And when she came out it was raining, the night itself
Wanted to touch her, a silver stillness
Stood waiting, she was wet all through
Like a willow in the garden, wet apron
Shivering on an abyss. “What is death,”
She quipped, “but a lack of talent?” and spat at the rosebud,
“You are but breathing dust, and, look, you know
The language we call ‘Crossing the River’, do you speak
The older tongue called ‘Wallow?-watch the fish!”.
And then the swans
Stabbed that wriggling porridge with their beaks.
She stabbed the oak once. It tore like grating silk.
She uncaps jars of venomous honey. I take her by the hips
And lift her down as from a tree. In the cornfield we make our
love And as we finish the air is thickly grassed with rain. Who was it
Who smelt even as she frowned in anger
Of blueberries and honey, in whose honour
Corn-lightning played over the horizon?
And if she herself grew old, the rain did not,
The terror of it and the mortal gaiety,
The kisses soft and money-cold, and there was
A squeamish clarity in every part of him. Blue denim
Singed with the seaspray, and the swim in the estuary
Not for the swim alone, but for the pang
Of their longer meeting, and for the wake that closed.
The tide oozed
And left a more earthly glistening, she was at first
Everything that fills you slowly, but after,
A moment longer than another’s death.
She stabbed the oak once, and our hours
Cringed in the sunshine, the evening shadows
Pastured gravely in the stabbed oak
Until at length the dawn made speech
Possible again. Then we grew
Into twining sunbeams full of breathing dust, gigantic
Upward nimble springs of seed and gold,
In spite of which she laughed
And gestured as if she were eternal,
And stabbed the oak once.
It was all coming together in wine or rain,
Much of it drinking, more leave-taking
In wine-must, so that a fresh cigarette
Seemed the only clean thing left–wine encounters,
Creatures of lively blood and crystal
Left on the stabbed table like two glass shells
The wine-roar beaching in their sides
And the quarrel-knife between. She said
“Had you not been calling me,”
“Or you me,” he said,
“I’d not have come to you, or drunk,
Or laid in passion with the tide,”
“Nor I to you,” he cried.
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