MIST
Fire and Deluge, rival pretenders
To ruling the world’s end; these cannot daunt us
Whom flames will never singe, nor floods drown,
While we stand guard against their murderous child
Mist, that slily catches at love’s throat,
Shrouding the clear sun and clean waters
Of all green gardens everywhere –
The twitching mouths likewise and furtive eyes
Of those who speak us fair.
THE WORD
The Word is unspoken
Between honest lovers:
They substitute a silence
Or wave at a wild flower,
Sighing inaudibly.
That it exists indeed
Will scarcely be disputed:
The wildest of conceptions
Can be reduced to speech –
Or so the Schoolmen teach.
You and I, thronged by angels,
Learned it in the same dream
Which startled us by moon-light,
And that we still revere it
Keeps our souls aflame.
‘God’ is a standing question
That still negates an answer.
The Word is not a question
But simple affirmation,
The antonym of ‘God’.
Who would believe this Word
Could have so long been hidden
Behind a candid smile,
A sweet but hasty kiss
And always dancing feet?
PERFECTIONISTS
Interalienation of their hearts
It was not, though both played resentful parts
In proud unwillingness to share
One house, one pillow, the same fare.
It was perfectionism, they confess,
To know the truth and ask for nothing less.
Their fire-eyed guardians watched from overhead:
‘These two alone have learned to love,’ they said,
‘But neither can forget
They are not worthy of each other yet.’
PRISON WALLS
Love, this is not the way
To treat a glorious day:
To cloud it over with conjectured fears,
Wiping my eyes before they brim with tears
And, long before we part,
Mourning the torments of my jealous heart.
That you have tried me more
Than who else did before,
Is no good reason to prognosticate
My last ordeal: when I must greet with hate
Your phantom fairy prince
Conjured in childhood, lost so often since.
Nor can a true heart rest
Resigned to second best –
Why did you need to temper me so true
That I became your sword of swords, if you
Must nail me on your wall
And choose a painted lath when the blows fall?
Because I stay heart-whole,
Because you bound your soul
To mine, with curses should it wander free,
I charge you now to keep full faith with me
Nor can I ask for less
Than your unswerving honest-heartedness.
Then grieve no more, but while
Your flowers are scented, smile
And never sacrifice, as others may,
So clear a dawn to dread of Judgement Day –
Lest prison walls should see
Fresh tears of longing you let fall for me.
A DREAM OF HELL
You reject the rainbow
Of our Sun castle
As hyperbolic;
You enjoin the Moon
Of our pure trysts
To condone deceit;
Lured to violence
By a lying spirit,
You break our troth.
Seven wide, enchanted
Wards of horror
Lie stretched before you,
To brand your naked breast
With impious colours,
To band your thighs.
How can I discharge
Your confused spirit
From its chosen hell?
You who once dragged me
From the bubbling slime
Of a tidal reach,
Who washed me, fed me,
Laid me in white sheets,
Warmed me in brown arms,
Would you have me cede
Our single sovereignty
To your tall demon?
OUR SELF
When first we came together
It was no chance foreshadowing
Of a chance happy ending.
The case grows always clearer
By its own worse disorder:
However reasonably we oppose
That unquiet integer, our self, we lose.
BITES AND KISSES
Heather and holly,
Bites and kisses,
A courtship-royal
On the hill’s red cusp.
Look up, look down,
Gaze all about you –
A livelier world
By ourselves contrived:
Swan in full course
Up the Milky Way,
Moon in her wildness,
Sun ascendant
In Crab or Lion,
Beyond the bay
A pride of dolphins
Curving and tumbling
With bites and kisses…
Or dog-rose petals
Well-starred by dew,
Or jewelled pebbles,
Or waterlilies open
For the dragon-flies
In their silver and blue.
SUN-FACE AND MOON-FACE
We twin cherubs above the Mercy Seat,
Sun-face and Moon-face,
Locked in the irrevocable embrace
That guards our children from defeat,
Are fire not flesh; as none will dare deny
Lest his own soul should die.
FREEHOLD
Though love expels the ugly past
Restoring you this house at last –
This generous-hearted mind and soul
Reserved from alien control –
How can you count on living free
From sudden jolts of history,
From interceptive sigh or stare
That heaves you back to how-things-were
And makes you answerable for
The casualties of bygone war?
Yet smile your vaguest: make it clear
That then was then, but now is here.
THE NECKLACE
Variegated flowers, nuts, cockle-shells
And pebbles, chosen lovingly and strung
On golden spider-webs with a gold clasp
For your neck, naturally: and each bead touched
By a child’s lips as he stoops over them:
Wear these for the new miracle they announce –
All four cross-quarter-days beseech you –
Your safe return from shipwreck, drought and war,
Beautiful as before, to what you are.
A BRACELET
A bracelet invisible
For your busy wrist,
Twisted from silver
Spilt afar,
From silver of the clear Moon,
From her sheer halo,
From the male beauty
Of a shooting star.
BLACKENING SKY
Lightning enclosed by a vast ring of mirrors,
Instant thunder extravagantly bandied
Between red cliffs no hawk may nest upon,
Triumphant jetting, passion of deluge: ours –
With spray that stuns, dams that lurch and are gone….
But against this insensate hubbub of subsidence
Our voices, always true to a fireside tone,
Meditate on the secret marriage of flowers
Or the bees’ p
aradise, with much else more;
And while the sky blackens anew for rain,
On why we love as none ever loved before.
BLESSED SUN
Honest morning blesses the Sun’s beauty;
Noon, his endurance; dusk, his majesty;
Sweetheart, our own twin worlds bask in the glory
And searching wisdom of that single eye –
Why must the Queen of Night on her moon throne
Tear up their contract and still reign alone?
LION-GENTLE
Love, never disavow our vow
Nor wound your lion-gentle:
Take what you will, dote on it, keep it,
But pay your debts with a grave, wilful smile
Like a woman of the sword.
SONG: THE PALM TREE
Palm-tree, single and apart
In your serpent-haunted land,
Like the fountain of a heart
Soaring into air from sand –
None can count it as a fault
That your roots are fed with salt.
Panniers-full of dates you yield,
Thorny branches laced with light,
Wistful for no pasture-field
Fed by torrents from a height,
Short of politics to share
With the damson or the pear.
Never-failing phoenix tree
In your serpent-haunted land,
Fount of magic soaring free
From a desert of salt sand;
Tears of joy are salty too –
Mine shall flow in praise of you.
SPITE OF MIRRORS
O what astonishment if you
Could see yourself as others do,
Foiling the mirror’s wilful spite
That shows your left cheek as the right
And shifts your lovely crooked smile
To the wrong corner! But meanwhile
Lakes, pools and puddles all agree
(Bound in a vast conspiracy)
To reflect only your stern look
Designed for peering in a book –
No easy laugh, no glint of rage,
No thoughts in cheerful pilgrimage,
No start of guilt, no rising fear,
No premonition of a tear.
How, with a mirror, can you keep
Watch on your eyelids closed in sleep?
How judge which profile to bestow
On a new coin or cameo?
How, from two steps behind you, stare
At your firm nape discovered bare
Of ringlets as you bend and reach
Transparent pebbles from the beach?
Love, if you long for a surprise
Of self-discernment, hold my eyes
And plunge deep down in them to see
Sights never long withheld from me.
PRIDE OF LOVE
I face impossible feats at your command,
Resentful at the tears of love you shed
For the faint-hearted sick who flock to you;
But since all love lies wholly in the giving,
Weep on: your tears are true,
Nor can despair provoke me to self-pity
Where pride alone is due.
HOODED FLAME
Love, though I sorrow, I shall never grieve:
Grief is to mourn a flame extinguished;
Sorrow, to find it hooded for the hour
When planetary influences deceive
And hope, like wine, turns sour.
INJURIES
Injure yourself, you injure me:
Is that not true as true can be?
Nor can you give me cause to doubt
It works the other way about;
So what precautions must I take
Not to be injured for love’s sake?
HER BRIEF WITHDRAWAL
‘Forgive me, love, if I withdraw awhile:
It is only that you ask such bitter questions,
Always another beyond the extreme last.
And the answers astound: you have entangled me
In my own mystery. Grant me a respite:
I was happier far, not asking, nor much caring,
Choosing by appetite only: self-deposed,
Self-reinstated, no one observing.
When I belittled this vibrancy of touch
And the active vengeance of these folded arms
No one could certify my powers for me
Or my saining virtue, or know that I compressed
Knots of destiny in a careless fist,
I who had passed for a foundling from the hills
Of innocent and flower-like phantasies,
Though minting silver by my mere tread….
Did I not dote on you, I well might strike you
For implicating me in your true dream.’
THE CRANE
The Crane lounes loudly in his need,
And so for love I loune:
Son to the sovereign Sun indeed,
Courier of the Moon.
STRANGENESS
You love me strangely, and in strangeness
I love you wholly, with no parallel
To this long miracle; for each example
Of love coincidence levels a finger
At strangeness undesigned as unforeseen.
And this long miracle is to discover
The inmost you and never leave her;
To show no curiosity for another;
To forge the soul and its desire together
Gently, openly and for ever.
Seated in silence, clothed in silence
And face to face – the room is small
But thronged with visitants –
We ask for nothing: we have all.
From The Poor Boy Who Followed His Star
(1968)
The trees are tall, but the moon small,
My legs feel rather weak,
For Avis, Mavis and Tom Clarke
Are hiding somewhere in the dark
And it’s my turn to seek.
Suppose they lay a trap and play
A trick to frighten me?
Suppose they plan to disappear
And leave me here, half-dead with fear,
Groping from tree to tree?
Alone, alone, all on my own
And then perhaps to find
Not Avis, Mavis and young Tom
But monsters to run shrieking from,
Mad monsters of no kind?
THE HERO
Slowly with bleeding nose and aching wrists
After tremendous use of feet and fists
He rises from the dusty schoolroom floor
And limps for solace to the girl next door,
Boasting of kicks and punches, cheers and noise,
And far worse damage done to bigger boys.
AT SEVENTY-TWO
At seventy-two,
Being older than you,
I can rise when I please
Without slippers or shoes
And go down to the kitchen
To eat what I choose –
Jam, tomatoes and cheese –
Then I visit the garden
And wander at ease
Past the bed where what grows is
A huge clump of roses
And I swing in the swing
Set up under the trees
My mouth full of biscuits,
My hat on my knees.
From Poems 1965–1968
(1968)
SONG: HOW CAN I CARE?
How can I care whether you sigh for me
While still I sleep alone swallowing back
The spittle of desire, unmanned, a tree
Pollarded of its crown, a dusty sack
Tossed on the stable rack?
How can I care what coloured frocks you wear,
What humming-birds you watch on jungle hills,
What phosphorescence wavers in your hair,
Or with what water-music the night fills –
Dear love, how can I care?
SONG: THOUGH ONCE TRUE LOVERS
Though once true lovers,
We are less than friends.
What woman ever
So ill-used her man?
That I played false
Not even she pretends:
May God forgive her,
For, alas, I can.
SONG: CHERRIES OR LILIES
Death can have no alternative but Love,
Or Love but Death.
Acquaintance dallying on the path of Love,
Sickness on that of Death,
Pause at a bed-side, doing what they can
With fruit and flowers bought from the barrow man.
Death can have no alternative but Love,
Or Love but Death.
Then shower me cherries from your orchard, Love,
Or strew me lilies, Death:
For she and I were never of that breed
Who vacillate or trifle with true need.
SONG: CROWN OF STARS
Lion-heart, you prowl alone
True to Virgin, Bride and Crone;
None so black of brow as they
Now, tomorrow, yesterday.
Yet the night you shall not see
Must illuminate all three
As the tears of love you shed
Blaze about their single head
And a sword shall pierce the side
Of true Virgin, Crone and Bride
Among mansions of the dead.
SONG: FIG TREE IN LEAF
One day in early Spring
Upon bare branches perching
Great companies of birds are seen
Clad all at once in pilgrim green
Their news of love to bring:
Their fig tree parable,
For which the world is watchful,
Retold with shining wings displayed:
Her secret flower, her milk, her shade,
Her scarlet, blue and purple.
SONG: DEW-DROP AND DIAMOND
The difference between you and her
(Whom I to you did once prefer)
Is clear enough to settle:
She like a diamond shone, but you