Kitabı oku: «Collected Love Poems», sayfa 2
A Small Dragon
I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.
I fed it on many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
food you can’t provide.
It made a nest among the coal,
not unlike a bird’s but larger.
It is out of place here
and is quite silent.
If you believed in it I would come
hurrying to your house to let you share my wonder,
but I want instead to see
if you yourself will pass this way.
Doubt Shall Not Make an End of You
Doubt shall not make an end of you
Nor closing eyes lose your shape
When the retina’s light fades;
What dawns inside me will light you.
In our public lives we may confine ourselves to darkness,
Our nowhere mouths explain away our dreams,
But alone we are incorruptible creatures,
Our light sunk too deep to be of any public use
We wander free and perfect without moving,
Or love on hard carpets
Where couples revolving round the room
End found at its centre—
I reach into you to reach all mankind,
And the deeper into you I reach
The deeper glows elsewhere the world
And sings of you. It says,
To love is the one common miracle.
Our love like a whale from its deepest ocean rises—
I offer this and a multitude of images,
From party rooms to oceans,
The single star and all its reflections;
Being completed we include all
And nothing wishes to escape us.
Feel nothing separate then—
We have translated each other into love
And into light go streaming.
First Love
Falling in love was like falling down the stairs
Each stair had her name on it
And he went bouncing down each one like a tongue-tied lunatic
One day of loving her was an ordinary year
He transformed her into what he wanted
And the scent from her
Was the best scent in the world
Fifteen he was fifteen
Each night he dreamed of her
Each day he telephoned her
Each day was unfamiliar
Scary even
And the fear of her going weighed on him like a stone
And when he could not see her for two nights running
It seemed a century had passed
And meeting her and staring at her face
He knew he would feel as he did forever
Hopelessly in love
Sick with it
And not even knowing her second name yet
It was the first time
The best time
A time that would last forever
Because it was new
Because he was ignorant it could ever end
It was endless
After Rimbaud’s Première Soirée
Sitting half naked in my chair
she clasped her hands to her mouth
trembling with pleasure
The shadows of the cypress trees leaned into the window
to gawp at us
Her breasts were so tiny
and her hair cropped so short
she could have been a boy
but we were beyond such trifling considerations
I licked her small ankles
kissed each fragile bone
as her stomach flipped over and over
Things she had imagined so furtively and for so long
yet had dared share with no one
were coming true at last!
It is how she wanted things to be
Her feet shivered on the cool floor of the room
beating out a rhythm of pure pleasure
Now They Will Either Sleep, Lie Still, or Dress Again
It’s evening,
Over the room’s silence other voices and sounds.
For them the world is a distant planet.
And lying here they are naked,
Her blonde hair falling is spread out across him.
Around her throat her mother’s necklace adds
Sophistication to her clumsiness.
Let their touchings be open—
They no longer belong to a race of pale children
Whose bodies are hardly born,
Nor among the virgins hung still inside their sadness,
But waking together their world is perfect.
Littered about the room still
Are the clothes they used for meeting in.
Evening, and the sun has moved across the room.
Now they will either sleep, lie still, or dress again.
Party Piece
He said:
‘Let’s stay here
Now this place has emptied
And make gentle pornography with one another,
While the partygoers go out
And the dawn creeps in,
Like a stranger.
Let us not hesitate
Over what we know
Or over how cold this place has become,
But let’s unclip our minds
And let tumble free
The mad, mangled crocodile of love.’
So they did,
There among the cigarettes and guinness stains,
And later he caught a bus and she a train
And all there was between them then
Was rain.
Nor the Sun Its Selling Power
They said her words were like balloons
with strings I could not hold,
that her love was something in a shop
cheap and far too quickly sold.
But the tree does not price its apples
nor the sun its selling power,
the rain does not gossip
or speak of where it goes.
When She Wakes Drenched from Her Sleep
When she wakes drenched from her sleep
She will not ask to be saluted by the light
Nor carolled by morning’s squabbling birds,
Nor lying in his arms wish him repeat
The polite conversations already heard;
She’ll not be loved by roses but by men,
She will glide free of sweet beauty’s net
And all her senses open out
To receive each sensation for herself.
If I could be that real, that open now,
And not by half a light half lit
I would not gossip of what is beauty and what is not
Nor reduce love to a freak poem in the dark.
Dressed
Dressed you are a different creature.
Dressed you are polite, are discreet and full of friendships,
Dressed you are almost serious.
You talk of the world and of all its disasters
As if they really moved you.
Dressed you hold on to illusions.
The wardrobes are full of your disguises.
The dress to be unbuttoned only in darkness,
The dress that seems always about to fall from you,
The touch-me-not dress, the how-expensive dress,
The dress slung on without caring.
Dressed you are a different creature.
You are indignant of the eyes upon you,
The eyes that crawl over you,
That feed on the bits you’ve allowed
To be naked.
Dressed you are imprisoned in labels,
You are cocooned in fashions,
Dressed you are a different creature.
As easily as in the bedrooms
In the fields littered with rubble
The dresses fall from you,
In the spare room the party never reaches
The dresses fall from you.
Aided or unaided, clumsily or easily,
The dresses fall from you and then
From you falls all the cheap blossom.
Undressed you are a different creature.
The Transformation
You are no longer afraid.
You watch, still half asleep,
How dawn ignites a room;
His rough head and body curled
In awkward fashion can but please.
His face is puffed with sleep;
His body once distant from your own
Has by the dawn been changed,
And what little care you had at first
Within this one night has grown.
You smile at how those things that troubled you
Were quick to leave,
At how in their place has come a peace,
A rest once beyond imagining.
Your bodies linked, you hardly dare to move;
A new thought has now obsessed your brain:
‘Come the light,
He might again have changed.’
And what you feel
You are quick to name,
And what you feel
You are quick to cage.
You watch, still half asleep,
How dawn misshapes a room;
And all your confidence by the light is drained
And still his face,
His face is still transformed.
Leavetaking
She grew careless with her mouth.
Her lips came home in the evening numbed.
Excuses festered among her words.
She said one thing, her body said another.
Her body, exhausted, spoke the truth.
She grew careless, or became without care,
Or panicked between both.
Too logical to suffer, imagining
Love short-lived and ‘forever’
A lie fostered on the mass to light
Blank days with hope,
What she meant to him was soon diminished.
He too had grown careless with his mouth.
Habit wrecked them both, and wrecked
They left the fragments untouched, and left.
The Poor Fools
You ask why poets speak so often
In the language of goodbyes.
It’s because beginnings take them by surprise.
Love comes and hammers them,
And then the poor fools are lost for words.
They abandon their pens, and their fingers
Itch for other things: buttons, nipples, zips—
For everything but the poor abandoned pen.
Tonight I Will Not Bother You
Tonight I will not bother you with telephones
Or voices speaking their cold and regular lines;
I’ll write no more notes in crowded living rooms
Saying what and how much has changed,
But fall instead to silence and things known.
When through exhaustion you scream, throw up
Sorrow that’s become a physical pain,
I’ll not try and comfort you with words
That add little but darkness to ourselves
But with the body speak, its senses known.
There is no frantic hurry to love
Or press on another one’s own dream.
This much I know has changed,
What was once wild is calmed,
And quieter now behind the brain
May throw more light on things;
And what starved for love survives
Whatever shadow it hunted down.
Taking what love comes makes
All that comes much easier;
Something buried deep selects what our shapes need;
The smaller habits it allows to breathe then fade,
Leaving the centre clean.
Tonight I will not bother you with excuses.
If owning separate worlds means pain
Comes more easily, and hurt
Remains a common part of us,
The silence is best; it will allow
All doubts to strip themselves.
Then whatever’s seen will surely
Be seen in its own light,
And whatever is wanted be wanted
For more than wanting’s sake.
It is Time to Tidy Up Your Life
It is time to tidy up your life!
Into your body has leaked this message.
No conscious actions, no broodings
Have brought the thought upon you.
It is time to take into account
What has gone and what has replaced it.
Living your life according to no plan
The decisions were numerous and yet
The ways to go were always one.
You stand between trees this evening;
The cigarette in your cupped hand
Glows like a flower.
The drizzle falling seems
To wash away all ambition.
There are scattered through your life
Too many dreams to entirely gather.
Through the soaked leaves, the soaked grass,
The earth-scents and distant noises
This one thought is re-occurring:
It is time to take into account what has gone,
To cherish and replace it.
You learnt early enough that celebrations
Do not last forever,
So what use now the sorrows that mount up?
You must withdraw your love from that
Which would kill your love.
There is nothing flawless anywhere,
Nothing that has not the power to hurt.
As much as hate, tenderness is the weapon of one
Whose love is neither perfect nor complete.
Remembering
Not all that you want and ought not to want
Is forbidden to you,
Not all that you want and are allowed to want
Is acceptable.
Then it gets late on
And things change their value.
You are tired.
You feel the ground with your hands.
A single blade of grass appears before your eyes.
It flashes on and off,
A remnant of paradise.
And then perhaps you will remember
What you have forgotten to remember,
What should have been so easy remembering.
You will recall the hut in the morning,
And hoof-prints flooded with frost,
And how a weed and a pebble were caught once
On a cow’s lip,
And perhaps how on a tremendous horse
A small boy once galloped off,
And how it was possible to do
All that now seems impossible,
All you ever wanted.
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