Collected Poems, page 15
went home.
Faust was in. A word, he said,
I spent the night being pleasured
by a virtual Helen of Troy.
Face that launched a thousand ships.
I kissed its lips.
Thing is –
I’ve made a pact
with Mephistopheles,
the Devil’s boy.
He’s on his way
to take away
what’s owed,
reap what I sowed.
For all these years of
gagging for it,
going for it,
rolling in it,
I’ve sold my soul.
At this, I heard
a serpent’s hiss,
tasted evil, knew its smell,
as scaly devil hands
poked up
right through the terracotta Tuscan tiles
at Faust’s bare feet
and dragged him, oddly smirking, there and then
straight down to Hell.
Oh, well.
Faust’s will
left everything –
the yacht,
the several homes,
the Lear jet, the helipad,
the loot, et cet, et cet,
the lot –
to me.
C’est la vie.
When I got ill,
it hurt like hell.
I bought a kidney
with my credit card,
then I got well.
I keep Faust’s secret still –
the clever, cunning, callous bastard
didn’t have a soul to sell.
Delilah
Teach me, he said –
we were lying in bed –
how to care.
I nibbled the purse of his ear.
What do you mean? Tell me more.
He sat up and reached for his beer.
I can rip out the roar
from the throat of a tiger,
or gargle with fire,
or sleep one whole night in the Minotaur’s lair,
or flay the bellowing fur
from a bear,
all for a dare.
There’s nothing I fear.
Put your hand here –
he guided my fingers over the scar
over his heart,
a four-medal wound from the war –
but I cannot be gentle, or loving, or tender.
I have to be strong.
What is the cure?
He fucked me again
until he was sore,
then we both took a shower.
Then he lay with his head on my lap
for a darkening hour;
his voice, for a change, a soft burr
I could just about hear.
And, yes, I was sure
that he wanted to change,
my warrior.
I was there.
So when I felt him soften and sleep,
when he started, as usual, to snore,
I let him slip and slide and sprawl, handsome and huge,
on the floor.
And before I fetched and sharpened my scissors –
snipping first at the black and biblical air –
I fastened the chain to the door.
That’s the how and the why and the where.
Then with deliberate, passionate hands
I cut every lock of his hair.
Anne Hathaway
‘Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed . . .’
(from Shakespeare’s will)
The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights, I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.
Queen Kong
I remember peeping in at his skyscraper room
and seeing him fast asleep. My little man.
I’d been in Manhattan a week,
making my plans; staying at 2 quiet hotels
in the Village, where people were used to strangers
and more or less left you alone. To this day
I’m especially fond of pastrami on rye.
I digress. As you see, this island’s a paradise.
He’d arrived, my man, with a documentary team
to make a film. (There’s a particular toad
that lays its eggs only here.) I found him alone
in a clearing, scooped him up in my palm,
and held his wriggling, shouting life till he calmed.
For me, it was absolutely love at first sight.
I’d been so lonely. Long nights in the heat
of my own pelt, rumbling an animal blues.
All right, he was small, but perfectly formed
and gorgeous. There were things he could do
for me with the sweet finesse of those hands
that no gorilla could. I swore in my huge heart
to follow him then to the ends of the earth.
For he wouldn’t stay here. He was nervous.
I’d go to his camp each night at dusk,
crouch by the delicate tents, and wait. His colleagues
always sent him out pretty quick. He’d climb
into my open hand, sit down; and then I’d gently pick
at his shirt and his trews, peel him, put
the tip of my tongue to the grape of his flesh.
Bliss. But when he’d finished his prize-winning film,
he packed his case; hopped up and down
on my heartline, miming the flight back home
to New York. Big metal bird. Didn’t he know
I could swat his plane from these skies like a gnat?
But I let him go, my man. I watched him fly
into the sun as I thumped at my breast, distraught.
I lasted a month. I slept for a week,
then woke to binge for a fortnight. I didn’t wash.
The parrots clacked their migraine chant.
The swinging monkeys whinged. Fevered, I drank
handfuls of river right by the spot where he’d bathed.
I bled when a fat, red moon rolled on the jungle roof.
And after that, I decided to get him back.
So I came to sail up the Hudson one June night,
with the New York skyline a concrete rainforest
of light; and felt, lovesick and vast, the first
glimmer of hope in weeks. I was discreet, prowled
those streets in darkness, pressing my passionate eye
to a thousand windows, each with its modest peep-show
of boredom or pain, of drama, consolation, remorse.
I found him, of course. At 3 a.m. on a Sunday,
dreaming alone in his single bed; over his lovely head
a blown-up photograph of myself. I stared for a long time
till my big brown eyes grew moist; then I padded away
through Central Park, under the stars. He was mine.
Next day, I shopped. Clothes for my man, mainly,
but one or two treats for myself from Bloomingdale’s.
I picked him, like a chocolate from the top layer
of a box, one Friday night, out of his room
and let him dangle in the air betwen my finger
and my thumb in a teasing, lover’s way. Then we sat
on the tip of the Empire State Building, saying farewell
to the Brooklyn Bridge, to the winking yellow cabs,
to the helicopters over the river, dragonflies.
Twelve happy years. He slept in my fur, woke early
to massage the heavy lids of my eyes. I liked that.
He liked me to gently blow on him; or scratch,
with care, the length of his back with my nail.
Then I’d ask him to play on the wooden pipes he’d made
in our first year. He’d sit, cross-legged, near my ear
for hours: his plaintive, lost tunes making me cry.
When he died, I held him all night, shaking him
like a doll, licking his face, breast, soles of his feet,
his little rod. But then, heartsore as I was, I set to work.
He would be pleased. I wear him now about my neck,
perfect, preserved, with tiny emeralds for eyes. No man
has been loved more. I’m sure that, sometimes, in his silent death,
against my massive, breathing lungs, he hears me roar.
Mrs Quasimodo
I’d loved them fervently since childhood.
Their generous bronze throats
gargling, or chanting slowly, calming me –
the village runt, name-called, stunted, lame, hare-lipped;
but bearing up, despite it all, sweet-tempered,
good at needlework;
an ugly cliché in a field
pressing dock-leaves to her fat, stung calves
and listening to the five cool bells of evensong.
I believed that they could even make it rain.
The city suited me; my lumpy shadow
lurching on its jagged alley walls;
my small eyes black
as rained-on cobblestones.
I frightened cats.
I lived alone up seven flights,
boiled potatoes on a ring
and fried a single silver fish;
then stared across the grey lead roofs
as dusk’s blue rubber rubbed them out,
and then the bells began.
I climbed the belltower steps,
out of breath and sweating anxiously, puce-faced,
and found the campanologists beneath their ropes.
They made a space for me,
telling their names,
and when it came to him
I felt a thump of confidence,
a recognition like a struck match in my head.
It was Christmas time.
When the others left,
he fucked me underneath the gaping, stricken bells
until I wept.
We wed.
He swung an epithalamium for me,
embossed it on the fragrant air.
Long, sexy chimes,
exuberant peals,
slow scales trailing up and down the smaller bells,
an angelus.
We had no honeymoon
but spent the week in bed.
And did I kiss
each part of him –
that horseshoe mouth,
that tetrahedron nose,
that squint left eye,
that right eye with its pirate wart,
the salty leather of that pig’s hide throat,
and give his cock
a private name –
or not?
So more fool me.
We lived in the Cathedral grounds.
The bellringer.
The hunchback’s wife.
(The Quasimodos. Have you met them? Gross.)
And got a life.
Our neighbours – sullen gargoyles, fallen angels,
cowled saints
who raised their marble hands in greeting
as I passed along the gravel paths,
my husband’s supper on a tray beneath a cloth.
But once,
one evening in the lady chapel on my own,
throughout his ringing of the seventh hour,
I kissed the cold lips of a Queen next to her King.
Something had changed,
or never been.
Soon enough
he started to find fault.
Why did I this?
How could I that?
Look at myself.
And in that summer’s dregs,
I’d see him
watch the pin-up gypsy
posing with the tourists in the square;
then turn his discontented, mulish eye on me
with no more love than stone.
I should have known.
Because it’s better, isn’t it, to be well formed.
Better to be slim, be slight,
your slender neck quoted between two thumbs;
and beautiful, with creamy skin,
and tumbling auburn hair,
those devastating eyes;
and have each lovely foot
held in a bigger hand
and kissed;
then be watched till morning as you sleep,
so perfect, vulnerable and young
you hurt his blood.
And given sanctuary.
But not betrayed.
Not driven to an ecstasy of loathing of yourself:
banging your ugly head against a wall,
gaping in the mirror at your heavy dugs,
your thighs of lard,
your mottled upper arms;
thumping your belly –
look at it –
your wobbling gut.
You pig. You stupid cow. You fucking buffalo.
Abortion. Cripple. Spastic. Mongol. Ape.
Where did it end?
A ladder. Heavy tools. A steady hand.
And me, alone all night up there,
bent on revenge.
He had pet names for them.
Marie.
The belfry trembled when she spoke for him.
I climbed inside her with my claw-hammer,
my pliers, my saw, my clamp;
and, though it took an agonizing hour,
ripped out her brazen tongue
and let it fall.
Then Josephine,
his second-favourite bell,
kept open her astonished, golden lips
and let me in.
The bells. The bells.
I made them mute.
No more arpeggios or scales, no stretti, trills
for christenings, weddings, great occasions, happy days.
No more practising
for bellringers
on smudgy autumn nights.
No clarity of sound, divine, articulate,
to purify the air
and bow the heads of drinkers in the city bars.
No single
solemn
funeral note
to answer
grief.
I sawed and pulled and hacked.
I wanted silence back.
Get this:
When I was done,
and bloody to the wrist,
I squatted down among the murdered music of the bells
and pissed.
Medusa
A suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy
grew in my mind,
which turned the hairs on my head
to filthy snakes,
as though my thoughts
hissed and spat on my scalp.
My bride’s breath soured, stank
in the grey bags of my lungs.
I’m foul mouthed now, foul tongued,
yellow fanged.
There are bullet tears in my eyes.
Are you terrified?
Be terrified.
It’s you I love,
perfect man, Greek God, my own;
but I know you’ll go, betray me, stray
from home.
So better by far for me if you were stone.
I glanced at a buzzing bee,
a dull grey pebble fell
to the ground.
I glanced at a singing bird,
a handful of dusty gravel
spattered down.
I looked at a ginger cat,
a housebrick
shattered a bowl of milk.
I looked at a snuffling pig,
a boulder rolled
in a heap of shit.
I stared in the mirror.
Love gone bad
showed me a Gorgon.
I stared at a dragon.
Fire spewed
from the mouth of a mountain.
And here you come
with a shield for a heart
and a sword for a tongue
and your girls, your girls.
Wasn’t I beautiful?
Wasn’t I fragrant and young?
Look at me now.
The Devil’s Wife
1. DIRT
The Devil was one of the men at work.
Different. Fancied himself. Looked at the girls
in the office as though they were dirt. Didn’t flirt.
Didn’t speak. Was sarcastic and rude if he did.
I’d stare him out, chewing my gum, insolent, dumb.
I’d lie on my bed at home, on fire for him.
I scowled and pouted and sneered. I gave
as good as I got till he asked me out. In his car
he put two fags in his mouth and lit them both.
He bit my breast. His language was foul. He entered me.
We’re the same, he said, That’s it. I swooned in my soul.
We drove to the woods and he made me bury a doll.
I went mad for the sex. I won’t repeat what we did.
We gave up going to work. It was either the woods
or looking at playgrounds, fairgrounds. Coloured lights
in the rain. I’d walk around on my own. He tailed.
I felt like this: Tongue of stone. Two black slates
for eyes. Thumped wound of a mouth. Nobody’s Mam.
2. MEDUSA
I flew in my chains over the wood where we’d buried
the doll. I know it was me who was there.
I know I carried the spade. I know I was covered in mud.
But I cannot remember how or when or precisely where.
Nobody liked my hair. Nobody liked how I spoke.
He held my heart in his fist and he squeezed it dry.
I gave the cameras my Medusa stare.
I heard the judge summing up. I didn’t care.
I was left to rot. I was locked up, double-locked.
I know they chucked the key. It was nowt to me.
I wrote to him every day in our private code.
I thought in twelve, fifteen, we’d be out on the open road.
But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil’s wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil was gone then how could this be hell?
