Collected Love Poems

Collected Love Poems
BRIAN PATTEN

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Not Only

Into My Mirror Has Walked

These Songs Were Begun One Winter

The Ambush

A Blade of Grass

What I Need for the Present

Through All Your Abstract Reasoning

Song for Last Year’s Wife

On Time for Once

A Small Dragon

Doubt Shall Not Make an End of You

First Love

After Rimbaud’s Première Soirée

Now They Will Either Sleep, Lie Still, or Dress Again

Party Piece

Nor the Sun Its Selling Power

When She Wakes Drenched from Her Sleep

Dressed

The Transformation

Leavetaking

The Poor Fools

Tonight I Will Not Bother You

It is Time to Tidy Up Your Life

Remembering

Love Lesson

The Innocence of Any Flesh Sleeping

Someone Coming Back

Mindless Now

In Your Turning Against Walls

The Confession

She Complicates Her Life

Perhaps

The Assassination of the Morning

A Creature to Tell the Time By

A Suitcase Full of Dust

The Mistake

In Someplace Further On

And Nothing is Ever as Perfect as You Want It to Be

Simple Lyric

Seascape

Waves

In the Dying of Anything

Angel Wings

Burning Genius

Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworth’s

The Unicorn

Her Song

When into Sudden Beds

Horror Story

Rauin

Park Note

At Four O’Clock in the Morning

Early in the Evening

Lethargy

One Another’s Light

Our Lives Had Grown So Empty

No Taxis Available

On a Horse Called Autumn

Apart Together in Her Bed We Lay

The Heroine Bitches

Vanishing Trick

Towards Evening and Tired of the Place

A Few Questions about Romeo

The Wife

The Outgoing Song

News from the Gladland

The Morning’s Got a Sleepy Head

The Ice Maiden

You Come to Me Quiet as Rain Not Yet Fallen

The Tragedy

The Cynic’s Only Love Poem

You Missed the Sunflowers at Their Height

The Want

Waiting

Amour

Probably It Is Too Early in the Morning

Forgetmeknot

Reading Between Graffiti

Embroidered Butterflies

Near the Factory Where They Make the Lilac Perfume

January Gladsong

A Drop of Unclouded Blood

You Have Gone to Sleep

A Valentine

Because There Were No Revelations at Hand

End of Story

The Likelihood

Inessential Things

The Recognition

I Caught a Train that Passed the Town Where You Lived

The Bee’s Last Journey to the Rose

Letting Go

I Tried to Find My Voice

And Heart is Daft

If Words Were More Her Medium than Touch

Her Advice

Bare Necessity

Sometimes it Happens

Meeting Again

The Understudies

Yes

So Late in the Evening

Autumn Joke

Wound Cream

When You Wake Tomorrow

The Stolen Orange

Hesitant

Dear Thief

I Have Changed the Numbers on My Watch

An Obsession

You Go into Town

Whose Body Has Opened

Her Coldness Explained

Road Song

The Word

Tristan, Waking in His Wood, Panics

Survivor

Sleepy

Don’t Ask

Over All We Are a Shadow Falls

The Shadow-Puppet’s Lament

They’ve Heard about You

April Morning Walk

Fingers Have Bruised Your Skin the Way a Fallen Peach is Bruised

Poem Written in the Street on a Rainy Evening

That Dress, This Shirt

These Boys Have Never Really Grown into Men

A Few Sentences about Beauty

Her Ghost

Love Poem in February

INDEX OF FIRST LINES

About the Author

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

Not Only

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

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

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.

The Ambush

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.

A Blade of Grass

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.

What I Need for the Present

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!

Song for Last Year’s Wife

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.

On Time for Once

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.