through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

I wish we had never crossed path that day or night or whatever cursed moment it was that we chanced upon. What use are these longings? You moved on; and I. Yet some part of me still yearns for what could not have been, what would never be.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

Covering Two Years

This nothingness that feeds upon itself: Pencils that turn to water in the hand, Parts of a sentence, hanging in the air, Thoughts breaking in the mind like glass, Blank sheets of paper that reflect the world Whitened the world that I was silenced by. There were two years of that. Slowly, Whatever splits, dissevers, cuts, cracks, ravels, or divides To bring me to that diet of corrosion, burned And flickered to its terminal.--Now in an older hand I write my name. Now with a voice grown unfamiliar, I speak to silences of altered rooms, Shaken by knowledge of recurrence and return. 

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

Afternoon Happiness

So how does the poem play Without the paraphernalia of betrayal and loss? I don’t have a jealous eye or fear And neither do you. In truth, I’m fond Of your ex-mate, whom I name “my wife-in-law.” My former husband, that old disaster, is now just funny, So laugh we do, in what Cyril Connolly Has called the endless, nocturnal conversation Of marriage. Which may be the best part. Darling, must I love you in light verse Without the tribute of profoundest art? Of course it won’t last. You will break my heart Or I yours, by dying. I could weep over that. But now it seems forced, here in these heaven hills, The mourning doves mourning, the squirrels mating, My old cat warm in my lap, here on our terrace As from below comes a musical cursing As you mend my favorite plate. Later of course I could pick a fight; there is always material in that. But we don’t come from fighting people, those Who scream out red-hot iambs in their hate. No, love, the heavy poem will have to come From temps perdu, fertile with pain, or perhaps Detonated by terrors far beyond this place Where the world rends itself, and its tainted waters Rise in the east to erode our safety here. Much as I want to gather a lifetime thrift And craft, my cunning skills tied in a knot for you, There is only this useless happiness as gift.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

Early Affection

I lov’d thee from the earliest dawn,      When first I saw thy beauty’s ray, And will, until life’s eve comes on,      And beauty’s blossom fades away; And when all things go well with thee, With smiles and tears remember me. I’ll love thee when thy morn is past,      And wheedling gallantry is o’er, When youth is lost in age’s blast,      And beauty can ascend no more, And when life’s journey ends with thee, O, then look back and think of me. I’ll love thee with a smile or frown,      ’Mid sorrow’s gloom or pleasure’s light, And when the chain of life runs down,      Pursue thy last eternal flight, When thou hast spread thy wing to flee, Still, still, a moment wait for me. I’ll love thee for those sparkling eyes,      To which my fondness was betray’d, Bearing the tincture of the skies,      To glow when other beauties fade, And when they sink too low to see, Reflect an azure beam on me.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

A Girl

A Girl,      Her soul a deep-wave pearl Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;      A face flowered for heart’s ease,      A brow’s grace soft as seas      Seen through faint forest-trees:      A mouth, the lips apart, Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze      From her tempestuous heart.      Such: and our souls so knit,      I leave a page half-writ —            The work begun Will be to heaven’s conception done,      If she come to it.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

The little cracks they escalated And before we knew it was too late For making circles and telling lies

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

i still think about you every now and then. no. most of my waking hours. silly eh. i know. 

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,

All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

between the shadow and the soul

...because I know no other way than this

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

What we do not see, we are told, we do not mourn; yet night and sleep trouble us, suspicion being the strongest dream and dread the thong. The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

Remember how we picked the daffodils? Nobody else remembers, but I remember. Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy, Helping the harvest. She has forgotten. She cannot even remember you. And we sold them It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them. Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer, Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot (It was his last chance, He would die in the same great freeze as you), He persuaded us. Every Spring He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen, 'A custom of the house'. Besides, we still weren't sure we wanted to own Anything. Mainly we were hungry To convert everything to profit. Still nomads--still strangers To our whole possession. The daffodils Were incidental gilding of the deeds, Treasure trove. They simply came, And they kept on coming. As if not from the sod but falling from heaven. Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck. We knew we'd live for ever. We had not learned What a fleeting glance of the everlasting Daffodils are. Never identified The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera - Our own days! We thought they were a windfall. Never guessed they were a last blessing. So we sold them. We worked at selling them As if employed on somebody else's Flower-farm. You bent at it In the rain of that April - your last April, We bent there together, among the soft shrieks Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken Of their girlish dance-frocks - Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy, Opened too early. We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's bench, Distributed leaves among the dozens - Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered - Propped their raw butts in bucket water, Their oval, meaty butts, And sold them, sevenpence a bunch - Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth, With their odourless metals, A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold As if ice had a breath - We sold them, to wither. The crop thickened faster than we could thin it. Finally, we were overwhelmed And we lost our wedding-present scissors. Every March since they have lifted again Out of the same bulbs, the same Baby-cries from the thaw, Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers In the draughty wings of the year. On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering They return to forget you stooping there Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April, Snipping their stems. But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are. Here somewhere, blades wide open, April by April Sinking deeper Through the sod - an anchor, a cross of rust.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

Oh remember the children of first marriages For they are silent and awkward in their comings and their goings; For the seal of the misbegotten is upon them; For they walk in apology and dis-ease; For their star is sunk; For their fathers’ brows are knitted against them; For they bristle and snarl. All you light-limbed amblers in the sun, Remember the grovellers in the dark; The scene-shifters, the biders, the loners.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

beauty like a tightened bow

[through-thefog-and-filthyai-blog]

A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.