Collected Love Poems. Brian Patten
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It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.
You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.
You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,
And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.
Thanks, but please take back
the trinket box, the picture
made from butterfly wings and
the crystal glass.
Please take back the books,
the postcards, the beeswax candles,
the potted plant, the Hockney print
and the expensive pen.
Ungracious of me to say it, but
so many gifts that are given
are given in lieu of what
cannot be given.
Ungracious to say it, but
wherever I move in this room
it’s not these gifts I see, but your absense
that accumulates on them like dust.
Forgive me. Your intentions
were so very kind, but here’s
your box of fetters back. It’s not
what I need for the present.
Through All Your Abstract Reasoning
Coming back one evening through deserted fields
when the birds, drowsy with sleep,
have all but forgotten you,
you stop, and for one moment jerk alive.
Something has passed through you
that alters and enlightens: O
realization of what has gone and was real.
A bleak and uncoded message whispers
down all the nerves:
‘You cared for her! For love you cared!’
Something has passed a finger through
all your abstract reasoning.
From love you sheltered outside of love but still
the human bit leaked in,
stunned and off-balanced you.
Unprepared, struck so suddenly by another’s identity,
how can you hold on to any revelation?
You have moved too carefully through your life.
Always the light within you is hooded by
your own protecting fingers!
Alice, this is my first winter of waking without you, of knowing that you, dressed in familiar clothes, are elsewhere, perhaps not even conscious of our anniversary. Have you noticed? The earth’s still as hard, the same empty gardens exist? It is as if nothing special had changed. I wake with another mouth feeding from me, but still feel as if love had not the right to walk out of me. A year now. So what? you say. I send out my spies to find who you are living with, what you are doing. They return, smile and tell me your body’s as firm, you are as alive, as warm and inviting as when they knew you first.
Perhaps it is the winter, its isolation from other seasons, that sends me your ghost to witness when I wake. Somebody came here today, asked how you were keeping, what you were doing. I imagine you, waking in another city, enclosed by this same hour. So ordinary a thing as loss comes now and touches me.
I was sitting thinking of our future
and of how friendship had overcome
so many nights bloated with pain;
I was sitting in a room that looked on to a garden
and a stillness filled me,
bitterness drifted from me.
I was as near paradise as I am likely to get again.
I was sitting thinking of the chaos
we had caused in one another
and was amazed we had survived it.
I was thinking of our future
and of what we would do together,
and where we would go and how,
when night came
burying me bit by bit,
and you entered the room
trembling and solemn-faced,
on time for once.
I’ve found a small dragon in the woodshed.
Think it must have come from deep inside a forest
because it’s damp and green and leaves
are still reflecting in its eyes.
I fed it on many things, tried grass,
the roots of stars, hazel-nut and dandelion,
but it stared up at me as if to say, I need
food you can’t provide.
It made a nest among the coal,
not unlike a bird’s but larger.
It is out of place here
and is quite silent.
If you believed in it I would come
hurrying to your house to let you share my wonder,
but I want instead to see
if you yourself will pass this way.
Doubt Shall Not Make an End of You
Doubt shall not make an end of you
Nor