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

romantic –
    well, maybe it was easier for Keats:
    I’d write with more conviction about death
    if it were clutching at my every breath.
    And now we’ve come to it. The subject’s out:
    the ineluctable, the all-pervasive.
    Your death is what this letter’s all about;
    and if so far I’ve seemed a bit evasive
    it’s not from cowardice or phoney tact –
    it’s simply that I can’t believe the fact.
    I’d put you, with New Zealand, in cold storage
    to wait for my return (should I so choose).
    News of destruction can’t delete an image:
    what isn’t seen to go, one doesn’t lose.
    The bulldozed streets, the buildings they’ve torn down
    remain untouched until I’m back in town.
    And so with you, framed in that sepia vision
    a hemisphere away from me, and half
    the twenty years I’ve known you. Such division
    converts a face into a photograph:
    a little blurred perhaps, the outlines dim,
    but fixed, enduring, permanently Jim.
    I saw you first when I was seventeen,
    a word-struck student, ripe for dazzling. You
    held unassuming court in the canteen –
    the famous poet in the coffee-queue.
    I watched with awe. But soon, as spheres are apt
    to do in Wellington, ours overlapped.
    I married, you might say, into the art.
    You were my husband’s friend; you’d wander in
    on your way home from teaching, at the start,
    for literary shop-talk over gin.
    And then those fabled parties of one’s youth:
    home-brew and hot-lines to poetic truth.
    Later the drinks were tea and lemonade,
    the visits family ones, the talk less vatic;
    and later still, down south, after I’d made
    my getaway, came idiosyncratic
    letters, your generous comments on my verse,
    and poems of your own. But why rehearse
    matters which you, acute observer, wise
    recorder, don’t forget? And now I falter,
    knowing your present case: those tolerant eyes
    will register no more. But I can’t alter
    this message to a dirge; the public attitude
    isn’t my style: I write in simple gratitude.
    To think of elegies is to recall
    several of yours. I find, when I look through
    your varied, eloquent poems, nearly all
    frosted with hints at death. What can I do
    now, when it has become your own condition,
    but praise all that you gave to the tradition?

St John’s School
    When I went back the school was rather small
    but not unexpectedly or oddly so.
    I peered in at the windows of the hall
    where we sang O God Our Help thirty years ago
    for D-Day, the Normandy landings. It was all
    as I’d pictured it. Outside, they’d cut the row
    of dusty laurels, laid a lawn instead,
    and the prefab classroom at the end was new;
    but there were the lavatories, there was the shed
    where we sat on rainy days with nothing to do,
    giggling; and the beech trees overhead
    whose fallen husks we used to riffle through
    for triangular nuts. Yes, all as it should be –
    no false images to negotiate,
    no shocks. I wandered off contentedly
    across the playground, out through the north gate,
    down the still knee-straining slope, to see
    what sprang up suddenly across the street:
    the church, that had hardly existed in my past,
    that had lurked behind a tree or two, unknown –
    and uncensorious of me as I chased
    squirrels over the graves – the church had grown:
    high on its huge mound it soared, vast;
    and God glared out from behind a tombstone.

Pupation
    Books, music, the garden, cats:
    I have cocooned myself
    in solitude, fatly silken.
    Settled?
                   I flatter myself.
    Things buzz under my ribs;
    there are ticklings, dim blunderings.
    Ichneumon flies have got in.

The Drought Breaks
    That wet gravelly sound is rain.
    Soil that was bumpy and crumbled
    flattens under it, somewhere;
    splatters into mud. Spiked grass
    grows soft with it and bends like hair.
    You lean over me, smiling at last.

Kilpeck
    We are dried and brittle this morning,
    fragile with continence, quiet.
    You have brought me to see a church.
    I stare at a Norman arch in red