Collected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

windows
    Of earth-grained eyes
    Are fullstops ending invisible sentences,
    Aphorisms, quips, mottoes of the gods
    Indicate what might have been made clear
    Had words stayed plain before them.
    Criss-crossed endlessly for those who read,
    Each light-year sentence testifies how far
    Life spreads, and how those full stops
    Go on living after necks cease aching.
    In observing them, the bones relax:
    Eyes close when we are dead
    And they have stared all poets out.
    Full stops are beautiful as stars,
    Each glowing with the light of people vanished
    From the continually red-burned earth
    Fuelled by those whose outward eye drinks fever
    And inward eye harnesses their shadows
    To read what never had been written
    Until, drunk with Charioteers, Animals and Goddesses,
    Conjurers, Club-men, Fish and Magic Boxes
    Full stops are joined with words shaped into poems
    Ending with full stops as meaningful as stars.

YES
    Yes – definitively to some wrongful deed
    And ending like a quick knife to a knot,
    Is a serpent-lover singing to be freed
    From no and negative and nothing gained.
    Hard to fix decisions as to yea and nay
    While needing the when and how: near-questions
    Aimed to draw that final sibilant and vow
    To upright-positive and all to win.
    Success for lovers and conspirators
    Unlocks the sins that grace a thousand lips;
    Dogs bark, and babies cry at meeting air:
    (Whether yes or no is hardly to be known)
    But if affirmative, are guessings at the guess
    That darkness is nothing but a final yes.

DEAD MAN’S GRAVE
    Three sons in silence by their father’s grave
    Think of the live man
    Not yet split in three by blackness –
    Cannot cross the limbo zone,
    Reach him who went a year ago through.
    Mute before grass bending:
    Headstones grey and white proliferate,
    Stumps in a shell-shocked forest
    Making question and exclamation mark;
    They talk about flowers from a visit
    When water in the vase was ice
    On this plateau exposed to collieries
    And winds bailing out Death’s
    Deepest coffers it was so cold;
    Of how frost to prove the dead not dead
    Turned the water iron-white,
    Swollen muscle garrotting the flowers
    Till the vase exploded,
    By trying its own strength out on itself –
    Scattered petals to a dozen graves.
    Three brothers stand in silence,
    Feel the strength the father lost.

THE DROWNED SHROPSHIRE WOMAN
    Narrow in the back
    She played all day with fishes
    Watched them go like arrows
    Through aerated water
    Between her legs and dodge
    The fantail spread of fingers.
    She was crossed in love:
    Water hurtling loinwards and into heart
    Found another hiding-place and pool
    Where sharper arrows
    Played upon her sorrow,
    And sunlight on her stooping
    Made more voracious fishes breed.
    She was narrow in the back
    And played all night at fishes,
    Wading for the biggest of them all
    By moon and guile
    Out from the reedy bank,
    Until by unlit dawn
    A fisherman in silence
    Drew his silent catchnet down.
    Green fishes fled through lightgreen water
    Flint heads with moulded eyes
    Chipping at infiltrating light,
    And switching to the
    White legs of the Shropshire woman,
    Played tag in the blue beams
    Of her impenetrable eyes,
    Between the whitening flesh
    Of open fingers.

CAR FIGHTS CAT
    In a London crescent curving vast
    A cat sat –
    Between two rows of molar houses,
    Birdsky in each grinning gap.
    Cat small – coal and snow
    Road wide – a zone of tar set hard and fast:
    Four-wheeled speedboats cutting a dash
    For it
    From time to time.
    King Cat stalked warily midstream
    As if silence were no warning on this empty road
    Where even a man would certainly have crossed
    With hands in pockets and been whistling.
    Cat heard, but royalty and indolence
    Weighed its paws to hobnailed boots
    Held it from the dragon’s-teeth of safety first and last,
    Until a Daimler scurrying from work
    Caused cat to stop and wonder where it came from –
    Instead of zig-zag scattering to hide itself.
    Maybe a deaf