Selected Poems of Thom Gunn Read online

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.

  What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

  These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.

  No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

  Into what bulk has method disappeared?

  Like ham, streaked. I am gross – grey, gross, flap-eared.

  The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.

  My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

  That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.

  If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.

  Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine.

  Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

  I root and root, you think that it is greed,

  It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

  Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,

  To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

  Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,

  From milky flower to the black forked root.

  From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin

  And human title, putting pig within.

  I push my big grey wet snout through the green,

  Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

  For Signs

  1

  In front of me, the palings of a fence

  Throw shadows hard as board across the weeds;

  The cracked enamel of a chicken bowl

  Gleams like another moon; each clump of reeds

  Is split with darkness and yet bristles whole.

  The field survives, but with a difference.

  2

  And sleep like moonlight drifts and clings to shape.

  My mind, which learns its freedom every day,

  Sinks into vacancy but cannot rest.

  While moonlight floods the pillow where it lay,

  It walks among the past, weeping, obsessed,

  Trying to master it and learn escape.

  I dream: the real is shattered and combined,

  Until the moon comes back into that sign

  It stood in at my birth-hour; and I pass

  Back to the field where, statued in the shine,

  Someone is gazing upward from the grass

  As if toward vaults that honeycomb the mind.

  Slight figure in a wide black hat, whose hair

  Massed and moon-coloured almost hides his face.

  The thin white lips are dry, the eyes intense

  Watching not thing, but lunar orgy, chase,

  Trap, and cool fantasy of violence.

  I recognize the pale long inward stare.

  His tight young flesh is only on the top.

  Beneath it, is an answering moon, at full,

  Pitted with craters and with empty seas.

  Dream mentor, I have been inside that skull,

  I too have used those cindered passages.

  But now the moon leaves Scorpio: I look up.

  3

  No, not inconstant, though it is called so.

  For I have always found it waiting there,

  Whether reduced to an invisible seed,

  Or whether swollen again above the air

  To rake the oubliettes of pain and greed

  Opened at night in fellowship below.

  It goes, and in its going it returns,

  Cycle that I in part am governed by

  And cannot understand where it is dark.

  I lean upon the fence and watch the sky,

  How light fills blinded socket and chafed mark.

  It soars, hard, full, and edged, it coldly burns.

  Three

  All three are bare.

  The father towels himself by two grey boulders

  Long body, then long hair,

  Matted like rainy bracken, to his shoulders.

  The pull and risk

  Of the Pacific’s touch is yet with him:

  He kicked and felt it brisk,

  Its cold live sinews tugging at each limb.

  It haunts him still:

  Drying his loins, he grins to notice how,

  Struck helpless with the chill,

  His cock hangs tiny and withdrawn there now.

  Near, eyes half-closed,

  The mother lies back on the hot round stones,

  Her weight to theirs opposed

  And pressing them as if they were earth’s bones.

  Hard bone, firm skin,

  She holds her breasts and belly up, now dry,

  Striped white where clothes have been,

  To the heat that sponsors all heat, from the sky.

  Only their son

  Is brown all over. Rapt in endless play,

  In which all games make one,

  His three-year nakedness is everyday.

  Swims as dogs swim.

  Rushes his father, wriggles from his hold.

  His body which is him,

  Sturdy and volatile, runs off the cold.

  Runs up to me:

  Hi there hi there, he shrills, yet will not stop,

  For though continually

  Accepting everything his play turns up

  He still leaves it

  And comes back to that pebble-warmed recess

  In which the parents sit,

  At watch, who had to learn their nakedness.

  From the Wave

  It mounts at sea, a concave wall

  Down-ribbed with shine,

  And pushes forward, building tall

  Its steep incline.

  Then from their hiding rise to sight

  Black shapes on boards

  Bearing before the fringe of white

  It mottles towards.

  Their pale feet curl, they poise their weight

  With a learn’d skill.

  It is the wave they imitate

  Keeps them so still.

  The marbling bodies have become

  Half wave, half men,

  Grafted it seems by feet of foam

  Some seconds, then,

  Late as they can, they slice the face

  In timed procession:

  Balance is triumph in this place,

  Triumph possession.

  The mindless heave of which they rode

  A fluid shelf

  Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,

  Loses itself.

  Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals

  Loosen and tingle;

  And by the board the bare foot feels

  The suck of shingle.

  They paddle in the shallows still;

  Two splash each other;

  Then all swim out to wait until

  The right waves gather.

  Street Song

  I am too young to grow a beard

  But yes man it was me you heard

  In dirty denim and dark glasses.

  I look through everyone who passes

  But ask him clear, I do not plead,

  Keys lids acid and speed.

  My grass is not oregano.

  Some of it grew in Mexico.

  You cannot guess the weed I hold,

  Clara Green, Acapulco Gold,

  Panama Red, you name it man,

  Best on the street since I began.

  My methedrine, my double-sun,

  Will give you two lives in your one,

  Five days of power before you crash.

  At which time use these lumps of hash

  – They burn so sweet, they smoke so smooth,

  They make you sharper while they soothe.

  Now here, the best I’ve got to show,

  Made by a righteous cat I know.

  Pure acid – it will scrape your brain,

  And make it something else again.

  Call it heaven, call it hell,

  Join me and see the world I sell.

  Join me, and I will take you there,

  Your head will cut out from your hair

  Into whichever self you choose
.

  With Midday Mick man you can’t lose,

  I’ll get you anything you need.

  Keys lids acid and speed.

  Grasses

  Laurel and eucalyptus, dry sharp smells,

  Pause in the dust of summer. But we sit

  High on a fort, above grey blocks and wells,

  And watch the restless grasses lapping it.

  Each dulling-green, keen, streaky blade of grass

  Leans to one body when the breezes start:

  A one-time pathway flickers as they pass,

  Where paler toward the root the quick ranks part.

  The grasses quiver, rising from below.

  I wait on warm rough concrete, I have time.

  They round off all the lower steps, and blow

  Like lights on bended water as they climb.

  From some dark passage in the abandoned fort,

  I hear a friend’s harmonica – withdrawn sound,

  A long whine drawling after several short …

  The spiky body mounting from the ground.

  A wail uneven all the afternoon,

  Thin, slow, no noise of tramping nor of dance.

  It is the sound, half tuneless and half tune,

  With which the scattered details make advance.

  Kirby’s Cove

  The Discovery of the Pacific

  They lean against the cooling car, backs pressed

  Upon the dust of a brown continent,

  And watch the sun, now Westward of their West,

  Fall to the ocean. Where it led they went.

  Kansas to California. Day by day

  They travelled emptier of the things they knew.

  They improvised new habits on the way,

  But lost the occasions, and then lost them too.

  One night, no one and nowhere, she had woken

  To resin-smell and to the firs’ slight sound,

  And through their sleeping-bag had felt the broken

  Tight-knotted surfaces of the naked ground.

  Only his lean quiet body cupping hers

  Kept her from it, the extreme chill. By degrees

  She fell asleep. Around them in the firs

  The wind probed, tiding through forked estuaries.

  And now their skin is caked with road, the grime

  Merely reflecting sunlight as it fails.

  They leave their clothes among the rocks they climb,

  Blunt leaves of iceplant nuzzle at their soles.

  Now they stand chin-deep in the sway of ocean,

  Firm West, two stringy bodies face to face,

  And come, together, in the water’s motion,

  The full caught pause of their embrace.

  Sunlight

  Some things, by their affinity light’s token,

  Are more than shown: steel glitters from a track;

  Small glinting scoops, after a wave has broken,

  Dimple the water in its draining back;

  Water, glass, metal, match light in their raptures,

  Flashing their many answers to the one.

  What captures light belongs to what it captures:

  The whole side of a world facing the sun,

  Re-turned to woo the original perfection,

  Giving itself to what created it,

  And wearing green in sign of its subjection.

  It is as if the sun were infinite.

  But angry flaws are swallowed by the distance;

  It varies, moves, its concentrated fires

  Are slowly dying – the image of persistence

  Is an image, only, of our own desires:

  Desires and knowledge touch without relating.

  The system of which sun and we are part

  Is both imperfect and deteriorating.

  And yet the sun outlasts us at the heart.

  Great seedbed, yellow centre of the flower,

  Flower on its own, without a root or stem,

  Giving all colour and all shape their power,

  Still recreating in defining them,

  Enable us, altering like you, to enter

  Your passionless love, impartial but intense,

  And kindle in acceptance round your centre,

  Petals of light lost in your innocence.

  from

  JACK STRAW’S CASTLE

  (1976)

  Diagrams

  Downtown, an office tower is going up.

  And from the mesa of unfinished top

  Big cranes jut, spectral points of stiffened net:

  Angled top-heavy artefacts, and yet

  Diagrams from the sky, as if its air

  Could drop lines, snip them off, and leave them there.

  On girders round them, Indians pad like cats,

  With wrenches in their pockets and hard hats.

  They wear their yellow boots like moccasins,

  Balanced where air ends and where steel begins,

  Sky men, and through the sole’s flesh, chewed and pliant,

  They feel the studded bone-edge of the giant.

  It grunts and sways through its whole metal length.

  And giving to the air is sign of strength.

  Iron Landscapes (and the Statue of Liberty)

  No trellises, no vines

  a fire escape

  Repeats a bare black Z from tier to tier.

  Hard flower, tin scroll embellish this landscape.

  Between iron columns I walk toward the pier.

  And stand a long time at the end of it

  Gazing at iron on the New Jersey side.

  A girdered ferry-building opposite,

  Displaying the name LACKAWANNA, seems to ride

  The turbulent brown-grey waters that intervene:

  Cool seething incompletion that I love.

  The zigzags come and go, sheen tracking sheen;

  And water wrestles with the air above.

  But I’m at peace with the iron landscape too,

  Hard because buildings must be hard to last

  – Block, cylinder, cube, built with their angles true,

  A dream of righteous permanence, from the past.

  In Nixon’s era, decades after the ferry,

  The copper embodiment of the pieties

  Seems hard, but hard like a revolutionary

  With indignation, constant as she is.

  From here you can glimpse her downstream, her far charm,

  Liberty, tiny woman in the mist

  – You cannot see the torch – raising her arm

  Lorn, bold, as if saluting with her fist.

  Morton Street Pier, New York, May 1973

  Last Days at Teddington

  The windows wide through day and night

  Gave on the garden like a room.

  The garden smell, green composite,

  Flowed in and out a house in bloom.

  To the shaggy dog who skidded from

  The concrete through the kitchen door

  To yellow-squared linoleum,

  It was an undivided floor.

  How green it was indoors. The thin

  Pale creepers climbed up brick until

  We saw their rolled tongues flicker in

  Across the cracked paint of the sill.

  How sociable the garden was.

  We ate and talked in given light.

  The children put their toys to grass

  All the warm wakeful August night.

  So coming back from drinking late

  We picked our way below the wall

  But in the higher grass, dewed wet,

  Stumbled on tricycle and ball.

  When everything was moved away,

  The house returned to board and shelf,

  And smelt of hot dust through the day,

  The garden fell back on itself.

  Jack Straw’s Castle

  1

  Jack Straw sits

  sits in his castle

  Jack Straw watches the rain

/>   why can’t I leave my castle

  he says, isn’t there anyone

  anyone here besides me

  sometimes I find myself wondering

  if the castle is castle at all

  a place apart, or merely

  the castle that every snail

  must carry around till his death

  and then there’s the matter of breath

  on a cold day it rears before me

  like a beautiful fern

  I’m amazed at the plant

  will it survive me

  a man of no account

  visited only by visions

  and no one here

  no one who knows how to play

  visions, voices, burning smells

  all of a rainy day

  2

  Pig Pig she cries

  I can hear her from next door

  He fucked me in the mouth

  and now he won’t give me car fare

  she rages and cries

  3

  The rain stops. I look round: a square of floor,

  Blond wood, shines palely in the laggard sun;

  The kittens suck, contrasting strips of fur,

  The mother in their box, a perfect fit;

  I finally got it how I wanted it,