Magical grief that no honour could vex.
Was it ever granted earlier true lovers –
Whether equally bruised need not concern us –
To anticipate such hand-in-hand conformity?
If so, how were they named? And was their glory
Fixed by an oath you never dared deny me?
FAST BOUND TOGETHER
Fast bound together by the impossible,
The everlasting, the contempt for change,
We meet seldom, we kiss seldom, seldom converse,
Sharing no pillow in no dark bed,
Knowing ourselves twin poets, man with woman,
A millennial coincidence past all argument,
All laughter and all wonder.
£ s. d.
When Libra, Solidus, Denarius
Ruled our metallic currency,
They satisfied and steadied us: –
Pounds, shillings, pence, all honest British money.
True, the gold libra weighed twelve ounces once.
The solidus, gold equally,
Worth twenty-five denarii –
Money that did not burn,
Money which in its turn…
‘What happened to the solidus?’ you ask me.
Reduced at last to an unsilvered shilling
Of twelve denarii – ‘pence’, or bronze money –
It faded pitifully into the blue…
As for the libra, having done with gold,
It languished among paper promises
Based on hopes, lies and shrewd financial guesses.
But mourn for the French sou, as is most proper:
Three hundred ounces, once, all of pure copper.
THREE WORDS ONLY
Tears from our eyes
Start out suddenly
Until wiped away
By the gentle whisper
Of three words only.
And how should we stifle
Grief and jealousy
That would jerk us apart
Were it not for an oracle
Of three words only?
Three words only,
Full seven years waiting
With prolonged cruelty
Night by night endured
For three words only.
Sweetheart, I love you
Here in the world’s eye
And always shall do
With a perfect faith
In three words only.
Let us boast ourselves
Still to be poets
Whose power and whose faith
Hang at this tall altar
Of three words only
TRUE MAGIC
Love, there have necessarily been others
When we are forced apart
Into far-off continents and islands
Either to sleep alone with an aching heart
Or admit casual lovers…
Is the choice murderous? Seven years have passed
Yet each remains the other’s perfect love
And must continue suffering to the last…
Can continence claim virtue in preserving
An oath hurtful and gruelling?
Patience! No firm alternative can be found
To absolute love; we therefore plead for none
And are poets, thriving all hours upon true magic
Distilled from poetry – such love being sacred
And its breach wholly beyond absolution.
THE TOWER OF LOVE
What demon lurked among those olive-trees,
Blackening your name, questioning my faith,
Raising sudden great flaws of desperate wind,
Making a liar of me?
Confess: was it the demon Jealousy?
Has there been any gift in these eight years
That ever you refused when gently asked?
Or that I ever chose to refuse you –
For fear of loving you too dearly –
However much I had failed to demand?
Forgive, and teach me to forgive myself.
This much we know: lifting our faith above
All argument and idle contradiction,
We have won eternity of togetherness
Here in this tall tower blessed for us alone.
THE LOVE LETTER
It came at last, a letter of true love,
Not asking for an answer,
Being itself the answer
To such perversities of absence
As day by day distress us –
Spring, summer, autumn, winter –
With due unhappiness and unease.
What may I say? What must I not say?
Ours is an evil age, afflicting us
With acts of unexampled cruelty
Even in this fast circle of friends,
Offering no choice between disease and death –
With love balanced above profound deeps…
Yet here is your love letter.
Why must we never sleep in the same bed
Nor view each other naked
Though our hearts and minds require it
In proof of honest love?
Can it be because poetic magic
Must mount beyond all sensual choosing
To a hidden future and forgotten past?
SONG: SEVEN FRESH YEARS
Two full generations
Had parted our births
Yet still I could love you
Beyond all concealment,
All fear, all reproach,
Until seven fresh years
Ruling distance and time
Had established our truth.
Love brooded undimmed
For a threatening new age,
So we travelled together
Through torment and error
Beyond jealousy’s eras
Of midnight and dawn,
Until seven fresh years
Ruling distance and time
Had established our truth.
AS A LESS THAN ROBBER
You can scarcely grant me now
What was already granted
In bland self-deprivation
Only to other debtors
To whom you owed nothing.
And had I cause for complaint
After my honest absence
That for seven long years
I never dared insist
That you should keep faith?
Now in reward for waiting,
Being still a mere nobody,
Let me plead without reproach
As a less than robber
That I am owed nothing.
SINGLENESS IN LOVE
And the magic law long governing our lives
As poets, how should it be rightly phrased?
Not as injunction, not as interdiction,
But as true power of singleness in love
(The self-same power guarding the fifth dimension
In which we live and move
Perfect in time gone by and time foreknown)
Our endless glory to be bound in love,
Nor ever lost by cheating circumstance.
LOVE CHARMS
How closely these long years have bound us
Stands proved by constant imminence of death –
On land, on water, and in the sky –
As by our love-charms worn on the same finger
Against a broken neck or sudden drowning –
Should we debate them?
To have done with quarrels and misunderstandings
Seems of small import even though emphasizing
The impossibility of a fatal breach.
And yet how strange such charms may seem, how wanton,
And forced on us by what? Not by the present
Nor the past either, nor the random future:
Here we lie caught in love’s close net of truth.
AT THE GATE
Where are poems? Why do I now write none?
&nb
sp; This can mean no lack of pens, nor lack of love,
But need perhaps of an increased magic –
Where have my ancient powers suddenly gone?
Tonight I caught a glimpse of her at the gate
Grappling a monster never found before,
And jerking back its head. Had I come too late?
Her eyes blazed fire and I could look no more.
What could she hold against me? Never yet
Had I lied to her or thwarted her desire,
Rejecting prayers that I could never forget,
Stealing green leaves to light an alien fire.
THE MOON’S TEAR
Each time it happened recklessly:
No poet’s magic could release her
From those feckless unfathomable demands
Of anger and imprudence,
Those pleas of cruelly injured innocence.
Why should he keep so strange a woman
Close at his elbow fitfully observing
The end of a world that was?
Must he fetch a moon’s black tear to tame her
For ever and a day?
SONG: FROM OTHERWHERE OR NOWHERE
Should unknown messengers appear
From otherwhere or nowhere,
Treat them with courtesy,
Listen most carefully,
Never presume to argue.
Though the sense be unintelligible,
Accept it as true.
Otherwhere is a lonely past,
Nowhere a far future
To which love must have access
In time of loneliness.
Listen most carefully:
Though the sense be unintelligible,
Accept it as true.
A distant flower-garden,
A forgotten forest,
Islands on a lake
Teeming with salmon,
Its waters dark blue –
Though the sense be unintelligible,
Accept it as true.
NAME
Caught by the lure of marriage,
Casting yourself in prospect
As perfect wife and mother
Through endless years of joy,
Be warned by one who loves you
Never to name your first-born
Until you know the father
And: is it girl or boy?
Nine months in mortal darkness
Let it debate the future,
Reviewing its inheritance
Through three-score generations,
From both sides of the family,
A most exacting game;
Then, just before delivery,
Prepare for a soft whisper
As it reveals its name.
TWO DISCIPLINES
Fierce bodily control, constant routine,
Precision and a closely smothered rage
Alike at ballet-school and the manège:
These harden muscles, these bolster the heart
For glorious records of achievement
To glow in public memory apart.
Which disciplines (ballet and horsemanship)
Have proved no less reciprocally exclusive –
Note their strange differences in gait and carriage –
Than permissivity and Christian marriage
THE UGLY SECRET
Grow angry, sweetheart, if you must, with me
Rather than with yourself. This honest shoulder
Will surely shrug your heaviest blow away,
So you can sleep the sounder.
As for the ugly secret gnawing at you
Which you still hide for fear of hurting me,
Here is my blank pledge of forgiveness –
Nor need you ever name the enemy,
Nor need I ever guess.
THREE YEARS WAITING
Have we now not spent three years waiting
For these preposterous longings to make sense –
Mine and what I divine to be your secret
Since gently you tighten your lips on its conclusion
Though never registering a copyright?
Since these are poems in their first making,
Let us refrain from secret consideration
Of their bewildered presence.
What is a poem
Unless a shot in the night with a blind arrow
From a well-magicked bowstring?
From Collected Poems 1975
(1975)
THE CRYSTAL
Incalculably old,
True gift from true king –
Crystal with streaks of gold
For mounting in a ring –
Be sure this gem bespeaks
A sunrise love-making:
To kiss, to have, to hold.
A CHARM FOR SOUND SLEEPING
A charm for sound sleeping,
A charm against nightmares,
A charm against death –
Without rhyme, without music,
Yet short of deceit?
How to master such magic,
How acquire such deep knowledge,
How secure such full power?
Would you shrink from her answer?
Would you dare face defeat?
For to work out of time,
To endure out of space,
To live within her truth –
That alone is full triumph
And honour complete.
THE NEW ETERNITY
We still remain we;
The how and where now being stationary
Need not henceforth concern us;
Nor this new eternity
Of love prove dangerous
Even though it still may seem
Posted and hidden past all dream.
HISTORY OF THE FALL
But did not Adam, Eve’s appointed playmate,
Honour her as his goddess and his guide,
Finding her ten times hardier than himself:
Resistant to more sickness and worse weather?
Did he not try his muscles in Eve’s service –
Fell trees, shoulder vast boulders, run long errands?
Hers was a pure age, until humankind
Ate flesh like the wild beasts. Fruits, roots, and herbs
Had been their diet before world-wide drought
Forced famine on them: before witless Adam
Disobeyed orders, tossing sacred apples
From Eve’s green tree, driving and butchering deer,
Teaching his sons to eat as now he ate.
Eve forced the family from their chosen Eden…
And Cain killed Abel, battening on the corpse.
ELSEWHERE
Either we lodge diurnally here together
Both in heart and in mind,
Or awhile you lodge elsewhere –
And where, dear heart, is Elsewhere?
Elsewhere may be your casual breach of promise –
Unpunishable since unbound by oath –
Yet still awhile Elsewhere.
As a veteran I must never break my step,
As a poet I must never break my word,
Lest one day I should suddenly cease to love you
And remain unloved elsewhere.
Gome, call on me tonight –
Not marching, love, but walking.
WHAT CAN WE NOT ASK?
What can we not ask you?
Being a woman
You still alert the world and, still being men,
We never dare gainsay you, nor yet venture
To descend the mountain when your bells chime
The midday feast and nature gives assent.
Whatever hours they strike, you are found true
To your lovely self and to yourself only:
Silent yet still uncontradictable.
Did we ever see you stumble, taking thought?
What rights have men in such divinity,
Widely though they may move within its shade,
Abstaining still from prayers?
TWO CRUCIAL GENERATIONS
Two crucial generations parted them,
Though neither chargeable as an offence –
Nor could she dare dismiss an honest lover
For no worse crime than mere senility,
Nor could he dare to blame her, being himself
Capable of a passionate end to love
Should she show signs of mocking at old age?
Then why debate the near impossible
Even in fitful bouts of honest rage?
TO COME OF AGE
At last we could keep quiet, each on his own,
Signalling silently though memorably
His news or latest unnews.
When younger we had spent those wintry evenings
In shoutings and wild laughter –
We dared not come of age.
Unless obsessed by love none of us changed.
How could we change? Has true love ever changed?
Not in our day, but only in another’s.
Tell me, my heart of hearts, I still beseech you:
When dare we reasonably come of age?
SEPTEMBER LANDSCAPE
Olive-green, sky-blue, gravel-brown,
With a floor of tumbled locusts,
And along the country lane
Isabel dances dressed in red
Erect, thinking aloud,
Framed against sudden cloud
And its bold promise of much-needed rain.
CRUCIBLES OF LOVE
From where do poems come?
From workshops of the mind,
As do destructive armaments,
Philosophic calculations,
Schemes for man’s betterment?
Or are poems born simply
From crucibles of love?
May not you and I together
Engrossed with each other
Assess their longevity?
For who else can judge merits
Or define demerits –
This remains a task for lovers
Held fast in love together
And for no others.
WOMAN POET AND MAN POET
Woman poet and man poet
Fell in love each with the other.
It was unsafe for either
To count on sunny weather,