to find white pebbles for games.

  I look for the island, kidding myself

  I see it hump through the waves.

  Back in the tent it’s warm, wine-smelling,

  heavy with breath.

  The lamp shines on the bodies

  of our captain and his companion.

  These are the tented days I remember

  more than the battles.

  This is the smell of a herbal rub

  on great Achilles.

  This is the blue soap-scum on the pitcher,

  and cold parcels of goat-meat,

  the yawning moment

  late in the evening, when I step out

  and see the stars alight in their same places.

  Uncle Will’s telegram

  She kept Uncle Will’s telegram

  between the sheets of her wedding-album.

  Her life-long imaginary future

  dazzled the moment it came.

  He tried the counter-top biro

  and asked the post office clerk

  to check the time of arrival

  for ten words in block capitals.

  In the levelled-down churchyard

  they posed for the first photographs

  while powdery grandmothers

  whispered ‘We wish you’

  and came up with the word ‘Happiness’.

  She stood against laurel-black cherries

  while the church dived into silence,

  a great maritime creature

  leaving without echoes.

  At the lych-gate a tide-line

  of white flowers remained.

  In the Flowers the best man

  read Uncle Will’s telegram

  and the guests lifted their glasses

  shouting ‘Io, Io Hymen!’

  Rapunzel

  Rapunzel

  let down your hair,

  let your strong hair

  wind up the water you wish for.

  All your life looking down

  on bright tree-tops

  your days go by quickly.

  You read and you eat

  in your white tower top

  where sunlight fans through high

  windows and far below you

  bushes are matted with night.

  With soft thumbprints

  darkness muddles your pages.

  The prince arrives,

  whose noisy breathing

  and sweat as he vaults your window-sill

  draw you like wheat fields

  on the enchanted horizontal.

  He seeds your body with human fragments,

  dandruff, nail-clippings, dust.

  The detritus of new pleasures

  falls on your waxed boards.

  Your witch mother, sweeping them,

  sorrowfully banishes the girl

  who has let a prince clamber her.

  For six years you wander the desert

  from level to pale level.

  At night you make a bunker to sleep in

  near to the coyotes.

  The ragged prince plays blind-man’s-buff

  to the sound of your voice singing

  as you gather desert grasses

  in hollows hidden from him.

  Daily your wise mother

  unpicks the walls of the tower.

  Its stones are taken for sheep-folds,

  your circle of hair

  hidden beneath the brambles.

  The sea skater

  A skater comes to this blue pond,

  his worn Canadian skates

  held by the straps.

  He sits on the grass

  lacing stiff boots

  into a wreath of effort and breath.

  He tugs at the straps and they sound

  as ice does when weight troubles it

  and cracks bloom around stones

  creaking in quiet mid-winter

  mid-afternoons: a fine time for a skater.

  He knows it and gauges the sun

  to see how long it will be safe to skate.

  Now he hisses and spins in jumps

  while powder ice clings to the air

  but by trade he’s a long-haul skater.

  Little villages, stick-like in the cold,

  offer a child or a farm-worker

  going his round. These watch him

  go beating onward between iced alders

  seawards, and so they picture him

  always smoothly facing forward, foodless and waterless,

  mounting the crusted waves on his skates.

  In the tea house

  In the tea house the usual

  customers sit with their cooling

  tea glasses

  and new pastries

  sealed at the edge

  with sticky droplets.

  The waitress walks off,

  calves solid and shapely as vases,

  leaving a juicy baba

  before her favourite.

  Each table has bronze or white chrysanthemums

  and the copper glass-stands imperceptibly

  brush each other like crickets

  suddenly focussed at dusk,

  but the daily newspapers

  dampened by steam

  don’t rustle.

  The tea house still has its blinds out

  even though the sun is now amiably

  yellow as butter

  and people hurrying by raise up their faces

  without abandon, briskly

  talking to their companions;

  no one sits out at the tables

  except a travel-stained couple

  thumbing a map.

  The waitress reckons her cloths

  watching the proprietor

  while he, dark-suited, buoyant,

  pauses before a customer.

  Her gaze breaks upon the tea-house

  like incoming water

  joining sandbanks swiftly and

  softly moving the pebbles,

  moving the coloured sugar and coffee

  to better places,

  counting the pastries.

  Florence in permafrost

  Cold pinches the hills around Florence.

  It roots out vines, truffles for lemon trees

  painfully heated by charcoal

  to three degrees above freezing.

  A bristling fir forest

  moves forward over Tuscany.

  A secret wood

  riddled with worm and lifeless

  dust-covered branches

  stings the grass and makes it flowerless,

  freezing the long-closed eyelids of Romans.

  They sleep entrusted to darkness

  in the perpetual, placid, waveless

  music of darkness.

  The forest ramps over frontiers and plains

  and swallows voluble Customs men

  in slow ash. A wind sound

  scrapes its thatching of sticks.

  Blind thrushes in the wood blunder

  and drop onto the brown needles.

  There are no nests or singing-places.

  A forest of matchwood and cheap furniture

  marches in rows. Nobody harvests

  its spongey woods and makes the trunks sigh

  like toy soldiers giving up life.

  All over Italy and northward

  from fair Florence to München

  and the cold city of Potsdam

  the forest spreads like a pelt

  on meadows, terraces, riverbanks

  and the shards of brick houses.

  It hides everywhere from everywhere

  as each point of perspective

  is gained by herds of resinous firs.

  There may be human creatures

  at nest in the root sockets.

  They whicker words to each other

  against the soughing of evergreens

  while the great faces of reindeer

  come g
razing beside the Arno.

  Missile launcher passing at night

  The soft fields part in hedges, each

  binds each, copse pleats

  rib up the hillside.

  Darkness is coming and grass

  bends downward.

  The cattle out all night

  eat, knee-deep, invisible

  unless a headlight arcs on their mild faces.

  The night’s damp fastens, droplet by droplet,

  onto the animals.

  They vibrate to the passing of a missile launcher

  and stir

  their patient eyelashes.

  A blackbird

  startled by floodlights

  reproduces morning.

  Cattle grids tremble and clang,

  boots scrape

  holly bursts against wet walls

  lost at the moment of happening.

  FROM

  THE RAW GARDEN

  (1988)

  Code-breaking in the Garden of Eden

  The Raw Garden is a collection of closely-related poems, which are intended to speak to, through, and even over each other. The poems draw their full effect from their setting; they feed from each other, even when the link is as mild as an echo of phrasing or cadence.

  It is now possible to insert new genes into a chromosomal pattern. It is possible to feed in new genetic material, or to remove what is seen as faulty or damaged material. The basic genetic code is contained in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), and its molecular structure is the famous double helix, so called because it consists of two complementary spirals which match each other like the halves of a zip. Naturally-occurring enzymes can be used to split the double strand, and to insert new material. The separate strands are then recombined to form the complete DNA helix. By this process of gene-splicing a new piece of genetic information can be inserted into a living organism, and can be transmitted to the descendants of the organism.

  It seems to me that there is an echo of this new and revolutionary scientific process in the way each poet feeds from the material drawn together in a long poetic tradition, “breaks” it with his or her individual creative voice, and recombines it through new poems.

  One thing I have tried to do in these poems is to explore the effect which these new possibilities of genetic manipulation may have on our concept of what is natural and what is unnatural. If we can not follow Romantic poets in their assumption of a massive, unmalleable landscape which moulds the human creatures living upon it and provides them with a constant, stable frame of reference, then how do we look at landscape and at the “natural”? We are used to living in a profoundly human-made landscape. As I grew up I realised that even such apparently wild places as moors and commons were the product of human decisions and work: people had cut down trees, grazed animals, acquired legal rights. But still this knowledge did not interfere with my sense that these places were natural.

  The question might be, what does it take to disturb the sense of naturalness held by the human being in his or her, landscape? Is there a threshold beyond which a person revolts at a feeling that changedness has gone too far? Many of these poems focus on highly manipulated landscapes and outcrops of “nature”, and on the harmonies and revulsions formed between them and the people living among them.

  Perhaps the Garden of Eden embodies some yearning to print down an idea of the static and the predictable over our knowledge that we have to accept perpetual changeability. The code of the Garden of Eden has been broken open an infinite number of times. Now we are faced with a still greater potential for change, since we have acquired knowledge of the double helix structure of DNA. If the Garden of Eden really exists it does so moment by moment, fragmented and tough, cropping up like a fan of buddleia high up in the gutter of a deserted warehouse, or in a heap of frozen cabbages becoming luminous in the reflected light off roadside snow. This Garden of Eden propagates itself in strange ways, some of which find parallels in far-fetched horticultural techniques such as air layering, or growing potatoes in a mulch of rotted seaweed on white sand. I hope that these poems do not seem to hanker back to a prelapsarian state of grace. If I want to celebrate anything, it is resilience, adaptability, and the power of improvisation.

  Seal run

  The potatoes come out of the earth bright

  as if waxed, shucking their compost,

  and bob against the palm of my hand

  like the blunt muzzles of seals swimming.

  Slippy and pale in the washing-up bowl

  they bask, playful, grown plump

  in banks of seaweed on white sand,

  seaweed hauled from brown circles

  set in transparent waters off Easdale

  all through the sun-fanned West Highland midnights

  when the little potatoes are seeding there

  to make necklaces under the mulch,

  torques and amulets in their burial place.

  The seals quiver, backstroking

  for pure joy of it, down to the tidal

  slim mouth of the loch,

  they draw their lips back, their blunt whiskers

  tingle at the inspout of salt water

  then broaching the current they roll

  off between islands and circles of oarweed.

  At noon the sea-farmer

  turns back his blanket of weed

  and picks up potatoes like eggs

  from their fly-swarming nest,

  too fine for the sacks, so he puts them in boxes

  and once there they smell earthy.

  At noon the seals nose up the rocks

  to pile there, sun-dazed,

  back against belly, island on island.

  and sleep, shivering like dogs

  against the tug of the stream

  flowing on south past Campbelltown.

  The man’s hands rummage about still

  to find what is full-grown there.

  Masts on the opposite shore ring faintly

  disturbing themselves, and make him look up.

  Hands down and still moving

  he works on, his fingers at play blinded,

  his gaze roving the ripe sea-loch.

  Wild strawberries

  What I get I bring home to you:

  a dark handful, sweet-edged,

  dissolving in one mouthful.

  I bother to bring them for you

  though they’re so quickly over,

  pulpless, sliding to juice,

  a grainy rub on the tongue

  and the taste’s gone. If you remember

  we were in the woods at wild strawberry time

  and I was making a basket of dockleaves

  to hold what you’d picked,

  but the cold leaves unplaited themselves

  and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves

  until I gave up and ate wild strawberries

  out of your hands for sweetness.

  I lipped at your palm –

  the little salt edge there,

  the tang of money you’d handled.

  As we stayed in the wood, hidden,

  we heard the sound system below us

  calling the winners at Chepstow,

  faint as the breeze turned.

  The sun came out on us, the shade blotches

  went hazel: we heard names

  bubble like stock-doves over the woods

  as jockeys in stained silks gentled

  those sweat-dark, shuddering horses

  down to the walk.

  A mortgage on a pear tree

  A pear tree stands in its own maze.

  It does not close its blossom all night

  but holds out branchfuls of cool

  wide-open flowers. Its slim leaves look black

  and stir like tongues in the lamp-light.

  It was here before the houses were built.

  The owner grew wasteland and waited for values to rise.

  The builders swerved a boundary sidewa
ys

  to cup the tree in a garden. When they piled rubble

  it was a soft cairn mounting the bole.

  The first owner of the raw garden

  came out and walked on the clay clods.

  There was the pear tree, bent down

  with small blunt fruits, each wide where the flower was,

  shaped like a medlar, but sweet.

  The ground was dense with fermenting pears,

  half trodden to pulp, half eaten.

  She could not walk without slipping.

  Slowly she walked in her own maze,

  sleepy, feeling the blood seep

  down her cold fingers, down the spread branch

  of veins which trails to the heart,

  and remembered how she’d stood under a tree

  holding out arms, with two school-friends.

  It was the fainting-game,

  played in the dinner-hour from pure boredom,

  never recalled since. For years this was growing

  to meet her, and now she’s signed for her own

  long mortgage over the pear tree

  and is the gainer of its accrued beauty,

  but when she goes into her bedroom

  and draws her curtains against a spring night

  the pear tree does not close its white blossom.