Poems 1960-2000 Read Online Free PDF

like
    Japanese paper flowers in water,
    like anything one hardly believes
    will really work this time; and
    I am a stupefied spectator
    as usual. What are they all, these
    multiverdant, variously-made
    soft sudden things, these leaves?
    So I walk solemnly in the park
    with a copy of Let’s Look at Trees
    from the children’s library,
    identifying leaf-shapes and bark
    while behind my back, at home,
    my own garden is turning into a wood.
    Before my house the pink may tree
    lolls its heavy heads over mine
    to grapple my hair as I come
    in; at the back door I walk out
    under lilac. The two elders
    (I let them grow for the wine)
    hang vastly over the fence, no doubt
    infuriating my tidy neighbours.
    In the centre the apple tree
    needs pruning. And everywhere,
    soaring over the garden shed,
    camouflaged by roses, or snaking
    up through the grass like vertical worms,
    grows every size of sycamore.
    Last year we attacked them; I saw
    my son, so tender to ants, so sad
    over dead caterpillars, hacking
    at living roots as thick as his arms,
    drenching the stumps with creosote.
    No use: they continue to grow.
    Under the grass, the ground
    must be peppered with winged seeds,
    meshed with a tough stringy net
    of roots; and the house itself undermined
    by wandering wood. Shall we see
    the floorboards lifted one morning
    by these indomitable weeds,
    or find in the airing-cupboard
    a rather pale sapling?
    And if we do, will it be
    worse than cracked pipes or dry rot?
    Trees I can tolerate; they are why
    I chose this house – for the apple tree,
    elder, buddleia, lilac, may;
    and outside my bedroom window, higher
    every week, its leaves unfurling
    pink at the twig-tips (composite
    in form) the tallest sycamore.

Country Station
    First she made a little garden
    of sorrel stalks wedged among
    some yellowy-brown moss-cushions
    and fenced it with ice-lolly sticks
    (there were just enough); then she
    set out biscuit-crumbs on a brick
    for the ants; now she sits on a
    deserted luggage-trolley
    to watch them come for their dinner.
    It’s nice here – cloudy but quite warm.
    Five trains have swooshed through, and one
    stopped, but at the other platform.
    Later, when no one is looking,
    she may climb the roof of that
    low shed. Her mother is making
    another telephone call (she
    isn’t crying any more).
    Perhaps they will stay here all day.

The Three-toed Sloth
    The three-toed sloth is the slowest creature we know
    for its size. It spends its life hanging upside-down
    from a branch, its baby nestling on its breast.
    It never cleans itself, but lets fungus grow
    on its fur. The grin it wears, like an idiot clown,
    proclaims the joys of a life which is one long rest.
    The three-toed sloth is content. It doesn’t care.
    It moves imperceptibly, like the laziest snail
    you ever saw blown up to the size of a sheep.
    Disguised as a grey-green bough it dangles there
    in the steamy Amazon jungle. That long-drawn wail
    is its slow-motion sneeze. Then it falls asleep.
    One cannot but envy such torpor. Its top speed,
    when rushing to save its young, is a dramatic
    fourteen feet per minute, in a race with fate.
    The puzzle is this, though: how did nature breed
    a race so determinedly unenergetic?
    What passion ever inspired a sloth to mate?

Against Coupling
    I write in praise of the solitary act:
    of not feeling a trespassing tongue
    forced into one’s mouth, one’s breath
    smothered, nipples crushed against the
    ribcage, and that metallic tingling
    in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:
    unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help –
    such eyes as a young girl draws life from,
    listening to the vegetal
    rustle within her, as his gaze
    stirs polypal fronds in the obscure
    sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.
    There is much to be said for abandoning
    this no longer novel exercise –
    for not ‘participating in
    a total experience’ – when
    one feels like the lady in Leeds who
    had seen The Sound of Music eighty-six times;
    or more,