Poetry

1 In nineteen sixty, in July a husband made his young wife cry. Mr Cordelia, plain and true, God help the poor bitch marries you, your truth that lacks the warmth of lies, the decency to compromise. Watch him this dull and windy day, the seventh of their holiday. There’s been a row, he runs…

She learned again so soon How the body is subdued To all the laws that rule The acorn’s fall and the erosion of tall cliffs. Like one borne away in a dance and veiled She dreamed of a high house with shining floors Where they squatted over stoves And well-shod women held breath in the…

“Dear wife, I don’t suppose you understand my cheerfulness these days with passion cooling, my love-songs of a bachelor, my boyish fooling, the way I lie so easy on my own side or rise to screw newspaper for the fire? Crooning over breakfast pans is all that I desire. Safely alive in the quiet light…

My eldest sister arrived home that morning In her white muslin evening dress. `Who the hell do you think you are Running out to dances in next to nothing? As though we hadn’t enough bother With the world at war, if not at an end.’ My father was pounding the breakfast-table. `Those Yankees were touch…

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…