Poems 1960-2000 Read Free

it was like a wheel,
    the paper-thin spokes raying out from the hub
    to the half-transparent circumference of rind,
    with small dark ellipses suspended between.
    He could see the wood of the table-top through it.
    Then he knelt, and with his eye at orange-level
    saw it as the globe, its pithy core
    upright from pole to flattened pole. Next,
    its levitation: sustained (or so he told us)
    by a week’s diet of nothing but rice-water
    he had developed powers, drawing upon which
    he raised it to a height of about two feet
    above the table, with never a finger near it.
    That was all. It descended, gradually opaque,
    to rest; while he sat giddy and shivering.
    (He shivered telling it.) But surely, we asked,
    (and still none of us mentioned self-hypnosis
    or hallucinations caused by lack of food),
    surely triumphant too? Not quite, he said,
    with his little crooked smile. It was not enough:
    he should have been able to summon up,
    created out of what he had newly learnt,
    a perfectly imaginary orange, complete
    in every detail; whereupon the real orange
    would have vanished. Then came explanations
    and his talk of mysticism, occult physics,
    alchemy, the Qabalah – all his hobby-horses.
    If there was failure, it was only here
    in the talking. For surely he had lacked nothing,
    neither power nor insight nor imagination,
    when he knelt alone in his room, seeing before him
    suspended in the air that golden globe,
    visible and transparent, light-filled:
    his only fruit from the Tree of Life. 

Composition for Words and Paint
    This darkness has a quality
    that poses us in shapes and textures,
    one plane behind another,
    flatness in depth.
    Your face; a fur of hair; a striped
    curtain behind, and to one side cushions;
    nothing recedes, all lies extended.
    I sink upon your image.
    I see a soft metallic glint,
    a tinsel weave behind the canvas,
    aluminium and bronze beneath the ochre.
    There is more in this than we know.
    I can imagine drawn around you
    a white line, in delicate brush-strokes:
    emphasis; but you do not need it.
    You have completeness.
    I am not measuring your gestures;
    (I have seen you measure those of others,
    know a mind by a hand’s trajectory,
    the curve of a lip).
    But you move, and I move towards you,
    draw back your head, and I advance.
    I am fixed to the focus of your eyes.
    I share your orbit.
    Now I discover things about you:
    your thin wrists, a tooth missing;
    and how I melt and burn before you.
    I have known you always.
    The greyness from the long windows
    reduces visual depth; but tactile
    reality defies half-darkness.
    My hands prove you solid.
    You draw me down upon your body,
    hard arms behind my head.
    Darkness and soft colours blur.
    We have swallowed the light.
    Now I dissolve you in my mouth,
    catch in the corners of my throat
    the sly taste of your love, sliding
    into me, singing;
    just as the birds have started singing.
    Let them come flying through the windows
    with chains of opals around their necks.
    We are expecting them. 

Regression
    All the flowers have gone back into the ground.
    We fell on them, and they did not lie
    crushed and crumpled, waiting to die
    on the earth’s surface. No: they suddenly wound
    the film of their growth backwards. We saw them shrink
    from blossom to bud to tiny shoot,
    down from the stem and up from the root.
    Back to the seed, brothers. It makes you think.
    Clearly they do not like us. They’ve gone away,
    given up. And who could blame
    anything else for doing the same?
    I notice that certain trees look smaller today.
    You can’t escape the fact: there’s a backward trend
    from oak to acorn, and from pine
    to cone; they all want to resign.
    Understandable enough, but where does it end?
    Harder, you’d think, for animals; yet the cat
    was pregnant, but has not produced.
    Her rounded belly is reduced,
    somehow, to normal. How to answer that?
    Buildings, perhaps, will be the next to go;
    imagine it: a tinkle of glass,
    a crunch of brick, and a house will