A meal of pure white bread is bad
When given to a dog the dog goes mad.
The bread of life is of a different grain
It feeds the body wholemeal and the brain.
13
Slowly, slowly, Dungeness lighthouse
Dim in the distance dipped its wick:
Old Folkestone vowed to thee its country
And Beachy Head was being sick;
But stouter England stood and stouter
From Berwick’s Tweed to Dover Castle
Hugging the Downs beneath its arm
Like an empty paper parcel;
And slowly also big Cape Grey Nose
Lays itself before the boat
Sends its white birds up to catch my
Soul while yet it stays afloat.
14
Retreat, dig in, retreat
Withdraw your shadow from the crimson
Gutters that run riot down the street.
Retreat, dig in, arrange your coat
As a protective covering
A clever camouflage of antidote.
Retreat still more, still more
Remembering your images and words:
Perfect the principles of fang-and-claw.
The shadows of retreat are wide
Town and desert equally bereft
Of honest hieroglyph or guide.
Release your territory and retreat
Record preserve and memorize
The journey where no drums can rouse nor beat:
Defeat is not the question. Withdraw
Into the hollows of the hills
Until this winter passes into thaw.
Dig in no more. Turn round and fight
Forget the wicked and regret the lame
And travel back the way you came,
In front the darkness, and behind — THE LIGHT.
from A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, 1964
POEM LEFT BY A DEAD MAN
Let no one say I was cleaning this gun:
I killed myself because
I wanted the sun
But got the moon.
Sanity came back too soon.
I did not even clean the gun:
Put in two bullets for the moon and sun
Spun the chamber in a final game.
The sun and moon were both the same.
CAPE FINISTERRE
Borrow got here, so did I
Nothing in front but sea and sky.
Blue, traditional, unplanned,
Then white with envy at safe land:
Were such cold acres ever seen
Than vast and climbing for this rock?
Big as the fish that got away,
Bigger, but no one ever died from shock
At so much water, such wide space:
Vostok III and Vostok IV
Slap proportion in the face.
Rapier-thin horizons claw
At blasé tissue of bland eye:
While Man is climbing at the moon
The sea foams white on every shore,
Moonstruck where the start began
Moonlit in the wake of Man
Who turns his back on Finisterre.
WOODS
Woods are for observing from a distance
On your father’s arms:
Woods are for being frightened of –
Bogie-men swing among those close-packed trees.
Woods are then for making fires in
Running before the wrath of cop or farmer:
Smoke and the smell of dandelions
In place of blood.
Later for loving girls in:
Untidy bushes lick damp hair,
Secret, dark and out of sight
With nothing now to replace blood.
Some use woods for attacking and defending
The black scream of unnatural possession,
Tree roots linchpinned into earth
By shudders and the soil of death.
By summer shunned in fear of lightning
The bitter roaming flash of snaked lightning;
In winter shelter us from rain or snow:
Tree-packs hold our fate like cards.
Woods are then forgotten two-score years
Power lapsing into midnight dreams,
The core of body and soul
Scooped by the knife of living.
The wood became jungle, and you its shadow:
Woods a purple rage of wakened dogs,
To be kept out of, snubbed
Hemmed into night, not known.
Woods returned, tamed, not for
Making love or fires in.
Familiar; suspicious of their shelter
You stay at home in rain or snow –
The woods are seen but not remembered
A far-off shadow, cloud or dream;
Your power vanishes with their’s –
No more to be defended, or attacked.
STORM
Safe from horizontal rain
And gale-blown boxing-gloves thumping the walls
The wireless plays a drama
Of a poet stricken at a priest’s house
Reached only by footpath,
A poet descending Jacob’s ladder made of sand
Washed by mountain torrents,
Spouting rhetoric of fire as he fell –
While kilocycles off frequency
Morse code mewed by strophe and antistrophe
Behind the stark undoing of the poet
Lost in narrow seams of God and Sin and Death,
Corroded by the opposite of what he would be.
The code comes in again, a querulous demand
Plucked by a far-off guitar with one string left
That chance may hear,
And through the poet’s white despair
The rhythmic images cry distraction,
Till I read their symbols
That beyond my bosom-comfort
A ship by chance of time committed
To elemental wrath in asking for anchorage
From blind and twisting waves:
Five score sailors on the sea
Never to be compared to a suffering poet in his anguish.
HOUSEWIFE
A housewife sweeps her doorstep
Pavement yard and walls
Each leaf of wilting privet
Polishes the window
To do away with dust and bloodmarks
In case one speck shows sin.
Kills all trace by art and elbow as if dirt
Smears the dark side of her mirror face –
As proof of jungle ape and missing link
That drags back to when we hopped
From the saltpan slime of Lake Bacteria,
That first jelly-blob deviously edging
Towards moondust and the feat of sleep,
Sunstroke, blight of spoiled nerves,
Weapons and a new flint-hack for food –
And then the bright machinegun.