I sat under the quiet trees all the restless afternoon,
Dreaming of what had been and never more could be:
Bitten the clouds, the declining canopy of air
Weary with insects weary with bats.
Black days black nights.
The benches of the dead set out, the dining dead.
At eight I rose, bitten the clouds,
A dog barked dead and long
Down the river of dead sights.
The thistle over which the dead goldfinch dreams of seeds;
The crimson road that marks the accident.
In courts, in currencies of plenty, wherever you are,
Do you hear the frogs croak, “Katharine”?

I found myself in Putney
after many stupid years.
It was a worthless day
before spring comes with all its biting powers.
There was nothing there in Putney
but that February hearse
and all the villainy of incredible memory
born out of pointless love and hope that blackmails.
There was traffic there, that endless vicious fume
of noise; and litter blowing pointlessly;
savage parents; hard and worried kids;
the thundering mess of London all around;
a hop of sparrows on that pointless ground.
I found myself in Putney
where I lost myself so many stupid years ago,
and by that withered house a withered love arose.
“Ah, love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
“You acknowledge me?” she said.
“Of course,” I answered.
“Put your arm across my breast,” she said.
“Touch my still hair. Weep plentifully.
“Let your poor heart break. Strike here across my cheek
“To know what you have lost.”
“My love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
(From the withered house the years were toppling.)
“Stupid questions from a stupid man.
“You loved me and you lost me.”
Then the roar of London hurt my head.
I saw a man go down a street
Where no street was, where no man was.

She was that fatal girl who said the worst goodnight.
No one but she!
None could have dished out poison with such right
Perceptive wit upon occasions
Of late merry-making when wine and beer,
Cakes and red cheese, dallied down
The honeyed round.
                              Skill! Skill!
Such women with such skill!
Super controllers of no destiny!

Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of scorpions.
Jill came down
With daisy-chains
But Jack was bitten to ribbons.

Oh, you have been so lovely and so lost
While May arrived to purple flowers,
Moisten lilies and the early roses show. But no
Skimmering of joy leapt up to gild the glory of those flowers.
Martins built (so suddenly they came)
And all the swallows, too,
But elegies made cloudy dimness glow in heaven’s blue,
And then the pageant May descanted Katharine,
And Katharine’s untrue.

Kathy, lately
birds seem rarer.
Even in the lilacs
where the blackbird whistles,
boughs seem spent.
Foolish men who read their loss in nature’s
always wax too eloquent,
so, while I try to paint
a sense of desolation
in the brooks of heaven and streams of night
(wherever they may be),
I know it’s farce –
an enterprising manufacture making nothing laugh.

I should write nothing,
nothing makes more sense,
although, my darling,
when I mourn for you who travelled hence
(and left me, placing nothing in my arms)
my mind drifts out,
and like a fragment driven by the wind,
I have to write.
I have to wring these vague alarms.
I have to give to nothing something slight.

You are no longer smiling
In the garden stacked with afternoons,
Your skirt above your knees,
Gloating and scorning my wish for modesty,
While roses are sticking themselves to bees
And sun is setting on coffee spoons,
A lifted skirt, your knees.

My darling, now when you never smile
In that garden without a fair,
When those peculiar stretches of petals
Are memories better forgotten, being bare,
I can still see you walking across that lawn
And turning to me with dark, extravagant beauty
And your secret held into you like an impossible dawn.

Knowing you hated me then and hate me now,
Knowing you called me “Horror” for a reason, every day,
What point in writing an elegy
That mourns the spurious and grieves for the grey,
Dissolution of love, the continuity of deceit,
Light in the stocks
And modesty peeping out of your socks

If not to celebrate something more
Than everything you were or can ever have been,
Something more because you made me seem
More than myself and surrounded my heart
With so many somber and beautiful dreams
That life grew riotous
Springing the lids of tombs?

I found myself in Putney
after many stupid years.
It was a worthless day
before spring comes with all its biting powers.
There was nothing there in Putney
but that February hearse
and all the villainy of incredible memory
born out of pointless love and hope that blackmails.
There was traffic there, that endless vicious fume
of noise; and litter blowing pointlessly;
savage parents; hard and worried kids;
the thundering mess of London all around;
a hop of sparrows on that pointless ground.
I found myself in Putney
where I lost myself so many stupid years ago,
and by that withered house a withered love arose.
“Ah, love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
“You acknowledge me?” she said.
“Of course,” I answered.
“Put your arm across my breast,” she said.
“Touch my still hair. Weep plentifully.
“Let your poor heart break. Strike here across my cheek
“To know what you have lost.”
“My love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
(From the withered house the years were toppling.)
“Stupid questions from a stupid man.
“You loved me and you lost me.”
Then the roar of London hurt my head.
I saw a man go down a street
Where no street was, where no man was.