Kitabı oku: «Collected Love Poems»
Collected Love Poems
BRIAN PATTEN
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Not Only
Into My Mirror Has Walked
These Songs Were Begun One Winter
The Ambush
A Blade of Grass
What I Need for the Present
Through All Your Abstract Reasoning
Song for Last Year’s Wife
On Time for Once
A Small Dragon
Doubt Shall Not Make an End of You
First Love
After Rimbaud’s Première Soirée
Now They Will Either Sleep, Lie Still, or Dress Again
Party Piece
Nor the Sun Its Selling Power
When She Wakes Drenched from Her Sleep
Dressed
The Transformation
Leavetaking
The Poor Fools
Tonight I Will Not Bother You
It is Time to Tidy Up Your Life
Remembering
Love Lesson
The Innocence of Any Flesh Sleeping
Someone Coming Back
Mindless Now
In Your Turning Against Walls
The Confession
She Complicates Her Life
Perhaps
The Assassination of the Morning
A Creature to Tell the Time By
A Suitcase Full of Dust
The Mistake
In Someplace Further On
And Nothing is Ever as Perfect as You Want It to Be
Simple Lyric
Seascape
Waves
In the Dying of Anything
Angel Wings
Burning Genius
Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworth’s
The Unicorn
Her Song
When into Sudden Beds
Horror Story
Rauin
Park Note
At Four O’Clock in the Morning
Early in the Evening
Lethargy
One Another’s Light
Our Lives Had Grown So Empty
No Taxis Available
On a Horse Called Autumn
Apart Together in Her Bed We Lay
The Heroine Bitches
Vanishing Trick
Towards Evening and Tired of the Place
A Few Questions about Romeo
The Wife
The Outgoing Song
News from the Gladland
The Morning’s Got a Sleepy Head
The Ice Maiden
You Come to Me Quiet as Rain Not Yet Fallen
The Tragedy
The Cynic’s Only Love Poem
You Missed the Sunflowers at Their Height
The Want
Waiting
Amour
Probably It Is Too Early in the Morning
Forgetmeknot
Reading Between Graffiti
Embroidered Butterflies
Near the Factory Where They Make the Lilac Perfume
January Gladsong
A Drop of Unclouded Blood
You Have Gone to Sleep
A Valentine
Because There Were No Revelations at Hand
End of Story
The Likelihood
Inessential Things
The Recognition
I Caught a Train that Passed the Town Where You Lived
The Bee’s Last Journey to the Rose
Letting Go
I Tried to Find My Voice
And Heart is Daft
If Words Were More Her Medium than Touch
Her Advice
Bare Necessity
Sometimes it Happens
Meeting Again
The Understudies
Yes
So Late in the Evening
Autumn Joke
Wound Cream
When You Wake Tomorrow
The Stolen Orange
Hesitant
Dear Thief
I Have Changed the Numbers on My Watch
An Obsession
You Go into Town
Whose Body Has Opened
Her Coldness Explained
Road Song
The Word
Tristan, Waking in His Wood, Panics
Survivor
Sleepy
Don’t Ask
Over All We Are a Shadow Falls
The Shadow-Puppet’s Lament
They’ve Heard about You
April Morning Walk
Fingers Have Bruised Your Skin the Way a Fallen Peach is Bruised
Poem Written in the Street on a Rainy Evening
That Dress, This Shirt
These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men
A Few Sentences about Beauty
Her Ghost
Love Poem in February
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
About the Author
Other Books By
Copyright
About the Publisher
Not Only
Not only the leaf shivering with delight
No,
Not only the grass shrugging off the weight of frost
No,
Not only the taste of your skin
No,
Not only steam rising from the morning river
No,
Not only the heart on fire
No,
Not only the sound of the sunflower roaring
No,
Not only love’s resurrection
No,
Not only the cathedral window deep in the raindrop
No,
Not only the sky as blue and smooth as an egg
No,
Not only the fairytale of forever
No,
Not only the wings of the crane fly consumed by fire
No,
Not only these things
No,
But without you none of these things
Into My Mirror Has Walked
Into my mirror has walked
A woman who will not talk
Of love or of its subsidiaries,
But who stands there,
Pleased by her own silence.
The weather has worn into her
All seasons known to me.
In one breast she holds
Evidence of forests,
In the other, of seas.
I will ask her nothing yet
Would ask so much
If she gave a sign—
Her shape is common enough,
Enough shape to love.
But what keeps me here
Is what glows beyond her.
I think at times
A boy’s body
Would be as easy
To read light into,
I think sometimes
My own might do.
These Songs Were Begun One Winter
These songs were begun one winter
When on a window thick with frost
Her finger drew
A map of all possible directions,
When her body was one possibility among
Arbitrary encounters
And loneliness sufficient to warrant
A meeting of opposites.
How easily forgotten then
What was first felt—
An anchor lifted from the blood,
Sensations intense as any lunatic’s,
Ruined by unaccustomary events,
Let drop because of weariness.
The Ambush
When the face you swore never to forget
Can no longer be remembered,
When a list of regrets is torn up and thrown away
Then the hurt fades,
And you think you’ve grown strong.
You sit in bars and boast to yourself,
‘Never again will I be vulnerable.
It was an aberration to be so open,
A folly, never to be repeated.’
How absurd and fragile such promises.
Hidden from you, crouched
Among the longings you have suppressed
And the desires you imagine tamed,
A sweet pain waits in ambush.
And there will come a day when in a field
Heaven’s mouth gapes open,
And on a web the shadow
Of a marigold will smoulder.
Then without warning,
Without a shred of comfort,
Emotions you thought had been put aside
Will flare up within you and bleed you of reason.
The routines which comforted you,
And the habits in which you sought refuge
Will bend like sunlight under water,
And go astray.
Once again your body will become a banquet,
Falling heavenwards.
You will loll in spring’s sweet avalanche
Without the burden of memory,
And once again
Monstrous love will swallow you.
A Blade of Grass
You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.
I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.
You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.
You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,
And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.
What I Need for the Present
Thanks, but please take back
the trinket box, the picture
made from butterfly wings and
the crystal glass.
Please take back the books,
the postcards, the beeswax candles,
the potted plant, the Hockney print
and the expensive pen.
Ungracious of me to say it, but
so many gifts that are given
are given in lieu of what
cannot be given.
Ungracious to say it, but
wherever I move in this room
it’s not these gifts I see, but your absense
that accumulates on them like dust.
Forgive me. Your intentions
were so very kind, but here’s
your box of fetters back. It’s not
what I need for the present.
Through All Your Abstract Reasoning
Coming back one evening through deserted fields
when the birds, drowsy with sleep,
have all but forgotten you,
you stop, and for one moment jerk alive.
Something has passed through you
that alters and enlightens: O
realization of what has gone and was real.
A bleak and uncoded message whispers
down all the nerves:
‘You cared for her! For love you cared!’
Something has passed a finger through
all your abstract reasoning.
From love you sheltered outside of love but still
the human bit leaked in,
stunned and off-balanced you.
Unprepared, struck so suddenly by another’s identity,
how can you hold on to any revelation?
You have moved too carefully through your life.
Always the light within you is hooded by
your own protecting fingers!
Song for Last Year’s Wife
Alice, this is my first winter of waking without you, of knowing that you, dressed in familiar clothes, are elsewhere, perhaps not even conscious of our anniversary. Have you noticed? The earth’s still as hard, the same empty gardens exist? It is as if nothing special had changed. I wake with another mouth feeding from me, but still feel as if love had not the right to walk out of me. A year now. So what? you say. I send out my spies to find who you are living with, what you are doing. They return, smile and tell me your body’s as firm, you are as alive, as warm and inviting as when they knew you first.
Perhaps it is the winter, its isolation from other seasons, that sends me your ghost to witness when I wake. Somebody came here today, asked how you were keeping, what you were doing. I imagine you, waking in another city, enclosed by this same hour. So ordinary a thing as loss comes now and touches me.
On Time for Once
I was sitting thinking of our future
and of how friendship had overcome
so many nights bloated with pain;
I was sitting in a room that looked on to a garden
and a stillness filled me,
bitterness drifted from me.
I was as near paradise as I am likely to get again.
I was sitting thinking of the chaos
we had caused in one another
and was amazed we had survived it.
I was thinking of our future
and of what we would do together,
and where we would go and how,
when night came
burying me bit by bit,
and you entered the room
trembling and solemn-faced,
on time for once.
