fall,

  Yet imperceptibly they shift, at flood,

  In quiet encroachment on the wood –

  First touching stalk and leaf with silvery cast,

  They block the pores to death at last

  And drift in silky banks around the trunk,

  Where dock and fern are fathoms sunk.

  Yet farther from the hill the bowl of dust

  Is open to the casual gust

  That dives upon its silence, teasing it

  Into a spasm of wild grit.

  Here it lies unprotected from the plain,

  And vexed with constant loss and gain,

  It seems, of the world’s refuse and debris,

  Turns to a vaguely heaving sea,

  Where its own eddies, spouts, and calms appear.

  But seas contain a graveyard: here

  The graveyard is the sea, material things

  – From stone to claw, scale, pelt, and wings –

  Are all reduced to one form and one size.

  And here the human race, too, lies.

  An imperfection endlessly refined

  By the imperfection of the mind.

  They have all come who sought distinction hard

  To this universal knacker’s yard,

  Blood dried, flesh shrivelled, and bone decimated:

  Motion of life is thus repeated,

  A process ultimately without pain

  As they are broken down again.

  The remnants of their guilt mix as they must

  And average out in grains of dust

  Too light to act, too small to harm, too fine

  To simper or betray or whine.

  Each colourless hard grain is now distinct,

  In no way to its neighbour linked,

  Yet from wind’s unpremeditated labours

  It drifts in concord with its neighbours,

  Perfect community in its behaviour.

  It yields to what it sought, a saviour:

  Scattered and gathered, irregularly blown,

  Now sheltered by a ridge or stone,

  Now lifted on strong upper winds, and hurled

  In endless hurry round the world.

  The First Man

  XIII

  The present is a secure place to inhabit,

  The past being fallen from the mind, the future

  A repetition, only, with variations:

  The same mouse on its haunches, nibbling, absorbed,

  Another piece of root between the forefeet

  Slender as wishbones; the woodlice, silvery balls;

  The leaves still falling in vestiges of light.

  Is he a man? If man is cogitation,

  This is at most a rudimentary man,

  An unreflecting organ of perception;

  Slow as a bull, in moving; yet, in taking,

  Quick as an adder. He does not dream at night.

  Echo is in the past, the snow long past,

  The year has recovered and put forth many times.

  He is bent, looks smaller, and is furred, it seems.

  Molelike he crouches over mounds of dirt,

  Sifting. His eyes have sunk behind huge brows.

  His nostrils twitch, distinguishing one by one

  The smells of the unseen that blend to make

  The black smell of the earth, smell of the Mother,

  Smell of her food: pale tender smell of worms,

  Tough sweet smell of her roots. He is a nose.

  He picks through the turned earth, and eats. A mouth.

  If he is man, he is the first man lurking

  In a thicket of time. The mesh of green grows tighter.

  There is yew, and
oak picked out with mistletoe.

  Watch, he is darkening in the heavy shade

  Of trunks that thicken in the ivy’s grip.

  XIV

  ‘What is it? What?’

  Mouth struggles with the words that mind forgot.

  While from the high brown swell

  He watches it, the smudge, he sees it grow

  As it crawls closer, crawls unturnable

  And unforeseen upon the plain below.

  ‘That must be men.’

  Knowledge invades him, yet he shrinks again

  And sickens to live still

  Upon the green slopes of his isolation,

  The ‘final man upon a final hill,’

  As if he did a sort of expiation.

  And now he dreams

  Of a shadowed pool nearby fed by two streams:

  If he washed there, he might,

  Skin tautened from the chill, emerge above,

  Inhuman as a star, as cold, as white,

  Freed from all dust. And yet he does not move.

  Could he assert

  To men who climb up in their journey’s dirt

  That clean was separate?

  The dirt would dry back, hardening in the heat:

  Perpetual that unease, that world of grit

  Breathed in, and gathered on the hands and feet.

  He is unaware

  Of the change already taking place as there,

  In the cold clear early light

  He, lingering on the scorched grass wet with dew,

  Still hunched but now a little more upright,

  In picturing man almost becomes man too.

  XV

  Hidden behind a rock, he watches, grown

  As stony as a lizard poised on stone.

  Below, the indeterminate shape flows steady

  From plain to wood, from wood to slope. Already

  Sharp outlines break, in movement, from the edge.

  Then in approach upon the final ridge

  It is slowly lost to sight, but he can hear

  The shingle move with feet. Then they appear,

  Being forty men and women, twos and threes,

  Over the rim. From where he is he sees

  One of the last men stumble, separate,

  Up to the rock, this rock, and lean on it.

  You can hear him gulp for wind, he is so close,

  You can hear his hand rasp on the shrivelled moss

  Blotching the rock: by peering you can see

  What a ribbed bony creature it must be,

  Sweat streaking dirt at collarbones and spine,

  Sores round the mouth disfiguring the line.

  And on the thin chest two long parallel

  Clear curving scratches are discernible.

  Recent, for only now the drops within

  Steal through the white torn edges of the skin

  To mix with dirt. Round here, such cuts are common.

  It is not hard to visualize the human,

  Tired, walking upward on a wooded slant;

  Keeping his eyes upon the ground in front,

  He made his way round some dropped rotten limb,

  And a hanging briar unnoticed swung at him.

  And only later does it start to sting.

  That wood has its own way of countering.

  The watcher is disturbed, not knowing why.

  He has with obstinate equanimity,

  Unmoving and unmoved, watched all the rest,

  But seeing the trivial scratches on the chest,

  He frowns. And he performs an action next

  So unconsidered that he is perplexed,

  Even in performing it, by what it means –

  He walks around to where the creature leans.

  The creature sees him, jumps back, staggers, calls,

  Then, losing balance on the pebbles, falls.

  Now that he has moved toward, through, and beyond

  The impulse he does not yet understand,

  He must continue where he has begun,

  Finding, as when a cloud slips from the sun,

  He has entered, without stirring, on a field

  The same and yet more green and more detailed,

  Each act of growth discovered by his gaze;

  Yet if the place is changed by what surveys,

  He is surveyed and he himself is changed,

  Bombarded by perceptions, rearranged –

  Rays on the skin investing with a shape,

  A clarity he cannot well escape.

  He stops, bewildered by his force, and then

  Lifts up the other to his feet again.

  XVI

  Others approach, and I grip

  his arm. For it seems to me

  they file past my mind, my mind

  perched on this bare rock, watching.

  They turn and look at me full,

  and as they pass they name me.

  What is the name Adam speaks

  after the schedule of beasts?

  Though I grip his arm, the man,

  the scratched man, seems among them,

  and as he pauses the old

  bitter dizziness hits me:

  I almost fall. The stale stench!

  the hangdog eyes, the pursed mouth!

  no hero or saint, that one.

  It is a bare world, and lacks

  history; I am neither

  his lord nor his servant.

  By an act of memory,

  I make the recognition:

  I stretch out the word to him

  from which conversations start,

  naming him, also, by name.

  XVII

  Others approach. Well, this one may show trust

  Around whose arm his fingers fit.

  The touched arm feels of dust, mixing with dust

  On the hand that touches it.

  And yet a path is dust, or it is none,

  – Merely unstable mud, or weeds,

  Or a stream that quietly slips on and on

  Through the undergrowth it feeds.

  His own flesh, which he hardly feels, feels dust

  Raised by the war both partly caused

  And partly fought, and yet survived. You must,

  If you can, pause; and, paused,

  Turn out toward others, meeting their look at full,

  Until you have completely stared

  On all there is to see. Immeasurable,

  The dust yet to be shared.

  Pierce Street

  Nobody home. Long threads of sunlight slant

  Past curtains, blind, and slat, through the warm room.

  The beams are dazzling, but, random and scant,

  Pierce where they end

  small areas of the gloom

  On curve of chairleg or a green stalk’s bend.

  I start exploring. Beds and canvases

  Are shapes in each room off the corridor,

  Their colours muted, square thick presences

  Rising between

  the ceiling and the floor,

  A furniture inferred much more than seen.

  Here in the seventh room my search is done.

  A bluefly circles, irregular and faint.

  And round the wall above me friezes run:

  Fixed figures drawn

  in charcoal or in paint.

  Out of night now the flesh-tint starts to dawn.

  Some stand there as if muffled from the cold,

  Some naked in it, the wind around a roof.

  But armed, their holsters as if tipped with gold.

  And twice life-size –

  in line, in groups, aloof,

  They all stare down with large abstracted eyes.

  A silent garrison, and always there,

  They are the soldiers of the imagination

  Produced by it to guard it everywhere.

  Bodied within

  the limits of their station

  As, also, I am bodied in m
y skin,

  They vigilantly preserve as they prevent

  And are the thing they guard, having some time stood

  Where the painter reached to make them permanent.

  The f loorboards creak.

  The house smells of its wood.

  Those who are transitory can move and speak.

  from

  MOLY

  (1971)

  Rites of Passage

  Something is taking place.

  Horns bud bright in my hair.

  My feet are turning hoof.

  And Father, see my face

  – Skin that was damp and fair

  Is barklike and, feel, rough.

  See Greytop how I shine.

  I rear, break loose, I neigh

  Snuffing the air, and harden

  Toward a completion, mine.

  And next I make my way

  Adventuring through your garden.

  My play is earnest now.

  I canter to and fro.

  My blood, it is like light.

  Behind an almond bough,

  Horns gaudy with its snow,

  I wait live, out of sight.

  All planned before my birth

  For you, Old Man, no other,

  Whom your groin’s trembling warns.

  I stamp upon the earth

  A message to my mother.

  And then I lower my horns.

  Moly

  Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.

  I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

  Leathery toad that ruts for days on end,

  Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend,

  Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,

  Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat: