Read Poems 1960-2000 for Free Online

carpeted floor
    in the saloon bar
    of the Coach and Horses; to sense
    others lying near,
    very still; and nearest to me
    this new second self.
3
    I had one history until today:
    now I shall have two.
    No matter how nicely she may contrive
    to do what I do
    there are two hearts now for our identical
    blood to pass through.
    Nothing can change her. Whether she walks by my side
    like a silly twin
    or dyes her hair, adopts a new accent,
    disguises her skin
    with make-up and suntan, she cannot alter
    the creature within.
    She sees with my imperfect vision, she wears
    my fingerprints; she is made
    from me. If she should break the bones I gave her,
    if disease should invade
    her replicas of my limbs and organs,
    which of us is betrayed?
4
    How was she torn out of me? Was it the
    urgent wrench of birth, a matter of hard
    breathless shoving (but there is no blood) or
    Eve from Adam’s rib, quick and surgical
    (but there is no scar) or did I burgeon
    with fleshy buds along my limbs, growing
    a new substance from that gas I drank in,
    to double myself ? Did I perform the
    amoeba’s trick of separating into
    two loose amorphous halves, a heart in each?
    Or was my skin slipped off like the skin of
    a peanut, to reveal two neat sections,
    face to face and identical, within?
    Yes, we had better say it was like this:
    for if it was birth, which was the mother?
    Since both have equal rights to our past, she
    might justly claim to have created me.

5
    It is the sixth day
    now, and nothing much has happened.
    Those of us who are
    double (all the living ones) go
    about our business.
    The two Mrs Hudsons bake bread
    in the pub kitchen
    and contrive meals from what is left –
    few shops are open.
    The two Patricks serve in the bar
    (Bill Hudson is dead).
    I and my new sister stay here –
    it seems easiest –
    and help with the housework; sometimes
    we go for walks, or
    play darts or chess, finding ourselves
    not as evenly
    matched as we might have expected:
    our capacity
    is equal, but our moods vary.
    These things occupy
    the nights – none of us needs sleep now.
    Only the dead sleep
    laid out in all the beds upstairs.
    They do not decay,
    (some effect of the gas) and this
    seemed a practical
    and not irreverent means of
    dealing with them. My
    dead friend from London
    and a housemaid from the hotel
    lie in the bedroom
    where we two go to change our clothes.
    This evening when we
    had done our hair before dinner
    we combed and arranged
    theirs too.

6
    Saturday night in the bar; eight couples
    fill it well enough: twin schoolteachers, two
    of the young man from the garage, four girls
    from the shop next door, some lads from the farms.
    These woodenly try to chat up the girls,
    but without heart. There is no sex now, when
    each has his undeniable partner,
    and no eyes or hands for any other.
    Division, not union, is the way we
    must reproduce now. Nor can one think with
    desire or even curiosity
    of one’s identical other. How lust
    for what is utterly familiar?
    How place an auto-erotic hand on
    a thigh which matches one’s own? So we chat
    about local events: the twin calves born,
    it seems, on every farm; the corpse
    in a well, and the water quite unspoiled;
    the Post Office reopened, but with no
    telephone links to places further than
    the next town – just as there are no programmes
    on television or radio, and
    the single newspaper that we have seen
    (a local one) contained only poems.
    No one cares much for communication
    outside this circle. I am forgetting
    my work in London, my old concerns (we
    laugh about the unpaid rent, the office
    unmanned, the overdue library books).
    They did a good job, whoever they were.
7
    Two patterns of leaves above me: laurel
    rather low, on my right,
    and high on my left sycamore; a sky
    pale grey: dawn or twilight.
    Dew on my face, and on the gravel path
    on which I am lying.
    That scent of wax in the air, and a few
    birds beginning to sing.

    My mind is hazed by a long sleep – the first
    for