Poems 1960-2000 Read Online Free PDF Page B

perhaps, like the school drama mistress
    producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream
    for the seventh year running, with
    yet another cast from 5B.
    Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but
    the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.
    I advise you, then, to embrace it without
    encumbrance. No need to set the scene,
    dress up (or undress), make speeches.
    Five minutes of solitude are
    enough – in the bath, or to fill
    that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

Mornings After
    The surface dreams are easily remembered:
    I wake most often with a comforting sense
    of having seen a pleasantly odd film –
    nothing too outlandish or too intense;
    of having, perhaps, befriended animals,
    made love, swum the Channel, flown in the air
    without wings, visited Tibet or Chile:
    simple childish stuff. Or else the rare
    recurrent horror makes its call upon me:
    I dream one of my sons is lost or dead,
    or that I am trapped in a tunnel underground;
    but my scream is enough to recall me to my bed.
    Sometimes, indeed, I congratulate myself
    on the nice precision of my observation:
    on having seen so vividly a certain
    colour; having felt the sharp sensation

    of cold water on my hands; the exact taste
    of wine or peppermints. I take a pride
    in finding all my senses operative
    even in sleep. So, with nothing to hide,
    I amble through my latest entertainment
    again, in the bath or going to work,
    idly amused at what the night has offered;
    unless this is a day when a sick jerk
    recalls to me a sudden different vision:
    I see myself inspecting the vast slit
    of a sagging whore; making love with a hunchbacked
    hermaphrodite; eating worms or shit;
    or rapt upon necrophily or incest.
    And whatever loathsome images I see
    are just as vivid as the pleasant others.
    I flush and shudder: my God, was that me?
    Did I invent so ludicrously revolting
    a scene? And if so, how could I forget
    until this instant? And why now remember?
    Furthermore (and more disturbing yet)
    are all my other forgotten dreams like these?
    Do I, for hours of my innocent nights,
    wallow content and charmed through verminous muck,
    rollick in the embraces of such frights?
    And are the comic or harmless fantasies
    I wake with merely a deceiving guard,
    as one might put a Hans Andersen cover
    on a volume of the writings of De Sade?
    Enough, enough. Bring back those easy pictures,
    Tibet or antelopes, a seemly lover,
    or even the black tunnel. For the rest,
    I do not care to know. Replace the cover.

Gas
    1
    You recognise a body by its blemishes:
    moles and birthmarks, scars, tattoos, oddly formed earlobes.
    The present examination must be managed
    in darkness, and by touch alone. That should suffice.
    Starting at the head, then, there is a small hairless
    scar on the left eyebrow; the bridge of the nose flat;
    crowded lower teeth, and a chipped upper canine
    (the lips part to let my fingers explore); a mole
    on the right side of the neck.
                                                 No need to go on:
    I know it all. But as I draw away, a hand
    grips mine: a hand whose thumb bends back as mine does, whose
    third finger bears the torn nail I broke in the door
    last Thursday; and I feel these fingers check the scar
    on my knuckle, measure my wrist’s circumference,
    move on gently exploring towards my elbow…
2
    It was gas, we think.
    Insects and reptiles survived it
    and most of the birds;
    also the larger mammals – grown
    cattle, a few sheep,
    horses, the landlord’s Alsatian
    (I shall miss the cats)
    and, in this village, about a
    fifth of the people.
    It culled scientifically
    within a fixed range,
    sparing the insignificant
    and the chosen strong.
    It let us sleep for fourteen hours
    and wake, not caring
    whether we woke or not, in a
    soft antiseptic
    silence. There was a faint odour
    of furniture-wax.
    We know now, of course, more or less
    what happened, but then
    it was rather puzzling: to wake
    from a thick dark sleep
    lying on the