Thom Gunn

I leave you in your garden. In the yard Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared With boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour: Dog-generations you have trained the vigour That few can breed to train and fewer still Control with the deliberate human will. And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf, The accumulations that compose the self— Poem and history: for if we use Words to maintain the actions that we choose, Our words, with slow defining influence, Stay to mark out our chosen lineaments. Continual temptation waits on each To renounce his empire over thought and speech, Till he submit his passive faculties To evening, come where no resistance is; The unmotivated sadness of the air Filling the human with his own despair. Where now lies power to hold the evening back? Implicit in the grey is total black: Denial of the discriminating brain Brings the neurotic vision, and the vein Of necromancy. All as relative For mind as for the sense, we have to live In a half-world, not ours nor history’s, And learn the false from half-true premisses. But sitting in the dusk—though shapes combine, Vague mass replacing edge and flickering line, You keep both Rule and Energy in view, Much power in each, most in the balanced two: Ferocity existing in the fence Built by an exercised intelligence. 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.

I thought I was so tough, But gentled at your hands, Cannot be quick enough To fly for you and show That when I go I go At your commands. Even in flight above I am no longer free: You seeled me with your love, I am blind to other birds— The habit of your words Has hooded me. As formerly, I wheel I hover and I twist, But only want the feel, In my possessive thought, Of catcher and of caught Upon your wrist. You but half civilize, Taming me in this way. Through having only eyes For you I fear to lose, I lose to keep, and choose Tamer as prey.

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows, Has nested in the trees and undergrowth. Seeking their instinct, or their poise, 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 Boys, 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, direction where the tyres 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 a 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, Choosing 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-defined, astride the created will They burst away; the towns they travel through Are home for neither bird nor holiness, For birds and saints complete their purposes. At worst, one is in motion; and at best, Reaching no absolute, in which to rest, One is always nearer by not keeping still.

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 that they are indeed apart, winnowed from failures, they withdraw to an orbit and turn with disinterested hard energy, like the stars.

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake. I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take? Leathery toad that ruts for days on end, Or cringing dribbling dog, man’s servile friend, Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat, Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat: Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea. What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me. These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof. Into what bulk has method disappeared? Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared. The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature. My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature That bites through anything, root, wire, or can. If I was not afraid I’d eat a man. Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine. Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine. I root and root, you think that it is greed, It is, but I seek out a plant I need. Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly: Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot, From milky flower to the black forked root. From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin And human title, putting pig within. I push my big grey wet snout through the green, Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

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.

Your dying was a difficult enterprise. First, petty things took up your energies, The small but clustering duties of the sick, Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric. Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray Or test (while you read novels two a day) Already with a kind of clumsy stealth Distanced you from the habits of your health. In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin, You tried to stay the man that you had been, Treating each symptom as a mere mishap Without import. But then the spinal tap. It brought a hard headache, and when night came I heard you wake up from the same bad dream Every half-hour with the same short cry Of mild outrage, before immediately Slipping into the nightmare once again Empty of content but the drip of pain. No respite followed: though the nightmare ceased, Your cough grew thick and rich, its strength increased. Four nights, and on the fifth we drove you down To the Emergency Room. That frown, that frown: I’d never seen such rage in you before As when they wheeled you through the swinging door. For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom The hedonistic body basks within And takes for granted—summer on the skin, Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea In a dry mouth. You had gone on from me As if your body sought out martyrdom In the far Canada of a hospital room. Once there, you entered fully the distress And long pale rigours of the wilderness. A gust of morphine hid you. Back in sight You breathed through a segmented tube, fat, white, Jammed down your throat so that you could not speak. How thin the distance made you. In your cheek One day, appeared the true shape of your bone No longer padded. Still your mind, alone, Explored this emptying intermediate State for what holds and rests were hidden in it. You wrote us messages on a pad, amused At one time that you had your nurse confused Who, seeing you reconciled after four years With your grey father, both of you in tears, Asked if this was at last your ‘special friend’ (The one you waited for until the end). ‘She sings,’ you wrote, ‘a Philippine folk song To wake me in the morning ... It is long And very pretty.’ Grabbing at detail To furnish this bare ledge toured by the gale, On which you lay, bed restful as a knife, You tried, tried hard, to make of it a life Thick with the complicating circumstance Your thoughts might fasten on. It had been chance Always till now that had filled up the moment With live specifics your hilarious comment Discovered as it went along; and fed, Laconic, quick, wherever it was led. You improvised upon your own delight. I think back to the scented summer night We talked between our sleeping bags, below A molten field of stars five years ago: I was so tickled by your mind’s light touch I couldn’t sleep, you made me laugh too much, Though I was tired and begged you to leave off. Now you were tired, and yet not tired enough —Still hungry for the great world you were losing Steadily in no season of your choosing— And when at last the whole death was assured, Drugs having failed, and when you had endured Two weeks of an abominable constraint, You faced it equably, without complaint, Unwhimpering, but not at peace with it. You’d lived as if your time was infinite: You were not ready and not reconciled, Feeling as uncompleted as a child Till you had shown the world what you could do In some ambitious role to be worked through, A role your need for it had half-defined, But never wholly, even in your mind. You lacked the necessary ruthlessness, The soaring meanness that pinpoints success. We loved that lack of self-love, and your smile, Rueful, at your own silliness. Meanwhile, Your lungs collapsed, and the machine, unstrained, Did all your breathing now. Nothing remained But death by drowning on an inland sea Of your own fluids, which it seemed could be Kindly forestalled by drugs. Both could and would: Nothing was said, everything understood, At least by us. Your own concerns were not Long-term, precisely, when they gave the shot —You made local arrangements to the bed And pulled a pillow round beside your head. And so you slept, and died, your skin gone grey, Achieving your completeness, in a way. Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense Of being ejected with some violence From vigil in a white and distant spot Where I was numb, into this garden plot Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain. I was delivered into time again —The variations that I live among Where your long body too used to belong And where the still bush is minutely active. You never thought your body was attractive, Though others did, and yet you trusted it And must have loved its fickleness a bit Since it was yours and gave you what it could, Till near the end it let you down for good, Its blood hospitable to those guests who Took over by betraying it into The greatest of its inconsistencies This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.

You go from me In June for months on end To study equanimity Among high trees alone; I go out with a new boyfriend And stay all summer in the city where Home mostly on my own I watch the sunflowers flare. You travel East To help your relatives. The rainy season's start, at least, Brings you from banishment: And from the hall a doorway gives A glimpse of you, writing I don't know what, Through winter, with head bent In the lamp's yellow spot. To some fresh task Some improvising skill Your face is turned, of which I ask Nothing except the presence: Beneath white hair your clear eyes still Are candid as the cat's fixed narrowing gaze —Its pale-blue incandescence In your room nowadays. Sociable cat: Without much noise or fuss We left the kitchen where he sat, And suddenly we find He happens still to be with us, In this room now, though firmly faced away, Not to be left behind, Though all the night he'll stray. As you began You'll end the year with me. We'll hug each other while we can, Work or stray while we must. Nothing is, or will ever be, Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart, But what we hold in trust We do hold, even apart.

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.

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 curl, 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; Then all swim out to wait until The right waves gather.