Not what the light will do but how he shapes it

And what particular colours it will bear,

And something of the climber’s concentration

Seeing the white peak, setting the right foot there.

Not how the sun was plausible at morning

Nor how it was distributed at noon,

And not how much the single stone could show

But rather how much brilliance it would shun;

Simply a paring down, a cleaving to

One object, as the star-gazer who sees

One single comet polished by its fall

Rather than countless, untouched galaxies.

Stargazers and Others

One, staring out stars,

Lost himself in looking and almost

Forgot glass, eye, air, space;

Simply, he thought, the world is improved

By my staring, how the still glass leaps

When the sky thuds in like tides.

Another, making love, once

Stared so far over his pleasure

That woman, world, the spiral

Of taut bodies, the clinging hands, broke apart

And he saw, as the stargazer sees,

Landscapes made to be looked at,

Fruit to fall, not be plucked.

In you also something

Of such vision occurs.

How else would I have learnt

The tapered stars, the pause

On the nervous spiral? Names I need

Stronger than love, desire,

Passion, pleasure. O discover

Some star and christen it, but let me be

The space that your eye moves over.

To a Friend with a Religious Vocation

For C.

Thinking of your vocation, I am filled

With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see

Within myself no wish to breed or build

Or take the three vows ringed by poverty.

And yet I have a sense,

Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry,

Of purpose. Is it merely a pretence,

A kind of scaffolding which I erect

Half out of fear, half out of laziness?

The fitful poems come but can’t protect

The empty areas of loneliness.

You know what you must do,

So that mere breathing is a way to bless.

Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you.

Your vows enfold you. I must make my own;

Now this, now that, each one empirical.

My poems move from feelings not yet known,

And when the poem is written I can feel

A flash, a moment’s peace.

The curtain will be drawn across your grille.

My silences are always enemies.

Yet with the same convictions that you have

(It is but your vocation that I lack),

I must, like you, believe in perfect love.

It is the dark, the dark that draws me back

Into a chaos where

Vocations, visions fail, the will grows slack

And I am stunned by silence everywhere.

Children and Death

Not to be spoken of, they will not let

Us enter rooms where anyone has died,

And they put candles by our beds, a light

That keeps us watchful and more terrified

Than any dear familiar darkness where

Our shadows slip away. We dream of death

Sweet and apparent in the freedom there