How dangerous was the act.
It might have seemed cruel blackmail,
Not mere foreknowledge, to confess
What powers protected and supported him
In his mute call for singleheartedness.
It was she indeed who planted the first kiss,
Pleading with him for true togetherness –
Therefore her faults might well be charged against him.
She dared to act as he had never dared.
Nor could he change: his heart remaining full,
Commanded by her, yet unconquerable,
Blinding her with its truth.
So, worse than blind,
He suffered more than she in body and mind.
A DREAM OF FRANCES SPEEDWELL
I fell in love at my first evening party.
You were tall and fair, just seventeen perhaps,
Talking to my two sisters. I kept silent
And never since have loved a tall fair girl,
Until last night in the small windy hours
When, floating up an unfamiliar staircase
And into someone’s bedroom, there I found her
Posted beside the window in half-light
Wearing that same white dress with lacy sleeves.
She beckoned. I came closer. We embraced
Inseparably until the dream faded.
Her eyes shone clear and blue….
Who was it, though, impersonated you?
THE ENCOUNTER
Von Masoch met the Count de Sade
In Hell as he strode by.
‘Pray thrash me soundly, Count!’ he begged.
His lordship made reply:
‘What? Strike a lacquey who enjoys
Great blows that bruise and scar?’
‘I love you, Count,’ von Masoch sighed,
‘So cruel to me you are.’
AGE GAP
My grandfather, who blessed me as a child
Shortly before the Diamond Jubilee,
Was born close to the date of Badajoz
And I have grandchildren well past your age –
One married, with a child, expecting more.
How prudently you chose to be a girl
And I to be a boy! Contrary options
Would have denied us this idyllic friendship –
Boys never fall in love with great-grandmothers.
NIGHTMARE OF SENILITY
Then must I punish you with trustfulness
Since you can trust yourself no more and dread
Fresh promptings to deceive me? Or instead
Must I reward you by deceiving you,
By heaping coals of fire on my own head?
Are truth and friendship dead?
And why must I, turning in nightmare on you,
Bawl out my lies as though to make them true?
O if this Now were once, when pitifully
You dressed my wounds, kissed and made much of me,
Though warned how things must be!
Very well, then: my head across the block,
A smile on your pursed lips, and the axe poised
For a merciful descent. Ministering to you
Even in my torment, praising your firm wrists,
Your resolute stance….How else can I protect you
From the curse my death must carry, except only
By begging you not to prolong my pain
Beyond these trivial years?
I am young again.
I watch you shrinking to a wrinkled hag.
Your kisses grow repulsive, your feet shuffle
And drag. Now I forget your name and forget mine…
No matter, they were always equally ‘darling’.
Nor were my poems lies; you made them so
To mystify our friends and our friends’ friends.
We were the loveliest pair: all-powerful too,
Until you came to loathe me for the hush
That our archaic legend forced on you.
ABSENT CRUSADER
An ancient rule prescribed for true knights
Was: ‘Never share your couch with a true lady
Whom you would not care in honour to acknowledge
As closest to your heart, on whose pure body
You most would glory to beget children
And acknowledge them your own.’
The converse to which rule, for fine ladies,
No knight could preach with firm authority;
Nor could he venture to condemn any
Who broke the rule even while still sharing
Oaths of love-magic with her absent knight,
Telling herself: ‘This is not love, but medicine
For my starved animal body; and my right.
Such peccadilloes all crusades afford –
As when I yield to my own wedded Lord.’
DREAM RECALLED ON WAKING
The monstrous and three-headed cur
Rose hugely when she stroked his fur,
Using his metapontine tail
To lift her high across the pale.
Ranging those ridges far and near
Brought blushes to her cheek, I fear,
Yet who but she, the last and first
Could dare what lions never durst?
Proud Queen, continue as you are,
More steadfast than the Polar Star,
Yet still pretend a child to be
Gathering sea-wrack by the sea.
COLOPHON
Dutifully I close this book ….
Its final pages, with the proud look
Of timelessness that your love lends it,
Call only for a simple Colophon
(Rose, key or shepherd’s crook)
To announce it as your own
Whose coming made it and whose kiss ends it.
From Timeless Meeting
(1973)
THE PROMISED BALLAD
This augurs well; both in their soft beds
Asleep, unwakably far removed,
Nevertheless as near as makes no odds –
Proud fingers twitching, all but touching.
What most engages him are his own eyes
Beautified by dreaming how one day
He will cast this long love-story as a ballad
For her to sing likewise –
How endless lovers will accept its marvels
As true, which they must be indeed:
Freed of dark witches and tall singing devils.
THE IMPOSSIBLE DAY
A day which never could be yesterday
Nor ever can become tomorrow,
Which framed eternity in a great lawn
Beside the appletrees, there in your garden –
We never shall dismiss it.
Threats of poverty, or of long absence,
Foreknowledge often thousand strokes
Threatened against our love by a blank world –
How suddenly they vanished and were gone;
We had fallen in love for ever.
Our proof of which, impossibility,
Was a test of such true magic
As no one but ourselves could answer for.
Both of us might be dead, but we were not,
Our light being still most needed.
And if some unannounced oppression breaks
To chase the governing stars from a clear sky,
Thunder rolling at once from west and east
What should we lovers fear from such a scene
Being incontestably a single heart?
Then say no more about eternity
That might compel us into fantasy:
One day remains our sure centre of being,
Substance of curious impossibility
At which we stand amazed.
THE POET’S CURSE
Restore my truth, love, or have done for good –
Ours being a simple compact of the heart
Guiding each obstinate body
And sl
ow mind regularly –
Each always with a proud faith in the other’s
Proud faith in love, though often wrenched apart
By the irresistible Nightmare that half-smothers –
But bound for ever by the poet’s curse
Intolerably guarding ill from worse.
SEVEN YEARS
Where is the truth to indulge my heart,
These long years promised –
Truth set apart,
Not wholly vanished.
I still have eyes for watching,
Hands for holding fast,
Legs for far-striding,
Mouth for truth-telling –
Can the time yet have passed,
For loving and for listening?
LOVE AS LOVELESSNESS
What she refused him – in the name of love
And the hidden tears he shed –
She granted only to such soulless blades
As might accept her casual invitation
To a loveless bed.
Each year of the long seven gnawed at her heart,
Yet never would she lay
Tokens of his pure love under her pillow
Nor let him meet, by chance, her new bedfellow;
Thus suffering more than he.
Seven years had ended, the fierce truth was known.
Which of these two had suffered most?
Neither enquired and neither cared to boast:
‘Not you, but I. It was myself alone.’
In loneliness true love burns to excess.
THE SCARED CHILD
It is seven years now that we first loved –
Since you were still a scared and difficult child
Confessing less than love prompted,
Yet one night coaxed me into bed
With a gentle kiss
And there blew out the candle.
Had you then given what your tongue promised,
Making no fresh excuses
And never again punished your true self
With the acceptance of my heart only,
Not of my body, nor offered your caresses
To brisk and casual strangers –
How would you stand now? Not in love’s full glory
That jewels your fingers immemorially
And brines your eyes with bright prophetic tears.
AS ALL MUST END
All ends as all must end,
And yet cannot end
The way that all pretend,
Nor will it have been I
Who forged the obtrusive lie
But found sufficient wit
To contradict it.
Never was there a man
Not since this world began
Who could outlie a woman:
Nor can it have been you
Who tore our pact in two
And shaking your wild head
Laid a curse on my bed.
I hid in the deep wood,
Weeping where I stood,
Berries my sole food,
But could have no least doubt
That you would search me out,
Forcing from me a kiss
In its dark recesses.
TOUCH MY SHUT LIPS
Touch my shut lips with your soft forefinger,
Not for silence, but speech –
Though we guard secret words of close exchange,
Whispering each with each,
Yet when these cloudy autumn nights grow longer
There falls a silence stronger yet, we know,
Than speech: a silence from which tears flow.
THE MOON’S LAST QUARTER
So daylight dies.
The moon’s in full decline,
Nor can those misted early stars outshine her.
But what of love, counted on to discount
Recurrent terror of the moon’s last quarter?
Child, take my hand, kiss it finger by finger!
Can true love fade? I do not fear death
But only pity, with forgetfulness
Of love’s timeless vocabulary
And an end to poetry
With death’s mad aircraft rocketing from the sky.
Child, take my hand!
TRUE EVIL
All bodies have their yearnings for true evil,
A pall of darkness blotting out the heart,
Nor can remorse cancel luckless events
That rotted our engagements with Heaven’s truth;
These are now history. Therefore once more
We swear perpetual love at love’s own altar
And reassign our bodies, in good faith,
To faith in their reanimated souls.
But on our death beds shall our flaming passions
Revert in memory to their infantile
Delight of mocking the stark laws of love?
Rather let death concede a warning record
Of hells anticipated but foregone.
WHEN AND WHY
When and why we two need never ask –
It is not, we know, our task
Though both stand bound still to accept
The close faith we have always kept
With contradictions and the impossible:
To work indeed as one for ever
In rapt acknowledgment of love’s low fever.
THE WINDOW PANE
To bed, to bed: a storm is brewing.
Three natural wonders – thunder, lightning, rain –
Test our togetherness. The window pane,
Regaling us with vistas of forked lightning,
Grants our mortality fair warning;
And every stroke reminds us once again
How soon true love curves round to its beginning.
PRIDE OF PROGENY
While deep in love with one another,
Those seven long earlier years, we two
Would often kiss, lying entranced together
Yet never do what simpler lovers do
In generous pride of generous progeny;
Counting ourselves as poets only,
We judged it false to number more than two.
THAT WAS THE NIGHT
That was the night you came to say goodnight,
Where from the roof hung gargoyles of protection
And our eyes ached, but not intolerably,
The scene for once being well:
We had no now that did not spell forever
Though traffic growled and wild cascades of rain
Rattled against each streaming window pane.
They had gone at last, we reassured each other,
Even those morbid untranslatable visions
Whose ancient terrors we were pledged to accept,
Whose broken past lay resolutely elsewhere.
Hell, the true worldly Hell, proved otherwise:
Dry demons having drunk our marshes dry.
SONG: THE QUEEN OF TIME
Two generations bridge or part us.
The case, we grant, is rare –
Yet while you dare, I dare:
Our curious love being age-long pledged to last,
Posterity, even while it ridicules,
Cannot disprove the past.
Neither of us would think to hedge or lie –
Too well we know the cost:
Should the least canon of love’s law be crossed,
Both would be wholly lost –
You, queen of time, and I.
SHOULD I CARE?
‘Should I care,’ she asked, ‘his heart being mine,
If his body be another’s? –
Should I long for children and a full clothes-line?
Children, indeed, need mothers,
But do they still need fathers?
And now that money governs everything
Should a country need a king?’
TIMELESS MEETING
To have attained an endless, timeless meeting
By faith in t
he stroke which first engaged us,
Driving two hearts improbably together
Against all faults of history
And bodily disposition –
What does this mean? Prescience of new birth?
But one suffices, having paired us off
For the powers of creation –
Lest more remain unsaid.
Nor need we make demands or deal awards
Even for a thousand years:
Who we still are we know.
Exchange of love-looks came to us unsought
And inexpressible:
To which we stand resigned.
ENVOI
There is no now for us but always,
Nor any I but we –
Who have loved only and love only
From the hilltops to the sea
In our long turbulence of nights and days:
A calendar from which no lover strays
In proud perversity.
At The Gate
(1974)
OURS IS NO WEDLOCK
Ours is no wedlock, nor could ever be:
We are more, dear heart, than free.
Evil surrounds us – love be our eye-witness –
Yet while a first childish togetherness
Still links this magic, all terror of lies
Fades from our still indomitable eyes:
We love, and none dares gibe at our excess.
THE DISCARDED LOVE POEM
Should I treat it as my own
Though loth to recall
The occasion, the reason,
The scorn of a woman
Who let no tears fall?
It seems no mere exercise
But grief from a wound
For lovers to recognize:
A scar below the shoulder,
White, of royal size.
How did she treat the occasion?
In disdainful mood?
Or as death to her womanhood?
As the Devil’s long tooth?
As the end of all truth?
EARLIER LOVERS
First came fine words softening our souls for magic,
Next came fine magic, sweetening hope with sex;
Lastly came love, training both hearts for grief–