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

unstoppable robot walk
    into a conspiracy of our bodies.
    Had we ruined the whole thing?
    The waiter waited:
    it was his business to appear composed.
    Perhaps we should make it ours also?
    We moved an inch or two closer together.
    Our toes touched. We looked. We had decided.
    Papaya then; and coffee and rolls. Of course.

A Message
    Discreet, not cryptic. I write to you from the garden
    in tawny, provoking August; summer is just
    on the turn. The lawn is hayseeds and grassy dust.
    There are brilliant yellow daisies, though, and fuchsia
    (you’ll know why) and that mauve and silvery-grey
    creeper under the apple tree where we lay.
    There have been storms. The apples are few, but heavy,
    heavy. And where blossom was, the tree
    surges with bright pink flowers – the sweet pea
    has taken it over again. Things operate
    oddly here. Remember how I found
    the buddleia dead, and cut it back to the ground?
    That was in April. Now it’s ten feet high:
    thick straight branches – they’ve never been so strong –
    leaves like a new species, half a yard long,
    and spikes of flowers, airily late for their season
    but gigantic. A mutation, is it? Well,
    summers to come will test it. Let time tell.
    Gardens are rife with sermon-fodder. I delve
    among blossoming accidents for their designs
    but make no statement. Read between these lines.

Proposal for a Survey
    Another poem about a Norfolk church,
    a neolithic circle, Hadrian’s Wall?
    Histories and prehistories: indexes
    and bibliographies can’t list them all.
    A map of Poets’ England from the air
    could show not only who and when but where.
    Aerial photogrammetry’s the thing,
    using some form of infra-red technique.
    Stones that have been so fervently described
    surely retain some heat. They needn’t speak:
    the cunning camera ranging in its flight
    will chart their higher temperatures as light.
    We’ll see the favoured regions all lit up –
    the Thames a fiery vein, Cornwall a glow,
    Tintagel like an incandescent stud,
    most of East Anglia sparkling like Heathrow;
    and Shropshire luminous among the best,
    with Offa’s Dyke in diamonds to the west.
    The Lake District will be itself a lake
    of patchy brilliance poured along the vales,
    with somewhat lesser splashes to the east
    across Northumbria and the Yorkshire dales.
    Cities and churches, villages and lanes,
    will gleam in sparks and streaks and radiant stains.

    The lens, of course, will not discriminate
    between the venerable and the new;
    Stonehenge and Avebury may catch the eye
    but Liverpool will have its aura too.
    As well as Canterbury there’ll be Leeds
    and Hull criss-crossed with nets of glittering beads.
    Nor will the cool machine be influenced
    by literary fashion to reject
    any on grounds of quality or taste:
    intensity is all it will detect,
    mapping in light, for better or for worse,
    whatever has been written of in verse.
    The dreariness of eighteenth-century odes
    will not disqualify a crag, a park,
    a country residence; nor will the rant
    of satirists leave London in the dark.
    All will shine forth. But limits there must be:
    borders will not be crossed, nor will the sea.
    Let Scotland, Wales and Ireland chart themselves,
    as they’d prefer. For us, there’s just one doubt:
    that medieval England may be dimmed
    by age, and all that’s earlier blotted out.
    X-rays might help. But surely ardent rhyme
    will, as it’s always claimed, outshine mere time?
    By its own power the influence will rise
    from sites and settlements deep underground
    of those who sang about them while they stood.
    Pale phosphorescent glimmers will be found
    of epics chanted to pre-Roman tunes
    and poems in, instead of about, runes.

Fairy-tale
    This is a story. Dear Clive
    (a name unmet among my acquaintance)
    you landed on my island: Mauritius
    I’ll call it – it was not unlike.
    The Governor came to meet your plane.
    I stood on the grass by the summerhouse.
    It was dark, I think. And next morning
    we walked in the ripples of