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.

A Small Dragon

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

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.

First Love

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.

Party Piece

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.

Nor the Sun Its Selling Power

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

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

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

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.

The Transformation

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.

Leavetaking

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.

The Poor Fools

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

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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