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4 And I say this Who lies with open eyes upon the pavement Can you hurt her? Tread on those frightened eyes Why should it frighten her to die? This is a fault This is a fault in which I have a part. poems The Body in Asia Despite the mountains at my doorstep This is a hollow, hollow life. The mist blows clear and shows the snow Among the dark green firs, but here Upon the cold, scorched, dusty grass The camels looped together raise Their supercilious noses. Upon the road the donkeys trot And mule-teams with their muleteers pace. The country lies before me like A map I carry in my mind – A wall built by the Hindu Kush A plain that falls away to sea I on the foothills here between Sniffing the cold and dusty air. Too long of longing makes me cold The heart a tight and burning fistful Hangs like a cold sun in my chest A hollow kind of firmament. I can imagine my exterior The body, and the limbs that run off from it But there is nothing in it I am sure Except the ball of heart that weighs one side Like the lead ballast in a celluloid duck. And in my head a quarter-incher’s brain Looks out as best it can from my two eyes: It can imagine how the country lies To left and right, extensions of the limbs
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from The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems But has no thoughts that I can understand. Not only in this land I have felt it so But on the Brahmaputra where Bits of the jungle floated down Black heaps upon the coloured river When night fell and the sun A red and geometric disk Above its square reflection stood For half a moment and then dipped: I heard it sizzle in the water. The flat and muddy banks, remote Beyond the miles of plashing water Diminished me Till, smaller than the skin I stood in I leaned against the rails and watched The searchlights on the licking water. The secret of diminishment Is in this sad peninsula Where the inflated body struts Shouting its wants, but lacks conviction. Conviction joins the muscles up But here the body flaps and flutters A flapping sail in a fitful wind. In a Dark Wood Now I am forty I must lick my bruises What has been suffered cannot be repaired I have chosen what whoever grows up chooses A sickening garbage that could not be shared. My errors have been written in my senses The body is a record of the mind My touch is crusted with my past defences Because my wit was dull my eye grows blind. There is no credit in a long defection And defect and defection are the same I have no person fit for resurrection Destroy then rather my half-eaten frame. 5

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And I say this Who lies with open eyes upon the pavement Can you hurt her? Tread on those frightened eyes Why should it frighten her to die? This is a fault This is a fault in which I have a part.

poems

The Body in Asia Despite the mountains at my doorstep This is a hollow, hollow life. The mist blows clear and shows the snow Among the dark green firs, but here Upon the cold, scorched, dusty grass The camels looped together raise Their supercilious noses. Upon the road the donkeys trot And mule-teams with their muleteers pace. The country lies before me like A map I carry in my mind – A wall built by the Hindu Kush A plain that falls away to sea I on the foothills here between Sniffing the cold and dusty air. Too long of longing makes me cold The heart a tight and burning fistful Hangs like a cold sun in my chest A hollow kind of firmament.

I can imagine my exterior The body, and the limbs that run off from it But there is nothing in it I am sure Except the ball of heart that weighs one side Like the lead ballast in a celluloid duck. And in my head a quarter-incher’s brain Looks out as best it can from my two eyes: It can imagine how the country lies To left and right, extensions of the limbs

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