Brian Patten - Collected Love Poems

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

Nor 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

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

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 sold.

But the tree does not price its apples

nor the sun its selling power,

the rain does not gossip

or speak of where it goes.

When she wakes drenched from her sleep

She will not ask to be saluted by the light

Nor carolled by morning’s squabbling birds,

Nor lying in his arms wish him repeat

The polite conversations already heard;

She’ll not be loved by roses but by men,

She will glide free of sweet beauty’s net

And all her senses open out

To receive each sensation for herself.

If I could be that real, that open now,

And not by half a light half lit

I would not gossip of what is beauty and what is not

Nor reduce love to a freak poem in the dark.

Dressed you are a different creature.

Dressed you are polite, are discreet and full of friendships,

Dressed you are almost serious.

You talk of the world and of all its disasters

As if they really moved you.

Dressed you hold on to illusions.

The wardrobes are full of your disguises.

The dress to be unbuttoned only in darkness,

The dress that seems always about to fall from you,

The touch-me-not dress, the how-expensive dress,

The dress slung on without caring.

Dressed you are a different creature.

You are indignant of the eyes upon you,

The eyes that crawl over you,

That feed on the bits you’ve allowed

To be naked.

Dressed you are imprisoned in labels,

You are cocooned in fashions,

Dressed you are a different creature.

As easily as in the bedrooms

In the fields littered with rubble

The dresses fall from you,

In the spare room the party never reaches