Poems 1960-2000 by Fleur Adcock

sandstone
    carved like a Mayan temple-gate;
    at serpents writhing up the doorposts
    and squat saints with South-American features
    who stare back over our heads
    from a panel of beasts and fishes.
    The gargoyles jutting from under the eaves
    are the colour of newborn children.
    Last night you asked me
    if poetry was the most important thing.
    We walk on around the building
    craning our heads back to look up
    at lions, griffins, fat-faced bears.
    The Victorians broke some of these figures
    as being too obscene for a church;
    but they missed the Whore of Kilpeck.
    She leans out under the roof
    holding her pink stony cleft agape
    with her ancient little hands.
    There was always witchcraft here, you say.
    The sheep-track up to the fragments
    of castle-wall is fringed with bright bushes.
    We clamber awkwardly, separate.
    Hawthorn and dog-rose offer hips and haws,
    orange and crimson capsules, pretending
    harvest. I taste a blackberry.
    The soil here is coloured like brick-dust,
    like the warm sandstone. A fruitful county.
    We regard it uneasily.
    There is little left to say
    after all the talk we had last night
    instead of going to bed –
    fearful for our originality,
    avoiding the sweet obvious act
    as if it were the only kind of indulgence.
    Silly perhaps.
                           We have our reward.
    We are languorous now, heavy
    with whatever we were conserving,
    carrying each a delicate burden
    of choices made or about to be made.
    Words whisper hopefully in our heads.
    Slithering down the track we hold hands
    to keep a necessary balance.
    The gargoyles extend their feral faces,
    rosy, less lined than ours.
    We are wearing out our identities.

Feverish
    Only a slight fever:
    I was not quite out of my mind;
    enough to forget my name
    and the number and sex of my children
    (while clinging to their existence –
    three daughters, could it be?)
    but not to forget my language
    with Words for Music Perhaps ,
    Crazy Jane and the bishop,
    galloping through my head.
    As for my body, not
    quite out of that either:
    curled in an S-bend somewhere,
    conscious of knees and skull
    pressing against a wall
    (if I was on my side)
    or against a heavy lid
    (if I was on my back);
    or I could have been face downward
    kneeling crouched on a raft,
    castaway animal, drifting;
    or shrivelled over a desk
    head down asleep on it
    like Harold, our wasted Orion,
    who slept on the bare sand
    all those nights in the desert
    lightly, head on his briefcase;
    who carried the new Peace
    to chief after chief, winning
    their difficult signatures
    by wit and a cool head
    under fire and public school charm;
    who has now forgotten his Arabic
    and the names of his brother’s children
    and what he did last week;
    dozes over an ashtray
    or shuffles through Who Was Who .
    Crazy Jane I can take –
    the withered breasts that she flaunted,
    her fierce remembering tongue;
    but spare me his forgetting.
    Age is a sad fever.

Folie à Deux
    They call it pica,
    this ranging after alien tastes:
    acorns (a good fresh country food,
    better than I’d remembered)
    that morning in the wood,
    and moonlit roses –
    perfumed lettuce, rather unpleasant:
    we rinsed them from our teeth with wine.
    It seems a shared perversion,
    not just a kink of mine –
    you were the one
    who nibbled the chrysanthemums.
    All right: we are avoiding something.
    Tonight you are here early.
    We seem to lack nothing.
    We are alone,
    quiet, unhurried. The whisky has
    a smoky tang, like dark chocolate.
    You speak of ceremony, of
    something to celebrate.
    I hear the church bells
    and suddenly fear blasphemy,
    even name it. The word’s unusual
    between us. But you don’t laugh.
    We postpone our ritual
    and act another:
    sit face to face across a table,
    talk about places we have known
    and friends who are still alive
    and poems (not our own).
    It works. We are altered
    from that fey couple who talked out
    fountains of images, a spray
    of loves, deaths, dramas,