Under the parabola of a ball,

a child turning into a man,

I looked into the air too long.

The ball fell in my hand, it sang

in the closed fist: Open Open

 

Now in my dial of glass appears

the soldier who is going to die.

He smiles, and moves about in ways

his mother knows, habits of his.

The wires touch his face: I cry

NOW.  Death, like a familiar, hears

 

and look, has made a man of dust

of a man of flesh.  This sorcery

I do.  Being damned, I am amused

to see the centre of love diffused

and the waves of love travel into vacancy.

How easy it is to make a ghost.

 

The weightless mosquito touches

her tiny shadow on the stone,

and with how like, how infinite

a lightness, man and shadow meet.

The fuse.  A shadow is a man

when the mosquito death approaches.

 

KEITH DOUGLAS

---

Ted Hughes was to describe it as 'quite perfect in its way'.

As a white stone draws down the fish

she on the seafloor of the afternoon

draw down men's glances and their cruel wish

for love.  Slyly red lip on the spoon

 

slips in a morsel of ice-cream; her hands

white as a milky stone; white submarine

fronds, sink with spread fingers, lean

along the table, carmined at the ends.

 

A cotton magnate, an important fish

with great eyepouches and a golden mouth

through the frail reefs of furniture swims out

and idling, suspended, stays to watch.

 

A crustacean old man clamped to his chair

sits coldly near her and might see

her charms through fissures where the eyes should be

or else his teeth are parted in a stare.

 

Captain on leave, a lean dark mackerel,

lies in the offing; turns himself and looks

through currents of sound.  The flat-eyed flatfish sucks

on a straw, staring from its repose, laxly.

 

And gallants in shoals swim up and lag,

circling and passing near the white attratction:

sometimes pausnig, opening a conversation;

fish pause so to nibble or tug.

 

Now the ice-cream is finished, is

paid for.  The fish swim off on business

and she sits alone at the table, a white stone

useless except to a collector, a rich man.

 

KEITH DOUGLAS

 

在大家跳舞的日子里

我一个人数着蚂蚁

每天

看它们走过

这个肥些，那个瘦些

每天

数它们寂寞

这个多些，那个少些