Poems of Thom Gunn

To Yvor Winters
Though night is always close, complete negation Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion, Night from the air or the carnivorous breath, Still it is right to know the force of death, And, as you do, persistent, tough in will, Raise from the excellent the better still.

The Man with Night Sweats

I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made robust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.

The Hug
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined Half of the night with our old friend Who'd showed us in the end To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.

Already I lay snug, And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side. I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug, Suddenly, from behind, In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed: Your instep to my heel, My shoulder-blades against your chest. It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial. My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place. I only knew The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

The Dump
He died, and I admired the crisp vehemence of a lifetime reduced to half a foot of shelf space. But others came to me saying, we too loved him, let us take you to the place of our love. So they showed me everything, everything-a cliff of notebooks with every draft and erasure of every poem he published or rejected, thatched already with webs of annotation. I went in further and saw a hill of matchcovers from every bar or restaurant he'd ever entered. Trucks backed up constantly, piled with papers, and awaited by archivists with shovels; forklifts bumped through trough and valley to adjust the spillage. Here odors of rubbery sweat intruded on the pervasive smell of stale paper, no doubt from the mound of his collected sneakers. I clambered up the highest pile and found myself looking across not history but the vistas of a steaming

range of garbage reaching to the coast itself. Then I lost my footing! and was carried down on a soft avalanche of letters, paid bills, sexual polaroids, and notes refusing invitations, thanking fans, resisting scholars. In nightmare I slid, no ground to stop me, until I woke at last where I had napped beside the precious half foot. Beyond that, nothing, nothing at all.

The Butcher's Son

Mr Pierce the butcher Got news his son was missing About a month before The closing of the war. A bald man, tall and careful, He stood in his shop and found No bottom to his sadness, Nowhere for it to stop. When my aunt came through the door Delivering the milk, He spoke, with his quiet air Of a considerate teacher, But words weren't up to it, He turned back to the meat. The message was in error. Later that humid summer At a local high school fete, I saw, returned, the son Still in his uniform. Mr Pierce was not there But was as if implied In the son who looked like him Except he had red hair. For I recall him well Encircled by his friends, Beaming a life charged now Doubly because restored, And recall also how Within his hearty smile His lips contained his father's Like a light within the light That he turned everywhere.

Street Song

I am too young to grow a beard But yes man it was me you heard In dirty denim and dark glasses. I look through everyone who passes But ask him clear, I do not plead, Keys Lids acid and speed. My grass is not oregano. Some of it grew in Mexico. You cannot guess the weed I hold, Clara Green, Acapulco Gold, Panama Red, you name it man, Best on the street since I began. My methedrine, my double-sun, Will give you too lives in your one, Five days of power before you crash. At which time use these lumps of hash - They burn so sweet, they smoke so smooth, They make you sharper while they soothe. Now here, the best I've got to show, Made by a righteous cat I know. Pure acid - it will scrape your brain, And make it something else again. Call it heaven, call it hell, Join me and see the world I sell. Join me, and I will take you there, Your head will cut out from your hair Into whichever self you choose. With Midday Mick man you can't lose, I'll get you anything you need. Keys lids acid and speed.

Still Life
I shall not soon forget The greyish-yellow skin To which the face had set: Lids tights: nothing of his, No tremor from within, Played on the surfaces. He still found breath, and yet It was an obscure knack. I shall not soon forget The angle of his head, Arrested and reared back On the crisp field of bed, Back from what he could neither Accept, as one opposed, Nor, as a life-long breather, Consentingly let go, The tube his mouth enclosed In an astonished O.

Painting by Vuillard
Two dumpy women with buns were drinking coffee In a narrow kitchenat least I think a kitchen And I think it was whitewashed, in spite of all the shade. They were flat brown, they were as brown as coffee. Wearing brown muslin? I really could not tell. How I loved this painting, they had grown so old That everything had got less complicated, Brown clothes and shade in a sunken whitewashed kitchen. But its not like that for me: age is not simpler Or less enjoyable, not dark, not whitewashed. The people sitting on the marble steps Of the national gallery, people in the sunlight, A party of handsome children eating lunch And drinking chocolate milk, and a young woman Whose t-shirt bears the defiant word WHATEVER, And wrinkled folk with visored hats and cameras Are vivid, they are not browned, not in the least, But if they do not look like coffee they look As pungent and startling as good strong coffee tastes, Possibly mixed with chicory. And no cream

On The Move 'Man, You Gotta Go.'

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows Some hidden purpose, and the gush of birds That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows, Have nested in the trees and undergrowth. Seeking their instinct, or their pose, or both, One moves with an uncertain violence Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense Or the dull thunder of approximate words. On motorcycles, up the road, they come: Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy, Until the distance throws them forth, their hum Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh. In goggles, donned impersonality, In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust, They strap in doubt--by hiding it, robust-And almost hear a meaning in their noise. Exact conclusion of their hardiness Has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts They ride, directions where the tires press. They scare a flight of birds across the field: Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes. It is part solution, after all. One is not necessarily discord On Earth; or damned because, half animal,

One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes Afloat on movement that divides and breaks. One joins the movement in a valueless world, Crossing it, till, both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward. A minute holds them, who have come to go: The self-denied, astride the created will. They burst away; the towns they travel through Are home for neither birds nor holiness, For birds and saints complete their purposes. At worse, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.

My Sad Captains
One by one they appear in the darkness: a few friends, and a few with historical names. How late they start to shine! but before they fade they stand perfectly embodied, all the past lapping them like a cloak of chaos. They were men who, I thought, lived only to renew the wasteful force they spent with each hot convulsion. They remind me, distant now. True, they are not at rest yet, but now they are indeed apart, winnowed from failures, they withdraw to an orbit and turn with disinterested hard energy, like the stars.

From the Wave

It mounts at sea, a concave wall Down-ribbed with shine, And pushes forward, building tall Its steep incline. Then from their hiding rise to sight Black shapes on boards Bearing before the fringe of white It mottles towards. Their pale feet curled, they poise their weight With a learn'd skill. It is the wave they imitate Keeps them so still.

The marbling bodies have become Half wave, half men, Grafted it seems by feet of foam Some seconds, then, Late as they can, they slice the face In timed procession: Balance is triumph in this place, Triumph possession. The mindless heave of which they rode A fluid shelf Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed, Loses itself. Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals Loosen and tingle; And by the board the bare foot feels The suck of shingle. They paddle in the shallows still; Two splash each other; They all swim out to wait until The right waves gather.

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes, where rain has darkened the earth's dark. He moves in a wood of desire, pale antlers barely stirring as he hunts. I cannot tell what power is at work, drenched there with purpose, knowing nothing. What is a snail's fury? All I think is that if later I parted the blades above the tunnel and saw the thin trail of broken white across litter, I would never have imagined the slow passion to that deliberate progress.

Cat island
Cats met us at the landing-place reclining in the sun

to check us in with a momentary glance, concierges of a grassy island. (Attila's Throne, the Devil's Bridge, and "the best Byzantine church in the world", long saints admonitory on kiln-like inner walls.) And lunch in a shady court where cats now systematically worked the restaurant, table by table, gazing into eyes pleading "I'm hungry and I'm cute", reaching front paws up to knees and always getting before zeroing in on the next table, same routine, same result. Sensible bourgeois wild-cats working with the furred impudence of those who don't pretend to be other than whores, they give you not the semblance of love but simply a look at their beauty in return for food. Models, not escorts. They lack, too, the prostitute's self-pity, being beyond shame. And we lack what they have.

Black Jackets
In the silence that prolongs the span Rawly of music when the record ends, The red-haired boy who drove a van In weekday overalls but, like his friends, Wore cycle boots and jacket here To suit the Sunday hangout he was in, Heard, as he stretched back from his beer, Leather creak softly round his neck and chin. Before him, on a coal-black sleeve Remote exertion had lined, scratched, and burned Insignia that could not revive The heroic fall or climb where they were earned.

On the other drinkers bent together, Concocting selves for their impervious kit, He saw it as no more than leather Which, taught across the shoulders grown to it, Sent through the dimness of a bar As sudden and anonymous hints of light As those that shipping give, that are Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in sight. He stretched out like a cat, and rolled The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue, And listened to a joke being told: The present was the things he stayed among. If it was only loss he wore, He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion, Complicity and nothing more. He recollected his initiation, And one especially of the rites. For on his shoulders they had put tattoos: The group's name on the left, The Knights, And on the right the slogan Born to Lose.

A Map of the City

I stand upon a hill and see A luminous country under me, Through which at two the drunk sailor must weave; The transient's pause, the sailor's leave. I notice, looking down the hill, Arms braced upon a window sill; And on the web of fire escapes Move the potential, the grey shapes. I hold the city here, complete; And every shape defined by light Is mine, or corresponds to mine, Some flickering or some steady shine. This map is ground of my delight. Between the limits, night by night, I watch a malady's advance, I recognize my love of chance. By the recurrent lights I see Endless potentiality, The crowded, broken, and unfinished! I would not have the risk diminished.

The Man with Night Sweats

I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet. My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed. I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made robust, A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin. I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked. I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me, As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.

The Reassurance - Thom Gunn About ten days or so After we saw you dead You came back in a dream. I'm alright now you said.

And it was you, although You were fleshed out again: You hugged us all round then, And gave your welcoming beam.

How like you to be so kind, Seeking to reassure. And, yes, how like my mind To make itself secure