“Love” Poems For Kathy Number Five

BELIEVING

Beside you,

leaves, petals and the scattering lights

pall or they keen

in the careless night

and funeral world where what has never been

will never be.

We are sat at a table of dugs and drapes, television

mules, fools and mulled food, never clean

fruit – entertainment to have spat

out slow maggots. What should be done

when earth splits and the castigating sun

rues mournfully, lights run?

Though there has never been –

no, nor ever was –

love, shod in a hammering

lyreful of crystalline whorls,

yet do not abuse yourself, your bruise-nippled breasts,

(a “delicate” violence there in those words)

and neither hit the poor brute, love,

nor break the flowering leaves

and lavender-thronging sprays, nor kick the stale

joke dead that yet

mourns mysteriously and maintains

love in a paradox of regret.

Now what has never been can be,

and dream (not out of

shamed perversity like me), dream that where

the folded swan suddenly,

from the clear streams and unwritten rainbows,

rises, and seemingly stuns the air,

in the rushed beat of his wings,

from the clear margins and shivering shades,

such unmechanical activity and uncluttering things

are daily shaken, and, though

we can never belong to such swan-like wanderings,

yet we can sing songs no winding-sheet knows.

(from “”Love” Poems For Kathy / Green. Laced. Leaves”)

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