Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock Page B

under the thrashing nettles
    and pull the mud up to my chin.
    Not that I would submit so
    to one voice only;
    but by the voices of these several winds
    merged into a flowing fringe of tones
    that swirl and comb over the hills
    I am compelled.
    I shall lie sound-proofed in the mud,
    a huge caddis-fly larva,
    a face floating upon Egyptian unguents
    in a runnel at the bottom of England.

In the Dingle Peninsula
    We give ten pence to the old woman
    and climb through nettles to the beehive hut.
    You’ve been before. You’re showing me prehistory,
    ushering me into a stone cocoon.
    I finger the corbelled wall and squat against it
    bowing my back in submission to its curves.
    The floor’s washed rock: not even a scorchmark
    as trace of the once-dwellers. But they’re here,
    closer than you, and trying to seduce me:
    the arched stones burn against my shoulders,
    my knees tingle, the cool air buzzes…
    I drag my eyelids open and sleep-walk out.
    ‘We’re skeletons underneath’ I’ve heard you say,
    looking into coffins at neat arrangements
    laid out in museums. We’re skeletons.
    I take the bones of your hand lightly in mine
    through the dry flesh and walk unresisting,
    willing to share it, over the peopled soil.

In the Terai
    Our throats full of dust, teeth harsh with it,
    plastery sweat in our hair and nostrils,
    we slam the flaps of the Landrover down
    and think we choke on these roads.
    Well, they will be better in time:
    all along the dry riverbed
    just as when we drove past this morning
    men and women squatting under umbrellas
    or cloth stretched over sticks, or nothing,
    are splitting chipped stones to make smaller chips,
    picking the fingernail-sized fragments
    into graded heaps: roads by the handful.
    We stop at the village and buy glasses of tea,
    stewed and sweet; swallow dust with it
    and are glad enough. The sun tilts lower.
    Somewhere, surely, in this valley
    under cool thatch mothers are feeding children
    with steamy rice, leaning over them
    to pour milk or water; the cups
    tasting of earthenware, neutral, clean,
    the young heads smelling only of hair.

River
    ‘…I saw with infinite pleasure the great object of my mission; the long sought for, majestic Niger, glittering to the morning sun, as broad as the Thames at Westminster, and flowing slowly to the eastward.’
    MUNGO PARK
    Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa
    The strong image is always the river
    was a line for the poem I never wrote
    twenty years ago and never have written
    of the green Wanganui under its willows
    or the ice-blue milky-foaming Clutha
    stopping my tremulous teenage heart.
    But now when I cross Westminster Bridge
    all that comes to mind is the Niger
    a river Mungo Park invented for me
    as he invented all those African villages
    and a certain kind of astonishing silence –
    the explorer having done the poet’s job
    and the poet feeling gratefully redundant.

To and Fro
    The Inner Harbour
    Paua-Shell
    Spilt petrol
    oil on a puddle
    the sea’s colour-chart
    porcelain, tie-dyed.
    Tap the shell:
    glazed calcium.
Cat’s-Eye
    Boss-eye, wall-eye, squinty lid
    stony door for a sea-snail’s tunnel
    the long beach littered with them
    domes of shell, discarded virginities
    where the green girl wanders, willing
    to lose hers to the right man
    or to the wrong man, if he should raise
    his frolic head above a sand dune
    glossy-black-haired, and that smile on him
Sea-Lives
    Under the sand at low tide
    are whispers, hisses, long slithers,
    bubbles, the suck of ingestion, a soft
    snap: mysteries and exclusions.
    Things grow on the dunes too –
    pale straggle of lupin-bushes,
    cutty-grass, evening primroses
    puckering in the low light.
    But the sea knows better.
    Walk at the edge of its rich waves:
    on the surface nothing shows;
    underneath it is fat and fecund.
Shrimping-Net
    Standing just under the boatshed
    knee-deep in dappled water
    sand-coloured legs and the sand itself
    greenish in the lit ripples
    watching the shrimps avoid her