Collected Love Poems
Of all the poets writing today, Brian Patten is perhaps the most accessible and popular. Now his love poems, old and new, are collected together in his single volume.Widely acknowledged as one of Europe’s foremost writers, Brian Patten’s love poems have earned him recognition far and wide. Truthful and tender, profoundly aware of the possibility of magic and the miraculous, these poems are beautiful, informed and, even at their darkest moments, filled with courage and hope.Alongside old favourites, this edition will contain a selection of new and hitherto unpublished poems. A must for lovers and poetry lovers everywhere this February.
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Collected Love Poems
BRIAN PATTEN
Table of Contents
These Songs Were Begun One Winter
Through All Your Abstract Reasoning
Doubt Shall Not Make an End of You
After Rimbaud’s Première Soirée
Now They Will Either Sleep, Lie Still, or Dress Again
When She Wakes Drenched from Her Sleep
It is Time to Tidy Up Your Life
The Innocence of Any Flesh Sleeping
The Assassination of the Morning
A Creature to Tell the Time By
And Nothing is Ever as Perfect as You Want It to Be
Somewhere Between Heaven and Woolworth’s
At Four O’Clock in the Morning
Apart Together in Her Bed We Lay
Towards Evening and Tired of the Place
The Morning’s Got a Sleepy Head
You Come to Me Quiet as Rain Not Yet Fallen
You Missed the Sunflowers at Their Height
Probably It Is Too Early in the Morning
Near the Factory Where They Make the Lilac Perfume
Because There Were No Revelations at Hand
I Caught a Train that Passed the Town Where You Lived
The Bee’s Last Journey to the Rose
If Words Were More Her Medium than Touch
I Have Changed the Numbers on My Watch
Tristan, Waking in His Wood, Panics
Over All We Are a Shadow Falls
Fingers Have Bruised Your Skin the Way a Fallen Peach is Bruised
Poem Written in the Street on a Rainy Evening
Not only the leaf shivering with delight
No,
Not only the grass shrugging off the weight of frost
No,
Not only the taste of your skin
No,
Not only steam rising from the morning river
No,
Not only the heart on fire
No,
Not only the sound of the sunflower roaring
No,
Not only love’s resurrection
No,
Not only the cathedral window deep in the raindrop
No,
Not only the sky as blue and smooth as an egg
No,
Not only the fairytale of forever
No,
Not only the wings of the crane fly consumed by fire
No,
Not only these things
No,
But without you none of these things
Into my mirror has walked
A woman who will not talk
Of love or of its subsidiaries,
But who stands there,
Pleased by her own silence.
The weather has worn into her
All seasons known to me.
In one breast she holds
Evidence of forests,
In the other, of seas.
I will ask her nothing yet
Would ask so much
If she gave a sign—
Her shape is common enough,
Enough shape to love.
But what keeps me here
Is what glows beyond her.
I think at times
A boy’s body
Would be as easy
To read light into,
I think sometimes
My own might do.
These songs were begun one winter
When on a window thick with frost
Her finger drew
A map of all possible directions,
When her body was one possibility among
Arbitrary encounters
And loneliness sufficient to warrant
A meeting of opposites.
How easily forgotten then
What was first felt—
An anchor lifted from the blood,
Sensations intense as any lunatic’s,
Ruined by unaccustomary events,
Let drop because of weariness.
When the face you swore never to forget
Can no longer be remembered,
When a list of regrets is torn up and thrown away
Then the hurt fades,
And you think you’ve grown strong.
You sit in bars and boast to yourself,
‘Never again will I be vulnerable.
It was an aberration to be so open,
A folly, never to be repeated.’
How absurd and fragile such promises.
Hidden from you, crouched
Among the longings you have suppressed
And the desires you imagine tamed,
A sweet pain waits in ambush.
And there will come a day when in a field
Heaven’s mouth gapes open,
And on a web the shadow
Of a marigold will smoulder.
Then without warning,
