Parlour-Piece

With love so like fire they dared not 

Let it out into strawy small talk 
With love so like a flood they dared not 
Let out a trickle lest the whole crack 

These two sat speechlessly 
Pale cool tea in tea-cups chaperoned 
Stillness, silence, the eyes 
Where fire and flood strained.

Fallgrief's Girlfriends

Not that she had no equal, not that she was

His before flesh was his or the world was;
Not that she had the especial excellence
To make her cat-indolence and shrew-mouth
Index to its humanity. Her looks
Were what a good friend would not comment on.
If he made flattery too particular,
Admiring her cookery or lipstick,
Her eyes reflected painfully. Yet not that
He pitied her: he did not pity her.

“Any woman born”, he said, “having
What any woman born cannot but have,
Has as much of the world as is worth more
Than wit or lucky looks can make worth more;
And I, having what I have as a man
Got without choice, and what I have chosen,
City and neighbour and work, am poor enough
To be more than bettered by a worst woman.
Whilst I am this muck of a man in this
Muck of existence, I shall not seek more
Than a muck of a woman: wit and lucky looks
Were a ring disablign this pig-snout,
And a tin clasp on this diamond.”

By this he meant to break out of the dream
Where’s admiration’s giddy mannequin
Leads every sense to motley; he meant to stand naked
Awake in the pitch dark where the animal runs,
Where the insects couple as they murder each other,
Where the fish outwait the water.

The chance changed him:
He has found a woman with such wit and looks
He can brag of her in every company.

October Dawn

October is marigold, and yet

A glass half full of wine left out

To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition

Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun its heave.

The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green

Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.

First a skin, delicately here
Restraining a ripple from the air;

Soon plate and river on pond and brook;
Then tons of chain and massive lock

To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight
Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate

Reunion while a fist of cold
Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,

Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,
And now it is about to start.