Too near the place
that signifies
bone. Not for you:
remembering our last
meeting, your last words,
eyes on the glass of wine
in both your hands.
I wanted you so much,
shaken by the tenderness in me
for you. Not for you, those songs. This.
Ransacked
There are no shadows
in the dream. The sun
is very bright. The wind
exceeds expectation.
Ransacked, we watch
everything blow away
and everything, blowing away,
watches us recede.
Soon, without appearing to move,
we are far from each other,
and I seem to have arrived
where no one needs my love.
The wind is done. Shadows
slide into place, bringing stars.
And then, in the dream, she comes,
her hands spilling moonlight,
to accept the sacrifice
with the naming of her name.
Windrise
Agia Galini, Crete
Two hours ago,
moonlit with shadows,
I walked Libby down
to her room by the harbour.
The village dark, sea quiet,
slight chill and shiver
as we said good night.
Back up the hill alone,
through various provinces,
then an apparition in the street:
gaunt, bearded, Tomas
in a hooded robe, long-striding,
passing me unseeing, a dream.
Mine? His? Venus,
after I went by, was bright
as a wound in the eastern sky.
The wind rising now at dawn,
the waves white-edged.
Edge of day, of everything,
of absolutely everything.
A Carpet
Always something new.
Above the cliff tonight
the moon, two days from full,
glimpsed through traceries
of cirrus cloud,
laid down a diffusion
of woven light on the sea.
On The Balcony
I used to dream of this,
but moonlight on the bay
is more than I remembered.
The cliff behind the beach still invents
shades of colour at sunset and now
the sea is stippled with a silvering.
More, all of this, than memory, but also
less, because you’re in the pattern now,
seven thousand miles from this balcony.
If you were here with me tonight
the sea’s sound might shape itself
into your name . . .
These are words. A conceit. I have
a mild facility that lets me turn
such phrases. Here, though, is truth:
I am in love with where I am
but more in love with you.
A Northern Man
I CRETE
Too much of Greece can sear the soul.
I am a northern man. Where I come from
the sky is wide and far away
and March is mired in snow.
Here, subtleties of shading on the sea,
renderings of blue (never before seen,
where I come from) have made
a binding of light. Island-held,
trammelled in grace,
one finally awakes, knowing
what needs to be done: six weeks
without words. Time to go.
II LONDON
Where I have been the light has shape.
Inventiveness. Wit, almost.
A cliff beyond the bay of Agia Galini
taught me that. Sunshine here,
although eliciting gratitude,
is a pale, soft, small gift.
Where I have been all gifts
were large: the taste of wine,
January flowers up the valley,
sea-sound, music at night, words
coming in the morning. There was
no stinting, where I have been.
Initiation
West Hanney, Oxfordshire
He left his torch at home.
Walking through winding lanes
he feels himself ruled by the dark
that twists with the path
through high sudden trees.
He knows the way
but something tells him otherwise.
He walks carefully back
to the meaning of night
through the vanished, starlit town.
West Hanney Churchyard
The great deceptions comfort in the end.
Thy will be done, one stern stone cries
Over someone’s infant son.
No flowers. Tall weeds rise.
Another tablet whispers, Reunited.
John Patrick Rutherford lies here
Beside his wife, Eileen, who followed five
Years after, in the winter of ’twenty-four.
Rain begins to fall from a heavy sky,
Touching a long world done in grey
And tones of wintered green.
The sound of birds moving away.
A growing hollow of silence rises and flows
From the flowered rows, and the bare.
Wine
The lights of houses
push into the village night
a little way and fail.
Drifting through fog
You strain towards windows.
Figures move behind curtains.
Islands of sound.
A baby cries.
Somewhere else
a woman laughs
and then stops laughing.
Wine offered and withdrawn.
In the morning the council houses
will be small, curtains drab,
women harried and wan.
But in fog-weighted night
the rush of tires
is a rushing of waves,
and unseen laughter
incarnates mysteries
and releases them.
Northumbria
for Dorothy Dunnett
. . . and I saw horsemen:
indentations in the sky
above the heathered hills,
running away to Scotland
five hundred years ago.
The hills are then, easily.
The morning sun seems to want
those riders as much as I,
appearing in bright felicity
to shine on other times,
other worlds.
Tintagel
A long way off
in every dimension I know
the sea is still pounding
on the causeway
I crossed in rain.
The waves have not yet
broken through—
we would have heard.
Those foolish enough to care
can still cross. One woman
was slender, dark-haired,
walked with a grace of shyness,
lived for music, closed her eyes
before we kissed, to lose the world.
The ruined castle in Cornwall
is being cut in half by the sea.
They say Merlin was there once,
when Arthur was begotten. The causeway
crumbles softly, pebble by clod of earth.
The high, white, awesome spray
dispassionately continues.
Re-Reading Over Sir John’s Hill
Delerium of the sound-spun: words in riot,
wrought from the witched womb of night
in a boathouse room high over Laugharne
as a mad-cap moon looked down on Wales
and a hawk hovered at the top of the wind,
waiting t
o kill.
Salt of the sea in the taste of words
and the wings and cries of birds
heard, and the furred beasts
dabbed with moonlight dashing to dark.
All shining and spinning in the high,
rising torrent of sound let loose
as the flowered flood
blooms in the room.
Morning After
Tenby, South Wales
Walking the south beach,
watching the tide. Listening.
The wind. Far down
someone walks a dog.
A light rain falls
on the boarded-up hotels.
Elderly women
lean against each other,
bundled against the cold,
edging past closed shops
with bathing suits still
in the windows. And then
the rushing down
of night by six o’clock.
Beach resorts in winter
have the derelict grace
of a beauty queen
the morning after
her coronation,
when make-up
has been washed off,
the lighting offers no help,
and beauty elicits sorrow,
being transitory.
If I Should Fly Across The Sea Again
for J.R.R. Tolkien
If I should fly across the sea again
and take the train to Oxford
and the 23 bus to West Hanney Memorial,
I could alight on the village green
and walk up the curving road
past Mrs. Shepherd’s shop and the houses
where John Gamble lived, and Roy,
and at the end of that road
I’d have Lydbrook on my left
with the barn behind it and the
single white horse on the gate.
I don’t think I’d stop for long.
Papers and books
realized that place for me
and they aren’t there any more.
I’d continue
up the same road, following it
out of the village and into the fields,
seeing the Meads rolling north
past fences and stiles and,
in the distance, Lyford Grange,
where Campion hid and was found
and taken to London to die
four hundred years ago. And not far
along that path, just where it bent
sharply north, I would find the elm
and there I’d rest. Because, on a last
morning under those branches, I promised
myself that one day I would return,
taking the train and the bus,
and walk back to that tree and,
unable to stop growing older,
lie down in the shade of the leaves.
PART
TWO
Taut
Early spring sunshine.
Women taught by swift flowers
Maddeningly wake.
Following
Of you in the slowly dark I’m thinking,
feeling the twilight as music
marred by the chord of your absence.
One afternoon
you lamented the curl of your hair
and the shape of your toes.
I told you I couldn’t possibly love
a freckled woman. And you
were laughing. My finger found
a blue vein running along
your throat and followed it down,
though I had said that if you ran
I would not follow.
And so I am entangled
in a promise I may break,
because I would have you want me,
at the very least, enough to take
these offerings for what they are:
craftings in the hollow of a sleepless night,
shot through with the discord
of your being far away, and not mine.
The Last Woman I Loved
The last woman I loved
was silken-smooth.
No hard edges to
body or disposition.
A hesitant way
of lifting her face
into a kiss,
surprised by herself.
She wrote a letter,
neatly-written pages,
about one of my
poems, what it meant to her.
You burnt the only poem
I ever gave you.
The last woman I loved
would never have understood
what it is in you that arrows
like light across a lake
to the target I’ve become
beside night waters.
Specifically
Beyond a certain point
distance is a fact and not a measure.
It hardly matters whether I am
five or seven thousand miles away
or whether it is five o’clock
or six where you are.
In any case, I do know,
and the above is abstraction,
a way to begin a poem
which is not about time zones
or distance, but a memory.
Specifically,
the morning you flew to Toronto
and knocked without
warning at my door.
Specifically,
the moment I saw,
going downstairs,
who wanted to come in.
Specifically,
the look in your eyes
as I came down:
apprehension and desire,
remembered into now
because I knew then,
on the stairs,
that it was a mirror.
A Narrow Escape
Because he was such as could spend
a whole night, centuries from sleep,
crafting a poem to reclaim the afternoon
when they first met, she fell in love with him.
But when he actually did so,
and, piling sin upon sin,
showed her the result,
in a pure rage of possessiveness
she burst into angry tears, crying:
‘How could I not have seen
how destructive you are?’
Out of love with him, she will
congratulate herself on a narrow escape,
and for her it will have been. She could
never have lain secure in a love
that allows him to leave her bed
in deep night for a hard desk
where, half-asleep, he scribbles fiercely
in a shaming infidelity, searching
for a word to give her eyes, a voice
for her voice, while she wakes
alone, and calls him to her, and
he does not come.
In His Arms
In his arms
you may come to know
the peace I never gave you.
We never had
any kind of gentleness.
Every union
made a cauldron
of the night.
In his arms
you may be healed.
I scalded you.
You burnt
the lines I gave your name.
How could we
hold together? In his arms
you may be cooled
into love. I can
wish that for you,
tracing, at this distance,
the place on my shoulder
where your nails
marked me one night.
On his arms
are there such scars
as this one,
along which
my finger follows
the branding,
ash years ago, of yours?
Another Country
All the leaves
that are going to fall
have fallen. Midwinter snows
cover us. At night the cold
is intransigent and absolute.
We dream, in beds too far apart
for the assuaging of desire.
My dream is of the world as whole,
made so by you, spaces closed,
like my eyes, by your hands.
We will make love, sleep
in each other’s arms,
wake, live, sleep
at the heart of things.
The small gestures we have made
foretell the ones we will bestow.
I give you what is in me
to offer, you give me everything.
Avalon
‘But we both knew this long ago.’
We did. The blood has ways.
Veins and arteries
communicate beneath the skin
(though I have been so careful
not to touch, you not to touch).
Still, following your eyes
away into the grass,
the question in our hesitation
is like a needle
in this downtown park,
or like sorrow
threaded (like a needle)
through desire:
what begins with us?
Among the babies and the derelicts,
mid-afternoon, a Wednesday,
caught in the rush of things,
leaves racing each other
to be green, you are
with me in a stillness,
arms around your legs,
chin on your knees,
but eyes on me again
and knowing, long ago,
what I knew long ago.
The young sun slants
from behind me,
finds your hair.
I watch you make shadows
with your hands: cool traceries,
places to hide, promises.
In this light we lay claim
to each other. You will be
here beside me on the grass
until the sun goes down in Avalon.
Too Far
Summer haze, radios
beside the swimming pool
sing desire, announce far wars.
Drifting in a white noon light
I am aware of your body
beside me, imprinted
on the screen of my eyelids.
When I open them
it is to see you actually
here, the heat-shimmered trees
behind you, beyond the pool,
green as desire.
Too far, the distance
we’d have to cross.
For summer, for this life.