A Small Selection of Poetry by Anne Stevenson
Page numbers shown are from
Collected Poems and Granny Scarecrow.

	From 'Poems 1955-2005'

Fool’s Gold*
(A Saturday Night Sonnet)

Girls in their nervous freedom, heeled and painted,
Swarm out in teams – oh, bold pursuit of passion!
Geared for the sexual snatch, they seem acquainted
With all the ways and means of public fashion.
Who has not seen them, arm in arm, come rolling,
Midriffs agape but fending off all gazes,
Haughty and cool, forbidding yet controlling;
Each breast inflames us, every hip amazes.
Girls, were these parts for other girls created?
Walking exposed, you shrug aside our doting.
Or has the art of dressing been defeated
By skilfulness in wearing nearly nothing?
  If so, put on your clothes and tease our pleasure.
  Bared flesh is fool’s gold, wealth’s a buried treasure.

*Modelled on Shakespeare’s Sonnet, number 20.

Back to Top

As I Lay Sleeping
                                            For Carol Rumens

Out of the afterlife behind my eyelids
Arrived the offer of a plush hotel.
Yes, there it was, as we were driven past it,
High on a green embankment, white and big.
It had to be Russian. Where else does marble curl
In tufted layers like a powdered wig?
Geraniums blazed in tubs and hanging baskets.
Not for us. We had too many kids,

But where? I’d swear I was alone with you.
The sun set in some oil-polluted stream,
And we were floating there or wading through
Its tessellated fragments when the dream
Revealed the awful place assigned to us:
An eighteen-storey highrise with a view
Into a gulf or gullet – an immense abyss.
The children crowded to the edge of this,

Then one by one they held their hands together,
The way you hold them out to dive or pray,
And off they peeled. One body, then another,
The little stony fledglings fell away.
A dream, I thought, I shouldn’t be afraid.
Why was I sure the truth would be more
Beautiful and lethal? Was it war?
No, it was only daylight. But it stayed.

Back to Top

In the Museum of Floating Bodies and Flammable Souls

                                            For Angela Leighton

Painters who painted the flights of martyrs for money,
Who filled the drapery of angels with rose-tinted oil,
Had to please rich patrons with trapeze acts of the body,
Since no one can paint the electricity of the soul.

My lady in her blue silk cowl must by now be topsoil;
She swans into Heaven, almond eyes uplifted in piety.
My lord kneels at prayer in a cassock, blade at his heel.
Not a single electron remains of his sin or sanctity.

While in Hell – well preserved in the water church of Torcello–
The wicked receive their deserts. Disembowelled and dismembered,
They are set upon eternally, yet their bodies alone are touched;
Unless souls, flushed out of the flesh, are the flames that torch them.

No wonder evil’s so interesting and goodness pitifully dull.
Torture of the body symbolises torture of the mind;
And burning in the bonfires of conscience is hardly confined
To a hell for bad Italians, being damned and being saved as well.

Back to Top

What I Miss

is some hexagonal white seal
like a honey cell.
Silence I miss:
the hand on the fiddle
muting the vaulted arrogance
it raises;
the crowded hush
of the conductor’s lifted wand,
then the chorale
walking with little empty breaths
though air it praises.

My air is noises
amplified by an ugly pink
barnacle in my ear.
All the music I hear
is a tide dragging pebbles
to and away in my brain.
Sphered, the harmonies fall,
mutate, abort. Emptiness
is like rain
in my insomniac city,
ceaseless and merciless.

                                            To Elon Salmon

Back to Top

	From A report from the Border

Carol of the Birds

Feet that could be clawed, but are not. . .
Arms that might have flown, but did not . . .
No one said, “Let there be angels!” but the birds.

Whose choirs fling alleluias over the sea,
Herring gulls, black backs carolling raucously
While cormorants dry their wings on a rocky stable.

Plovers that stoop to sancify the land
And scoop small, roundy mangers in the sand,
Swaddle a saviour each in a speckled shell.

A chaffinchy fife unreeling in the marsh
Accompanies the tune a solo thrush
Half sings, half talks in riffs of wordless words,

As hymns flare up from tiny muscled throats,
Robins and hidden wrens whose shiny notes
Tinsel the precincts of the winter sun.

What loftier organ than these pipes of beech,
Pillars resounding with the jackdaws’ speech,
And poplars swayed with light like shaken bells?

Wings that could be hands, but are not. . .
Cries that might be pleas yet cannot
Question or disinvent the stalker’s gun,

Be your own hammerbeam angels of the air
Before in the maze of space, you disappear,
Stilled by our dazzling anthrocentric mills.

Back to Top

A Marriage

When my mother knew why her treatment wasn’t working,
She said to my father, trying not to detonate her news,
“Steve, you must marry again. When I’m gone, who’s going
To tell you to put your trousers on before your shoes?”

My father opened his mouth to -- couldn’t -- refuse.
Instead, he threw her a look; a man just shot
Gazing at the arm or leg he was about to lose.
His cigarette burned him, but he didn’t stub it out.

Later, on the porch, alive in the dark together,
How solid the house must have felt, how sanely familiar
The street-lit leaves, their shadows patterning the street.
The house is still there. The elms and the people, not.

It was now, and it never was now. Like every experience
Of being entirely here, yet really not being.
They couldn’t imagine the future that I am seeing,
For all his philosophy and all her common sense.

Back to Top

A Report from the Border

Wars in peacetime don’t behave like wars.
So loving they are.
Kissed on both cheeks, silk-lined ambassadors
Pose and confer.

Unbuckle your envy, drop it there by the door.
We will settle,
We will settle without blows or bullets
The unequal score.

In nature, havenots have to be many
And havelots few.
Making money out of making money
Helps us help you.

This from the party of useful words. From the other,
Hunger’s stare,
Drowned crops, charred hopes, fear, stupor, prayer
And literature.

Back to Top

   

Making Poetry

‘You have to inhabit poetry
if you want to make it.’

And what’s ‘to inhabit?’

To be in the habit of, to wear
words, sitting in the plainest light,
in the silk of morning, in the shoe of night;
a feeling bare and frondish in surprising air;
familiar. . . rare.

And what’s ‘to make?’

To be and to become words’ passing
weather; to serve a girl on terrible terms,
embark on voyages over voices,
evade the ego-hill, the misery-well,
the siren hiss of publish, success, publish,
success, success, success.

And why inhabit, make, inherit poetry?

Oh, it’s the shared comedy of the worst
blessed; the sound leading the hand;
a wordlife running from mind to mind
through the washed rooms of the simple senses;
one of those haunted, undefendable, unpoetic
crosses we have to find.

(Collected Poems, 101)

Back to Top

Swifts

Spring comes little, a little. All April it rains.
The new leaves stick in their fists; new ferns still fiddleheads.
But one day the swifts are back. Face to the sun like a child
you shout, ‘The swifts are back!’

Sure enough, bolt nocks bow to carry one sky-scyther
two hundred miles an hour across full-blown windfields.
Swereee swereee.   Another.   And another.
It’s the cut air falling in shrieks on our chimneys and roofs.

The next day, a fleet of high crosses cruises in ether.
These are the air pilgrims, pilots of air rivers;
a shift of wing, and they’re earth-skimmers, daggers,
skilful in guiding the throw of themselves away from themselves.

Quick flutter, a scimitar upsweep, out of danger of touch, for
earth is forbidden to them, water’s forbidden to them,
all air and fire, little owlish ascetics, they outfly storms,
they rush to the pillars of altitude, the thermal fountains.

Here is a legend of swifts, home-made, a parable:
When the Great Raven bent over earth to create the birds,
the swifts were ungrateful. They were small muddy things
like shoes, with strong legs and short wings.

So they took themselves off to the mountains to sulk,
and they stayed there. ‘Well,’ said the Raven, after years of this,
‘I will give you the sky. You can have the whole sky
on condition that you give up rest.’

‘Yes, yes,’ screamed the swifts, ‘We abhor rest.
We detest the filth of growth, the sweat of sleep,
soft nests in the wet fields, slimehold of worms.
Let us be free, be air!’

So the Raven took their legs and bound them into their bodies.
He bent their wings like boomerangs, honed them like knives.
He streamlined their feathers and stripped them of velvet.
Then he released them, Never to Return 

inscribed on their feet and wings.  And so
we have swifts, though in reality, not parables but
bolts in the world’s need: swift
swifts, not in punishment, not in ecstasy, simply

sleepers over oceans in the mill of the world’s breathing.
The grace to say they live in another firmament.
A way to say the miracle will not occur.
And watch the miracle. 

(Collected Poems,   76)

Back to Top

 

Vertigo

Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.

(Granny Scarecrow,  11)

Back to Top

Clydie is dead!

Our lar, our little mammal.
Though his last day didn’t believe it.
It kept on moving at its usual heartless pace
over and around a hollow cat-space.

We buried him by the toolshed.
The cat flap wouldn’t believe it,
so we sealed its chattering mouth.
We seized and scrubbed his feeding bowls
and sent them to a far shelf.

The fact is, nothing in the house could bear it
when Clyde dropped out of himself...
who waxed loquacious on the subject of roast meat
and cat’s rights, who took favours
from my fingers at mealtimes as just deserts,
who  always kept his dress-shirt spinnaker-white
while extending an urgent tongue to his tabby parts;
who reserved for himself, every morning,
a place on a lap, whereon for a while he might
subdue a human; upon whose face
the cat-painter’s brush had slipped a little
applying the Chinese white; for which he received
in compensation, huge Indonesian eyes -
polished jet in a setting of crinkled topaz;

whose tail was so long he could wrap himself up in it;

who could fill with his length, without exertion,
the entire shelf over the radiator;
who was adept at the art of excretion,
and discreet as to the burying of personal treasure.

Dear, wise Clyde, who after tyrannical Bonnie died,
thrived in her absence, Hadrian after Domitian,
you will never again rule us by vocative law,
or pull back the bedclothes at six with a firm paw,
or bemoan the indignities of travelling by car,
or flourish an upright tail on crepuscular walks,
no, nor compile statistics on the field mice of Wales.

Pwllymarch  was your chief estate,
you whom Oxford made and Cambridge unmade,
though Hay-on-Wye and Durham made you great.
Much travelled, valuable, voluble Clyde,
who said so much, yet never spoke a word,
requies cat.

(Granny Scarecrow,  26)

Back to Top

 

Granny Scarecrow 

Tears flowed at the chapel funeral,
more beside the grave on the hill. Nevertheless,
after the last autumn ploughing,
they crucified her old flowered print housedress
live, on a pole.

Marjorie and Emily, shortcutting to school,
used to pass and wave; mostly Gran would wave back.
Two white Sunday gloves
flapped good luck from the crossbar; her head’s plastic sack
would nod, as a rule.

But when winter arrived, her ghost thinned.
The dress began to look starved in its field of snowcorn.
One glove blew off and was lost.
The other hung blotchy with mould from the hedgerow, torn
by the wind.

Emily and Marjorie noticed this.
Without saying why, they started to avoid the country way
through the cornfield. Instead they walked
from the farm up the road to the stop where they
caught the bus.

And it caught them. So in time they married.
Marjorie, divorced, rose high in the catering profession.
Emily had children and grandchildren, though,
with the farm sold, none found a cross to fit their clothes when
Emily and Marjorie died.

(Granny Scarecrow,  33)