Poems 1960-2000 Read Free Page B

the wriggling, munching scavengers.
    Returning later, though, you will see
    a shape of clean bone, a few feathers,
    an inoffensive symbol of what
    once lived. Nothing to make you shudder.
    It is clear then. But perhaps you find
    the analogy I have chosen
    for our dead affair rather gruesome –
    too unpleasant a comparison.
    It is not accidental. In you
    I see maggots close to the surface.
    You are eaten up by self-pity,
    crawling with unlovable pathos.
    If I were to touch you I should feel
    against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.
    Do not ask me for charity now:
    go away until your bones are clean.

The Water Below
    This house is floored with water,
    wall to wall, a deep green pit,
    still and gleaming, edged with stone.
    Over it are built stairways
    and railed living-areas
    in wrought iron. All rather
    impractical; it will be
    damp in winter, and we shall
    surely drop small objects – keys,
    teaspoons, or coins – through the chinks
    in the ironwork, to splash
    lost into the glimmering
    depths (and do we know how deep?).
    It will have to be rebuilt:
    a solid floor of concrete
    over this dark well (perhaps
    already full of coins, like
    the flooded crypt of that church
    in Ravenna). You might say
    it could be drained, made into
    a useful cellar for coal.
    But I am sure the water
    would return; would never go.
    Under my grandmother’s house
    in Drury, when I was three,
    I always believed there was
    water: lift up the floorboards
    and you would see it – a lake,
    a subterranean sea.
    True, I played under the house
    and saw only hard-packed earth,
    wooden piles, gardening tools,
    a place to hunt for lizards.
    That was different: below
    I saw no water. Above,
    I knew it must still be there,
    waiting. (For why did we say
    ‘Forgive us our trespasses,
    deliver us from evil’?)
    Always beneath the safe house
    lies the pool, the hidden sea
    created before we were.
    It is not easy to drain
    the waters under the earth. 

Think Before You Shoot
    Look, children, the wood is full of tigers,
    scorching the bluebells with their breath.
    You reach for guns. Will you preserve the flowers
    at such cost? Will you prefer the death
    of prowling stripes to a mush of trampled stalks?
    Through the eyes, then – do not spoil the head.
    Tigers are easier to shoot than to like.
    Sweet necrophiles, you only love them dead.
    There now, you’ve got three – and with such fur, too,
    golden and warm and salty. Very good.
    Don’t expect them to forgive you, though.
    There are plenty more of them. This is their wood
    (and their bluebells, which you have now forgotten).
    They’ve eaten all the squirrels. They want you,
    and it’s no excuse to say you’re only children.
    No one is on your side. What will you do?

The Pangolin
    There have been all those tigers, of course,
    and a leopard, and a six-legged giraffe,
    and a young deer that ran up to my window
    before it was killed, and once a blue horse,
    and somewhere an impression of massive dogs.
    Why do I dream of such large, hot-blooded beasts
    covered with sweating fur and full of passions
    when there could be dry lizards and cool frogs,
    or slow, modest creatures, as a rest
    from all those panting, people-sized animals?
    Hedgehogs or perhaps tortoises would do,
    but I think the pangolin would suit me best:
    a vegetable animal, who goes
    disguised as an artichoke or asparagus-tip
    in a green coat of close-fitting leaves,
    with his flat shovel-tail and his pencil-nose:
    the scaly anteater. Yes, he would fit
    more aptly into a dream than into his cage
    in the Small Mammal House; so I invite him
    to be dreamt about, if he would care for it.

A Game
    They are throwing the ball
    to and fro between them,
    in and out of the picture.
    She is in the painting
    hung on the wall
    in a narrow gold frame.
    He stands on the floor
    catching and tossing
    at the right distance.
    She wears a white dress,
    black boots and stockings,
    and a flowered straw hat.
    She moves in silence
    but it seems from her face
    that she