The squirrels have reached the end of their caches,
they pause between the vast tree boles,
frisk their tails,
scratch at last year's leaf fall,
taking pot luck like gold-diggers.
The grey planes rise overhead,
like tall leaping horses
whose riders tug on metal reins
trampling the woods with hooves of noise.
This the squirrels are used to,
they dig on like beavers;
it is my helpless raising of my hands
to plug my ears
that startles them up the trees.
The American Military Cemetery, Cambridge.
If they had less than their share of years
these dead visitors can at least take pride
in their allotment up here above Madingley;
when our names are reallocated,
our untended graves requisitioned for gardens,
these few thousand will continue to be.
America gave the best dollars could buy,
each cross carved better than the last
in starch-white Portland stone,
well-placed trees of beech, catalpa, pagoda,
an invisible host of groundsmen
to clip the exact box hedges and lawn.
Surveying such magic, a superintendent
grows old here, distributes his fact sheet
(the flagpole's height, the depth of the oblong pools),
expatiates in the chapel, an Ops. room
mapping the war's progress, while overhead
mosaic squadrons enter heaven with the angels.
Horse chestnuts
Under horse chestnuts a concert with bees,
the ground bass, the noise of the leaves
like an audience rustling programmes, a dove
coos - you, you, I love, I love you, I love -
breaking off to give the rabble of songbirds
their turn, and the gulls flying seawards.
Listen, the bird is calling and getting
faint answers from the distance, sending
an urgent code along the avenue -
love, love, I love you, I love you -
in the green shade hung with magic lanterns
there's applause from the leaves. It sidesteps, turns
cocks its small grey head, its bright beady eyes
watching the tops of passing cars, the flies
crawling on the leaves, this figure below
looking up, making no noise. Or does he blow
through cupped hands - I, I love you, I -
waiting for a reply?
The Magic Town
Your husband wanted a quick sale,
waved the sign at the street like a flag
of surrender, tempered your distress
with a visit to a northern town
comforted by hills, where property's cheaper,
and the promise of your own car.
After you went the lights burned so late
I abandoned my vigil, it was so clearly
not you behind the makeshift curtains;
you always went up early, to your husband's chagrin,
makers of spells needing their sleep, or time
in their books, away from the television.
Perhaps they were all charmed,
the circle of your friends who found
gifts bestowed on them each time they called,
or was I the only one whose hand
received a light caress in taking hold
of my portion in what you had no use for?
They've lost their properties now, just things,
there's nothing here that wears your scent,
or conjures up images. I could rub
their surfaces for hours, no spirit in your guise
would appear to me, offering favours.
Your house has cast off its aurora
yet your magical effects linger
around the town, its least bright quarters
invested with special status by our walks,
our rendezvous. And though it's true
I shall never meet you in the streets,
or accompany you home across the park,
the town holds your warmth like a stone,
and I can imagine, centuries on,
archeological surveys will find
traces of our emotion here, like barrows.
Rose clouds in the bare windows
Rose clouds in the bare windows -
it took a clock to wake us,
lost among the crumpled pillows,
our bearings slowly found with kisses.
What could come between me and you,
laced by fingers, arms and thighs
but a golden hair you softly drew
out from our mouths? Nothing in your eyes
prepared me for this, the second's grace
when sparrows wake me, the tears that run
along the contours of the face
down routes they took at twelve and one.
And so it will be until I find
they have dissolved at every hour
each treaty of love we wrote and signed,
so true, so sure, all twenty four.
Tilt your head in the dark
Tilt your head in the dark, you can cry
in the porch of your partner's ear and not be heard;
any fool can learn to hide everyday pain
for a bedfellow reading with the light on,
red eyes and a watery gaze excuse
as hay-fever, in season, or conjunctivitis
flaring up again. 'Isn't it about time
you tidied yourself up a bit?' - indicating
your worn clothes - 'My God, the place is a pigsty!'
Tears that hiss on the sole of an iron
fall silently into a bath of children:
there's always a place you can really let rip
without waking the house.
These are skills you should be proud of.
When, in the pregnant interval
When, in the pregnant interval between
the closing of our books, you fall asleep -
I consider how our rhythms differ,
how long the night, how strange the way desire
gathers at the temples, of all places.
I could suggest we take the morning off -
'We're not teenagers' you would say, dressing
with your back to me. Switching on the light,
I go back to my book, saving time
I would have preferred to spend on embracing.
When planking touches at crown, shoulder, heel:
one will accept the arrangement of limbs,
the tidying of sparse grey hair. I sleep
easiest on my back, or not at all.
The Middle Son
The middle son
wreathed in his mother's scent
waved until the train had gone.
Too young to care, too old,
his brothers raced to the 'Travellers Fare' -
the middle son
sure it was something he had done,
his messy room, his noisy play,
waved until the train had gone.
His father standing there
recalled the sudden smart of beard,
the middle son
half-asleep, reaching out
to a parent gone by morning, and his son
waved until the train had gone.
'It won't be long', he said -
he lied, he was still waiting;
the middle son
waved until the train had gone.
Now this ring
Now this ring has escaped oblivion
as removed for rough work on a garden pot
it was not taken by magpies or lost to the worms,
consigned to a pocket for days it outsmarted
the faulty seam, missed gratings by inches,
retrieved from cloakrooms, the workshop's woodshavings,
survived abrasion, the atoms of gold dropped
wherever I went, the burglar's ransacking
and the ring-stripping cold of the sea;
it has won safe-keeping, slipped from the hand,
(suddenly naked and afraid) and discarded
in a drawer with souvenirs and foreign coins.
To a lover who admits to a belief in reincarnation
Older than your father whose déjà vu
told you he started out a wimpled nun,
you show me in your present apparition
galleries of self-portraits. Who are you,
and how can you expect your love to not
ridicule this leap-frogging of the grave,
from ruffian jabbering in his cave
through bird and beetle back to the year dot?
Put your borrowed arms round me, I won't mock
your creed, despite the séance tape you played
on which you drown, and the rape of a maid
in medieval times; it's poppycock,
of course, this strange affiliation to the dead,
the provisional way you smile and nod your head.
Buying lemons
Their goods swathed in polythene
traders lurk in dim shelters, the stall of fruit
and flowers the only one where a queue grows.
Day-glo men with hammers and crow-bars
batter a grate in a foaming gutter;
it stays fast for all their pains.
Lemons from a hot Sicilian grove
where an adder basks in a broken wall
and twigs crackle in the heat.
Buses sail the wet streets
with bow waves and wakes of spray
bound for the long low Cambridge suburbs.
On the dark stairs the lemons burst the wet bag,
bounce high and skew to the door and the lawn
where daffodils bloom and magnolia buds.
Richard impales one on his umbrella -
he's back from a sortie for spices,
his blazer dry as a bone, his Diana laughing.
In memory of Richard Marsh
(drowned on naval exercises, 10/3/82).
Richard, recipient of my longest epistles,
this is a letter you won't have to read;
remember I tried to convert you,
to give you the password you didn't need?
Under a smoke-screen to hide us from Finals
you argued with me about God, your talk
ship-shape for Dartmouth,
your gait more a march than a walk.
You knew where you were going, you said,
your blue eyes fixed on the horizon,
scanned from the bridge of your first command,
your fair hair clipped for a career in the sun.
Yet you were, drawn, weren't you, when you met
the Christians in their joy, Bible-handed, off somewhere
or heard the singing in an upper room and found,
later, in the bar, their looks too bright to bear?
Look at me now, confused, apostate,
your being, apparently, in hell, added to my wrongs;
did I fail you? Tell me, what were your dumb cries
as you drank the sea to slake your burning lungs?