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Peotry and Fiction

Five Poems

David Constantine

Moon

Under compulsion when the moon turned murderous

Coldly we walked out during the white hours Who should have kept ourselves indoors for warmth Asking of one another only mercy.

Sweetheart, I pleaded, under this hag moon

We must say nothing and look upon nothing. Come in and sleep now or we shall convert Our universe to ash and ice and stone.

Her hung and bitter face setting against me,

Look everywhere, she said, once and for all And speak of everything and show me if you can Some love still living under my truthful moon.

Turning to look I gave our fields to ash,

I creased the brows of hills with lines of stone,

I struck the wincing surface of our lake, I wrinkled every stream. In silence then

Standing triumphant by the sobbing ice

I cupped my hands in trickling dust for her

Whom fever shook. Moon love, she said,

This being done how will you warm me now?

"Moon" appears in the collection Watching for Dolphins, Bloodaxe Books, 1983.

Soldiering On

We need another monument. Everywhere Has Tommy Atkins with his head bowed down

For all his pals, the alphabetical dead,

And that is sweet and right and every year

We freshen the whited cenotaph with red

But no one seems to have thought of standing her

In all the parishes in bronze or stone

With bags, with heavy bags, with bags of spuds

And flour and tins of peas and clinging kids

Lending the bags their bit of extra weight —

Flat-chested little woman in a hat,

Thin as a rake, tough as old boots, with feet

That ache, ache, ache. I've read

He staggered into battle carrying sixty pounds

Of things for killing with. She looked after the pence,

She made ends meet, she had her ports of call

For things that keep body and soul together

Like sugar, tea, a loaf, spare ribs and lard,

And things the big ship brings that light the ends

Of years, like oranges. On maps of France

I've trailed him down the chalky roads to where

They end and her on the oldest A to Z

Down streets, thin as a wraith, year in, year out Bidding the youngest put her best foot forward, Lugging the rations past the war memorial.

Cycladic Idols

In the night there were owls, so close

One on the chimney pot calling back

As though she had found me and were summoning the others.

The flat white face has visited again.

I warm my hands on coffee in a fired clay. This bitter morning I am willing to listen.

Grow up, she says.

Your grown-up son was right not to sleep with me. He has a healthy fear. Grow up yourself.

You will never see me in the flesh

Only in the bone.

Your eyes are incorrigible

As though a nipple in each would cool your migraine Likewise your hands

Small and ugly and with bitten nails

As though one laid on my public bone would warm me through Will they never learn? Again and again:

Where I belong is never warmer than moonlight

You had no right to fetch me in

I do not belong on your pillow

Your son was right to turn my face to the wall.

Owls are friendlier. I hug myself For cold and nobody else And nobody hugs me.

'Mid-afternoon in another narrow bed'

Mid-afternoon in another narrow bed

High up in another thin hotel

Now they are watching swifts crossing the snow And higher, higher criss-crossing the blue.

Freed of their own they think the swifts' hunger

A love of life, and life all play,

All bodying forth some consummate ability

For the love of it, in freedom. Later when they go down

On the choking streets to seek a sharp red wine,

Succulent bitter olives, soft white bread

And oranges, and when they hear

The caged birds hung on balconies as though to test the air

Each in its shaft of sun

Singing as though to burst the heart and the cage

These two seeking their nourishment when they please By that trapped singing will feel their hunger raised

Higher than the highest floor of their flung-up hotel,

Higher than the ravenous swifts, higher than the snow

Into the blue itself, the keen

Cold infinite and insatiable blue.

'Nåid-afternoon in another narrow bed', 'Cycladic Idols', and 'Soldiering On' appear in The Pelt of Wasps, Bloodaxe Books, 1998

Shabbesgoy

Daylight still, a green sky. At lighting-up time

There was already the thin beginning of a moon, and one star So that from the streets that smelled of the gasworks and coalfires

And gasps of fighting beer and because of the abattoir

Almost rural he went with clenched fists, wishing hard

Over the river that only transfusions from the factories

Kept going. Or it was winter, fog

In which he left her safe by the street lamp nearest home Shaped and illumined and vanished immediately Towards the hospital, its thousand smeared windows.

Him, you. You do not remember, but I say

That on the hill at the big houses waiting for a lamplighter

Or a firemender they never had anyone luckier than you

The boy courting, radiant, burning, for that small service

Out of his trance of vows and wishes accosted courteously

At the gate, passer-by, who lifted his head that wore

The new moon and her star or shone from the drizzled fog

With the aura of apparition. How queer the rules are High on the slopes above the dead river,

How quick and simple were your offered hands.

'Shabbesgoy' was published in Poetry Review in September, 1998.

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