Todd Swift
The Teetotaller’s Song
The woman in Waitrose
Considering lamb, or,
On Marylebone, hurrying
In the cold first hours of February –
Each enticing met face
Reminds, not of pleasure
But of pleasure’s final consequence –
An exhaustion, fine and judicious
As strong boys wrestling,
Shirts off, on August grass,
Neither yielding their bit of lawn,
Their held shadows poised,
As if deciding whether to break
Or forever remain intact, enclosed.
So I love the appreciation
Of an arm, a throat, a gloved
Hand, drinking the unreasoned source
Of this adulterous notice,
Alert to what is expected of the world,
England, unbound from January,
The ones on the street I do not stop,
Entice, embrace, and kiss –
Writing this in loving’s stead,
Giddy as after being christened,
Lifted up, to the watered day,
My sober, spun, anguished forehead.
In Memory of F.T. Prince
‘Because to love
is terrible we prefer/The freedom of our crimes’ – from an
early published version of ‘Soldiers Bathing’, F.T. Prince, Captain, M.E.F.
(British)
Desire ages, ages hardly at all,
Edges, like those of a book,
Curled at the beach, where waves,
Sent by the summer, brush
The salt away, finely-combed,
And it is homosexual love That holds us in its palm, That cuts and dries the hair We both wore, like uniforms, That day that was a decade, Though neither of us found a bed That could be so cleanly made; For now, married, on continents Split as if in some biblical debate, We have shelved those dreamy Acts of early indiscipline, Where, cock from trousers, Cock in hand, we edged, together To a cliff, a Christian form Of final decision, in the Italian sand, But stepped away from intercourse, Or love, decided that, as men, Our hearts belonged to those Who could tend it otherwise, and so, Packed up our bathing suits, And wore trim expressions Home, at dawn, dressed, like wounds More deeply in blood-lies. Words have a purpose if no meaning Beyond shorelines where they crash, Which is to deface emotion With communication, in a style That drowns the jungle wholesale, And no ark or personality can swim Free of its deciding glamour And deceptive fluidity: so smile, And say, it was not love, that drove Our Damascene caresses to a cross, Upon which loss lay openly, but Desire suffered in its private language – No, it was decorum, or fear of Impropriety – simply petty feeling, Feeling inadequate to emotionality – But those who nailed the arm of God Into the wood were strong enough To withstand hardier cruelty, And played at the weeping feet, Just as the artists, unknown mostly Except for the names of school Or master, too, commanded passion To an ordering, pictorial and strange, Of such derangements of the body As we could never have drawn From our quivers to disarrow, true – So saying, even being, overcome Is not the terrible action it appears – No, it is the naïve aversion to it, Slowly accruing to regret, by year, That marks the one, who, like Cain, Enters a town each time as someone Immediately despised, narrow, pained, Leaving the districts with stones For signs the boys follow out with On the path; love’s release is betraying, Even as it holds back confession To end as a marble, certain epitaph. Love has the power to undo nothing, but like a refrain, returns to that absence so often it becomes a thing, a lake of fire in which husband and wife bathe when going to bed and when rising in the morning to the rooms of the lit dark house. Because you had not died Or
might not soon, Though some time I
bought flowers Yellow, white, and yellow again No other friend Became
my life As you did And do Childhood never ends When two love as one Love
born in spring Or reborn Eloquence is not natural Or must be if it runs Through the passions Despair
to miss you When you were here Are here I write this in two times Two places, one What I most hope for Your living The other what I most fear These two worlds Bring sorrow and sorrow’s end Together as a bouquet, Stemming and flowering Tears we all know Require of us born-breaths That first demand of air Air
in which we suffer And endure encompassing love Boys
on their field lit like an aquarium sad
to not be alight, like them, with goals that
a foot or hand can win; poetry’s rules no
less old than theirs, but poets are
not only players on green grass, night and
day, also the old-eyed others edged
in the park, who nod at each leap in air, each
attained yelp and elbowed throw, the
muscular panoply of bodied action folded
into hours with an end; slow to leave,
friendless, they once stood on the line, or
blew as referee, their bones now cold and
all trophies pawned. So poems both play and
hold, gravely, as if a mourner stood, one
self under the hood of the ground, the other, above,
head bowed, to pray. We stand and lie, this
way, to make the words hit home. So
ball and word fly untrue until a hand undoes the
flight by taking it down from abstract to
real motion, feeling out the meaning of its gut, impacted
with the lob’s sorrow-start, the
needing thrower’s heart, which is to gain the
art’s accolades, not be cheered in dismal parades
that sow ribbons on winners, and
never lift the anguished fade that flows across
the dark, onto playing grounds.
Our children
On the Eve of Surgery
Paddington Recreation Grounds