I’ve led you by my garrulous banks, babbling
on and on till – drunk on air
and sure it’s only water talking –
you come at last to my silence.
Listen, I’m dark
and still and deep enough.
Even this hottest gonging sun
on this longest day
What are you waiting for?
I lie here, inviting, winking you in.
The woman was easy.
Like to like, I called her, she came.
In no time I had her
out of herself, slipping on my water-stockings,
leaning into, being cupped and clasped
in my green glass bra.
But it’s you I want, and you know it, man.
I watch you, stripped, knee-deep
in my shallows, telling yourself
that what makes you gasp
and balls your gut
is not my coldness but your own fear.
– Your reasonable fear,
what’s true in me admits it.
(Though deeper, oh
older than any reason.)
Yes, I could
drown you, you
could foul my depths, it’s not
unheard of. What’s fish
in me could make flesh of you,
my wet weeds against your thigh, it
could turn nasty.
I could have you
gulping fistfuls fighting yourself
back from me.
I get darker and darker, suck harder.
On-the-brink man, you
wish I’d flash and dazzle again.
You’d make a fetish of zazzing dragonflies?
You want I should zip myself up
with the kingfisher’s flightpath, be beautiful?
I say no tricks. I say just trust,
I’ll soak through your skin and
slake your thirst.
I watch. You clench,
clench and come into me.
1984
She said she
woke up with him in
her head, in her bed.
Her mother-tongue clung to her mouth’s roof
in terror, dumbing her, and he came with a name
that was none of her making.
No maidservant ever
in her narrow attic, combing
out her hair in the midnight mirror
on Hallowe’en (having eaten
that egg with its yolk hollowed out
then filled with salt)
– oh never one had such success as this
she had not courted.
The amazed flesh of her
at his apparition.
Later, stark staring awake to everything
(the room, the dark parquet, the white high Alps beyond)
all normal in the moonlight
and him gone, save a ton-weight sensation,
the marks fading visibly where
his buttons had bit into her and
the rough serge of his suiting had chafed her sex,
she knew – oh that was not how –
but he’d entered her utterly.
This was the penetration
of seven swallowed apple pips.
Or else he’d slipped like a silver dagger
between her ribs and healed her up secretly
again. Anyway
he was inside her
and getting him out again
would be agony fit to quarter her,
unstitching everything.
Eyes on those high peaks
in the reasonable sun of the morning,
she dressed in damped muslin
and sat down to quill and ink
and icy paper.
1984
My little sister likes to try my shoes,
to strut in them,
admire her spindle-thin twelve-year-old legs
in this season’s styles.
She says they fit her perfectly,
but wobbles
on their high heels, they’re
hard to balance.
I like to watch my little sister
playing hopscotch, admire the neat hops-and-skips of her,
their quick peck,
never-missing their mark, not
over-stepping the line.
She is competent at peever.
I try to warn my little sister
about unsuitable shoes,
point out my own distorted feet, the calluses,
odd patches of hard skin.
I should not like to see her
in my shoes.
I wish she would stay
sure footed,
sensibly shod.
1981
Smash me looking-glass glass
coffin, the one
that keeps your best black self on ice.
Smash me, she’ll smash back –
without you she can’t lift a finger.
Smash me she’ll whirl out like Kali,
trashing the alligator mantrap handbags
with her righteous karate.
The ashcan for the stubbed lipsticks
and the lipsticked butts,
the wet lettuce of fivers.
She’ll spill the Kleenex blossoms,
the tissues of lies, the matted
nests of hair from the brushes’
hedgehog spikes, she’ll junk
the dead mice and the tampons
the twinking single eyes
of winkled out diamante, the hatpins
the whalebone and lycra,
the appleblossom and the underwires,
the chafing iron that kept them maiden,
the Valium and initialled hankies,
the lovepulps and the Librium,
the permanents and panstick and
Coty and Tangee Indelible,
Thalidomide and junk jewellery.
Smash me for your daughters and dead
mothers, for the widowed
spinsters of the first and every war
let her
rip up the appointment cards for the
terrible clinics,
the Greenham summonses, that date
they’ve handed us. Let her rip.
She’ll crumple all the
tracts and the adverts, shred
all the wedding dresses, snap
all the spike-heel icicles
in the cave she will claw out of –
a woman giving birth to herself.
1984
Morgan, master of the Instamatic Poem,
has flung open the glass door
– three storeys up –
of this high guest suite, and,
his own camera cocked and ready,
flashgun primed,
is muttering ‘Mag-ritte, Mag-grrritte’
with a mock-burr and much glee.
About to freeze-frame the scene before him.
Untouched by even a spring of birdclaw,
perfect behind wrought-iron battlements,
twenty or thirty feet of
snowy rooftop
sports a chair and round terrazzo-table
tipsily iced with an inches-deep drift.
Directly opposite
behind another rooftop door
lit up by slicing beams of anglepoise
but quite, quite empty this late at night
is the beautiful Bauhaus calm
of the office of the director of the
Literarisches Colloquium.
Behind Morgan,
Withers, Mulrine, McNaughtan, Lochhead,
well-clad, scarved and booted
stamp and laugh
(impatient for Gulaschsuppe and Berliner Weisse
at the restaurant by Wannsee S. Bahnhof)
then breathe, stilled
as his shutter falls, stopped
by this one moment’s
crystalline unbroken vision
of the dreaming order in the
purring electric heart of the house of our hosts.
1991