Unawed by the thick gloom.
Such love illuminates the far house
Where difficult questions meet their answers
And lies get scoured away.
Your powers to love were forged by Mother Night –
Her perfect discipline of thought and breath –
Sleep is their sustenance.
You prophesy without accessories:
Her words run splashed in light across your walls
For reading as you wake.
But Night, no doubt, has deathless other secrets
Guarded by her unblinking owls against
All clumsy stumbling on them.
CHILD WITH VETERAN
You were a child and I your veteran;
An age of violence lay between us,
Yet both claimed citizenship of the same land
Conversing in our own soft, hidden language,
Often by signs alone.
Our eyelids closed, little by little,
And we fell chained in an enchantment
Heavier than any known or dreamed before,
Groping in darkness for each other’s fingers
Lifting them to our lips.
Here brooded power beyond comparison,
Tremendous as a thousand bee-stings
Or a great volley of steel-tipped arrows
With which to take possession of a province
That no one could deny us,
For the swift regeneration of dead souls
And the pride of those undead.
PURIFICATION
‘He numbed my heart, he stole away my truth,
He laid hands on my body.
Never had I known ecstasy like that:
I could have flown with him to the world’s end
And thought of you no more.’
‘Wake, dearest love, here in my own warm arms,
That was a nightmare only.
You kept the wall-side, leaving me the outer,
No demon slid between us to molest you.
This is a narrow bed.’
I would have brought her breakfast on a tray
But she seemed haunted still
By terror that in nine short months, maybe,
A demon’s litter, twitching scaly tails
Would hang from either breast.
And still she shuddered inconsolably
All day; our true love-magic
Dwindled and failed. ‘He swore to take me
The round of Paris, on his midnight tours,
Fiddling for me to dance.’
Thus to have murdered love even in dream
Called for purification;
And (as the Great Queen yearly did at Paphos)
Down to the sea she trod and in salt water
Renewed virginity.
POWERS UNCONFESSED
Diffidently, when asked who might I be,
I agreed that, yes, I ruled a small kingdom
Though, like yourself, free to wander abroad
Hatless, barefooted and incognito.
Abruptly we embraced – a strange event,
The casual passers-by taking less notice
Than had this been a chance meeting of cousins –
Nor did we argue over protocol.
You, from your queendom, answerable only
To royal virtue, not to a male code,
Knew me for supernatural, like yourself,
And fell at once head over heels in love;
As I also with you – but lamentably
Never confessed what wrathful powers attest
The Roman jealousy of my male genius.
PANDORA
But our escape: to what god did we owe it,
Pandora, my one love?
White-faced we lay, apart and all but dead.
In place of magic had you offered fancy
(Being still a girl and over-credulous)
To honour my poor genius? –
And with your careless innocence of death
Concealed the mischief and those unseen Spites
For long months haunting you and me, your Titan,
Chasing away the honey-bees of love?
Though my acute dream-senses, apprehending,
Warned me with fevers, chills and violences
That the postern gate was forced
And the keep in instant peril,
Why did my eyes stay blind and my ears deaf?
And this escape: to what god did we owe it,
Or to what unborn child?
SOLOMON’S SEAL
Peace is at last confirmed for us:
A double blessing, heavily priced,
Won back as we renew our maiden hearts
In a magic known to ourselves only,
Proof against furious tides of error
Perfect in love now, though not sharing
The customary pillow – and our reasons
Appear shrouded in dark Egyptian dreams
That recreate us as a single being
Wholly in love with love.
Under each pyramid lies inverted
Its twin, the sister-bride to Pharaoh,
And so Solomon’s seal bears witness.
Therefore we neither plead nor threaten
As lovers do who have lost faith –
Lovers not riven together by an oath
Sworn on the very brink of birth,
Nor by the penetrative ray of need
Piercing our doubled pyramid to its bed.
All time lies knotted here in Time’s caress,
And so Solomon’s seal bears witness.
TO PUT IT SIMPLY
Perfect reliance on the impossible
By strict avoidance of all such conjecture
As underlies the so-called possible:
That is true love’s adventure.
Put it more simply: all the truth we need
Is ours by curious preknowledge of it –
On love’s impossibility agreed,
Constrained neither by horoscope nor prophet.
Or put it still more simply: all we know
Is that love is and always must be so.
TO TELL AND BE TOLD
What is it I most want in all the world?
To be with you at last, alone in the world,
And as I kiss with you to tell and be told.
A child you no more are, yet as a child
You foresaw miracles when no more a child –
So spread a bed for us, to tell and be told.
You wear my promises on rings of gold,
I wear your promise on a chain of gold:
For ever and once more to tell and be told.
THE THEME OF DEATH
Since love is an astonished always
Challenging the long lies of history,
Yesterday when I chose the theme of death
You shook a passionate finger at me:
‘Wake from your nightmare! Would you murder love?
Wake from your nightmare!’
No, sweetheart! Death is nightmare when conceived
As God’s Last Judgement, or the curse of Time –
Its intransgressible bounds of destiny;
But love is an astonished always
With death as affidavit for its birth
And timeless progress.
What if these tombs and catafalques conspire,
Menacing us with gross ancestral fears,
To dissipate my living truth, and yours,
To induct us into ritual weeping?
Our love remains a still astonished always,
Pure death its witness.
AT THE WELL
To work it out even a thought better
Than ever before – yet a thought rare enough
To raise a sigh of wonder –
That is your art (he said) but mine also
Since first I fell upon the secret
And sighed for wonder that our dry mouths
After a world of travel
Were drawn together by the same spell
To drink at the same well.
Coincidence (she said) continues with us,
Secret by secret,
Love’s magic being no more than obstinacy
In love’s perfection –
Like the red apple, highest on the tree
Reserved for you by me.
LOGIC
Clear knowledge having come
Of an algebraic queendom,
Compulsive touch and tread
By a public voice dictated
Proclaims renewed loyalty
To a defunct geometry:
Blue-prints of logic –
Logic, tricking the tongue
With its fool’s learning,
Prescribed excess,
Devoted emptiness,
With dull heart-burning
For a forgotten peace,
For work beyond employment,
For trust beyond allegiance,
For love beyond enjoyment,
For life beyond existence,
For death beyond decease.
ROBBERS’ DEN
They have taken Sun from Woman
And consoled her with Moon;
They have taken Moon from Woman
And consoled her with Seas;
They have taken Seas from Woman
And consoled her with Stars;
They have taken Stars from Woman
And consoled her with Trees;
They have taken Trees from Woman
And consoled her with Tilth;
They have taken Tilth from Woman
And consoled her with Hearth;
They have taken Hearth from Woman
And consoled her with Praise –
Goddess, the robbers’ den that men inherit
They soon must quit, going their ways,
Restoring you your Sun, your Moon, your Seas,
Your Stars, your Trees, your Tilth, your Hearth –
But sparing you the indignity of Praise.
THE ACCOMPLICE
Mercury, god of larceny
And banking and diplomacy,
Marks you as his accomplice.
No coins hang from his watch-chain
Where once he used to wear them:
He has done with toys like these.
Would you prove your independence
By entering some Order
Or taking your own life?
He will, be sure, divinely
Revenge the moral fervour
Of your disloyalties.
For his fistful of signed contracts
And million-dollar bank-notes
Bear witness to his credit
With your colleagues, friends, assistants
And your own faithful wife.
FIRST LOVE
Darling, if ever on some night of fever
But with your own full knowledge …
Darling, confess how it will be if ever
You violate your true-love pledge
Once offered me unprompted,
Which I reciprocated
Freely, fully and without restraint
Nor ever have abjured since first we kissed?
Will that prove you a liar and me a saint,
Or me a fool and you a realist?
THROUGH A DARK WOOD
Together, trustfully, through a dark wood –
But headed where, unless to the ancient, cruel,
Inescapable, marital pitfall
With its thorny couch for the procreation
Of love’s usurpers or interlopers?
Or worse by far, should each be trapped singly
But for true-love’s sake gulp down a jealousy
And grief at not having suffered jointly….
Together, through a dark wood, trustfully.
IN THE VESTRY
It is over now, with no more need
For whispers, for brief messages posted
In the chestnut-tree, for blank avoidance
Of each other’s eyes at festivals,
For hoarded letters, for blossom-tokens,
For go-betweens or confidants.
Well, are you glad that all is over now?
Be as truthful as you dare.
Posted at last as would-be man and wife
Behaving as the Lord Himself enjoined,
Repudiating your lascivious past,
Each alike swearing never to retrieve it,
Particularly (God knows) with someone else –
Marriage being for procreation only –
Are you both glad and sure that all is over?
WHEN LOVE IS NOT
‘Where is love when love is not?’
Asked the logician.
‘We term it Omega Minus,’
Said the mathematician.
‘Does that mean marriage or plain Hell?’
Asked the logician.
‘I was never at the altar,’
Said the mathematician.
‘Is it love makes the world go round?’
Asked the logician.
‘Or you might reverse the question,’
Said the mathematician.
THE REITERATION
The death of love comes from reiteration:
A single line sung over and over again –
No prelude and no end.
The word is not, perhaps, ‘reiteration’ –
Nature herself repunctuates her seasons
With the same stars, flowers, fruits –
Though love’s foolish reluctance to survive
Springs always from the same mechanical fault:
The needle jumps its groove.
MAN OF EVIL
But should I not pity that poor devil,
Such a load of guilt he carries?
He debauched the daughter of his benefactor –
A girl of seventeen – her brother too,
At the same drunken picnic.
Pushes hard drugs, abstains from them himself;
His first wife ended in a mad-house,
The second was found drowned in a forest pool –
The Coroner, observing his distress,
Called for an open verdict.
And so on, oh and so on – why continue?
He complains always of his luckless childhood
And fills commiserating eyes with tears.
The truth is: he was evil from the womb
And both his parents knew it.
He cowers and sponges when his guilt is plain
And his bank-account runs dry.
O, that unalterable black self-pity,
Void of repentance or amendment,
Clouding his Universe!
But who can cast out evil? We can only
Learn to diagnose that natal sickness,
The one known cure for which, so far, is death.
Evil is here to stay unendingly;
But so also is Love.
THE RAFT
Asleep on the raft and forced far out to sea
By an irresistible current:
No good, no good!
O for a sister island! Ships were scarce
In that unhomely latitude,
And he lacked food.
No canoes would row out to his rescue;
No native ever called him brother –
What was brotherhood?
He asked another question: which to choose?
A drowning vision of damnation
Or slow starvation?
Even savages, hungry for his flesh,
Would offer him a happier exit;
And he need not fight.
Yet, having always drifted on the raft
Each night, always without provision,
Loathing each night,
So now again he quaked with sudden terror
Lest the same current, irresistibly
Reversed, should toss him back
Once more on the same shore –
As it did every night.
THE UNCUT DIAMOND
This is ours by natural, not by civil, right:
An uncut diamond, found while picnicking
Beside blue clay here on the open veldt!
It should carve up to a walnut-sized brilliant
And a score of lesser gems.
What shall we do? To be caught smuggling stones
Assures us each a dozen years in gaol;
And who can trust a cutting-agency?
So, do you love me?
Or must I toss it back?
MY GHOST
I held a poor opinion of myself
When young, but never bettered my opinion
(Even by comparison)
Of all my fellow-fools at school or college.
Passage of years induced a tolerance,
Even a near-affection, for myself –
Which, when you fell in love with me, amounted
(Though with my tongue kept resolutely tied)
To little short of pride.
Pride brought its punishment: thus to be haunted
By my own ghost whom, much to my disquiet,
All would-be friends and open enemies
Boldly identified and certified
As me, including him in anecdotal
Autobiographies.
Love, should you meet him in the newspapers,
In planes, on trains, or at large get-togethers,
I charge you, disregard his foolish capers;
Silence him with a cold unwinking stare
Where he sits opposite you at table
And let all present watch amazed, remarking
On how little you care.
THE RISK
Though there are always doctors who advise
Fools on the care of their own foolish bodies,
And surgeons ready to rush up and set
Well-fractured arms or thighs, never forget
That you are your own body and alone
Can give it a true medical opinion
Drawn not from catalogued analogies
But from a sense of where your danger lies,
And how it obstinately defies the danger.
Your body, though yourself, can play the stranger
As when it falls in love, presuming on
Another’s truth and perfect comprehension,
And fails to ask you: dare it run the risk