Brian Patten - Collected Love Poems

The dresses fall from you.

Aided or unaided, clumsily or easily,

The dresses fall from you and then

From you falls all the cheap blossom.

Undressed you are a different creature.

You are no longer afraid.

You watch, still half asleep,

How dawn ignites a room;

His rough head and body curled

In awkward fashion can but please.

His face is puffed with sleep;

His body once distant from your own

Has by the dawn been changed,

And what little care you had at first

Within this one night has grown.

You smile at how those things that troubled you

Were quick to leave,

At how in their place has come a peace,

A rest once beyond imagining.

Your bodies linked, you hardly dare to move;

A new thought has now obsessed your brain:

‘Come the light,

He might again have changed.’

And what you feel

You are quick to name,

And what you feel

You are quick to cage.

You watch, still half asleep,

How dawn misshapes a room;

And all your confidence by the light is drained

And still his face,

His face is still transformed.

She grew careless with her mouth.

Her lips came home in the evening numbed.

Excuses festered among her words.

She said one thing, her body said another.

Her body, exhausted, spoke the truth.

She grew careless, or became without care,

Or panicked between both.

Too logical to suffer, imagining

Love short-lived and ‘forever’

A lie fostered on the mass to light

Blank days with hope,

What she meant to him was soon diminished.

He too had grown careless with his mouth.

Habit wrecked them both, and wrecked

They left the fragments untouched, and left.

You ask why poets speak so often

In the language of goodbyes.

It’s because beginnings take them by surprise.

Love comes and hammers them,

And then the poor fools are lost for words.

They abandon their pens, and their fingers

Itch for other things: buttons, nipples, zips—

For everything but the poor abandoned pen.

Tonight I will not bother you with telephones

Or voices speaking their cold and regular lines;

I’ll write no more notes in crowded living rooms

Saying what and how much has changed,

But fall instead to silence and things known.

When through exhaustion you scream, throw up

Sorrow that’s become a physical pain,

I’ll not try and comfort you with words

That add little but darkness to ourselves

But with the body speak, its senses known.

There is no frantic hurry to love

Or press on another one’s own dream.

This much I know has changed,

What was once wild is calmed,

And quieter now behind the brain

May throw more light on things;

And what starved for love survives

Whatever shadow it hunted down.

Taking what love comes makes

All that comes much easier;

Something buried deep selects what our shapes need;

The smaller habits it allows to breathe then fade,

Leaving the centre clean.

Tonight I will not bother you with excuses.

If owning separate worlds means pain

Comes more easily, and hurt

Remains a common part of us,

The silence is best; it will allow

All doubts to strip themselves.

Then whatever’s seen will surely

Be seen in its own light,

And whatever is wanted be wanted

For more than wanting’s sake.

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