Shine like an early drop of dew
Poised on a red rose-petal.
The dew-drop carries in its eye
Mountain and forest, sea and sky,
With every change of weather;
Contrariwise, a diamond splits
The prospect into idle bits
That none can piece together.
SONG: JUST FRIENDS
Just friend, you are my only friend –
You think the same of me
And swear our love must never end
Though lapped in secrecy,
As all true love should be.
They ask us: ‘What about you two?’
I answer ‘Only friends’ and you:
‘Just friends’ gently agree.
SONG: OF COURSE
No, of course we were never
Off course in our love,
Being nourished by manna
That dripped from above,
And our secret of loving
Was taught us, it seems,
By ravens and owlets
And fast-flowing streams.
We had sealed it with kisses,
It blazed from our eyes,
Yet all was unspoken
And proof against lies.
For to publish a secret
Once learned in the rain
Would have meant to lose course
And not find it again.
So this parting, of course,
Is illusion, not fate,
And the love in your letters
Comes charged overweight.
SONG: THREE RINGS FOR HER
Flowers remind of jewels;
Jewels, of flowers;
Flowers, of innocent morning;
Jewels, of honest evening –
Emerald, moonstone, opal –
For so I mean, and meant.
Jewels are longer lasting –
Emerald, moonstone, opal;
Opal, emerald, moonstone:
Moonstone, opal, emerald –
And wear a livelier scent
SINCÈREMENT
J’étais confus à cet instant.
Quelle honte d’avoir écrit
L’adverbe aveugle ‘sincèrement’ –
‘Je t’aime’ m’aurait suffi
Sans point et sans souci.
DAMS UN SEUL LIT
Entre deux belles femmes dans un seul lit
Cet homme, se sentant interdit,
Des convenances n’ose pas faire foin
Mais opte pour elle qu’il aime le moins.
Entre deux beaux hommes en pareil cas,
Une dame sans mœurs si délicats
Mais sans s’exprimer en termes crus,
Se penche vers lui qu’elle aime le plus.
IS NOW THE TIME?
If he asks, ‘Is now the time?’, it is not the time.
She turns her head from his concern with time
As a signal not to haste it;
And every time he asks: ‘Is now the time?’
A hundred nights are wasted.
TWINS
Siamese twins: one, maddened by
The other’s moral bigotry,
Resolved at length to misbehave
And drink them both into the grave.
SAIL AND OAR
Woman sails, man must row:
Each, disdainful of a tow,
Cuts across the other’s bows
Shame or fury to arouse –
And evermore it shall be so,
Lest man sail, or woman row.
GOOSEFLESH ABBEY
Nuns are allowed full liberty of conscience.
Yet might this young witch, when she took the veil,
Count on an aged Abbess’s connivance
At keeping toad-familiars in her cell?
Some called it liberty; but others, licence –
And how was she to tell?
THE HOME-COMING
At the tangled heart of a wood I fell asleep,
Bewildered by her silence and her absence –
As though such potent lulls in love were not
Ordained by the demands of pure music.
Dream of what gold and crimson she will wear
In honour of your oak-brown.’
It was her hoopoe. Yet, when the spread heavens
Of my feast night glistened with shooting stars
And she walked unheralded up through the dim light
Of the home lane, I did not recognize her –
So lost a man can be
Who feeds on hopes and fears and memory.
WITH THE GIFT OF A LION’S CLAW
Queen of the Crabs, accept this claw
Plucked from a Lion’s patient paw;
It shall propel her forward who
Ran sideways always hitherto.
WIGS AND BEARDS
In the bad old days a bewigged country Squire
Would never pay his debts, unless at cards,
Shot, angled, urged his pack through standing grain,
Horsewhipped his tenantry, snorted at the arts,
Toped himself under the table every night,
Blasphemed God with a cropful of God-damns,
Aired whorehouse French or lame Italian,
Set fashions of pluperfect slovenliness
And claimed seigneurial rights over all women
Who slept, imprudently, under the same roof.
Taxes and wars long ago ploughed them under –
‘And serve the bastards right’ the Beards agree,
Hurling their empties through the café window
And belching loud as they proceed downstairs.
Latter-day bastards of that famous stock,
They never rode a nag, nor gaffed a trout,
Nor winged a pheasant, nor went soldiering,
But remain true to the same hell-fire code
In all available particulars
And scorn to pay their debts even at cards.
Moreunder (which is to subtract, not add),
Their ancestors called themselves gentlemen
As they, in the same sense, call themselves artists.
PERSONAL PACKAGING, INC.
Folks, we have zero’d in to a big break-thru:
Our boys are learning how to package people
By a new impermeable-grading process
In cartons of mixed twenties – all three sexes!
Process involves molecular adjustment
To micro-regulated temperatures,
Making them unexpendable time-wise
Thru a whole century… Some clients opt for
Five thousand years, or six, in real deep freeze –
A chance what sensible guy would kick against
To pile up dollars at compound interest?
Nor do we even propose that they quit smoking
Or, necessarily, be parted from their wives.
WORK ROOM
Camp-stool for chair once more and packing case for table;
All histories of doubt extruded from this room
With its menacing, promising, delusive, toppling bookshelves;
Nothing now astir but you in my fresh imagination,
And no letters but yours ever demanding answers.
To start all over again; indeed, why should I not? –
With a new pen, clean paper, full inkpot.
THE ARK
Beasts of the field, fowls likewise of the air,
Came trooping, seven by seven or pair by pair;
And though from Hell the arch-fiend Samael
Bawled out ‘Escapist!’ Noah did not care.
ALL EXCEPT HANNIBAL
Trapped in a dismal marsh, he told his troops:
‘No lying down, lads! Form your own mess-groups
And sit in circles, each man on the knees
Of the man behind; then nobody will freeze.’
They obeyed his orde
rs, as the cold sun set,
Drowsing all night in one another’s debt,
All except Hannibal himself, who chose
His private tree-stump – he was one of those!
THE BEGGAR MAID AND KING COPHETUA
To be adored by a proud Paladin
Whom the wide world adored,
To queen it over countless noblewomen:
What fame was hers at last,
What lure and envy!
Yet, being still a daughter of the mandrake
She sighed for more than fame;
Not all the gold with which Cophetua crowned her
Could check this beggar-maid’s
Concupiscence.
Sworn to become proverbially known
As martyred by true love,
She took revenge on his victorious name
That blotted her own fame
For woman’s magic.
True to her kind, she slipped away one dawn
With a poor stable lad,
Gaunt, spotted, drunken, scrawny, desperate,
Mean of intelligence
So pitiable indeed that when the guards
Who caught them saw the green
Stain on her finger from his plain brass ring
They gaped at it, too moved
Not to applaud her.
FOR EVER
Sweetheart, I beg you to renew and seal
With a not supererogatory kiss
Our contract of ‘For Ever’.
Learned judges
Deplore the household sense ‘interminable’:
True love, they rule, never acknowledges
Future or past, only a perfect now….
But let it read ‘For Ever’, anyhow!
JUGUM IMPROBUM
Pyrrha, jugo tandem vitulum junges-ne leoni?
Sit tibi dilectus, num stricto verbere debet
Compelli pavitans medium moriturus in ignem?
DE ARTE POETICA
De minimis curat non Lex, utcumque poeta.
SIT MIHI TERRA LEVIS
Ante mortem qui defletus
Solis lucem repperit
Ante Mortem perquietus,
Erato, domum redit
ASTYMELUSA*
‘Astymelusa!’
Knees at your approach
Suddenly give, more than in sleep or death –
As well they may; such love compels them.
‘Astymelusa!’
But no answer comes.
Crowned with a leafy crown, the girl passes
Like a star afloat through glittering sky,
Or a golden flower, or drifted thistledown.
TOUSLED PILLOW
She appeared in Triad – Youth, Truth, Beauty –
Full face and profiles whispering together
All night at my bed-foot.
And when dawn came
At last, from a tousled pillow resolutely
I made my full surrender:
‘So be it, Goddess, claim me without shame
And tent me in your hair.’
Since when she holds me
As close as candlewick to candleflame
And from all hazards free,
My soul drawn back to its virginity.
TO BE IN LOVE
To spring impetuously in air and remain
Treading on air for three heart-beats or four,
Then to descend at leisure; or else to scale
The forward-tilted crag with no hand-holds;
Or, disembodied, to carry roses home
From a Queen’s garden – this is being in love,
Graced with agilitas and subtilitas
At which few famous lovers ever guessed
Though children may foreknow it, deep in dream,
And ghosts may mourn it, haunting their own tombs,
And peacocks cry it, in default of speech.
FACT OF THE ACT
On the other side of the world’s narrow lane
You lie in bed, your young breasts tingling
With imagined kisses, your lips puckered,
Your fists tight.
Dreaming yourself naked in my arms,
Free from discovery, under some holm oak;
The high sun peering through thick branches,
All winds mute.
Endlessly you prolong the moment
Of your delirium: a first engagement,
Silent, inevitable, fearful,
Honey-sweet.
Will it be so in fact? Will fact mirror
Your virginal ecstasies:
True love, uncircumstantial,
No blame, no shame?
It is for you, now, to say ‘come’;
It is for you, now, to prepare the bed;
It is for you as the sole hostess
Of your white dreams –
It is for you to open the locked gate,
It is for you to shake red apples down,
It is for you to halve them with your hands
That both may eat.
Yet expectation lies as far from fact
As fact’s own after-glow in memory;
Fact is a dark return to man’s beginnings,
Test of our hardihood, test of a wilful
And blind acceptance of each other
As also flesh.
TO OGMIAN HERCULES
Your Labours are performed, your Bye-works too,
Your ashes gently drift from Oeta’s peak.
Here is escape then, Hercules, from empire.
Lithe Hebë, youngest of all Goddesses,
Who circles on the Moon’s broad threshing-floor
Harboured no jealousy for Megara,
Augë, Hippolytë, Deianeira,
But grieved for each in turn. You broke all hearts,
Burning too Sun-like for a Grecian bride.
Rest your immortal head on Hebë’s lap;
What wars you started let your sons conclude.
Meditate a new Alphabet, heal wounds,
Draw poets to you with long golden chains
But still go armed with club and lion’s pelt.
ARROW SHOTS
Only a madman could mistake,
When shot at from behind a tree,
The whizz and thud that arrows make –
Yours, for example, fired at me.
Some bows are drawn to blind or maim,
I have known others drawn to kill,
But truth in love is your sole aim
And proves your vulnerary skill.
Though often, drowsing at mid-day,
I wince to find myself your mark,
Let me concede the hit, but say:
‘Your hand is steadiest after dark.’
SHE TO HIM
To have it, sweetheart, is to know you have it
Rather than think you have it;
To think you have it is a wish to take it,
Though afterwards you would not have it –
And thus a fear to take it.
Yet if you know you have it, you may take it
And know that still you have it.
WITHIN REASON
You have wandered widely through your own mind
And your own perfect body;
Thus learning, within reason, gentle one,
Everything that can prove worth the knowing.
A concise wisdom never attained by those
Bodiless nobodies
Who travel pen in hand through others’ minds,
But without reason,
Feeding on manifold contradiction.
To stand perplexed by love’s inconsequences
Like fire-flies in your hair
Or distant flashes of a summer storm:
Such are the stabs of joy you deal me
Who also wander widely through my mind
And still imperfect body
THE YET UNSAYABLE
It was always fiercer, brighter, gentler than
could be told
Even in words quickened by Truth’s dark eye:
Its absence, whirlpool; its presence, deluge;
Its time, astonishment; its magnitude,
A murderous dagger-point.
So we surrender
Our voices to the dried and scurrying leaves
And choose our own long-predetermined path
From the unsaid to the yet unsayable
In silence of love and love’s temerity.
NONE THE WISER
They would be none the wiser, even could they overhear
My slurred ecstatic mumbling or grow somehow aware
Of eyes ablaze behind shut lids in the attic gloom.
Even if they adjured me on pain of death to disclose
All that I see and am when I so absent myself,
What would they make of steady, somnolent light-rings
Converging, violet-blue or green hypnotic gold,
Upon a warded peep-hole, as it were a rift in Space,
Through which I peer, as it might be into your eyes,
And pass disembodied, a spiral wisp or whorl
Tall, slanted, russet-red, crowned with a lunar nimbus? –
To you the central flow, the glow, the ease, the hush
Of music drawn through irrecoverable modes.
And then such after-glory, meteors across the heart
When I awake, astonished, in the bed where once you dreamed.
‘Metaphysical’, they would comment lamely, ‘metaphysical’;
But you would smile at me for leaving so much out.
THE NARROW SEA
With you for mast and sail and flag,
And anchor never known to drag,
Death’s narrow but oppressive sea
Looks not unnavigable to me.
THE OLIVE-YARD
Now by a sudden shift of eye
The hitherto exemplary world
Takes on immediate wildness
And birds, trees, winds, the very letters
Of our childhood’s alphabet, alter
Into rainbowed mysteries.
Flesh is no longer flesh, but power;