Read Online Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock - Free Book Online Page A

like a pair of shoes.
    A coot plays beaks with its chick;
    children laugh and exclaim.
    Mr Morrison saunters past, smiling at them,
    humming a Sunday-school hymn.
    He wonders about his mood,
    irredeemably content:
    he should worry more about poverty, oppression,
    injustice; but he can’t, he can’t.
    He is not too callous to care
    but is satisfied in his work,
    well-fed, well-housed, tolerably married,
    and enjoying a walk in the park.
    Then the sun sticks in the sky,
    the tune sticks in his throat,
    a burning hand with razors for fingernails
    reaches inside his coat
    and hotly claws at his heart.
    He stands very quiet and still,
    seeing if he dares to breathe just a fraction;
    sweating; afraid he’ll fall.
    With stiff little wooden steps
    he edges his way to a bench
    and lowers his body with its secret fiery
    tenant down, inch by inch.
    He orders himself to be calm:
    no doubt it will soon pass.
    He resolves to smoke less, watch his cholesterol,
    walk more, use the car less.
    And it passes: he is released,
    the stabbing fingers depart.
    Tentatively at first, then easily,
    he fills his lungs without hurt.
    He is safe; and he is absolved:
    it was not just pain, after all;
    it enrolled him among the sufferers, allotted him
    a stake in the world’s ill.
    Doors open inside his head;
    once again he begins to hum:
    he’s been granted one small occasion for worry
    and the promise of more to come.

Things
    There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
    There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
    committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
    than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
    It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
    and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

A Way Out
    The other option’s to become a bird.
    That’s kindly done, to guess from how they sing,
    decently independent of the word
    as we are not; and how they use the air
    to sail as we might soaring on a swing
    higher and higher; but the rope’s not there,
    it’s free fall upward, out into the sky;
    or if the arc veer downward, then it’s planned:
    a bird can loiter, skimming just as high
    as lets him supervise the hazel copse,
    the turnip field, the orchard, and then land
    on just the twig he’s chosen. Down he drops
    to feed, if so it be: a pretty killer,
    a keen-eyed stomach weighted like a dart.
    He feels no pity for the caterpillar,
    that moistly munching hoop of innocent green.
    It is such tender lapses twist the heart.
    A bird’s heart is a tight little red bean,
    untwistable. His beak is made of bone,
    his feet apparently of stainless wire;
    his coat’s impermeable; his nest’s his own.
    The clogging multiplicity of things
    amongst which other creatures, battling, tire
    can be evaded by a pair of wings.
    The point is, most of it occurs below,
    earthed at the levels of the grovelling wood
    and gritty buildings. Up’s the way to go.
    If it’s escapist, if it’s like a dream
    the dream’s prolonged until it ends for good.
    I see no disadvantage in the scheme.

Prelude
    Is it the long dry grass that is so erotic,
    waving about us with hair-fine fronds of straw,
    with feathery flourishes of seed, inviting us
    to cling together, fall, roll into it
    blind and gasping, smothered by stalks and hair,
    pollen and each other’s tongues on our hot faces?
    Then imagine if the summer rain were to come,
    heavy drops hissing through the warm air,
    a sluice on our wet bodies, plastering us
    with strands of delicious grass; a hum in our ears.
    We walk a yard apart, talking
    of literature and of botany.
    We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.

Accidental
    We awakened facing each other
    across the white counterpane.
    I prefer to be alone in the mornings.
    The waiter offered us
    melon, papaya, orange juice or fresh raspberries.
    We did not discuss it.
    All those years of looking but not touching:
    at most a kiss in a taxi.
    And now this accident,
    this blind