The Complete Poems

  Fire and Deluge, rival pretenders

  To ruling the world’s end; these cannot daunt us

  Whom flames will never singe, nor floods drown,

  While we stand guard against their murderous child

  Mist, that slily catches at love’s throat,

  Shrouding the clear sun and clean waters

  Of all green gardens everywhere –

  The twitching mouths likewise and furtive eyes

  Of those who speak us fair.

  THE WORD

  The Word is unspoken

  Between honest lovers:

  They substitute a silence

  Or wave at a wild flower,

  Sighing inaudibly.

  That it exists indeed

  Will scarcely be disputed:

  The wildest of conceptions

  Can be reduced to speech –

  Or so the Schoolmen teach.

  You and I, thronged by angels,

  Learned it in the same dream

  Which startled us by moon-light,

  And that we still revere it

  Keeps our souls aflame.

  ‘God’ is a standing question

  That still negates an answer.

  The Word is not a question

  But simple affirmation,

  The antonym of ‘God’.

  Who would believe this Word

  Could have so long been hidden

  Behind a candid smile,

  A sweet but hasty kiss

  And always dancing feet?

  PERFECTIONISTS

  Interalienation of their hearts

  It was not, though both played resentful parts

  In proud unwillingness to share

  One house, one pillow, the same fare.

  It was perfectionism, they confess,

  To know the truth and ask for nothing less.

  Their fire-eyed guardians watched from overhead:

  ‘These two alone have learned to love,’ they said,

  ‘But neither can forget

  They are not worthy of each other yet.’

  PRISON WALLS

  Love, this is not the way

  To treat a glorious day:

  To cloud it over with conjectured fears,

  Wiping my eyes before they brim with tears

  And, long before we part,

  Mourning the torments of my jealous heart.

  That you have tried me more

  Than who else did before,

  Is no good reason to prognosticate

  My last ordeal: when I must greet with hate

  Your phantom fairy prince

  Conjured in childhood, lost so often since.

  Nor can a true heart rest

  Resigned to second best –

  Why did you need to temper me so true

  That I became your sword of swords, if you

  Must nail me on your wall

  And choose a painted lath when the blows fall?

  Because I stay heart-whole,

  Because you bound your soul

  To mine, with curses should it wander free,

  I charge you now to keep full faith with me

  Nor can I ask for less

  Than your unswerving honest-heartedness.

  Then grieve no more, but while

  Your flowers are scented, smile

  And never sacrifice, as others may,

  So clear a dawn to dread of Judgement Day –

  Lest prison walls should see

  Fresh tears of longing you let fall for me.

  A DREAM OF HELL

  You reject the rainbow

  Of our Sun castle

  As hyperbolic;

  You enjoin the Moon

  Of our pure trysts

  To condone deceit;

  Lured to violence

  By a lying spirit,

  You break our troth.

  Seven wide, enchanted

  Wards of horror

  Lie stretched before you,

  To brand your naked breast

  With impious colours,

  To band your thighs.

  How can I discharge

  Your confused spirit

  From its chosen hell?

  You who once dragged me

  From the bubbling slime

  Of a tidal reach,

  Who washed me, fed me,

  Laid me in white sheets,

  Warmed me in brown arms,

  Would you have me cede

  Our single sovereignty

  To your tall demon?

  OUR SELF

  When first we came together

  It was no chance foreshadowing

  Of a chance happy ending.

  The case grows always clearer

  By its own worse disorder:

  However reasonably we oppose

  That unquiet integer, our self, we lose.

  BITES AND KISSES

  Heather and holly,

  Bites and kisses,

  A courtship-royal

  On the hill’s red cusp.

  Look up, look down,

  Gaze all about you –

  A livelier world

  By ourselves contrived:

  Swan in full course

  Up the Milky Way,

  Moon in her wildness,

  Sun ascendant

  In Crab or Lion,

  Beyond the bay

  A pride of dolphins

  Curving and tumbling

  With bites and kisses…

  Or dog-rose petals

  Well-starred by dew,

  Or jewelled pebbles,

  Or waterlilies open

  For the dragon-flies

  In their silver and blue.

  SUN-FACE AND MOON-FACE

  We twin cherubs above the Mercy Seat,

  Sun-face and Moon-face,

  Locked in the irrevocable embrace

  That guards our children from defeat,

  Are fire not flesh; as none will dare deny

  Lest his own soul should die.

  FREEHOLD

  Though love expels the ugly past

  Restoring you this house at last –

  This generous-hearted mind and soul

  Reserved from alien control –

  How can you count on living free

  From sudden jolts of history,

  From interceptive sigh or stare

  That heaves you back to how-things-were

  And makes you answerable for

  The casualties of bygone war?

  Yet smile your vaguest: make it clear

  That then was then, but now is here.

  THE NECKLACE

  Variegated flowers, nuts, cockle-shells

  And pebbles, chosen lovingly and strung

  On golden spider-webs with a gold clasp

  For your neck, naturally: and each bead touched

  By a child’s lips as he stoops over them:

  Wear these for the new miracle they announce –

  All four cross-quarter-days beseech you –

  Your safe return from shipwreck, drought and war,

  Beautiful as before, to what you are.

  A BRACELET

  A bracelet invisible

  For your busy wrist,

  Twisted from silver

  Spilt afar,

  From silver of the clear Moon,

  From her sheer halo,

  From the male beauty

  Of a shooting star.

  BLACKENING SKY

  Lightning enclosed by a vast ring of mirrors,

  Instant thunder extravagantly bandied

  Between red cliffs no hawk may nest upon,

  Triumphant jetting, passion of deluge: ours –

  With spray that stuns, dams that lurch and are gone….

  But against this insensate hubbub of subsidence

  Our voices, always true to a fireside tone,

  Meditate on the secret marriage of flowers

  Or the bees’ paradise, with much else
more;

  And while the sky blackens anew for rain,

  On why we love as none ever loved before.

  BLESSED SUN

  Honest morning blesses the Sun’s beauty;

  Noon, his endurance; dusk, his majesty;

  Sweetheart, our own twin worlds bask in the glory

  And searching wisdom of that single eye –

  Why must the Queen of Night on her moon throne

  Tear up their contract and still reign alone?

  LION-GENTLE

  Love, never disavow our vow

  Nor wound your lion-gentle:

  Take what you will, dote on it, keep it,

  But pay your debts with a grave, wilful smile

  Like a woman of the sword.

  SONG: THE PALM TREE

  Palm-tree, single and apart

  In your serpent-haunted land,

  Like the fountain of a heart

  Soaring into air from sand –

  None can count it as a fault

  That your roots are fed with salt.

  Panniers-full of dates you yield,

  Thorny branches laced with light,

  Wistful for no pasture-field

  Fed by torrents from a height,

  Short of politics to share

  With the damson or the pear.

  Never-failing phoenix tree

  In your serpent-haunted land,

  Fount of magic soaring free

  From a desert of salt sand;

  Tears of joy are salty too –

  Mine shall flow in praise of you.

  SPITE OF MIRRORS

  O what astonishment if you

  Could see yourself as others do,

  Foiling the mirror’s wilful spite

  That shows your left cheek as the right

  And shifts your lovely crooked smile

  To the wrong corner! But meanwhile

  Lakes, pools and puddles all agree

  (Bound in a vast conspiracy)

  To reflect only your stern look

  Designed for peering in a book –

  No easy laugh, no glint of rage,

  No thoughts in cheerful pilgrimage,

  No start of guilt, no rising fear,

  No premonition of a tear.

  How, with a mirror, can you keep

  Watch on your eyelids closed in sleep?

  How judge which profile to bestow

  On a new coin or cameo?

  How, from two steps behind you, stare

  At your firm nape discovered bare

  Of ringlets as you bend and reach

  Transparent pebbles from the beach?

  Love, if you long for a surprise

  Of self-discernment, hold my eyes

  And plunge deep down in them to see

  Sights never long withheld from me.

  PRIDE OF LOVE

  I face impossible feats at your command,

  Resentful at the tears of love you shed

  For the faint-hearted sick who flock to you;

  But since all love lies wholly in the giving,

  Weep on: your tears are true,

  Nor can despair provoke me to self-pity

  Where pride alone is due.

  HOODED FLAME

  Love, though I sorrow, I shall never grieve:

  Grief is to mourn a flame extinguished;

  Sorrow, to find it hooded for the hour

  When planetary influences deceive

  And hope, like wine, turns sour.

  INJURIES

  Injure yourself, you injure me:

  Is that not true as true can be?

  Nor can you give me cause to doubt

  It works the other way about;

  So what precautions must I take

  Not to be injured for love’s sake?

  HER BRIEF WITHDRAWAL

  ‘Forgive me, love, if I withdraw awhile:

  It is only that you ask such bitter questions,

  Always another beyond the extreme last.

  And the answers astound: you have entangled me

  In my own mystery. Grant me a respite:

  I was happier far, not asking, nor much caring,

  Choosing by appetite only: self-deposed,

  Self-reinstated, no one observing.

  When I belittled this vibrancy of touch

  And the active vengeance of these folded arms

  No one could certify my powers for me

  Or my saining virtue, or know that I compressed

  Knots of destiny in a careless fist,

  I who had passed for a foundling from the hills

  Of innocent and flower-like phantasies,

  Though minting silver by my mere tread….

  Did I not dote on you, I well might strike you

  For implicating me in your true dream.’

  THE CRANE

  The Crane lounes loudly in his need,

  And so for love I loune:

  Son to the sovereign Sun indeed,

  Courier of the Moon.

  STRANGENESS

  You love me strangely, and in strangeness

  I love you wholly, with no parallel

  To this long miracle; for each example

  Of love coincidence levels a finger

  At strangeness undesigned as unforeseen.

  And this long miracle is to discover

  The inmost you and never leave her;

  To show no curiosity for another;

  To forge the soul and its desire together

  Gently, openly and for ever.

  Seated in silence, clothed in silence

  And face to face – the room is small

  But thronged with visitants –

  We ask for nothing: we have all.

  From The Poor Boy Who Followed His Star

  (1968)

  HIDE AND SEEK

  The trees are tall, but the moon small,

  My legs feel rather weak,

  For Avis, Mavis and Tom Clarke

  Are hiding somewhere in the dark

  And it’s my turn to seek.

  Suppose they lay a trap and play

  A trick to frighten me?

  Suppose they plan to disappear

  And leave me here, half-dead with fear,

  Groping from tree to tree?

  Alone, alone, all on my own

  And then perhaps to find

  Not Avis, Mavis and young Tom

  But monsters to run shrieking from,

  Mad monsters of no kind?

  THE HERO

  Slowly with bleeding nose and aching wrists

  After tremendous use of feet and fists

  He rises from the dusty schoolroom floor

  And limps for solace to the girl next door,

  Boasting of kicks and punches, cheers and noise,

  And far worse damage done to bigger boys.

  AT SEVENTY-TWO

  At seventy-two,

  Being older than you,

  I can rise when I please

  Without slippers or shoes

  And go down to the kitchen

  To eat what I choose –

  Jam, tomatoes and cheese –

  Then I visit the garden

  And wander at ease

  Past the bed where what grows is

  A huge clump of roses

  And I swing in the swing

  Set up under the trees

  My mouth full of biscuits,

  My hat on my knees.

  From Poems 1965–1968

  (1968)

  SONG: HOW CAN I CARE?

  How can I care whether you sigh for me

  While still I sleep alone swallowing back

  The spittle of desire, unmanned, a tree

  Pollarded of its crown, a dusty sack

  Tossed on the stable rack?

  How can I care what coloured frocks you wear,

  What humming-birds you watch on jungle hills,

  What phosphorescence wavers in your hair,

  Or with
what water-music the night fills –

  Dear love, how can I care?

  SONG: THOUGH ONCE TRUE LOVERS

  Though once true lovers,

  We are less than friends.

  What woman ever

  So ill-used her man?

  That I played false

  Not even she pretends:

  May God forgive her,

  For, alas, I can.

  SONG: CHERRIES OR LILIES

  Death can have no alternative but Love,

  Or Love but Death.

  Acquaintance dallying on the path of Love,

  Sickness on that of Death,

  Pause at a bed-side, doing what they can

  With fruit and flowers bought from the barrow man.

  Death can have no alternative but Love,

  Or Love but Death.

  Then shower me cherries from your orchard, Love,

  Or strew me lilies, Death:

  For she and I were never of that breed

  Who vacillate or trifle with true need.

  SONG: CROWN OF STARS

  Lion-heart, you prowl alone

  True to Virgin, Bride and Crone;

  None so black of brow as they

  Now, tomorrow, yesterday.

  Yet the night you shall not see

  Must illuminate all three

  As the tears of love you shed

  Blaze about their single head

  And a sword shall pierce the side

  Of true Virgin, Crone and Bride

  Among mansions of the dead.

  SONG: FIG TREE IN LEAF

  One day in early Spring

  Upon bare branches perching

  Great companies of birds are seen

  Clad all at once in pilgrim green

  Their news of love to bring:

  Their fig tree parable,

  For which the world is watchful,

  Retold with shining wings displayed:

  Her secret flower, her milk, her shade,

  Her scarlet, blue and purple.

  SONG: DEW-DROP AND DIAMOND

  The difference between you and her

  (Whom I to you did once prefer)

  Is clear enough to settle:

  She like a diamond shone, but you

  Shine like an early drop of dew

  Poised on a red rose-petal.