Supreme attention in my guise,
And heard the whole laborious din,
Piano, ’cello, violin;
And so, perhaps, they hardly guessed
I liked their footman, John, the best.
WILFRED OWEN
To—
Three rompers run together, hand in hand.
The middle boy stops short, the others hurtle:
What bumps, what shrieks, what laughter turning turtle.
Love, racing between us two, has planned
A sudden mischief: shortly he will stand
And we shall shock. We cannot help but fall;
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.
Better our lips should bruise our eyes, than He,
Rude love, out-run our breath; you pant, and I,
I cannot run much farther; mind that we
Both laugh with love; and having tumbled, try
To go forever children, hand in hand.
The sea is rising ... and the world is sand.
J.R. ACKERLEY
from After the Blitz, 1941
Invocation to a soldier reported missing
Observe! I turn the key in this new door
At which you have not knocked your gay tattoo;
Note the bright prospect down the passage to
The sunlit terrace (this conducted tour
Is specially for you) and disregard
The snake on that far threshold, its a pigeon
Craning for crumbs; we need no admonition
That life’s unstable and our due reward.
But praise me for my courage: could you tell,
Here in the anteroom, here in the parlour,
That all this newly painted furniture
Three months ago was refuse raked from hell?
Though here and there some defect still reveals —
The clock strikes three but it is four,
Whose face stares back at me from the bright mirror?
How life falls somewhat short of our ideals.
But now the forward view. Here we discover
The bedroom with the old familiar bed,
For love, or sleep, or death all sprucely spread;
It only waits the one thing or the other.
All’s ready for you, see; neat as new pins
Carpets on floors, chairs upon carpets set;
The clock strikes four and it is five, and yet
The movement’s onward, a new life begins.
ROBERT FRIEND
from The Teacher and the Indian
4. The Cowboy and the Indian
It was a cowboy story as he told it,
a scene out of a Western,
but with a difference,
although the setting was the expected one:
a one-street shantytown,
clapboard houses, a whorehouse and a bar
to whoop it up in.
Here came a deviation from the script:
our main characters turned out to be
a youngish cowboy and his Indian pal
only fifteen years old.
Nevertheless (returning to the script),
they whooped it up.
The cowboy leading his protégé into the bar,
taught him to drain a whiskey or a beer
at a single go, and soon they were,
as the saying has it, roaring drunk —
which the boy found much to his liking —
almost as much as what was soon to follow.
Staggering towards his horse
tethered to the hitching-post outside,
the cowboy managed to mount, making,
with the Indian pressing warmly behind him
on the one saddle, a tight fit.
Then hallooing, caterwauling, cursing,
the horse at times rearing when they suddenly drew
they raced up and down the soon-vacated street,
shying stones at windows, cats, stray hens,
and spraying, gloriously, bullets into the air.
This foreplay ended, the cowboy took to a road
that wound through a landscape mostly stones and hills,
but dotted occasionally with clumps of juniper.
Deciding without a word a particular clump would do,
he dismounted and lurching towards its concealing shelter,
the puzzled boy right behind him,
without forewarning stripped. Then offering
(another variation in the script)
his back to the boy, he said,
with a macho tenderness, ‘Come on, kid,
give it a try.’
Overcoming his surprise and fear,
and invaded by a sudden tide of lust,
the kid did. So began
what afterwards became their usual ritual —
one that led him, about a decade later,
to invite the teacher to a bar and then himself
into his teachers arms.
EDWIN MORGAN
Tram-Ride, 1939 (F.M.)
How cold it is to stand on the street comer
at nineteen, in the foggy Glasgow winter,
with pinched white face and hands in pockets, straining
to catch that single stocky gallus figure
who might be anyone but was one only;
prowling a few feet — not too far! — glanced at
idly by the patient Cosmo queue, growing
exposed, your watch burning, how long now, yes but,
what, half an hour, some eyes saying, Stood up eh? —
until the step has to be taken, casually,
you have to stroll off, what’s won by staying?
he won’t appear (he had simply forgotten,
you didn’t know that then), and on the top deck
of a southbound tram you stare into the window
as it reflects a mask about to shake with
ridiculous but uncontrollable tears, a choking
you gulp back instantly, no one has heard it,
shameful — shameful — to be dominated
by such emotions as the busy tramful
of half indifferent, half curious folk would
mock at if they knew, and would they sometime,
in half a century perhaps, accept that love is
what it is, that tears are what they are, that
Jack can shiver in the numbing close-mouth
of missing dates for Jill or Jake, and suffer?
J.D. McCLATCHY
Late Night Ode
Horace IV.i
Its over, love. Look at me pushing fifty now,
Hair like grave-grass growing in both ears,
The piles and boggy prostate, the crooked penis,
The sour taste of each days first lie,
And that recurrent dream of years ago pulling
A swaying bead-chain of moonlight,
Of slipping between the cool sheets of dark
Along a body like my own, but blameless.
What goods my cut-glass conversation now,
Now I’m so effortlessly vulgar and sad?
You get from life what you can shake from it?
For me, its g and t’s all day and CNN.
Try the blond boychick lawyer, entry level
At eighty grand, who pouts about overtime,
Keeps Evian and a beeper in his locker at the gym,
And hash in tinfoil under the office fern.
There’s your hound from heaven, with buccaneer
Curls and perfumed war-paint on his nipples.
His answering machine always has room for one more
Slurred, embarrassed call from you-know-who.
Some nights I’ve laughed so hard the tears
Won’t stop. Look at me now. Why now?
I long ago gave up pretending to believe
Anyone's memory will give as good as it gets
So w
hy these stubborn tears? And why do I dream
Almost every night of holding you again,
Or at least of diving after you, my long-gone,
Through the bruised unbalanced waves?
RICHARD ESSENDEN
Effects
1
This is the poem I have to write.
This is the poem I have to write to you.
2
Years back, you made me a copy of your will.
Now I do whatever you require.
Your coffin slides to the furnace;
and as you go, on the tape your living fingers
stroke out the notes of
I'd like to get you
on a slow boat to China,
all by myself alone
and then I wince and almost want to giggle
as the tune shifts into
All of me, why not take all of me...
I take the cheque,
await delivery of the TV, stereo, freezer.
And I drink the whisky left in your house
quickly, its raw warmth seeming my throats
right, blighted inheritance.
3
The name you chose when they made you a monk.
The name of wisdom.
What happened in your childhood, and went
echoing on in mine? And later.
Back to the first cause
we can’t go
but there is a sentence, commanding the child to be severed
in two
and one part to be given to each of those claiming him.
4
Start of a spell of nearly perfect weather more than
thirty years ago.
You walked into the quadrangle and paused,
hearing notes trickling from an open window, recognized
with a sweet shock the piano you had given up,
its tone to you as unmistakable as your mothers voice.
How many times did you tell me that?
Once you’d left, she couldn’t bear to keep the keys you’d played.
A mother’s love, turned to a fragrance like retribution.
She gave the piano to the old school; a year beyond her death,
you went to work there. Too neat, the way things happened
to you.
And so it was you walked into the sun-flooded quad,
and heard that monk in his eighties trying
clumsy arpeggios in an exercise of childhood.
Months later he died in your arms
and you woke up the dormitory at one a.m. to make us pray.
What happened to those cracked, nicotined ivories?
Twenty years after, in your cramped spare bedroom
there was a brand-new baby grand you never played.
It’s all like irony, but harsher.
I’ve given your records away.
But still I can see the fingers that had touched me
caressing some keyboard, practising some favourites:
Chopin, Brahms, Rachmaninov. You taught me to love
the ones you loved but now in my long defeat
I cherish listening to the Britten you hated
(nice touch, you watched the opera of Death in Venice
with the sound off).
And in my proper life I hear clean solitary notes of Satie,
falling as if like droplets from raised oars
in a boat my unborn brother is rowing on the almost silent
distance of a lake.
5
Orphaned and at boarding-school,
happier away from my childless guardians ‘home’,
I soon knew those corrupted kindnesses of yours,
soon depended on them.
You see, I write ‘corrupted’.
Every time I try to want to write of your kindness,
I think of more to condemn.
Of course I write this only now you’re dead.
6
At 13, 14, I thought I knew
I wanted to live a grown mans life.
But those Saturdays went on and on:
as the wrestling began on tv, your office-doors Yale-snib
clicking
locked; the red light going on; then always
the slither of your palm across the backs of my bared thighs.
The heady sweetness of that green liqueur you gave me.
Embarrassments; mysteries. And arousals.
And those corrupted kindnesses of yours that I relied on.
Afterwards the sneers and jealousies of Larry Pearson,
David Hewitt,
John and Peter Cowan, Alex Lord.
Even their fictitious names strike home.
I didn’t know for years the permutations they went through
in each others’ beds; or with you, in two or three locked
rooms:
Larry and John at Larry’s house one weekend;
David in shorts for you, drunk and eager, waiting hidden
behind the desk;
Peter and Alex in the dorm after you’d been gone a week;
and, later, when Alex met you at the country-hotel, you posing
as his uncle...
Who was it who set off the ticking metronomes of these lives?
All of them (at 13, 14) going in with you
and hearing the click of the Yale-lock on your office-door,
all of them sent into the small back-room to change ...
To change, but to be the same forever.
That age. That look. That innocence,
but aroused, responsive. That lost thing never lost.
What of all this should be forgiven?
All of it, perhaps. None of its ever forgotten.
I have to imagine John Cowan nearly naked close to
midnight in your bedroom,
the rest of us sleeping in the dorm just yards away.
He knelt (you said), his elbows on your bed, like a prayer
come true.
As he awaited you, his penis stiffening (I guess from what
you said),
what was John thinking then? And does he wait and want
to think of it again
now, thirty years on, even when with a woman or a wife
perhaps?
You used to say that, in our marriages and affairs,
you’d have us always in your grip. Alex and John,
who won’t read this, I wish they could tell me if it’s true
desire’s an unposted road, offering no other route to the island.
I wish they could speak to me the different shapes of what
they’ve lived
with men or women. Where I am,
memory is sleepless, must keep on going through it all again.
The red light coming on.
The green liqueur.
The small room at the back.
The thin white cotton shorts.
Click of the lock.
7
Each night, I hear the radios Shipping Bulletin
speak the name of where you lived.
A small, dull town.
I think of the grey sea quivering, rushing for miles
towards the pleasure-arcades, towards the white-walled
three-quarters-empty hotels.
We hardly ever tried to speak of consequences,
the distinct and random cause.
And now you’ve gone utterly beyond my words
as I lie listening to the radio intone its forecast,
its warning, its entrancement:
Haze. Calm. Four miles. Rising slowly.
8
When you pulled those nervous, pliant boys of 13, 14, 15
face-down across your lap,
their buttocks taut inside thin brief shorts,
what was it you were hoping for?
And the ones aged 17, 18, 19,
who needed no commanding to comply,
why did they seek with you their v
ersions of pleasure,
of contempt?
You’d lament they couldn’t still be 13, 14, 15.
Alex, John, the others —
locked into your dream, inside an airless childhood,
they gasped at their lives,
flinching their clenched willingness against your falling hand.
9
After lights-out, the locker was opened
and I glimpsed the brunette with big breasts
lifting her soft cleavage to me, leering.
That was 1965,
the autumn I discovered masturbation,
dreaming of the fly-half of the second xv.
I shared a room with Jerzy,
the blond half-Polish boy
who wore the briefest gym-shorts in the school.
Three times in the semi-dark he revealed to me
his stash of porn-mags,
an orange drizzle from the street-lamps letting us see.
Back in our separate beds,
our hands pumped furiously under the straining sheets.
And you knew, didn’t you,
just what I would be visualizing then —
the blond half-Polish boy as you had seen him,
his shorts down round his knees,
the smooth curves of his bare rump raised to your hand,
Gay Love Poetry Page 8