Nine stages towards Knowing

Why do we lie

’Why do we lie,’ she questioned, her warm eyes

on the grey Autumn wind and its coursing,

’all afternoon wasted in bed like this?’

’Because we cannot lie all night together.’

’Yes,’ she said, satisfied at my reasoning,

but going on to search her cruel mind

for better excuses to leave my narrow bed.

Too many flesh suppers

Abstracted in art,

in architecture,

in scholars’ detail;

absorbed by music,

by minutiae,

by sad trivia;

all to efface her,

whom I can forget

no more than breathing.

Theatregoer

Somewhere some nights she sees

curtains rise on those rites

we also knew and felt

I sit here desolate

in spite of company

Love is between people

And should she die?

And should she die tonight,

with this three years’ difference

as well between us now?

Or no, be maimed perhaps

and bearing pain, to live

on damages for life?

In any case, I wish

her no good, whom I loved

as Brunel loved iron.

All this Sunday long

All this Sunday long it has snowed,

and I weighted with the old grief

struggling to unseat her from my mind.

Yet winnowing our past I cannot find

a snow-gilded scene however brief:

thus do I wilfully increase my load.

Spatial Definition

Razed the room in which

we made so much love:

I try to re-place

it in space against

the windracked planetrees:

my eyes quarter air.

Able at last

’Able at last,’ she writes,

’to see things as they were,

I wonder we were so blind

to think our trust could bind

instead of just defer.’

I shudder at her fall,

for that was, from the heights,

not how it was at all.

Arrived at the place

Arrived at the place

to which I always

said I was going:

comfortless for lack

of her who chose not

to travel with me:

too aware of my way

to wherever next

is also alone.

Knowledge

Knowledge of her was

earned like miners’ pay:

afterwards I sought

friends’ knowledge of her:

now I need to know

nothing of this girl:

she whom once I knew

as my tongue my mouth.