Injury Time Page 5

  So one day those who know my books may say

  That this is where he signed his life away.”

  Recollected in Tranquillity

  You realise that this is no reprieve

  But merely a delay?

  The comedy must end. The way it ends

  Has just been put off to another day.

  Perhaps two months from now, perhaps two years,

  It will be known to family and friends

  That you, at last, are more dead than alive,

  With nothing left to say.

  When any tears there are will be their tears,

  Not yours, the wave of silence will arrive

  With which you leave.

  So this must be the storm before the lull,

  These webs of words

  Slowly assembled at the summer’s peak

  Here in the portico of your downfall,

  As you sit watchfully to count the birds –

  So few beside the Heathrow rush of spring –

  Which in the garden briefly peck and preen

  Before continuing

  To Finland, Iceland, Baffin Land, wherever:

  Your chance to speak before you never speak

  Again, your next to final scene.

  This peace, which will be perfect by and by,

  Came out of chaos. When the drugs went wrong

  It almost seemed a burden not to die

  As I shared that Babelic rumpus room

  With the trouser thief and the lady with one song

  She sang forever. Racing, my brain teemed

  With stuff to tell the doctors so they might

  Unbolt the door, but that place was a tomb

  Sealed tight. I ate my sleeping pills and dreamed

  Of all I could have had –

  The happiness I wasted. Now, set free,

  I see that my whole life

  Had been a greedy fever. A sad spell

  Of frenzy only summed it up. My wife

  And daughters built this studio for me

  In which I read and write and rest. They know

  Something ill-mended in my mind demands

  I live alone. And so they come and go

  To help me do that, and so all is well,

  As I wait for the day the last bird lands

  And nightfall finally

  Blankets my vision of this bright arcade.

  Outside, in that cane chair,

  I sat to read The Faerie Queene and found

  Garbled accounts of knights and damsels made

  Melodic sense, in verse as light as air.

  On this desk, crowded as a burial mound

  With treasured papers, my Chinese notebook,

  Full of unfinished thoughts, will still be there,

  When I, at last, can’t reach it. Should things look

  As if I knew despair, of this be sure:

  I loved it here.

  The Dark Roses

  The roses that I sent on Mother’s Day

  Maintained, in their glass vase, an after-glow

  Of crimson lustre, but their late display

  Of faded glory finally was gone

  For good. Strange that the shape of every bloom

  Remains, the outline of its folds more clear

  Now than before. This I must dwell upon:

  Here in the sunlight of this perfect room

  These roses die well, though they bring night near –

  For the darkness in their petals seeks me too,

  And once inside it I won’t even know

  How beautifully designed they are, how true

  To life. But for the moment they are here

  Where I can see them, as I pray that you

  Will think of what I once was when I go:

  Not beautiful, as these dead things are still,

  But still too full of life for time to kill.

  Summer Surprised Us

  Supposing this is my last summer, let

  What I see here, in all its glory, seem,

  Come winter, splendid to my fading gaze

  As it is now. Curse me if I forget

  The luck that still brings me this waking dream

  With such a freshness, here in my last days,

  I feel that I was born to breathe the air

  The rain has just drenched and cooled everywhere.

  It needed cooling. Heat does not belong,

  Where I lie down now, to the same degree

  As it did there, when I had just been born

  And started to grow up. It seems plain wrong

  To feel my thin supply of energy

  Depleted further, even though the dawn

  Is such a flood of light it might as well

  Be the Pacific sun. Clear as a bell,

  Rinsed by this wetly gleaming afternoon,

  The light still sparkles undiminished. When

  The temperature retreats, as soon it must,

  Things might look more like England, and the moon

  Seem less a vast night-club for magic men,

  Unless the rearrangement of its dust

  Is permanent, and nothing from now on

  Will cease from being changed or simply gone.

  For how to know that these weeks have not been

  The first three quarters of my final act

  In which, bemused, my judgment quite undone,

  I play Malvolio when, scene by scene,

  He stumbles to his downfall? Won’t that fact –

  Though punctuated by the sunset gun –

  Not feel like this, a fantasy, with all

  These other people in a fiction’s thrall?

  I’ll ask my keen-eyed daughters. Am I here?

  Is all this sunlight real? I hear surf boom

  As if I, somehow soon, might swim once more.

  But no, these waves are only in my ear:

  Tricks, like the way the sunlight in this room,

  Transposed through time, is light I saw before

  And brings with it the young man I once knew

  Who took one look and fell in love with you.

  As if you were here now and not sky-high

  Walking among the pitched roofs of Kashmir,

  I long for you to stroll the quarter mile

  From your side of the river and drop by,

  Just to be asked if I am fading here

  In this white stream of fire. Were you to smile,

  I’d take that as a no, though I have learned

  Richly to see the sky bleached, the air burned.

  The truth is that I need no heat to melt

  And die the puddled death of the snowman.

  I do that from within. My memories

  More than suffice to tell me I’ve been dealt

  A fair hand if not better. I began

  In light like this, and saw the burning trees

  Cut swathes through mountain ranges. Far too small

  Back then to really comprehend it all,

  I almost do now. It is life, drawn from

  The roaring force of nature, even here

  In these polite, pampered gardens. If I live

  To see again the cold Elysium

  Which is the winter’s destiny, forgive –

  As if it were a figment of the air –

  The weakness I show now, if not the way

  I thought it strength, back in a heedless day.

  At some time or another, it must be

  Near in the future now that I shall lose

  My last contact with life, and so depart

  To leave behind even the memory

  Of those cross garters I was proud to choose.

  But that absurd confusion spoke my heart:

  I sought release in vain, but at the last

  It seeks me with success. The die is cast:

  This sudden touch of autumn has begun

  At last to take the shine off all I see.

  A hint of winter will be in the ai
r

  As you fly back to us, but if the sun

  Should shine at all, it will for you and me,

  Blessing us here as first it blessed us there

  When real waves roared and how far we would get

  Together neither of us knew as yet.

  Tactics of the Air Battle

  (In this fantasy, one of the many young aircrew buried in the American cemetery outside Cambridge grows old in his home state, and writes to me.)

  No sudden death was quite as quick as when

  The enemy came from the front dead straight,

  The closing speed six hundred plus, and then

  In just one second, from the wings and snout

  He sprayed the shells that ripped your flight deck open

  And left an aimless wreck, which went straight down,

  The waist and turret gunners jumping ship

  If they were lucky. In a flank attack

  Sometimes the rudder was shot off,

  The flight crew keeping just enough control

  To turn for England. But with two or more

  Engines shut down and leaking so much fuel?

  Forget it. Like unpacked smoke-puffs

  Lone parachutes continued to appear

  For miles on end. Imagine the mad violence

  And then the slow admission of junk status

  As their hulking power symbol fell apart.

  Boys falling from the cold air, looking up,

  Saw the undoing of their citadels.

  You might ask why, then, the Krauts didn’t win.

  The answer is, they ran out of trained flyers.

  Our fighters cut theirs down at such a rate

  Luftwaffe pilots rated Ace if they

  Could land: forget about an actual fight.

  Only old hands could even get that near.

  The younger ones were heading for the wall

  Their first trip out. The Mustangs ate them up:

  The Mustangs and the Thunderbolts. P-47s

  Could go downhill like dump-trucks and come back

  Uphill like seagulls. None of the German planes

  Could mix it with a Lightning. Their night-fighters

  Stayed in the game because the British bombers

  Were unprotected. Finally, of course,

  Even the night-fighters went up by day,

  With all their radar aerials still on them,

  Cutting their speed. It was a turkey shoot:

  A Ju-88 would last ten minutes.

  The jets and rocket planes would certainly

  Have made a difference, but they were too few

  And far too late to count. I saw one once,

  I mean a jet, the 262. It went

  Across our nose as fast as you could blink

  And rippled as it launched its bunch of missiles

  At someone on the far side of the box

  From us. Someone I didn’t know, thank Christ,

  Was all gone in a flash. If that had happened

  Ten times in one raid we’d have had to stop,

  And send our bombs to Germany by mail.

  But all we saw was nothing but the future

  Just getting started, and we came home safe.

  I got to die of old age, just like you.

  Believe me, son, you didn’t miss a thing.

  The Gods Make Mischief

  The pliability of Jupiter

  Is easily explained. When Juno pleaded

  For Turnus, what she wished seemed granted her

  By the great god. But her wish was not needed

  To change his mind, which changed itself: the day

  Of death for that young man was undecided

  As yet, and in the long run Fate would say

  When it would be. Her fervour was misguided:

  She spoke too soon. My mother spoke too late.

  Our God could not postpone her husband’s dying.

  It was already done. Though God was great,

  Deep into hell her cries of grief went flying,

  And I began to be what I became,

  Doing my level best to seem undaunted:

  What use are gods, if Chance is their real name?

  The lifelong question by which I was haunted –

  Taunted, as if I were the one to blame.

  The Smocking Brick

  Across twelve thousand miles of land and ocean

  I came here to get most of my work done.

  Writings that were no more than a mere notion

  One day, and for a while were just begun,

  Grew out of those few lines to their fruition

  As if I were remembering the sun

  And surf of my original condition,

  When first I saw the shell the silkworm spun

  Was like a golden thimble for my mother

  As she worked at the smocking brick. No book

  Could be so neatly written. Now no other

  Memory haunts me like the pains she took

  To decorate those tiny frocks. The weather

  Has nothing here to match how thunder shook

  Our windows, but still, floating like a feather,

  Her needle hand, obeying her fixed look,

  Would build neat lattices hour after hour.

  Now, for her son, the hours grow few, and yet

  I might, impelled by that first taste of power,

  Write something to pay off an ancient debt

  If I sit up till dawn. Down to the wire,

  While I can still breathe I will not forget

  Networks of silk that glowed with pastel fire

  While she stitched through the day until sunset.

  It all took time, and time is a wild river

  That one day ceases to reflect the sky.

  Eventually the spinning coin will shiver,

  The rumble as it falls end with a sigh.

  When there is honest toil in the endeavour

  Piece-work is noble but cannot defy

  The night, which will not wait for me forever.

  Her work kept us alive, and as I die

  I’m certain I will think of the precision

  With which she placed the last stitch in a row.

  Never until the failing of her vision

  Did she cease to prepare her cloth and sew

  With her fine thread the rhymed and scanned equation

  Of pure expression and punctilio

  That made each separate séance an occasion.

  But why was she so quiet? Now I know.

  I know now that the shadow of non-being

  Will visit anyone who does these things

  And stay till they are done. All I was seeing

  Was somebody arranging offerings

  Before an altar, but there is no saying

  Which god was served. What grace such worship brings

  Is slow to show itself. We just keep praying

  Until that rapt moth spreads its perfect wings

  And leaves a cracked cocoon to be translated

  Into the luscious filament employed

  When seeing squares of cotton recreated,

  Making another mother overjoyed

  At how her child, too young to get excited

  By how she looks, in fact a bit annoyed,

  Becomes a princess. Suitably requited,

  The toiling seamstress profits from the void:

  And finally a poem, too, must render

  Obeisance to the dark where it can shine

  As only one more star, for no defender

  Of this art, which I still hope to make mine,

  Denies the overstock we’re buckling under.

  Yet the compulsion lives. Shaping a line

  To mark the shock of recollected thunder,

  I stitch the lightning into my design

  And see again that tireless needle gleaming

  As if its contrapuntal play of light

  Were part of what was made. If I were dreaming
/>   I would not also see the fruit-bat’s flight

  So clearly, or the frangipani blooming,

  Their shades of butter in plush cusps of white.

  But this is real, and now. The breakers booming

  Spatter my eyes with salt tears as I write.

  Intergalactic Junket

  Junkets my mother made would float in space

  Like flying saucers, which were all the rage

  At that time. They would settle into place

  On the kitchen table so a kid my age

  Could listen to them hum and watch them glow

  Before they disappeared without a trace

  Into the chasm of a childish face,

  A throat whose flattered gullet felt the flow.

  Sprinkled with nutmeg from beyond the stars

  The junket sat there tremulous in its plate

  And yet unmoving. Visiting milk bars

  When I was still too young to stay out late,

  I had seen sundaes more superb than this,

  But not with the divine tranquillity

  My mother’s junkets had. It seemed to me

  Their purity defied analysis.

  Just once she made the junket pink, but I,

  Craving vanilla, frowned at cochineal.

  It went down fluently enough, but why

  Fool with a classic product? Keep it real.

  My eyes must have conveyed my faint disgust.

  The visitant went back to being white

  As if it had absorbed the years of light

  It conquered spinning through the cosmic dust.

  I grew up, ate the sundae any time

  I felt like it, and never missed the bland

  Sweet smoothness of the junket. Now I climb

  Downstairs to see it coming in to land

  There on the table as it used to do

  So long ago, back when my life began.

  I found it difficult to be a man.

  This last feast seems more simple and more true.

  Front Flip Half Twist

  In the video from Wales, my granddaughter

  Steps to the wall’s edge. Just a yard below

  The beach begins, a long way from the water.

  A pause for thought. She then proceeds to throw

  A cartwheel through the air, and, when she lands,

  Stand upright on the sand, all done no hands.

  She came to her miraculous mastery

  Of this manoeuvre by a strict process –

  She still insists it was no mystery –

  Of more and more to reach down less and less

  Until, one day, the finished thing was there,

  Made manifest entirely in mid-air.

  I who can fly no longer feel I’m flying