Collected Love Poems. Brian Patten
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closing eyes lose your shape
When the retina’s light fades;
What dawns inside me will light you.
In our public lives we may confine ourselves to darkness,
Our nowhere mouths explain away our dreams,
But alone we are incorruptible creatures,
Our light sunk too deep to be of any public use
We wander free and perfect without moving,
Or love on hard carpets
Where couples revolving round the room
End found at its centre—
I reach into you to reach all mankind,
And the deeper into you I reach
The deeper glows elsewhere the world
And sings of you. It says,
To love is the one common miracle.
Our love like a whale from its deepest ocean rises—
I offer this and a multitude of images,
From party rooms to oceans,
The single star and all its reflections;
Being completed we include all
And nothing wishes to escape us.
Feel nothing separate then—
We have translated each other into love
And into light go streaming.
Falling in love was like falling down the stairs
Each stair had her name on it
And he went bouncing down each one like a tongue-tied lunatic
One day of loving her was an ordinary year
He transformed her into what he wanted
And the scent from her
Was the best scent in the world
Fifteen he was fifteen
Each night he dreamed of her
Each day he telephoned her
Each day was unfamiliar
Scary even
And the fear of her going weighed on him like a stone
And when he could not see her for two nights running
It seemed a century had passed
And meeting her and staring at her face
He knew he would feel as he did forever
Hopelessly in love
Sick with it
And not even knowing her second name yet
It was the first time
The best time
A time that would last forever
Because it was new
Because he was ignorant it could ever end
It was endless
After Rimbaud’s Première Soirée
Sitting half naked in my chair
she clasped her hands to her mouth
trembling with pleasure
The shadows of the cypress trees leaned into the window
to gawp at us
Her breasts were so tiny
and her hair cropped so short
she could have been a boy
but we were beyond such trifling considerations
I licked her small ankles
kissed each fragile bone
as her stomach flipped over and over
Things she had imagined so furtively and for so long
yet had dared share with no one
were coming true at last!
It is how she wanted things to be
Her feet shivered on the cool floor of the room
beating out a rhythm of pure pleasure
Now They Will Either Sleep, Lie Still, or Dress Again
It’s evening,
Over the room’s silence other voices and sounds.
For them the world is a distant planet.
And lying here they are naked,
Her blonde hair falling is spread out across him.
Around her throat her mother’s necklace adds
Sophistication to her clumsiness.
Let their touchings be open—
They no longer belong to a race of pale children
Whose bodies are hardly born,
Nor among the virgins hung still inside their sadness,
But waking together their world is perfect.
Littered about the room still
Are the clothes they used for meeting in.
Evening, and the sun has moved across the room.
Now they will either sleep, lie still, or dress again.
He said:
‘Let’s stay here
Now this place has emptied
And make gentle pornography with one another,
While the partygoers go out
And the dawn creeps in,
Like a stranger.
Let us not hesitate
Over what we know
Or over how cold this place has become,
But let’s unclip our minds
And let tumble free
The mad, mangled crocodile of love.’
So they did,
There among the cigarettes and guinness stains,
And later he caught a bus and she a train
And all there was between them then
Was rain.
They said her words were like balloons
with strings I could not hold,
that her love was something in a shop
cheap and far too quickly