Poetry Repository

Pain is in this dark room like many speakers of a costly set though mute as here the needle and the turning

the night lengthens it is winter a new year

what I live for I can seldom believe in who I love I cannot go to what I hope is always divided

but I say to myself you are not a child now if the night is long remember your unimportance sleep

then toward morning I dream of the first words of books of voyages sure tellings that did not start by justifying

I drop the dying year behind me like a shawl and let it fall. The urgent fireworks fling themselves against the night, flowers of desire, love’s fervency. Out of the space around me, standing here, I shape your absent body against mine. You touch me as the giving air.

Most far, most near, your arms are darkness, holding me, so I lean back, lip-read the heavens talking on in light, syllabic stars. I see, at last, they pray at us. Your breath is midnight’s, living, on my skin, across the miles between us, fields and motorways and towns, the million lit-up little homes.

I will love who loves me I will love as much as I am loved I will hate who hates me I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me I will stay indifferent to indifference I will live hostile to hostility I will make myself a passionate and eager lover          in response to passionate and eager love

From the complications of loving you I think there is no end or return. No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn’t it? This isn’t a playground, this is earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods that hold you in the center of my world.

5

I catch a movement of his         lips, but he won’t speak — You don’t love me?         — Yes, but in torment

drained and driven to death         (He looks round like an eagle) — You call this home? That’s         in the heart. — What literature!

Love is flesh, it is a         flower flooded with blood. Did you think it was just a         little chat across a table

a snatched hour and back home again         the way gentlemen and ladies play at it? Either love is…         — A shrine?                                   — or else a scar.

A scar every servant and guest         can see (and I think silently: love is a bow-string pulled         back to the point of breaking).

Love is a bond. That has snapped for         us our mouths and lives part (I begged you not to put a         spell on me that holy hour

close on mountain heights of         passion memory is mist). Yes, love is a matter of gifts         thrown in the fire, for nothing

The shellfish crack of his mouth         is pale, no chance of a smile: — Love is a large bed.         — Or else an empty gulf.

Now his fingers begin to         beat, no mountains move. Love is —               — Mine: yes. I understand. And so?

The drum beat of his fingers         grows (scaffold and square) — Let's go, he says. For me, let's die, would be easier.

Enough cheap stuff rhymes         like railway hotel rooms, so: — love means life although         the ancients had a different

name.         — Well?               — A scrap         of handkerchief in a fist like a fish. — Shall we go? — How,         bullet rail poison

Sitting in this car, houses & wind outside, three in the morning, windows obliterated by snow

coats & arms around each other hands cold, no place we can go

unable to say how much I want you unable even to say I am unable

*

Not that there is nothing to be said but that there is too much: this cripples me.

I watch with envy & desire, you speak so freely.

*

Tell me something, you ask at last, Anything.

To love is to let go of those excuses, habits we used once for our own safety

but the old words reappear in the shut throat, decree

themselves: exile, betrayal, failure

*

Airplane makes it off the runway, cars & houses deflate,

diesel air & stale upholstery, smell of you still on my skin;

thinking of my reluctance, way I withdrew when you came towards me, why did I.

Easier to invent, remember you than to confront you, fact

How does Love speak? In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek, And in the pallor that succeeds it; by The quivering lid of an averted eye— The smile that proves the parent to a sigh Thus doth Love speak.

How does Love speak? By the uneven heart-throbs, and the freak Of bounding pulses that stand still and ache, While new emotions, like strange barges, make Along vein-channels their disturbing course; Still as the dawn, and with the dawn’s swift force— Thus doth Love speak.

Love comes hungry to anyone’s hand. I found the newborn sparrow next to the tumbled nest on the grass.

Bravely opening its beak. Cats circled, squirrels. I tried to set the nest right but the wild birds had fled. The knot of pin feathers

sat in my hand and spoke. Just because I’ve raised it by touch, doesn’t mean it follows. All day it pecks at the tin image of

a faceless bird. It refuses to fly, though I’ve opened the door. What sends us to each other? He and I

had a blue landscape, a village street, some poems, bread on a plate. Love was a camera in a doorway, love was

a script, a tin bird. Love was faceless, even when we’d memorized each other’s lines. Love was hungry, love was faceless,

There’s a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of baying seals,

who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water,

and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them,

and how we are all waiting for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment when we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love,

in my dreams I hold my lovers next to me all at once and ask them

what was it I desired?

my hands are full of their heads like bunches of cut roses blond hair, brown hair, red, black, their eyes are pools of bewilderment staring up at me from the bouquet

what was it I desired? I ask again

was it your bodies? did I hope by draping your flesh over me I could escape boredom

loneliness gray hairs shooting towards me from the future like thin arrows? did I think I could escape, by taking your breath into my mouth, did I think I could escape the responsibility of breathing?

what did I desire in you?

sex? knowledge? power? love?

did I expect the clouds to crack and blue moths to fly out of the stars? did I expect a voice to call to me saying

“Here at last is the answer.”

what I yell at them shaking my lovers what did I desire in you?

their ears fall off like petals they shed their faces in a pile at my feet their bewildered eyes pucker and close centers of fallen flowers

When I was twenty, I said, All men are false, their minds like sparrows, feet hot on electric wires against sky. They take off and go when the wind blows long hair, young life.

At thirteen, I despised the unequal, struggling marriages in my hometown, envied the serenity of the nuns at school. I wanted to be a nun.

At sixteen, I had learned Te, Virtue, too well to abandon my parents as they aged. Sitting on a curve of rain tree root, I broke open seed pods, dry with ripeness, picked out the red seeds. Threw them one by one into the drain. They stayed where they landed. No water flowed in the drain.

I remember the dry feel of dust between my toes, and the light leaving the sky, the road; the road that ran forever to where land touched sky. I remember the crows overheard squawking, bidding others settles down, quit rocking the branch.