Collected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page B

say it doesn’t matter, go to sleep.
    Struck a lifeline horoscope
    Of luck, speedkid, handy with women –
    Which years will balance
    In give, take or ruination,
    Seeing all but never everything.
    Sleep beyond the iced bite of the moon,
    Being what you are this moment
    Free with innocence but lacking milk
    Soon to become all you do not feel,
    Advancing against
    The normal hazarding inroads
    That spin life into havoc:
    Power to dissect visions
    Like the yolk and mucus of an egg,
    And build up certain freedoms from the moon.

TREE
    A broad and solid oak exploded
    Split by mystery and shock
    Broken like bread
    Like a flower shaken.
    Acorn guts dropped out:
    A dead gorilla unlocked from breeding trees,
    Acorns with death in their baby eyes.
    A hang-armed scarecrow in the wind:
    What hit it? Got into it? Struck
    So quietly between dawn and daylight?
    With a dying grin and wooden wink
    A lost interior cell relinquished its ghost:
    In full spleen and abundant acorn
    A horn of lightning gored it to the quick.
    Trees move on Fenland
    Uprooting men and houses on a march
    To reach their enemy the sea.
    Silent at the smell of watersalt
    Treelines advance. The sea lies low,
    Snake-noise riding on unruffled surf
    While all trees wither and retreat.
    Out of farm range or cottage eyes trees make war
    Green heads, close as if to kiss
    Roots to rip at quickening wood of tree-hearts
    And tree-lungs, sap-running wood-flesh
    Hurled at the moon, breaking oak
    Like the dismemberment of ships,
    At the truce of dawn wind trumpeting.
    Sedate, dispassionate and beautiful
    They know about panic and life and patience
    Grow by guile into night’s
    Companions and day’s evil
    Setting landmarks and boundaries
    That fight the worms.
    Trees love, love love, love Death
    Love a windscorched earth and copper sky
    Love the burns of ice and fire
    When lightning as a last hope is called in.
    Boats on land they loathe the sea
    And wait with all arms spread to catch the moon:
    Pull back my skin and there is bark
    Peel off my bark and there is skin:
    I am a tree whose roots destroy me.

DITCHLING BEACON
    End of life and before death
    Feathers dipping towards oaken frost
    A bird heard that shot:
    The ink sky burst,
    Stone colliding with the sun
    Echo stunned its wing
    String hauled it down.
    Gamekeeper or poacher
    Cut its free flight to the sea.
    Vice had tongue, veins, teeth
    Dogs in panoply, pressure
    To ring a sunspot fitting neat
    The blacked-out circle of a gun.

LIZARD
    Fiddle-tongue and spite
    Hang as if asleep
    Safe on his tipped world,
    But lizard-shoulders hunch
    Pulsate at a fly on slanting wall.
    Belly smooth, feet stuck firm
    A thousand volts of paralyzing tongue
    Rifle out and kill;
    Weapons in one stomach pit.
    Death is quick when looked on,
    Sweet as food when the lamps of paradise
    Blacken a brain that one day
    Hoped to know.
    Sparking tongue ignites
    A common wink and into oblivion:
    The lizard unaware of upside down
    Eats as it runs.

EMPTY QUARTER
    He meditates on the Empty Quarter:
    Mosque of sand dissolving through eggtimer’s
    Neck. Looks on camel-loads
    Starting for Oman or Muscat
    By invisible Mercator’s thread
    That burns the hoof and shrivels
    All humps of water. Empty Quarter lures,
    He travels with his heaped caravan
    Earth-tracks marked as lines
    Of unstable land, golden sandgrit
    Lifting up grey dunes near vulcan-
    Trees and foul magnesium wells
    That asps and camels drink from.
    He throws off bells, beads, silk, guns
    Knives and slippers, scattering all
    No longer needed – camel meat
    For scavengers, everything
    But his own dishrags of flesh.
    Naked and demented he hugs
    A tree rooted in the widest waste
    Catching dew from God at dawn
    And dates dropping through rottenness,
    Tastes the lone tree’s shade
    No one can chop or whip him from,
    Till one day ravelled in his own white flame
    He abandons the Empty Quarter
    And trudges back to terrify the world.

FIRST POEM
    Burned out, burned out
    Water of rivers