Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock

unregarded.
                                   *
    Third in the car is Mrs Golding
    who never smiles. And why should she?
 3
    The senior consultant on his rounds
    murmurs in so subdued a voice
    to the students marshalled behind
    that they gather in, forming a cell,
    a cluster, a rosette around him
    as he stands at the foot of my bed
    going through my notes with them,
    half-audibly instructive, grave.
    The slight ache as I strain forward
    to listen still seems imagined.
    Then he turns his practised smile on me:
    ‘How are you this morning?’ ‘Fine,
    very well, thank you.’ I smile too.
    And possibly all that murmurs within me
    is the slow dissolving of stitches.
 4
    I am out in the supermarket choosing –
    this very afternoon, this day –
    picking up tomatoes, cheese, bread,
    things I want and shall be using
    to make myself a meal, while they
    eat their stodgy suppers in bed:
    Janet with her big freckled breasts,
    her prim Scots voice, her one friend,
    and never in hospital before,
    who came in to have a few tests
    and now can’t see where they’ll end;
    and Coral in the bed by the door
    who whimpered and gasped behind a screen
    with nurses to and fro all night
    and far too much of the day;
    pallid, bewildered, nineteen.
    And Mary, who will be all right
    but gradually. And Alice, who may.
    Whereas I stand almost intact,
    giddy with freedom, not with pain.
    I lift my light basket, observing
    how little I needed in fact;
    and move to the checkout, to the rain,
    to the lights and the long street curving.

Variations on a Theme of Horace
    Clear is the man and of a cold life
    who needn’t fear the slings and arrows;
    cold is the man, and perhaps the moorish bows
    will avoid him and the wolf turn tail.
                                    *
    Sitting in the crypt under bare arches
    at a quite ordinary table with a neat cloth,
    a glass of wine before him, ‘I’m never sure,’
    he said, ‘that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning.’

    Upstairs musicians were stretching their bows
    for a late quartet which would also save us from nothing.
    This ex-church was bombed to rubble,
    rebuilt. It is not of that he was thinking.
    And policemen decorate the underground stations
    to protect us from the impure of heart;
    the traveller must learn to suspect his neighbour,
    each man his own watchdog. Nor of that.
    Of a certain high felicity, perhaps,
    imagining its absence; of the chances.
    (If echoes fall into the likeness of music
    that, like symmetry, may be accidental.)
    ‘Avoid archaism for its own sake –
    viols, rebecks: what is important
    is simply that the instruments should be able
    to play the notes.’ A hard-learnt compromise.
    But using what we have while we have it
    seems, at times, enough or more than enough.
    And here were old and newer things for our pleasure –
    the sweet curves of the arches; music to come.
    Which this one set before him with his own death –
    far from probably imminent, not soon likely –
    ticking contrapuntally like a pace-maker
    inside him. Were we, then, lighter, colder?
    Had we ignored a central insistent theme?
    Possibly even the birds aren’t happy:
    it may be that they twitter from rage or fear.
    So many tones; one can’t be sure of one’s reading.
    Just as one can’t quite despise Horace
    on whom the dreaded tree never did quite fall;
    timid enjoyer that he was, he died
    in due course of something or other. And meanwhile
    sang of his Lalage in public measures,
    enjoyed his farm and his dinners rather more,
    had as much, no doubt, as any of us to lose.
    And the black cypress stalks after us all.

A Walk in the Snow
    Neighbours lent her a tall feathery dog
    to make her expedition seem natural.
    She couldn’t really fancy a walk alone,
    drawn though she was to the shawled whiteness,
    the flung drifts of wool. She was not a walker.
    Her winter pleasures were in firelit rooms –
    entertaining friends with inventive dishes
    or with