Collected Love Poems. Brian Patten

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,