Poetry

     Spain frightened you. Spain where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow omitted Spain. The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum. You did not know the language, your soul was empty Of the signs, and the welding light…

Sally, I was happy with you. Yet a dirty cafeteria in a railway station — In the hour before dawn over a formica table Confetti’ed with cigarette ash and coffee stains — Was all we ever knew of a home together. “Give me a child and let me go”: “Give me a child and let…

It is not true what they say about the body: that it must be loved, that it cannot sleep through its nights alone without injury. Look at me. Look at the way the artist lies about his loneliness, painting a room where walls, floor, and ceiling converge on a door too small for me to…

Now that we’ve come to the end I’ve been trying to piece it together, Not that distance makes anything clearer. It began in the half-light While we walked through the dawn chorus After a party that lasted all night, With the blackbird, the wood-pigeon, The song-thrush taking a bludgeon To a snail, our taking each…

I am stretched out under the lean-to Of an old tobacco-shed On a farm in North Carolina. A cardinal sings from the dogwood For the love of marijuana. His song goes over my head. There is such splendour in the grass I might be the picture of happiness. Yet I am utterly bereft Of the…

I, too, have trailed my father’s spirit From the mud-walled cabin behind the mountain Where he was born and bred, TB and scarletina, The farm where he was first hired out, To Wigan, to Crewe junction, A building-site from which he disappeared And took passage, almost, for Argentina. The mountain is coming down with hazel,…

They’re kindly here, to let us linger so late, Long after the shutters are up. A waiter glides from the kitchen with a plate Of stew, or some thick soup, And settles himself at the next table but one. We know, you and I, that it’s over, That something or other has come between Us,…

It’s almost April here, Where a white moth flutters on the screen door, And I step inside without scaring it off, Without a sound, And turn, And see the body sprawled over the couch— His bruised face looking As if it listens to all voices at once, now . . . Though in the end…

“The people need poetry.” That voice That was last heard asking for warm Clothes and money, also knew the hunger We all have for the gold light The goldfinch carries into the air Like a tang of crushed almonds. “The Kremlin mountaineer” scaled The peak of atrocity, seeking The cold final barbiturate Tablet from the…