Collected Love Poems. Brian Patten

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