Fleur Adcock Poems

After they had not made love
she pulled the sheet up over her eyes
until he was buttoning his shirt:
not shyness for their bodies- those
...

Coming out with your clutch of postcards
in a Tate gallery bag and another clutch
of images packed into your head you pause
on the steps to look across the river
...

And then there's the one about the old woman
who very apologetically asks the way
to Church Lane, adding 'I ought to know:
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The spuggies are back -
a word I lifted from Basil Bunting
and was never entirely sure how to pronounce,
having only seen it in print, in Briggflatts,
...

Viewed from the top, he said, it was like a wheel,
the paper-thin spokes raying out from the hub
to the half-transparent circumference of rind,
with small dark ellipses suspended between.
...

The tall guy in a green T-shirt,
vanishing past me as I cross
in the opposite direction,
has fairy wings on his shoulders:
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But it's diluted with sky, not water,
the aerial plankton on which they sup.
Our solitary pipistrelle flickers
over her chosen suburban quarter,
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If you liked them, how your heart might have lifted
to see their neat trapezium shapes studding
the wall like a newly landed flight of jet
ornaments, the intensity of their black
...

Get you, with your almain rivetts (latest
fad from Germany), and your corselet,
and your two coats of plate! How much harness
...

Across the road the decorators have finished;
your flat has net curtains again
after all these weeks, and a ‘To Let' sign.
...