|
LOVE
STORY
note
1:
First Encounter: Country
When
the sun’s in its meridian power
the
pimpernel shuts. At a similar hour
your
Hillman Imp bumps stop on a verge
of
littered grass, onto which we emerge
hiding
each from the other incitable eyes.
We
leg over ruts to where dragonflies
stitch
a pond’s sleep, fish-plops are heard.
There
are ordered elysia in the loosest word
spoken
by each immodest limb.
Senses
daubed upon; actions dim.
Haste
alone is anathema.
What
is that animal sound? The car?
No.
It’s switched off. It’s
me. Relax.
Our
picnics of carefree sex offend
perhaps
a cow, but we don’t ask it.
Pasture
and pulse should know how to mix.
The
excuse for appetency’s tricks
when—the
plates put away and shut the basket—
a
rainbow finds us at its end
is:
we are summer, love is the gnats.
note
2:
Second Encounter: Town
Resign
your last stitch of repute
to
the still floor uncritical of your cute
curious
frailty somehow worn.
Lies
do not heal what time has torn
but
if they make it seem less lewd
then
I will lie; your gratitude
regales
me with an answer kiss.
If
love is a doomed edifice
with
cellars where the thick moss lingers
why
should we not with festive fingers
pull
it down like a warm hood
about
our ears? Downfall is good
at
keeping the heat in as it crumbles.
But
blandly met we are very far
from
smelling danger in this rose,
your
oyster rose, your little flame.
Its
fragrance (another’s would be the same)
conduces
to one night’s repose,
informs
of no ineluctable star
dooming
the sleepy hand that fumbles.
note
3:
Old Hands
The
shadows in the garden move to night.
Draw
to your curtains, let green light,
sea-green
lamplight, spoil the room.
Crush
day’s argument, precious gloom,
and,
dear dunce, blink. It amazes me
how
your stupid eyes can still blissfully
illuminate,
vulgarian,
this
dim bed, sticky aquarium
I
wallow in. I wallow in it!
Do
that again. You take a
minute
regarding
me—it feels an hour—
and
then those hands, bringing so near the sour
moment,
never extinguishing...
Little
rich girl, not so beautiful,
drown
me forever in your weekend house
away
from the day I do badly in.
I
like it all, all, down to the swim
to
those skilled-as-if-oiled hands that dowse
so
well in me. The hands are
all!
An
hour more, then the other thing.
note
4:
Conscience
Nicely,
heart’s bawd, your words caress:
‘This
that thou dost, call it gentilesse,
Compassioun,
felawship, and trist,’
smiling
as fairly as Judas kissed.
This
that I do. Tell me,
whoremonger,
do
ruses make innocence the younger—
kissing
my way through a social fraud,
pinning
compassionate love like a gaud
to
the coat that hides my jealousy?
Heart,
let us practise for two or three
minutes
how we may set up trust
and
fellowship in this house of dust,
a
stay for travellers, well adorned.
But
who are these women with broken necks
that
lie in rape at the foot of the stairs
divested
of their expensive pearls?
O
golden lads, more golden girls,
see
what the heart does unawares
with
its ‘welcome’ chalked on the house of sex.
Who
more duped than these? Who more warned?
note
5:
Promise
‘Promise,’
she said.—Although we’d said,
as
a law, we’d quit when the thing was dead.
Hadn’t
I given a gift-shop lark
of
spindle glass, which in the park
we’d
rubbed in mud one autumn evening
where
fed-up parakeets were preening
and
said, ‘This screwy lark is us.
It’s
cheap, it doesn’t make a fuss.
We’ll
say it sings for love of the thing;
though
I cannot promise it will always sing
like
this.’ ‘Promise,’ she
said.—And I saw
how
it was with her. Neither
our ‘law’
nor
the song I mentioned affected her.
‘That
we’ll always be happy.’ Her
small hands were
(those
hands!) white. Her eyes were pain.
Silent,
Compassion entered my head
and
the Comradeship I hadn’t earned
and
a decent type called Civility
and
Trust with its charge of apostasy
to
return their verdict, and I turned
to
let her know. ‘I
promise,’ I said,
‘to
show you the bird when it sings again.’
note
6: Love, Perhaps?
Love,
perhaps? Perhaps I loved.
I
used to like the way we roughed
it
in so many beds. Her talk
of
high-class whoring, the lack of sulk,
I
liked all that. But when I
left
there
was (and it hurt) a specially deft
touch
that remained. There was a
thing
about
her voice. She throated
spring
before
the birds had drowsily thought
of
it. How deeply well she
caught
that
hollow pitch the sun had yet
to
fill; then she poured in; her debt
to
Italian ancestors, that sound.
I
spoke the voice of colder sires.
My
home spur, poor hill, hated her.
Yet
I grant all hills, near or far,
but
apologetic orchestra
for
her, their scraggy nymph, to stir
with
her gifted hand, to the breath of the choirs
of
angelic putti that clasp her round.
note
7: She
Oh
bloody hills, darker and vaster,
will
nothing go from my loose mind? Last
year
I
had this man in my car came riding
every
week to the lake, confiding
his
claptrap of ‘What’s best loves
and
then buries its love in leaves.’
He
put it on my pillow in his goodbye note.
I’ve
had it before. He even
wrote,
‘What
is the use of memory and
despair?
Eat people with your hand,
your
delicate lust, your dirty soul,
and
then forget them.’ That—to console!
My
people-eating so in arrears.
Then
this lark came out of my house, to see
a
rich bitch scratch at the autumn sky,
‘Promise
me,’ calling, ‘that I’ll forget!’
‘The
dry leaf is very soon wet, unwet,’
said
he, cocking his glassy eye.
I
cried and went out shakily
to
be eaten again, to find volunteers.
note
Alan
Marshfield
top
of page |
