Gay Love Poetry

by Neil Powell (ed)

  Each one of which with undivided will

  And married purpose we may make our own.

  Nay, rise: stand with me at the cavern door:

  The storms are over and the skies are clear,

  Trembling with dew and moonlight and still stars.

  Heaven hears us and the palpitating air,

  The woods that murmur, and the streams that leap

  Regenerate with tempest-scattered tears;

  Be these our temple and our witnesses,

  Our idol, altar, oracle, and priest,

  Our hymeneal chaunt and holy rite: —

  What better need we? and before we die,

  All Crete shall bless the marriage of tonight.’

  OSCAR WILDE

  from Charmides

  Down the steep rock with hurried feet and fast

  Clomb the brave lad, and reached the cave of Pan,

  And heard the goat-foot snoring as he passed,

  And leapt upon a grassy knoll and ran

  Like a young fawn unto an olive wood

  Which in a shady valley by the well-built city stood;

  And sought a little stream, which well he knew,

  For oftentimes with boyish careless shout

  The green and crested grebe he would pursue,

  Or snare in woven net the silver trout,

  And down amid the startled reeds he lay

  Panting in breathless sweet affright, and waited for the day.

  On the green bank he lay, and let one hand

  Dip in the cool dark eddies listlessly,

  And soon the breath of morning came and fanned

  His hot flushed cheeks, or lifted wantonly

  The tangled curls from off his forehead, while

  He on the running water gazed with strange and secret smile.

  And soon the shepherd in rough woollen cloak

  With his long crook undid the wattled cotes,

  And from the stack a thin blue wreath of smoke

  Curled through the air across the ripening oats,

  And on the hill the yellow house-dog bayed

  As through the crisp and rustling fern the heavy cattle strayed.

  And when the light-foot mower went afield

  Across the meadows laced with threaded dew,

  And the sheep bleated on the misty weald,

  And from its nest the waking corncrake flew,

  Some woodmen saw him lying by the stream

  And marvelled much that any lad so beautiful could seem,

  Nor deemed him born of mortals, and one said,

  ‘It is young Hylas, that false runaway

  Who with a Naiad now would make his bed

  Forgetting Herakles,’ but others, ‘Nay,

  It is Narcissus, his own paramour,

  Those are the fond and crimson lips no woman can allure.’

  And when they nearer came a third one cried,

  ‘It is young Dionysos who has hid

  His spear and fawnskin by the river side

  Weary of hunting with the Bassarid,

  And wise indeed were we away to fly:

  They live not long who on the gods immortal come to spy.’

  [145-186]

  FRANCIS KING

  Holiday

  Two beds, one stripped and one on which I lie.

  Hearing the rush of wind, the rasp of rain,

  And hither, thither, one small fretful fly,

  And high above my head that darkening stain.

  The stain spreads out and out. This storm will last

  All through the night. The frenzied water slaps

  The marble quay, from which no boat is cast.

  Mist makes the mountain crumble and collapse.

  Below, four figures huddle round a table,

  The boatman ponders, then flings down his cards,

  As though in some remote, Illyrian fable

  A god-man scatters divinatory shards.

  What does he read from them? A queasy tossing

  Of wave on wave on wave, a thread tugged tight,

  Then snapping, as the small boat braves the crossing

  Out of this dark into a blaze of light?

  The boatman smiles, while in my room above

  A vision flickers of those spilled cards lying

  Beneath a brutal hand; and all my love

  Becomes a long-drawn agony of dying.

  ROGER FINCH

  The Rape of Ganymede

  By eagles eye, the pubescence on the boy

  is visible as short gold wires. Zeus behind the eye

  sees millions of cells, each cell

  containing a yolk of energy.

  Just as the aggie is about to shoot

  from the forefinger fold in front of the boy’s thumb,

  scattering reds, blues, and greens out of the ring,

  the gate of Heaven rattles its gongs

  and Zeus descends the sky on a staircase of wings.

  The boy is startled. His playmate, a cousin, runs.

  Later, the cousin will tell that the sea

  fell from the sky, the black waves on fire

  from core to snow-cap, the hammering

  against the air like the hammering of hands

  against the heart. He does not understand love,

  does not know why his friend did not thrust the flood

  away but stood dancing in it, a god

  taking place in him as the sky danced in his blood.

  His words will serve as sketch for workers in stone.

  One will show a teenage boy at play

  with an eagle, one will show the bird

  lifting the boy, lifting its quarry.

  Stone cannot hold such motion. Only sound,

  the rumblings in the lower strings, the troughs and crests

  in the clarinets, the flutes high, high overhead,

  can portray the pair whirling out loud

  as they bypass the cousin, arms and wings spread.

  GREGORY WOODS

  ‘A goatboy pissing . . .’

  A goatboy pissing

  between roots, sweet vapour

  of urine and pine,

  turns to me grinning

  still pissing, barefoot

  in heat of wet needles,

  back to his careless herd.

  By way of introduction

  we gossip soccer

  and he goes on and on

  naming English teams

  as I go down on him.

  II STREET LIFE

  ______________________

  These are poems which, even if not literally of the streets, nevertheless belong in identifiably urban contexts. Despite the attractions of even a shepherdless rural existence, gay culture has always tended to colonize city spaces and gay poets to claim and name their chosen places. These are usually very specific: Venice (Platen-Hallermünde), Alexandria (Cavafy), Edinburgh (Owen), Rome (Penna), Glasgow (Morgan), San Francisco (Gunn), New York (Ash) and of course London (Stevenson, Treby, Daniels, Kinloch, Johnson). Within the cities, several of these poems record incidents and encounters on buses or trains: to be on the move, it seems, is our natural and necessary state.

  There are various implied continuities here, and I’ve also included two poems — by William Plomer and James Kirkup — which are explicitly meant as homages to C.P. Cavafy and Sandro Penna, whose poems immediately precede them. At the end are two recent poems from Toronto and New York, by R.M. Vaughan and Lawrence Schimel, which offer rather different perspectives on urban gay life: one ruefully funny, the other whimsically domestic.

  AUGUST GRAF VON PLATEN-HALLERMÜNDE

  Translated by Edwin Morgan

  Venetian Sonnets: XII

  I love you, as the sum of all those forms

  Which Venice in its paintings shows to us.

  The very heart may yearn, ‘Come close to us!’

  But they stand silent, we pass by their charms.

  I see you are the breathing stone whose
arms

  Hold beauty carved for ever motionless.

  Pygmalion’s rage is still. Victorious

  I cannot be, but yours, yours through all storms.

  You are a child of Venice, you live here

  And stay here; this place is your paradise,

  With all Bellini’s angels flocking near.

  But I — as I glide on, I recognise

  I am cheated of a world so great and so dear;

  Like the dreams of darkness it dissolves and flies.

  WALT WHITMAN

  from Calamus

  City of orgies, walks and joys,

  City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst

  will one day make you illustrious,

  Not the pageants of you, not your shifting tableaus,

  your spectacles, repay me,

  Not the interminable rows of your houses, nor the ships

  at the wharves,

  Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows

  with goods in them,

  Nor to converse with learn’d persons, or bear my share

  in the soiree or feast;

  Not those, but as I pass O Manhattan, your frequent

  and swift flash of eyes offering me love,

  Offering response to my own — these repay me,

  Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.

  JOHN GAMBRIL NICHOLSON

  Your City Cousins

  As I go down the street

  A hundred boys a day I meet,

  And gazing from my window high

  I like to watch them passing by.

  I like the boy that earns his bread;

  The boy that holds the horse’s head,

  The boy that tidies up the bar,

  The boy that hawks the Globe and Star.

  Smart-looking lads are in my line;

  The lad that gives my boots a shine,

  The lad that works the lift below,

  The lad that’s lettered GPO.

  I like the boy of business air

  That guards the loaded van with care,

  Or cycles through the city crowd,

  Or adds the ledger up aloud.

  I like the boy that’s fond of play;

  The office-boy cracks jokes all day,

  The barber’s prentice makes me laugh,

  The bookstall-boy gives back my chaff.

  When travelling home by tram or train

  I meet a hundred boys again,

  Behind them on the ’bus I ride

  Or pace the platform by their side.

  And though I never see you there

  All boys your name and nature share,

  And almost every day I make

  Some new acquaintance for your sake.

  C.P. CAVAFY

  Translated by John Mavrogordato

  The Next Table

  He must be hardly twenty-two. And yet

  I’m sure that nearly as many years ago

  That was the very body I enjoyed.

  It isn’t a kindling of desire at all.

  I only came into the casino a minute ago;

  I haven’t even had time to drink much.

  That very same body I have enjoyed.

  If I don’t remember where — one thing forgotten doesn’t signify.

  There, now that he has sat down at the next table,

  I know every movement he makes — and under his clothes

  Naked I can see again the limbs I loved.

  WILLIAM PLOMER

  A Casual Encounter

  In memory of Cavafy, 1863-1933

  They met, as most these days do,

  among streets, not under leaves; at night;

  by what is called chance, some think

  predestined; in a capital city, latish;

  instantly understanding, without words,

  without furtiveness, without guilt,

  each had been, without calculation, singled out.

  Wherever it was they had met,

  without introduction, before drifting this way,

  beneath lamps hung high, casting

  cones of radiance, hazed with pale dust,

  a dry pollenous mist that made

  each warm surface seem suede, the sense of touch

  sang like a harp; the two were alone.

  To be private in public added oddness,

  out of doors in a city with millions

  still awake, with the heard obbligato

  of traffic, that resolute drone,

  islanding both, their destination

  the shadow they stood in. The place

  should perhaps be defined.

  But need it? Cliff walls of warehouses;

  no thoroughfare; at the end a hurrying

  river, dragonish; steel gates locked;

  emptiness. Whatever they said

  was said gently, was not written down,

  not recorded. Neither had need

  even to know the other one’s name.

  Nor do you need to know any more

  of an hour so far off, so far,

  it may be, from what turns you on.

  They, with peacefulest smiles at a rare

  Befriedigung, parted, breathing the gold-

  dusted, denatured air like the pure

  air of some alp: nor met ever again.

  Is that all? To you it may seem

  a commonplace episode. Once was a man

  who might not have thought so. To him

  (an old photograph hides his neck clamped

  in a high stiff white collar, on his pale face

  a false-looking moustache) let me dedicate

  this moth-winged encounter, to Cavafy himself.

  WILFRED OWEN

  Six o’clock in Princes Street

  In twos and threes, they have not far to roam,

  Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;

  Those seek no further than their quiet home,

  Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.

  Neither should I go fooling over clouds,

  Following gleams unsafe, untrue,

  And tiring after beauty through star-crowds,

  Dared I go side by side with you;

  Or be you in the gutter where you stand,

  Pale rain-flawed phantom of the place,

  With news of all the nations in your hand,

  And all their sorrows in your face.

  SANDRO PENNA

  Translated by Blake Robinson

  ‘I lose myself...’

  I lose myself on a working-class block,

  so very busy when evening is near.

  For I'm among men quite distant from me,

  marvellous men to my eye: radiant,

  clear, not known quantities at all.

  All the same and unknown and new.

  I take the seat, that’s in a dark corner,

  a worker cedes to me. He chases

  after (just making it) a bus in flight.

  I didn’t see his face, but now

  I have his quick-limbed way in my heart.

  Left me in that dark corner is what

  I took from life — from him, an unknown —

  his honest animal smell, like mine.

  JAMES KIRKUP

  Homo in Omnibus

  In memory of Sandro Penna

  The rush hour in Naples

  lasts all day long, and

  most of the night.

  In the crowded bus,

  the summer suffocated.

  I tried to sublimate my agony

  by gazing on a boy’s delightful face

  just out of reach, not out of mind —

  that pure smile, those furry eyelashes!

  While contemplating that amour de tête,

  I gradually became aware

  of a concern more close —

  indeed, right behind me

  an urgent male body pressing

  with a policemans truncheon.

  I dared not
look behind —

  indeed I could not, my shoulders pinned —

  but I could just insinuate my hand around

  against the rough, worn cloth of someone’s

  cheap cotton working trousers

  with its pocketful of change.

  Not small change, either,

  but something beyond price. I, too,

  found myself in a manly condition

  (as Nabokov puts its somewhere).

  To be the possessor of such riches

  in such a humble purse!

  At Mergellina, I had to push my way

  off the bus — and I was glad to find

  he still was pushing close behind me.

  On the station escalators,

  I finally dared look round — and you were there.

  You might have been

  anybody, so ordinary did you look.

  But you were laughing as your hand outlined

  what I was now quite familiar with.

  A few words, a handclasp, an offered

  cigarette (refused), an arm in mine —

  so we prolonged that first encounter,

  so dangerously public, in hallowed privacy,

  all night together in the small hotel he knew

  near Napoli Piazza Garibaldi Termini.

  It was an eternal one-night stand,

  a passing need, and none the worse for that.