And was not here today.

There is no flesh so perfect

As on my lady’s bone,

And yet it seems so distant

When I am all alone:

As though she were a masterpiece

In some castled town,

That pilgrims come to visit

And priests to copy down.

Alas, I cannot travel

To a love I have so deep

Or sleep too close beside

A love I want to keep.

But I long to hold some lady,

For flesh is warm and sweet.

Cold skeletons go marching

Each night beside my feet.

—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961

WHEN I UNCOVERED YOUR BODY

When I uncovered your body

I thought shadows fell deceptively,

urging memories of perfect rhyme.

I thought I could bestow beauty

like a benediction and that your half-dark flesh

would answer to the prayer.

I thought I understood your face

because I had seen it painted twice

or a hundred times, or kissed it

when it was carved in stone.

With only a breath, a vague turning,

you uncovered shadows

more deftly than I had flesh,

and the real and violent proportions of your body

made obsolete old treaties of excellence,

measures and poems,

and clamoured with a single challenge of personal beauty,

which cannot be interpreted or praised:

it must be met.

—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961

TRAVEL

Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought

Of travelling penniless to some mud throne

Where a master might instruct me how to plot

My life away from pain, to love alone

In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake.

Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost

Enough to lose a way I had to take;

Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust

The will that forbid me contract, vow,

Or promise, and often while you slept

I looked in awe beyond your beauty.

Now

I know why many men have stopped and wept

Halfway between the loves they leave and seek,

And wondered if travel leads them anywhere—

Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,

The windy sky’s a locket for your hair.

—from The Spice-Box of Earth, 1961

YOU HAVE THE LOVERS

You have the lovers,

they are nameless, their histories only for each other,

and you have the room, the bed and the windows.

Pretend it is a ritual.

Unfurl the bed, bury the lovers, blacken the windows,

let them live in that house for a generation or two.

No one dares disturb them.

Visitors in the corridor tiptoe past the long closed door,

they listen for sounds, for a moan, for a song:

nothing is heard, not even breathing.

You know they are not dead,

you can feel the presence of their intense love.

Your children grow up, they leave you,

they have become soldiers and riders.

Your mate dies after a life of service.