Free Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock

the sea
    watching the green and purple creatures
    flashing in and out of the waves
    about our ankles. Seabirds, were they?
    Or air-fishes, a flying shoal
    of sea-parrots, finned and feathered?
    Even they were less of a marvel,
    pretty things, than that you’d returned
    after a year and such distraction
    to walk with me on the splashy strand.

At the Creative Writing Course
    Slightly frightened of the bullocks
    as we walk into their mud towards them
    she arms herself by naming them for me:
    ‘Friesian, Aberdeen, Devon, South Devon…’
    A mixed herd. I was nervous too,
    but no longer. ‘Devon, Friesian, Aberdeen…’
    the light young voice chants at them
    faster as the long heavy heads
    lift and lurch towards us. And pause,
    turn away to let us pass. I am learning
    to show confidence before large cattle.
    She is learning to be a poet.

Endings
    The Ex-Queen Among the Astronomers
    They serve revolving saucer eyes,
    dishes of stars; they wait upon
    huge lenses hung aloft to frame
    the slow procession of the skies.
    They calculate, adjust, record,
    watch transits, measure distances.
    They carry pocket telescopes
    to spy through when they walk abroad.
    Spectra possess their eyes; they face
    upwards, alert for meteorites,
    cherishing little glassy worlds:
    receptacles for outer space.
    But she, exile, expelled, ex-queen,
    swishes among the men of science
    waiting for cloudy skies, for nights
    when constellations can’t be seen.
    She wears the rings he let her keep;
    she walks as she was taught to walk
    for his approval, years ago.
    His bitter features taunt her sleep.
    And so when these have laid aside
    their telescopes, when lids are closed
    between machine and sky, she seeks
    terrestrial bodies to bestride.
    She plucks this one or that among
    the astronomers, and is become
    his canopy, his occultation;
    she sucks at earlobe, penis, tongue
    mouthing the tubes of flesh; her hair
    crackles, her eyes are comet-sparks.
    She brings the distant briefly close
    above his dreamy abstract stare

Off the Track
    Our busy springtime has corrupted
    into a green indolence of summer,
    static, swollen, invisibly devoured.
    Too many leaves have grown between us.
    Almost without choosing I have turned
    from wherever we were towards this thicket
    It is not the refuge I had hoped for.
    Walking away from you I walk
    into a trailing mist of caterpillars:
    they swing at my face, tinily suspended,
    half-blinding; and my hands are smudged
    with a syrup of crushed aphids.
    You must be miles away by now
    in open country, climbing steadily,
    head down, looking for larks’ eggs.

Beaux Yeux
    Arranging for my due ration of terror
    involves me in such lunacies
    as recently demanding to be shown
    the broad blue ovals of your eyes.
    Yes: quite as alarming as you’d promised,
    those lapidary iris discs
    level in your dark small face.
    Still, for an hour or two I held them
    until you laughed, replaced your tinted glasses,
    switched accents once again
    and went away, looking faintly uncertain
    in the sunlight (but in charge, no doubt of it)
    and leaving me this round baby sparrow
    modelled in feather-coloured clay,
    a small snug handful; hardly apt
    unless in being cooler than a pebble.

Send-off
    Half an hour before my flight was called
    he walked across the airport bar towards me
    carrying what was left of our future
    together: two drinks on a tray.

In Focus
    Inside my closed eyelids, printed out
    from some dying braincell as I awakened,
    was this close-up of granular earthy dust,
    fragments of chaff and grit, a triangular
    splinter of glass, a rusty metal washer
    on rough concrete under a wooden step.
    Not a memory. But the caption told me
    I was at Grange Farm, seven years old,
    in the back yard, kneeling outside the shed
    with some obscure seven-year-old’s motive,
    seeing as once, I must believe, I saw:
    sharply; concentrating as once I did.
    Glad to be there again I relaxed the focus
    (eyes still shut); let the whole scene open out
    to the pump and