Nine stages towards Knowing

Why do we lie’Why do we lie,’ she questioned, her warm eyeson the grey Autumn wind and its coursing,’all afternoon wasted in bed like this?’’Because we cannot lie all night together.’’Yes,’ she said, satisfied at my reasoning,but going on to search her cruel mindfor better excuses to leave my narrow bed.

Too many flesh

Abstracted in art,in architecture,in scholars’ detail;absorbed by music,by minutiae,by sad trivia;all to efface her,whom I can forgetno more than breathing.

Somewhere some nights she seescurtains rise on those riteswe also knew and feltI sit here desolatein spite of

Love is between

And should she die?

And should she die tonight,with this three years’ differenceas well between us now?

Or no, be maimed perhapsand bearing pain, to liveon damages for life?

In any case,

I wishher no good, whom I lovedas Brunel loved iron.

All this Sunday

All this Sunday long it has snowed,and I weighted with the old griefstruggling to unseat her from my mind.

Yet winnowing our past I cannot finda snow-gilded scene however brief:thus do I wilfully increase my load.

Spatial

Razed the room in whichwe made so much love:

I try to re-placeit in space againstthe windracked planetrees:my eyes quarter air.

Able at last’Able at last,’ she writes,’to see things as they were,

I wonder we were so blindto think our trust could bindinstead of just defer.’I shudder at her fall,for that was, from the heights,not how it was at all.

Arrived at the

Arrived at the placeto which I alwayssaid I was going:comfortless for lackof her who chose notto travel with me:too aware of my wayto wherever nextis also alone.

Knowledge of her wasearned like miners’ pay:afterwards I soughtfriends’ knowledge of her:now I need to knownothing of this girl:she whom once I knewas my tongue my mouth.