Sonnet 87
Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou knowst thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gavst, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavst it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
from Troilus and Cressida
RICHARD BARNFIELD
To His Friend Master R.L., in
Praise of Music and Poetry
If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great twixt thee and me,
Because thou lovst the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser, to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
Thou lovst to hear the sweet melodious sound
That Phoebus’ lute, the queen of music, makes;
And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned
Whenas himself to singing he betakes:
One god is god of both, as poets feign;
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.
WALT WHITMAN
from Calamus
Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,
Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and
unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face
in my hands;
Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go forth, speeding
swiftly the country roads, or through the city streets,
or pacing miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries;
Hours discouraged, distracted — for the one I cannot content
myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me;
Hours when I am forgotten, (O weeks and months are passing,
but I believe I am never to forget!)
Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed — but it is useless —
I am what I am;)
Hours of my torment — I wonder if other men ever have
the like, out of the like feelings?
Is there even one other like me — distracted — his friend,
his lover, lost to him?
Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning,
dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night,
awaking, think who is lost?
Does he too harbour his friendship silent and endless?
harbour his anguish and passion?
Does some stray reminder, or casual mention of a name,
bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and deprest?
Doe he see himself reflected in me? In these hours,
does he see the face of his hours reflected?
WILFRED OWEN
To Eros
In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you.
In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed.
All of most worth I bound and burnt and slew:
Old peaceful lives; frail flowers; firm friends; and Christ.
I slew all falser loves; I slew all true,
That I might nothing love but your truth, Boy.
Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do
Their wedding garments in their haste of joy.
But when I fell upon your sandalled feet,
You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.
I heard the singing of your wings’ retreat;
Far-flown, I watched you flush the Olympian snows,
Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned
To stare upon the ash of all I burned.
ROBERT FRIEND
Shirts
Rereading Cavafy I suddenly remembered
my own Ionian Sea, and a steamer
plying between the islands.
And I remembered, amidst the passengers
crowding the deck of the steamer,
a handsome young Greek wearing a shirt I very much admired,
and he in turn admiring mine.
We took off our shirts then and there
and exchanged them.
I wore his shirt next to my skin for many years.
But it was never the same on my body
as on his, and he was not there
to take it off.
EDWIN MORGAN
‘Dear man, my love goes out in waves . . .’
Dear man, my love goes out in waves
and breaks. Whatever is, craves.
Terrible the cage
to see all life from, brilliantly about,
crowds, pavements, cars, or hear the common shout
of goals in a near park.
But now the black bars arc blue in my breath — split — part —
I’m out — it’s art,
it’s love, it’s rage —
Standing in rage in decent air
will never clear the place of care.
Simply to be
should be enough, in the same city, and let
absurd despair tramp and roar off-set.
Be satisfied with it,
the gravel and the grit
the struggling eye can’t lift,
the veils that drift,
the weird to dree.
Press close to me at midnight as
you say goodbye; that’s what it has
to offer, life
I mean. Into the frost with you; into
the bed with me; and get the light out too.
Better to shake unseen
and let real darkness screen
the shadows of the heart,
the vacant part—
ner, husband, wife.
FRANCIS KING
The Bank-Notes
Really there is little enough I shall care now to remember
And perhaps this only, the thirst, the dust and the terror
of being alone,
Darkness that evening of August — or might it have been
September?
And flesh that burned on flesh, and the hard, cold touch
of stone.
Really there is little enough to remember. And time confuses
Such nights, reality with dream and loss with lack,
So perhaps that night does not exist to which my mind
now chooses,
Obstinately chooses now to twist and still twist back.
Yet surely it must exist: for how clearly I remember
The sound of tearing bank-notes as we struggled beneath
the trees
That far-off evening of August — or was it perhaps September? —
And the sweat upon that face and the blood upon my knees.
It had all seemed long forgotten; it is only now as I stand
Waiting for the men to come to carry my trunks away
That I feel those lips on my lips, that hand within my hand,
And again the two taut bodies lunge outwards and clutch
and sway.
THOM GUNN
The Problem
Close to the top
Of an encrusted dark
Converted brownstone West of Central Park
(For this was 1961),
In his room that
a narrow hutch
Was sliced from some once-cavemous flat,
Where now a window took a whole wall up
And t
ints were bleached-out by the sun
Of many a summer day,
We lay
upon his hard thin bed.
He seemed all body, such
As normally you couldn’t touch,
Reckless and rough,
One of Boss Cupid’s red—
haired errand boys
Who couldn’t get there fast enough.
Almost like fighting...
We forgot about the noise,
But feeling turned so self-delighting
That hurry soon gave way
To give-and-take,
Till each contested, for the other’s sake,
To end up not in winning and defeat
But in a draw.
Meanwhile beyond the aureate hair
I saw
A scrap of blackboard with its groove for chalk,
Nailed to a strip of lath
That had half-broken through,
The problem drafted there
still incomplete.
After I found out in the talk
Companion to a cigarette,
That he, turning the problem over yet
In his disorderly and ordered head,
Attended graduate school to teach
And study math,
his true
Passion cyphered in chalk beyond my reach.
ROGER FINCH
A Publicity Photograph
Butch. You are no poet, you are not
sweet Thomas Chatterton blacking out
limply at eighteen across his bed
in the chiaroscuro of his attic,
you are Butch, the neighbourhood bully, whose threat
‘I’ll beat you to a pulp’ simply because
I was the neighbourhood sissy almost
came true, his thumbnail inside my cheek,
his teeth clamped on my earlobe so hard
it must have been passion. You, at least,
have an easy smile and easy eyes.
But look, you have the same wire-haired terrier hair,
the same brutal brows, the same bull neck.
And why are you wearing that black leather
jacket and that black T-shirt that from where
I am standing reads ‘...lgar...’ or ‘...dgar...’
in white? You are threatening me. I touch
my ear, believing your strong white teeth
made the scar there, I touch other parts
of my body, believing your hands can reach
me from where you are sitting in that white
kitchen chair, intimately. Your words
are full of subjected women who moan
as they twist around you but I believe
I could teach your body to lie still on the floorboards
or the moss-softened rocks as I lower
myself in the attitude of a cross
upon you, the fluttering white wings
of my chest beating against your chest.
I want that first real surreptitious kiss.
J.D. McCLATCHY
After Ovid
Apollo and Hyacinthus
Guilts dirty hands, memory’s kitchen sink ...
It’s bad faith makes immortal love.
Take a closer look at Hyacinth.
Dark bud-tight curls and poppy-seed stubble,
The skin over his cheekbones pale as poison
Slowly dripped from eye to eye,
And a crotch that whispers its single secret
Even from behind the waiter’s apron.
He’s pouting now, staring at the traffic.
Every year there’s a new one at the bar
Sprung from whatever nowhere — the country,
The islands, the middle west ...
The old man at the far corner table, decades ago
Called by his critics ‘the sun god
Of our poetry’, sits stirring
A third coffee and an opening line,
Something like So often you renew
Yourself or You and I resemble
Nothing else Every other pair of lovers.
The grease stain on his left sleeve
Winks as the lights come on.
He signals the boy and means to ask
Under cover of settling the check
If, with the usual understanding
And for the same pleasures, he’d return again
Tonight, after work, there was something
He’d wanted to show the boy, a picture
Of two sailors that if held upside down ...
It’s then he notices the gold cufflinks
The boy is wearing, the pair the poet’s
Friends had given him when his first book —
That moist sheaf of stifled longings —
Appeared in Alexandria.
To have stolen from one who would give
Anything: what better pretext
To put the end to ‘an arrangement’?
The old man falls silent, gets up from his seat,
Leaves a few coins on the table
And walks out through his confusions,
Homeward through the sidestreets, across the square,
Up the fifty-two stone steps, up the years
And back to his study, its iron cot.
The heaving had stopped. The last sad strokes
Of the town clock had rung: Anger was one,
Humiliation the other.
He sat there until dawn and wrote out the poem
That has come to be in all the anthologies,
The one you know, beginning
You are my sorrow and my fault. The one that goes
In all my songs; in my mind, in my mouth,
The sighing still sounds of you.
The one that ends with the boy — the common,
Adored, two-timing hustler — turned
Into a flower, the soft-fleshed lily
But of a bruised purple that grief will come
To scar with its initials AI, AI.
O, the ache insists.
MICHAEL SCHMIDT
‘His father was a baker ... ’
for A.G.G.
His father was a baker, he the youngest son.
I understand they beat him, and they loved him.
His father was a baker in Oaxaca:
I understand his bakery was the best
And his three sons and all his daughters helped
As children with the baking and the pigs.
I can imagine chickens in their patio,
At Christmastime a wattled turkey-cock, a dog
Weathered like a wash-board, yellow-eyed,
That no one stroked, but ate the scraps of bread
And yapped to earn his keep. I understand
The family prospered though the father drank
And now the second brother drinks, often
To excess. I understand as well that love
Came early, bladed, and then went away
And came again in other forms, some foreign,
And took him by the heart away from home.
His father was a baker in Oaxaca
And here I smell the loaves that rose in ovens
Throughout a childhood not yet quite complete
And smell the fragrance of his jet-black hair,
Taste his sweet dialect that is mine too,
Until I understand I am to be a baker,
Up before dawn wth trays and trays of dough
To feed him this day, next day and for ever —
Or for a time — the honey-coloured loaves.
NEIL POWELL
The Difference
We watch the gathering sea through sepia dusk
Across a beach of fish-heads, glass beads, relics
Dumped by a careless deity called chance.
Ferry and trawler exchange a passing glance.
Dark comes fast: lighthouse and streetlamp pierce it.
You sit at the window, silent as I writ
e.
We are no longer locked in self-defence.
Being with you has made all the difference.
PAUL WILKINS
Glasnost’
The month Ivan’s and Misha’s tank whined
juddering into Wenceslas Square,
I passed O-level Russian.
‘Fascinating,’ grins Alastair,
who is listening to these lines.
August 1968: ‘Socialisms human face’ was
Dubcek’s, a poster on a Clapham bedroom wall, his thin mouth
smiling under tired, vulture eyes. In Croydon we heard
Prague Radio crackling, deciphered the chalked tank-turrets’
‘Volodya, go home! Your Anna is with Fyodor!’
I still have some of the Russian words.
Kak vas zavoot? I can ask someone.
‘What do they call you?’ ‘What is your name?’
Chai s’limonom, parzhalsta. I can order a cup of lemon tea.
I know that Glasnost' must be a noun.
And I remember Lenin’s question: What is to be done?
The man who taught us how to ask Shto delat'? was
‘obviously queer’. That August
he tried to persuade me I should take the subject further.
I went for Economics, collaborated in the rumours.
Gay Love Poetry Page 10