Brian Patten - Collected Love Poems

They’ve Heard about You Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

April Morning Walk Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Fingers Have Bruised Your Skin the Way a Fallen Peach is Bruised Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Poem Written in the Street on a Rainy Evening Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

That Dress, This Shirt Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

A Few Sentences about Beauty Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Her Ghost Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Love Poem in February Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

INDEX OF FIRST LINES Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

About the Author Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Other Books By Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Copyright Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

About the Publisher Collected Love Poems BRIAN PATTEN

Not only the leaf shivering with delight

No,

Not only the grass shrugging off the weight of frost

No,

Not only the taste of your skin

No,

Not only steam rising from the morning river

No,

Not only the heart on fire

No,

Not only the sound of the sunflower roaring

No,

Not only love’s resurrection

No,

Not only the cathedral window deep in the raindrop

No,

Not only the sky as blue and smooth as an egg

No,

Not only the fairytale of forever

No,

Not only the wings of the crane fly consumed by fire

No,

Not only these things

No,

But without you none of these things

Into my mirror has walked

A woman who will not talk

Of love or of its subsidiaries,

But who stands there,

Pleased by her own silence.

The weather has worn into her

All seasons known to me.

In one breast she holds

Evidence of forests,

In the other, of seas.

I will ask her nothing yet

Would ask so much

If she gave a sign—

Her shape is common enough,

Enough shape to love.

But what keeps me here

Is what glows beyond her.

I think at times

A boy’s body

Would be as easy

To read light into,

I think sometimes

My own might do.

These songs were begun one winter

When on a window thick with frost

Her finger drew

A map of all possible directions,

When her body was one possibility among

Arbitrary encounters

And loneliness sufficient to warrant

A meeting of opposites.

How easily forgotten then

What was first felt—

An anchor lifted from the blood,

Sensations intense as any lunatic’s,

Ruined by unaccustomary events,

Let drop because of weariness.

When the face you swore never to forget

Can no longer be remembered,

When a list of regrets is torn up and thrown away

Then the hurt fades,

And you think you’ve grown strong.

You sit in bars and boast to yourself,

‘Never again will I be vulnerable.

It was an aberration to be so open,

A folly, never to be repeated.’

How absurd and fragile such promises.

Hidden from you, crouched

Among the longings you have suppressed

And the desires you imagine tamed,

A sweet pain waits in ambush.

And there will come a day when in a field

Heaven’s mouth gapes open,

And on a web the shadow

Of a marigold will smoulder.

Then without warning,

Without a shred of comfort,

Emotions you thought had been put aside

Will flare up within you and bleed you of reason.

The routines which comforted you,

And the habits in which you sought refuge

Will bend like sunlight under water,

And go astray.

Once again your body will become a banquet,

Falling heavenwards.

You will loll in spring’s sweet avalanche

Without the burden of memory,

And once again

Monstrous love will swallow you.

You ask for a poem.

I offer you a blade of grass.

You say it is not good enough.

You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.

It has dressed itself in frost,

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.

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.