Past all unbelief, we know them held

  By peace and light and irrefragable love –

  Twin paragons, our final selves, resistant

  To the dull pull of earth dappled with shade:

  Myself the forester, never known to abandon

  His vigilant coursing of the greenwood’s floor,

  And you, dryad of dryads, never before

  Yielding her whole heart to the enemy, man.

  NOTHING NOW ASTONISHES

  A month of vigilance draws to its close

  With silence of snow and the Northern Lights

  In longed-for wordlessness.

  This rainbow spanning our two worlds

  Becomes more than a bridge between them:

  They fade into geography.

  Variegated with the seven colours

  We twist them into skeins for hide and seek

  In a lovers’ labyrinth.

  Can I be astonished at male trembling

  Of sea-horizons as you lean towards them?

  Nothing now astonishes.

  You change, from a running drop of pure gold

  On a silver salver, to the white doe

  In nut-groves harbouring.

  Let me be changed now to an eight-petalled

  Scarlet anemone that will never strain

  For the circling butterfly.

  Rest, my loud heart. Your too exultant flight

  Had raised the wing-beat to a roar

  Drowning seraphic whispers.

  I’D DIE FOR YOU

  I’d die for you, or you for me,

  So furious is our jealousy –

  And if you doubt this to be true

  Kill me outright, lest I kill you.

  From Collected Poems 1965

  (1965)

  GRACE NOTES

  It was not the words, nor the melody,

  Not the beat, nor the pace;

  It was that slow suspension of our breathing

  As we watched your face,

  And the grace-notes, unrecordable on the clef,

  Sung only by a spirit in grace.

  GOOD NIGHT TO THE OLD GODS

  Good night, old gods, all this long year so faint

  You propped your heavy eyelids up with shells!

  Though once we honoured you who ruled this land

  One hundred generations and ten more,

  Our mood has changed: you dribble at the mouth,

  Your dark-blue fern-tattoos are faded green,

  Your thunderous anger wanes to petulance,

  And love to groanings of indifference.

  What most you crave is rest in a rock-cave,

  Seasonally aroused by raucous gulls

  Or swallows, nodding off once more to sleep.

  We lay you in a row with cool palm wine

  Close at your elbows, should you suffer thirst,

  And breadfruit piled on rushes by your feet;

  But will not furnish you a standing guard –

  We have fish to net and spear, taro to hoe,

  Pigs to fatten, coco-trees to climb;

  Nor are our poets so bedulled in spirit

  They would mount a platform, praising in worn verse

  Those fusillades of lightning hurled by you

  At giants in a first day-break of time:

  Whom you disarmed and stretched in a rock-cave

  Not unlike this – you have forgotten where.

  THE SWEET-SHOP ROUND THE CORNER

  The child dreaming along a crowded street

  Lost hold of his mother, who had turned to greet

  Some neighbour, and mistakenly matched his tread

  With a strange woman’s. ‘Buy me sweets,’ he said,

  Waving his hand, which he found warmly pressed;

  So dragged her on, boisterous and self-possessed:

  ‘The sweet-shop’s round the corner!’ Both went in,

  And not for a long while did the child begin

  To feel a dread that something had gone wrong:

  Were Mother’s legs so lean, or her shoes so long,

  Or her skirt so patched, or her hair tousled and grey?

  Why did she twitter in such a ghostly way?

  ‘O Mother, are you dead?’

  What else could a child say?

  DOUBLE BASS

  He coils so close about his double-bass,

  Serpentine and entranced,

  That they form a single creature:

  Which man-instrument writhes and complains,

  Mouth of disaster, skeleton limbs a-twitch,

  Cavernous belly booming,

  Insistent fingers torturing us to love,

  Its deep-gulped fumes of marihuana

  Blinding our eyes with scarlet streamers ….

  Again I turn, for your laugh-nod to lend me

  Measured reassurance of sanity.

  DESCENT INTO HELL

  Christ harrowed Hell in pity for all damned souls

  Who had perverted innocence and honour –

  It was a Sabbath, the day given to rest –

  But none rose with him, and his journey grieved

  The hearts even of such as loved him best.

  THE PARDON

  Should not the white lie and the unkept promise,

  Though distant from black lie and broken vow,

  Demand a kiss of pardon afterwards

  From the sworn lover? So I kiss you now,

  Counting on my own pardon: who but I

  Provoked both unkept promise and white lie?

  POINT OF NO RETURN

  When the alcoholic passed the crucial point

  Of no return, he sold his soul to priests

  Who, mercifully, would not deny him drink

  But remitted a thousand years of purgatory

  On this condition: that he must now engage

  A woman’s pity, beseeching her to cure him,

  Wearing her down with betterment and relapse,

  Till he had won a second soul for glory,

  At the point of no return.

  A SHIFT OF SCENE

  To lie far off, in bed with a foul cough,

  And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth

  Of clear sky; here to watch, all the day long,

  For a dove, or a black cat, or a puff of smoke

  To cause a shift of scene – how could it do so? –

  Or to take a pen and write – what else is there

  To write but: ‘I am not dead, not quite, as yet

  Though I lie far off, in bed with a foul cough

  And a view of elms and roofs and six panes’ worth

  Of clear sky’? Tell me, love, are you sick too

  And plagued like me with a great hole in the mind

  Where all those towers we built, and not on sand,

  Have been sucked in and lost; so that it seems

  No dove, and no black cat, nor puff of smoke

  Can cause a shift of scene and fetch us back

  To where we lie as one, in the same bed?

  From Seventeen Poems Missing From ‘Love Respelt’

  (1966)

  COCK IN PULLET’S FEATHERS

  Though ready enough with beak and spurs,

  You go disguised, a cock in pullet’s feathers,

  Among those crowing, preening chanticleers.

  But, dear self, learn to love your own body

  In its full naked glory,

  Despite all blemishes of moles and scars –

  As she, for whom it shines, wholly loves hers.

  DEAD HAND

  Grieve for the loveless, spiritless, faceless men

  Without alternative but to protract

  Reason’s mortmain on what their hearts deny –

  Themselves – and owed small courtesy beyond

  The uncovered head, as when a hearse goes by.

  ARREARS OF MOONLIGHT

  My heart lies wrapped in red under your pillow,

  My body wanders b
anished among the stars;

  On one terrestrial pretext or another

  You still withhold the extravagant arrears

  Of moonlight that you owe us,

  Though the owl whoops from a far olive branch

  His brief, monotonous, night-long reminder.

  WHAT DID YOU SAY?

  She listened to his voice urgently pleading,

  So captivated by his eloquence

  She saw each word in its own grace and beauty

  Drift like a flower down that clear-flowing brook,

  And draw a wake of multicoloured bubbles.

  But when he paused, intent on her reply,

  She could stammer only: ‘Love, what did you say?’ –

  As loath as ever to hold him in her arms

  Naked, under the trees, until high day.

  LURE OF MURDER

  A round moon suffocates the neighbouring stars

  With greener light than sun through vine-leaves.

  Awed by her ecstasy of solitude

  I crouch among rocks, scanning the gulf, agape,

  Whetting a knife on my horny sole.

  Alas for the lure of murder, dear my love!

  Could its employment purge two moon-vexed hearts

  Of jealousy more formidable than death,

  Then each would stab, stab, stab at secret parts

  Of the other’s beloved body where unknown

  Zones of desire imperil full possession.

  But never can mortal dagger serve to geld

  This glory of ours, this loving beyond reason –

  Death holds no remedy or alternative:

  We are singled out to endure his lasting grudge

  On the tall battlements of nightfall.

  THE GORGE

  Yonder beyond all hopes of access

  Begins your queendom; here is my frontier.

  Between us howl phantoms of the long dead,

  But the bridge that I cross, concealed from view

  Even in sunlight, and the gorge bottomless,

  Swings and echoes under my strong tread

  Because I have need of you.

  ECSTASY OF CHAOS

  When the immense drugged universe explodes

  In a cascade of unendurable colour

  And leaves us gasping naked,

  This is no more than ecstasy of chaos:

  Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love

  Which alone, as we know certainly, restores

  Fragmentation into true being.

  STOLEN JEWEL

  You weep whole-heartedly – your shining tears

  Roll down for sorrow, not like mine for joy.

  Dear love, should we not scorn to treat each other

  With palliatives and with placebos?

  Under a blinding moon you took from me

  This jewel of wonder, but unaware

  That it was yielded only on condition

  Of whole possession; that it still denies you

  Strength or desire for its restitution.

  What do you fear? My hand around your throat?

  What do I fear? Your dagger through my heart?

  Must we not rage alone together

  In lofts of singular high starriness?

  THE EAGRE

  Suddenly the Eagre mounts upstream

  And a tall youth on dolphin back

  Outdares my blue eyes and your black.

  THE SNAPPED THREAD

  Desire, first, by a natural miracle

  United bodies, united hearts, blazed beauty;

  Transcended bodies, transcended hearts.

  Two souls, now unalterably one

  In whole love always and for ever,

  Soar out of twilight, through upper air,

  Let fall their sensuous burden.

  Is it kind, though, is it honest even,

  To consort with none but spirits –

  Leaving true-wedded hearts like ours

  In enforced night-long separation,

  Each to its random bodily inclination,

  The thread of miracle snapped?

  FORTUNATE CHILD

  For fear strangers might intrude upon us

  You and I played at being strangers,

  But lent our act such verisimilitude

  That when at last, by hazard, we met alone

  In a secret glen where the badger earths

  We had drawn away from love: did not prepare

  For melting of eyes into hearts of flowers,

  For a sun-aureoled enhancement of hair,

  For over-riding of death on an eagle’s back –

  Yet so it was: sky shuddered apart before us

  Until, from a cleft of more than light, we both

  Overheard the laugh of a fortunate child

  Swung from those eagle talons in a gold cloth.

  LOVING TRUE, FLYING BLIND

  How often have I said before

  That no soft ‘if’, no ‘either-or’,

  Can keep my obdurate male mind

  From loving true and flying blind? –

  Which, though deranged beyond all cure

  Of temporal reason, knows for sure

  That timeless magic first began

  When woman bared her soul to man.

  Be bird, be blossom, comet, star,

  Be paradisal gates ajar,

  But still, as woman, bear you must

  With who alone endures your trust.

  THE NEAR ECLIPSE

  Out shines again the glorious round sun –

  After his near-eclipse when pools of light

  Thrown on the turf between leaf shadows

  Grew crescent-shaped like moons – dizzying us

  With paraboles of colour: regal amends

  To our own sun mauled barbarously

  By the same wide-mouthed dragon.

  DANCING FLAME

  Pass now in metaphor beyond birds,

  Their seasonal nesting and migration,

  Their airy gambols, their repetitive song;

  Beyond the puma and the ocelot

  That spring in air and follow us with their eyes;

  Beyond all creatures but our own selves,

  Eternal genii of dancing flame

  Armed with the irreproachable secret

  Of love, which is: never to turn back.

  BIRTH OF ANGELS

  Never was so profound a shadow thrown

  On earth as by your sun: a black roundel

  Harbouring an unheard-of generation

  Fledged by the sun ablaze above your own –

  Wild beyond words, yet each of them an angel.

  ON GIVING

  Those who dare give nothing

  Are left with less than nothing;

  Dear heart, you give me everything,

  Which leaves you more than everything –

  Though those who dare give nothing

  Might judge it left you nothing.

  Giving you everything,

  I too, who once had nothing,

  Am left with more than everything

  As gifts for those with nothing

  Who need, if not our everything,

  At least a loving something.

  From Colophon to ‘Love Respelt’

  (1967)

  THE P’ENG THAT WAS A K’UN

  (Adapted from the Chinese of Lao Tse)

  In Northern seas there roams a fish called K’un,

  Of how many thousand leagues in length I know not,

  Which changes to a bird called P’eng – its wing-span

  Of how many thousand leagues in width I know not.

  Every half-year this P’eng, that was a K’un,

  Fans out its glorious feathers to the whirlwind

  And soars to the most Southerly pool of Heaven.

  The Finch and Sparrow, thus informed, debated:

  ‘We by our utmost efforts may fly only

  To yonder elm. How can the P’eng outdo us?’

  Th
ough, indeed, neither started as a fish.

  LIKE OWLS

  The blind are their own brothers; we

  Form an obscure fraternity

  Who, though not destitute of sight

  Know ourselves doomed from birth to see,

  Like owls, most clearly in half light.

  IN PERSPECTIVE

  What, keep love in perspective? – that old lie

  Forced on the Imagination by the Eye

  Which, mechanistically controlled, will tell

  How rarely table-sides run parallel;

  How distance shortens us; how wheels are found

  Oval in shape far oftener than round;

  How every ceiling-corner’s out of joint;

  How the broad highway tapers to a point –

  Can all this fool us lovers? Not for long:

  Even the blind will sense that something’s wrong.

  THE UTTER RIM

  But if that Cerberus, my mind, should be

  Flung to earth by the very opiate

  That frees my senses for undared adventure,

  Waving them wide-eyed past me to explore

  Limitless hells of disintegrity,

  Endless, undifferentiatable fate

  Scrolled out beyond the utter rim of nowhere,

  Scrolled out……

  who on return fail to surrender

  Their memory trophies, random wisps of horror

  Trailed from my shins or tangled in my hair?

  BOWER-BIRD

  The Bower-bird improvised a cool retreat

  For the hen he honoured, doing his poor best

  With parrot-plumage, orchids, bones and corals,

  To engage her fancy.

  But this was no nest …

  So, though the Penguin dropped at his hen’s feet

  An oval stone to signal: ‘be my bride’,

  And though the Jackdaw’s nest was glorified

  With diamond rings and brooches massed inside,

  It was the Bower-bird who contented me

  By not equating love with matrimony.