(Crief speaks about crime)
I’ve collected here a few, odd things:
a piece of paper a girl once tore,
a trifle of hair on a ***** sheet,
and a few keepsakes from a ransacked store,
and I’ve put them all in the bag I bought
and have set them in that corner so.
I was planning to leave but the weather changed,
and the sky grew grey with a **** of snow,
so I sat quite still on the bed I knew
and imagined the girl in her darkening years
and my thoughts were goads and devils of fire
so I lowered my head in a rage of tears;
but soon afterwards I stopped to think:
if she comes home now, she will find me here,
and her cupboards upset and her letters torn,
and a man on her bed in a rage of care;
and I think of her neck and defenceless sides,
her naked arms and her meaningless legs,
the substance that moves through nerves of cells
as easy to smash as yoky bits in eggs;
and I frighten myself with my vision then
and the street as dark and as quiet as death
with only the snow like a huge, white ****
floating outside in a cavort of breath;
and I look between my mind and hear
a single cry as intense as life
and afterwards snow, the silence outside,
a fog-horn sounding, a man named Crief
appearing and going down to a pond
to undo himself in the dead of night,
and finding the water frozen stiff
and hard and seamed in an icy blight!
And I whimper, then I jump to my feet,
I prowl past the door, like a beast from a lair,
but freeze in the frame, in the dead of the dark,
for lightly her footstep ascends that stair!

“I know she’ll break my heart,” he said.
“I know it certain as any sun
“Chivvies a glitter from a pipe of lead
“Where the poisoned waters run.

“She’ll take me into her thighs and turn
“Me out on a dawn as dark.
“Her face by the dark door, sorrow-stern,
“Will be creased with her smartest lark.

“Loose leaves and the ravelled flowers share
“Much aspect upon her face,
“But darker than any flutter of hair
“Is the part-past, and the chaste

“Abuse and mirror and sickening sweet,
“And battery forecast. And mean
“Her broken look! and her last retreat
“In the terrible City of Seen!”

We came down to a pond-
the stem of the **** was bleached
but brazen and bold.
                                   Chidden about the air
was a peppering fury of care,
and a wavering strand of gold, but darker and darker
(what tantrums the landscape threw!)
by the dangerous edge of things, we shouted it out. We’re through!
Tears grew.
                  We spoke
in that murderous murmur that even the sedge
refuses to voice when choked and hassled
by hustling wind blown over, its edge,
we spoke –
                    but only wild birds awoke to our “haven”
of heaven-hell-roped.

I can remember you, Kathy,
by a single tree
as sere as it was thin
where a path dwindled
and two robins, or perhaps three,  
(it was a heightened afternoon
and we had argued wearily)
piped pipe thin.
                           Your love since then
has proven me deciduous –
but where my lying fancies stray
I have manacled my mind
to make of us
a devilish cast, a dud tree,
your mouth ******* mine,
and a lark descending wretchedly.

Because love hungered in earth, in clay, and in the flowers in trees,
in the clustered blossoms of air
and the wavering pallor of sky and seas,
what should I do when such clear,
quiet themes, battered and bitten by rust and skein, grow
as mute as the cold horse-dung?
Is this not where my miserable dreams
***** out each snow-candle and cut each tongue?

Why do you laugh so (restless and calm) when I,
from the spluttering, red-crested downs
and infernal pother of fire-sparks to the sky,
would wail and wallow in grief? Why
have you woken, small breasted, laughing
beside me, calling me fool and madman,
puritan prater? You –
whom my hot lust burns to consume and chew!

I take turns
in turning you out
or letting your chiding in,
childishly minding you
and dressing you lavishly –
then suddenly ******* you to within
a poppystem-breadth of your nakedness
when you weigh up all mockery as sin
and, mouth to mouth, I am gathered
from my nakedness to your nakedness within.

I TAKE THESE GREEN-LACED LEAVES
I take these green-laced leaves,
this pageantry of spring,
these subtle buds to flowers,
the honeyed blossoms and the ivory race of clouds
the windy dawns have set in motion,
I take all these, and more :
                                           these bluebells
purple with commotion (yet to cover forest-floors!),
these hyacinths that out of more and still more
wild-flowering centres, bring forth myrrh and fume,
I take all these, and the larks that fill and fill further
every horizon as if none held but for
the nutshell-necessity of being tilled
to a central opalescence of singing pearl –
yes, all these, and pearls, voluptuous empires,
I take, I take all these, and you, yes, you,
my dark-haired darling crying on an apple-blossom pillow,
a wavering petal in petals, dark-leafed, of willow, I take forever,
for forever’s sake, all these, for you, all you.