Month: December 2016

Secret Garden 3

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Secret Garden 3

Good times, bad times, sun and rain:
only the robin knows what passes
through my mind at times like these.
Head on one side, looking at fresh-
turned earth for wriggling worms to take
to his new nest under the leaves, he’s not
telling anyone anything. So why should I?

“Once I had a secret love,”  but secrets
aren’t secrets when the heart is worn
on the sleeve or a shining ring adorns
the loved one’s finger. I remember
the warmth flooding through heart
and mind as I prepared for our secret
meetings. The Silver Gift Shop in Bath:
many’s the afternoon I waited there
while you finished your shift in Boot’s.

Then off to the Monk’s Retreat for sausage,
egg, and chips served in the frying pan
at the table: “Careful, my dears, it’s very hot.”
The Robin nods his head and winks a knowing eye.

There are voices in the garden. We lie
close to the ground hoping we won’t be seen.
Your state of undress is something
you’d want to hide from your mother,
even now, after a quarter of a century.
Would you encourage your daughter to make love
out of wedlock? We did. There: the secret’s out.

At least, I thought it was a secret,
but now, as I sit in the classroom
watching pair lovers, side by side,
I read so many signs I once thought
unreadable: sudden warmth in a smile,
a blush, eyes locking then looking
quickly away, a change in a person’s
breathing, hands touching lightly,
loves messages flashed swiftly
from eye to eye, along the secret pathway
that unites and ignites two souls.

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Anniversary Poem

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Anniversary Poem

“Hoy cumple amor en mis ardientes venas
veinte y dos años, Lisi, y no parece
que pasa día por el.”

Francisco de Quevedo

“For twenty-two years my captive heart has burned.”
Christ, what crap that is. The only heart burn
I have known came from your cooking: African
Nut Pie, as detailed in the cookbook I bought you
for Christmas on our first wedding anniversary,

remember? And do you remember the ride to Kincardine
on the train? A dozen coaches left Toronto and one
by one they were shunted away until only you and I and an
elderly man ploughed through the snowstorm in the one
remaining carriage. Deeper and deeper piled the snow.

You looked through the window and started to weep:
“What have I done?” you cried in shock and grief. Outside:
Ontario lake-effect snow. Headlights from two waiting
cars lit up the station. We drove to the homes of people
you didn’t know, third generation cousins of mine.

You’re the only bride I know who was carried to church
in the arms of the total stranger giving her away
in place of the father she never knew. The snow lay six
foot deep (eighteen inches fell on your wedding day
alone) and you, with a white wedding dress and black boots

up to your knees. Cousin Walter carried you to the altar:
how they laughed as they chanted that old song to us.
Later, when they tapped the glasses and fell silent
at the meal, I didn’t know what to do. And you, my love,
standing up, kissing me, married after six days in Canada.

S.W.A.L.K.

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S.W.A.L.K.

Where did all the sighs go?
The love that would last forever?
The tears that stained the letters?
The everlasting? The undying?

The eternally yours? The initials
we wrote on the back of envelopes?
SWALK, OXO, PHTR, RLN, ILYE,
ICWTKY, or was it ICWTMLTY?

I forget so much. But I do remember
how the windows steamed up
in your mother’s car when we sat
together for hours with nowhere to go

and nobody around to disturb us.
Combe Dingle, Wotton-Under-Edge,
Weston-Super-Mare: these were our
favorite places, do you remember them?

Just being together was more than enough
to keep us happy. We don’t hold hands
anymore. It’s not something grown-ups do,
especially in front of the children or the late

night news. Nor do football games inspire
passion and send us into ecstasies the way
the white spot did as it lit up your mother’s
TV, with us alone, and her asleep in bed.

Comment:
There are so many things packed into this poem, old things, perishable things, memories that will vanish, if they haven’t vanished already. Who now remembers writing regular letters, not e-mails or e-cards? Who remembers sealing them, perhaps with a loving kiss? Who remembers rushing to the front door as the postman pushes letters through the letter-box to see if the beloved has written back? If you didn’t go to a boarding school, you will know nothing about the 11:00 am break when we rushed back to our houses to go through the mail and see who had written. I’ll never forget those perfume-soaked envelopes I received from the local village girls. Nor will I forget a wrathful house-master, my scented letters stuffed up under his nose, sniffing at my letters like a bloodhound tracking me down.

Swans Swimming

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Swans Swimming

You swim so much better than I:
one length of the pool, then two
and your grace in the water is fluid,
like a swan’s. I think of white feathers,
dark feet paddling under water.

Swans follow the ferry as it crosses
the River Stour. Yellow bills, sharp
over the side of the boat, stretch
for the dry crusts the ferryman
keeps in a plastic bag by the engine.

When he smiles at you, my stomach
tightens. When he nods, you break
bread, pinch it tight in rigid fingers,
and offer it to the swans. Round, black
buttons of eyes judge the exact distance.
Can these sleek, folded wings really
break an arm or a leg? Serrated edges
on wicked bills make short work
of stale bread even if it is iron hard.

After a little while, the pool’s chlorine
stings our eyes. Swimming side by side,
our eye-lids tightly closed, we dream
our way across the pool. Ten lengths,
twenty: our world is a watery vision
of a weekend package deal: paradise
for two. Your body above me now,
locked together in an ancient dance,
Leda and the Swan performed to perfection.

 

Secret Garden 2

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Secret Garden 2

Five a.m.: The moon on the back porch
shines with  light as bright as day. It’s cold,
much too cold for August. Orion is back. To the left,
in the East, he has hoisted himself over the horizon.
Winter can’t be far behind.  Upstairs, in bed, I can
hear you twisting and turning, looking for me in your
sleep. I am not there. The garden is magic beneath
the moon-shadow playing on flower and plant. Withered,
it is all dried up from summer’s heat. A false light
casts moving shadows as whispers of clouds murmur
close to the moon’s ear. Orion heralds the bitterness
to come. The long bright winter nights, aurora borealis,
more than a dream, a vision dancing in brittle
air that crackles and snaps in changing sheets of color.
I know you are there, upstairs, waiting for me,
hoping I will sneak quietly back to bed,
waiting for my footstep on the stair.
What will you do when I am no longer there?

Predicting My Death 3

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Predicting My Death before Yours

3

Know this: I have no regrets. Not in anything that touches you.
No regrets, that is, save for the thing I have done to hurt you.
Many things. Some underhand. Some unsuspecting. Some deliberate.
You know, after all these years, the way I am. Unthinking.

Selfish. Never unfeeling. Often unknowing. So many negatives.
Is it negative to embrace my death before it comes? I don’t
think so. Perhaps it’s the most positive thing I’ve ever done,
this coming to grips with the maggots that gnaw me away,

night and day, gnawing me away. They aren’t invisible. You see
them  sometimes yourself: in the bottle I drain to send me to sleep;
in my tone on the phone when I answer an unwelcome call; in kicks
delivered to sleeping dogs that I can never let lie. Why? I cannot

answer that question. It bounces like a pinball round my head:
why? why? why? But try as I may, there is never any answer.
Why am I made as I am? Why do things happen the way they do?
Why do you still love me, in spite of all my faults, my kinks?

There: I’m being negative again. Be positive: this is my last will
and testament. My love, I leave to you the pleasant memories.
Days in the sun in Spain; our daughter born healthy; grooming
the show dogs; digging the snow together. Our very presence here

in Canada is a sign of the highest bond that could ever unite
two people: leaving their homes, their families, their friends,
their birthplace, their nationality to set up a new home together,
crossing the sea to reach this new found land of ice and snow.

 

Predicting My Death 2

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Three Poems Predicting My Death before Yours

2

There never was anybody else but you. Too late now when
you’ve discovered this to tell you that there probably
never will be anyone else. Middle age: I look back on all
the things we’ve done together. Shall I count the ways?

No: I’ll make a list. So often we’ve sat together at the table
planning the next set of duties that will keep us occupied
by driving us apart. But of all the people in the world
you’re the only one who doesn’t need a list of what we’ve done

or haven’t done. Goodrich Castle, last year in England,
was your discovery. We went there together at your instigation.
A part of you that will always be me, that first discovery
of ruins, new to us, growing from red bed-rock. I thought I had

seen everything worth seeing till I looked on Goodrich,
explored its towers, its labyrinth of connecting rooms.
Civil War tore down the curtain walls, fired the stables,
driving the horses wild with fear. Sometimes, at night,

I can feel that fear pumping through my veins. Knowing
I will die before you, knowing I will leave you alone
to defend yourself between curtained walls, isolated,
besieged by the same memories that mill in my mind.

Predicting My Death 1

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Three Poems Predicting My Death before Yours

1

I cannot always talk to you. There are so many barriers.
The hoovering, the cleaning, cooking the daily meals.
When we go to bed, you are tired, I’ve had too much to drink.
We know our routine answers off by heart. There’s never any time

for each other. House work, gymnastics, paying the bills,
even housekeeping on the computer: they all take time.
Time, time: so little of it left. I can feel death’s seeds
rooting in heart and chest. Premonitions: so little time.

Comment:

Rummaging in the dusty memories that line my bookshelves, I rediscovered a sequence of love poems I wrote for Clare, 25 years ago, in 1991. This is the second in the sequence. A Golden Oldie, it grips today even more than it did back then. I am growing old. The insurance company’s statistics tell me that soon, all too soon, I will join those statistics and become another black number on a white page. According to those statistics, Clare will survive me, but we don’t know by how much.

How do we prepare ourselves for such things? Our society, a society that sees violent death every day on the road, on the street, on television, backs away from death. We don’t face it, not in the same way they do in Oaxaca, for example, where it is celebrated once a year on the Day of the Dead. Homes are lit up. The dead ones favorite food is prepared. Little altars are illuminated by candles. Photos appear. Do the dead return to their homes to join in the celebrations? Sometimes, I guess they do. Certainly the would be made welcome if they did.

Perhaps Francisco de Quevedo, the seventeenth-century Spanish poet who was the subject of my doctoral thesis, was right. “The day I was born, I took my first step on the road to death.” He writes too of “this death that I carry within me, that has walked beside me all my life.” “If death is a law, and not just a punishment,” he writes, “then we must accept it and obey its call.” I guess it’s easier, if you are a Stoic or a Neo-Stoic, to face up to such things.

I once asked my grandfather, a man who survived the trenches of the First World War, if he was worried about dying. He looked at me in silence for a long time. I was very young and we were sitting in the sunshine on the bench by the old Swansea Hospital where he went daily to gossip with his friends. “Roger,” he said. “We are all going to die. We will die if we worry about it. We will die if we don’t. So why worry?”

I certainly don’t want to go. I didn’t want to go twenty-five years ago and I really don’t want to go right now. I have decided to take my grandfather’s advice. I’m not going to worry and I am going to continue to enjoy myself for as long as possible because: “For there are many fine things to be heard and good things to be seen / before we go to Paradise, by way of Kensal Green.”

 

 

Secret Garden

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Secret Garden 1

Being the secret love poems
I write to Clare at midnight
while she is upstairs, asleep.
They make up for the things
I can no longer say because
I am uptight, or under pressure,
or working too hard. Or maybe
because we are quarreling over
something stupid. So these are
some of the seeds I wanted to plant
but never did because I was busy.
They are also the things
that I would like Clare and Becky
to remember me by if I should
suddenly pass away without being
able to say good-bye. My parents
left me nothing but bitterness.
I want my wife and child to have
a garden they can wander through
without my being there, knowing
I have cultivated these thoughts,
at night, sleepless, without them.

Your Voice

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Your Voice
Love poem

Still in the still of the rain
I sense you near.

The room is full
of the scent of emptiness
yet even the silence
turns my head.

The walls expand
to enclose the world.

With gaudy flags
on a colored map
I mark your progress
through my memory,
upwards and inwards
your progress to my heart.

A moth glistens in the circle
cast by my reading light.

Your stealthy footsteps
sound in the corridor.

A voice, your voice,
drifts through the night