For the dark to open, for something whole to welcome

My staring eyes. A moth is beating about

The lamp. So many twitchings and stirrings.

I wish for some support of my sleeplessness,

For fingers around a bowl,

Someone, perhaps, just waiting.

I have pushed the earth aside, I am waiting, alert.

Mah Jong

Intricate pieces: children,

We could not understand them,

Played with them like bricks, built

On the card-table’s soft felt,

A world, a city, then

You suddenly broke the dream.

We knew you as presence, a far

Mood, something close to war.

That evening, the cups on the dresser

Shook; my sister and I

Watched fear fall from the sky.

You carried away the game,

Offered it to our nurse.

We had lost, you said, the rules –

Both of us too young for schools

Or for parents’ stratagem.

In bed we had nightmares.

Not at Home

This room is dead; the occupant has gone.

Why are we frightened? Is it simply that

So much taut stillness, so much neatness stun

The rough intruder? Under that glass dome

A bird peers out. The furniture is flat

With knowledge of so many who’ve gone home.

Why do we come so eagerly who once

Shrank from her invitations? What is there

In this old, moth-balled room, dead at a glance,

That holds us? Here there are no hauntings; we

Perhaps are held by the cold atmosphere,

The sudden stress on all we would not be.

We turn away and the whole room falls back

To junk-shop value; there is nothing more.

The things of worth would fit into a sack,

The rubbish keep a rag-and-bone man for

Longer than he’d believe. Yet, stripped and bare,

The room will hint of something still trapped there.

The Storm House

The wind is shaking this house,

This new house, nine storeys high and no one guessing

Such newness could ever be broached. The storm has done it,

The only natural sound in the whole city.

Along the river the boats are hooting farewell

And lights are coming on in the dingy streets.

Somebody, far-off, kicks a can and then

Returns to his separateness, his only gesture

Echoing down the street against the storm.

This moderate skyscraper is full of sickness,

A hospital houses a hundred different ailments.

The wind grows strong, winding a noisy bandage

Around the building; human sounds are unheard.

And if you cried, you would have to cry so loudly

That the wind was stilled a moment as if a hand,

In godlike supplication, laid peace upon it,

But the gods we invoke are quiet here as our prayers.

Problems of Viewing

I The Open Capital

Smoke rises and houses emerge

In geometric squares.

It is a question of how much the eye can hold

As it stares, impossibly filling

Its small space with a crowd, a street,

A distant hill;

And then the sky (that is another problem).

One thing is clear: