Rats that eat your eyes like oysters
Spread false trails over burrowed hills
Swamp-rats wood-rats tree rats
Plague-rats, pet-rats, army and police-rats
Sadistic rats that will not kill
Kind rats that drug you in the night
Rats that let you crush them in the garden
Run across your path
Climb trees before you see them
Eat corn that would give you the strength to kill them
Rats that laugh, rats that fill the night with infants crying
Rats that gloat, rats that bend your life before them
Rats that move around you in the night
Rats invisible that ring you during day
Rats in books, on radios, in tins of food
On television screens, rats behind
A million miles of counters
Wielding guide-books, tables, catalogues
Slide-rules, stethoscopes, maps
Election registers, passports, insurance stamps
Death certificates, prison records
Visas, references, forms to sign
Case histories, birth certificates
Statistics, interview reports
Personality tests, loyalty rating
And knives to cure
The pyrotechnic paranoia of the anti-rats.
7
The city is seething with discontent
For they all wonder where the deserters went:
They took no beer and they took no bread
And everyone says that they must be dead:
Some speak with anger (a few speak with tears)
But most out of vague speculatory fears
That they still live among us, active and thin
Or are out in the wilderness about to dig in
And return to besiege us when winter has fled.
The deserters are waiting without beer or bread
Around ancient fires of obstinate coke,
And they laugh in the city and wonder who spoke
When the wind lifts a flame from wilderness fires
(Caught in snowlight – quickly expires)
They look up and listen from parlour debates
Then resume their relinquished sensory states
Within and without their crumbling walls,
Like jungle tigers secure in their night
When the forlorn bark of the jackal calls.
8
Behind the rat-horizons of the world
Try to decipher what history has hurled
Against the white range of your exposed spine;
Sit in your isolated jungle and define
(Among pine-needles and a flask of wine)
Your lack of Revolutionary fire
Love of safety (number one desire)
Happily tied to the waterwheel
For irrigation that will soon congeal
Blood in brain and arms, will sit you still
And quiet while the busy rats distil
Sweet liquor as a chaser for each pill
That saps away the flame of heart and will.
You found it hard to struggle for house and bread
To hone a sword and guide a plough
Found the ache too much for your tread
From one loaf to another, held your head
Low because you killed the man who stood
Before you for a faggot of dry wood.
Sailing from one coast to another grew
Wearying. You wanted women and a mild brew
To dull what wits the day’s work left sound,
To sleep your life out on dry ground
Find a warm hut and a midnight glow,
A woman clothed in black from head to toe.
Sling, spear, plough, lathe and pen
Made artificers of house and den
Weighed power on scales and gave books of law
To save you from the blight of fang and claw,
Until this comfort to Utopia goes
Beyond a golden mean and throws
Us into progress where perfection flags:
Scarecrows beneath banners of atomic rags.
Like Zeno’s arrow the motion is but sure:
From good to bad or bad to good:
No ship stood in stillness pure
Moved north or south in flood-
Tide and wild wind, or smartly drove
Its mainsail back to struggle and song
After a doldrum residence wherein wove
Sea-dolphins – opium to the eyes in long
Performance. Either move,
Or the sea swells into another form,
Little choice between calm and storm.
Each man wants to move the boat
Clockwise with fashionable hands
Reading history on how to float
Upon the wash with watermusic bands.
One calls the tune but others play the music
And idle waves of Neptune make the crew sick.
The rats devise solutions for each lake
Each overture and song reduce to easy,
Fix stabilizers firm from wind to wake:
And still the crew persist in feeling queasy.
Old antagonisms rage:
Rat-machinations roped with force
Imprison beauty in a cage,
Encircle it with propaganda morse.
‘Corruption is corruption, sometimes sweet
Is only dangerous when it stagnates:
Corrupt before, corrupted ever
Only keep it moving to be safe.’
First Rat: Feed, house, educate and teach
Place anti-seasick tablets in their reach.
Second Rat: Dope, rope, spiflicate and preach
Colour them by sunray lamps or bleach.
Third Rat: Dazzle, flash, warp their speech
Send them every Sunday to the beach.
Fourth Rat: Deceive, demand, even beseech
Cleverly, cleverly – they’ll never screech!
9
Retreat like Scythians, like men of hair
Back into folding earth and lair:
Burn and scorch black the rich fields that you leave,
Once tilled with freedom and passion-verse.
Prepare to destroy that for which you grieve:
It is already ruined by the worse
Rat venom. Do not wish for what was there
Before Rats came but keep the cleansed air
Uncloyed, devoid of devil-noses
And perverted paper roses
Who pander to each scheme that rat proposes.
When on the rack-and-pinion of retreat
Earn your wayside cigarettes and bread
By giving lessons on the rats’ defeat
Disguised in languages more live than dead:
Tutor yourselves in map-reading and crime
And devil’s courage for the bleak time
When you alone will face the empty plain
Armed only with a visionary brain
That tried to understand how earth and sky
Could meet beyond the reach of feet and eye.
The would-be Rat-destroyers may feel this:
Burdened with a glimpse of emptiness
Night after night, with dreams that kiss
Despair as a king’s seal, and nothingness:
A dull light gleaming on continual fight
In a retreat that leads beyond the end of night.
10
It was a rabbit skin, without meat
That took me to the fleapit for a treat:
The wasteland that seemed to Mr Eliot death
Nurtured me with passion, life and breath
To prolong for one more generation
A wasteland satellite of veneration:
A bottle-top, a piece of bone, a stone
Marked on no posters or big banners
To catapult against the rodent planners.
… the rock stop and turbo-drill that goes
Through granite like a knife through butter
(Shall I follow Mr Eliot’s nose
And clinch this verse by using ‘gutter’?)
Rock-a-bye-baby, reach the tree top
Sing as you reap the apple crop;
Rob each garbled voice of Wednesday’s ash
Ring out the mardi gras to grab and smash:
Hook-up your ribbons to a new Maypole.
The wasteland was a place where I best played
As a snotty-nosed bottle-chasing raggèd-arsed kid:
From a rusty frame and two cot-wheels I made
A bike that took me on a roll and skid
Between canal banks, tip and plain
And junk shops advertising ‘Guns for Spain’.
I read the tadpole angler quite complete
What Katy did at her first Christmas treat
Envied Monte Cristo’s endless riches
But not Eliza’s shame at her dropped stitches,
The splendid sack of Usher’s houses
By philanthropists with ragged trousers.
In wintertime were rabbit skins fair game
For keeping warm the embers of such knowledge:
The wasteland was my library and college.
11
What’s past is past, what still to come:
King, queen and godhead of Time’s guide.
Show your bottom-dogs and sparkling fangs
In conspiratorial well-clawed gangs.
Open Baedeker’s Handbook to the Jungle
A thin-leaved blood-bound untried book to plan
All expeditions on, and scan
Its well-mapped footpaths (thornbush to the right):
Mined offices avoid at any cost;
Advice from all contributors is sound
Gathered by ears pressed firmly to the ground.
Ignore policemen if you’re lost
By-pass the Customs, frontier weak at X
Step on the skeletons of vanguard wrecks
Hillslopes good for cover, summit wrong,
Travellers had better go by night
And eat ripe berries as they walk along.
Landmarks described with economic prose:
This cathedral has a mildewed nose
From decades of unmedicated sores.
Decay comes quicker when it flouts Time’s laws.
See this castle? Rotten doors:
King left owing bills for bread and cheese
Queen stored perfumes in deepfreeze
Was tricked for absolution with the whores.
Take those statues by the wall
Carved on a diet of olive-oil and gall:
Unbribable stern servants of the realm
Turned up their noses and let go the helm.
12
Watch the sky. Watch the warning
Floating down of an autumn morning.
Barricade your colleges and schools
Sharpen slide-rules into fighting tools.
Paper to a depth of thirty inches
May stop a bullet and prove good defences,
But fire will desolate consume and scorch
That to begin needs but a single torch.
A red sky at night will be their delight
And red in the morning the Rats’ night dawning.
Admitted, you gave them ale and telly
But in return took each man’s name and age
And locked his magic in a wicker cage
Burning it in secret while they filled
Unwittingly their bellies after hunger.
You cannot read the writing on the wall:
They were not given bread at all
But food to make them strong (and sane)
Enough to understand your orders.
A meal of pure white bread is bad
When given to a dog the dog goes mad.
The bread of life is of a different grain
It feeds the body wholemeal and the brain.
13
Slowly, slowly, Dungeness lighthouse
Dim in the distance dipped its wick:
Old Folkestone vowed to thee its country
And Beachy Head was being sick;
But stouter England stood and stouter
From Berwick’s Tweed to Dover Castle
Hugging the Downs beneath its arm
Like an empty paper parcel;
And slowly also big Cape Grey Nose
Lays itself before the boat
Sends its white birds up to catch my
Soul while yet it stays afloat.
14
Retreat, dig in, retreat
Withdraw your shadow from the crimson
Gutters that run riot down the street.
Retreat, dig in, arrange your coat
As a protective covering
A clever camouflage of antidote.
Retreat still more, still more
Remembering your images and words:
Perfect the principles of fang-and-claw.
The shadows of retreat are wide
Town and desert equally bereft
Of honest hieroglyph or guide.
Release your territory and retreat
Record preserve and memorize
The journey where no drums can rouse nor beat:
Defeat is not the question. Withdraw
Into the hollows of the hills
Until this winter passes into thaw.
Dig in no more. Turn round and fight
Forget the wicked and regret the lame
And travel back the way you came,
In front the darkness, and behind – THE LIGHT.
from A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, 1964
POEM LEFT BY A DEAD MAN
Let no one say I was cleaning this gun:
I killed myself because
I wanted the sun
But got the moon.
Sanity came back too soon.
I did not even clean the gun:
Put in two bullets for the moon and sun
Spun the chamber in a final game.
The sun and moon were both the same.
CAPE FINISTERRE
Borrow got here, so did I
Nothing in front but sea and sky.
Blue, traditional, unplanned,
Then white with envy at safe land:
Were such cold acres ever seen
Than vast and climbing for this rock?
Big as the fish that got away,
Bigger, but no one ever died from shock
At so much water, such wide space:
Vostok III and Vostok IV
Slap proportion in the face.
Rapier-thin horizons claw
At blasé tissue of bland eye:
While Man is climbing at the moon
The sea foams white on every shore,
Moonstruck where the start began
Moonlit in the wake of Man
Who turns his back on Finisterre.
WOODS
Woods are for observing from a distance
On your father’s arms:
Woods are for being frightened of –
Bogie-men swing among those close-packed trees.
Woods are then for making fires in
Running before the wrath of cop or farmer:
Smoke and the smell of dandelions
In place of blood.
Later for loving girls in:
Untidy bushes lick damp hair,
Secret, dark and out of sight
With nothing now to replace blood.
Some use woods for attacking and defending
The black scream of unnatural possession,
Tree roots linchpinned into earth
By shudders and the soil of death.
By summer shunned in fear of lightning
The bitter roaming flash of snaked lightning;
In winter shelter us from rain or snow:
&n
bsp; Tree-packs hold our fate like cards.
Woods are then forgotten two-score years
Power lapsing into midnight dreams,
The core of body and soul
Scooped by the knife of living.
The wood became jungle, and you its shadow:
Woods a purple rage of wakened dogs,
To be kept out of, snubbed
Hemmed into night, not known.
Woods returned, tamed, not for
Making love or fires in.
Familiar; suspicious of their shelter
You stay at home in rain or snow –
The woods are seen but not remembered
A far-off shadow, cloud or dream;
Your power vanishes with their’s –
No more to be defended, or attacked.
STORM
Safe from horizontal rain
And gale-blown boxing-gloves thumping the walls
The wireless plays a drama
Of a poet stricken at a priest’s house
Reached only by footpath,
A poet descending Jacob’s ladder made of sand
Washed by mountain torrents,
Spouting rhetoric of fire as he fell –
While kilocycles off frequency
Morse code mewed by strophe and antistrophe
Behind the stark undoing of the poet
Lost in narrow seams of God and Sin and Death,
Corroded by the opposite of what he would be.
The code comes in again, a querulous demand
Plucked by a far-off guitar with one string left
That chance may hear,
And through the poet’s white despair
The rhythmic images cry distraction,
Till I read their symbols
That beyond my bosom-comfort
A ship by chance of time committed
To elemental wrath in asking for anchorage
From blind and twisting waves:
Five score sailors on the sea
Never to be compared to a suffering poet in his anguish.
HOUSEWIFE
A housewife sweeps her doorstep
Pavement yard and walls
Each leaf of wilting privet
Polishes the window
To do away with dust and bloodmarks
In case one speck shows sin.
Kills all trace by art and elbow as if dirt
Smears the dark side of her mirror face –
As proof of jungle ape and missing link
That drags back to when we hopped
From the saltpan slime of Lake Bacteria,
That first jelly-blob deviously edging
Towards moondust and the feat of sleep,
Sunstroke, blight of spoiled nerves,
Weapons and a new flint-hack for food –
And then the bright machinegun.
She sweeps to lovingly dispose
Of bigstar jellyfish and show-off crabs