Free Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock Page A

separator under the porch,
    the strolling chickens, the pear trees next to the yard,
    the barn full of white cats, the loaded haycart,
    the spinney…I saw it rolling on and on.
    As it couldn’t, of course. That I had faced
    when I made my compulsive return visit
    after more than twenty years. ‘Your aunt’s not well,’
    said Uncle George – little and gnarled himself –
    ‘You’ll find she doesn’t talk.’ They’d sold the farm,
    retired to Melton Mowbray with their daughter.
    ‘Premature senility,’ she whispered.
    But we all went out together in the car
    to see the old place, Auntie sitting
    straight-backed, dignified, mute,
    perhaps a little puzzled as we churned
    through splattering clay lanes, between wet hedges
    to Grange Farm again: to a square house,
    small, bleak, and surrounded by mud;
    to be greeted, shown to the parlour, given tea,
    with Auntie’s affliction gently signalled –
    ‘Her mouth hurts.’ Not my real aunt,
    nor my real uncle. Both dead now.
    I find it easiest to imagine dying
    as like the gradual running down of a film,
    the brain still flickering when the heart and blood
    have halted, and the last few frames
    lingering. Then where the projector jams
    is where we go, or are, or are no longer.
    If that comes anywhere near it, then I hope
    that for those two an after-image glowed
    in death of something better than mud and silence
    or than my minute study of a patch of ground;
    unless, like that for me, it spread before them
    sunny ploughland, pastures, the scented orchard.

Letter from Highgate Wood
    Your ‘wedge of stubborn particles’:
    that silver birch, thin as a bent flagpole,
    drives up through elm and oak and hornbeam
    to sky-level, catching the late sunlight.
    There’s woodsmoke, a stack of cut billets
    from some thick trunk they’ve had to hack;
    and of course a replacement programme under way –
    saplings fenced off against marauders.
    ‘We have seasons’ your poem says;
    and your letter tells me the black invader
    has moved into the lymph; is not defeated.
    ‘He’s lucky to be still around,’ said your friend –
    himself still around, still travelling
    after a near-axing as severe,
    it yet may prove, as yours at present.
    I have come here to think, not for comfort;
    to confront these matters, to imagine
    the proliferating ungentle cells.
    But the place won’t let me be fearful;
    the green things work their usual trick –
    ‘Choose life’ – and I remember instead
    our own most verdant season.
    My dear, after more than a dozen years
    light sings in the leaves of it still.

Poem Ended by a Death
    They will wash all my kisses and fingerprints off you
    and my tearstains – I was more inclined to weep
    in those wild-garlicky days – and our happier stains,
    thin scales of papery silk…Fuck that for a cheap
    opener; and false too – any such traces
    you pumiced away yourself, those years ago
    when you sent my letters back, in the week I married
    that anecdotal ape. So start again. So:
    They will remove the tubes and drips and dressings
    which I censor from my dreams. They will, it is true,
    wash you; and they will put you into a box.
    After which whatever else they may do
    won’t matter. This is my laconic style.
    You praised it, as I praised your intricate pearled
    embroideries; these links laced us together,
    plain and purl across the ribs of the world…

Having No Mind for the Same Poem
    Nor for the same conversation again and again.
    But the power of meditation to cure an allergy,
    that I will discuss
    cross-legged on the lawn at evening
    midges flittering, a tree beside us
    none of us can name;
    and rocks; a scent of syringa;
    certain Japanese questions; the journey…
    Nor for parody.
    Nor, if we come to it, for the same letter:
    ‘hard to believe…I remember best his laugh…
    such a vigorous man…please tell…’
    and running, almost running to stuff coins
    into the box for cancer research.
    The others.
    Nor for the same hopeless