Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock Page A

sherry, conversation, palm-reading:
    ‘You’ve suffered,’ she’d say. ‘Of course, life is suffering…’
    holding a wrist with her little puffy hand
    older than her face. She was writing a novel.
    But today there was the common smothered in snow,
    blanked-out, white as meringue, the paths gone:
    a few mounds of bracken spikily veiled
    and the rest smooth succulence. They pocked it,
    she and the dog; they wrote on it with their feet –
    her suede boots, his bright flurrying paws.
    It was their snow, and they took it.
                                                           That evening
    the poltergeist, the switcher-on of lights
    and conjuror with ashtrays, was absent.
    The house lay mute. She hesitated a moment
    at bedtime before the Valium bottle;
    then, to be on the safe side, took her usual;
    and swam into a deep snowy sleep
    where a lodge (was it?) and men in fur hats,
    and the galloping…and something about…

A Day in October
    1.30 p.m.
    Outside the National Gallery
    a man checks bags for bombs or weapons –
    not thoroughly enough: he’d have missed
    a tiny hand-grenade in my make-up purse,
    a cigarette packet of gelignite.
    I walk in gently to Room III
    not to disturb them: Piero’s angels,
    serene and cheerful, whom surely nothing could frighten,
    and St Michael in his red boots
    armed against all comers.
    Brave images. But under my heart
    an explosive bubble of tenderness gathers
    and I shiver before the chalky Christ:
    what must we do to save
    the white limbs, pale tree, trusting verticals?
    Playing the old bargaining game
    I juggle with prices, offer a finger
    for this or that painting, a hand or an eye
    for the room’s contents. What for the whole building?
    And shouldn’t I jump aside if the bomb flew,
    cowardly as instinct makes us?
    ‘Goodbye’ I tell the angels, just in case.
    4 p.m.
    It’s a day for pictures:
    this afternoon, in the course of duty,
    I open a book of black-and-white photographs,
    rather smudgy, the text quaintly translated
    from the Japanese: Atomic Bomb Injuries.
    All the familiar shots are here:
    the shadow blast-printed on to a wall,
    the seared or bloated faces of children.
    I am managing not to react to them.
    Then this soldier, who died from merely helping,
    several slow weeks afterwards.
    His body is a Scarfe cartoon –
    skinny trunk, enormous toes and fingers,
    joints huge with lymphatic nodes.
    My throat swells with tears at last.
    Almost I fall into that inheritance,
    long resisted and never my own doctrine,
    a body I would not be part of.
    I all but say it: ‘What have we done?
    How shall we pay for this?’
    But having a job to do I swallow
    tears, guilt, these pallid secretions;
    close the book; and carry it away
    to answer someone’s factual enquiry.
    7 p.m.
    In the desert the biggest tank battle
    since World War II smashes on.
    My friends are not sure whether their brothers
    in Israel are still alive.
    All day the skies roar with jets.
    And I do not write political poems.

House-talk
    Through my pillow, through mattress, carpet, floor and ceiling,
    sounds ooze up from the room below:
    footsteps, chinking crockery, hot-water pipes groaning,
    the muffled clunk of the refrigerator door,
    and voices. They are trying to be quiet,
    my son and his friends, home late in the evening.
    Tones come softly filtered through the layers of padding.
    I hear the words but not what the words are,
    as on my radio when the batteries are fading.
    Voices are reduced to a muted music:
    Andrew’s bass, his friend’s tenor, the indistinguishable
    light murmurs of the girls; occasional giggling.
    Surely wood and plaster retain something
    in their grain of all the essences they absorb?
    This house has been lived in for ninety years,
    nine by us. It has heard all manner of talking.
    Its porous fabric must be saturated
    with words. I offer it my peaceful breathing.

Foreigner
    These winds bully me:
    I am to lie down in a ditch
    quiet