Collected Love Poems. Brian Patten
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Collected Love Poems - Brian Patten страница 7

Название: Collected Love Poems

Автор: Brian Patten

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Поэзия

Серия:

isbn: 9780007343515

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ

      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 sold.

      But 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.

СКАЧАТЬ