Selected Poems of Thom Gunn Page 8
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,