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?

You worry me.

Your eyes dilate
as though an extra sorrow
enters them.

What is their colour?

You have told me
but the quirks of memory
forewarn the image
of my search
until a resurrection
seems impossible.

Perhaps I’m colour-blind.

Today I caught a conker
falling from a chestnut tree.
It dovetailed to my hand
and lay quite still –
a little stained but perfectly intact.

The surface shone translucently:
a brilliant, brown-red gloss.

Perhaps you’ll disbelieve me
but I thought : this colour’s like Anne’s eyes.

A little later wings of blue
persuaded me to change my mind
and then a blade of grass began a long interrogation.

Shyly and involuntarily your eyes appear
like music fading to a silent close.

from "Poems People Liked (2)"