Gay Love Poetry

by Neil Powell (ed)

  you never quite knowing how (if ever) power

  transforms itself to a caress, to a version of affection.

  10

  What is it that sets off a life’s relentless metronome?

  I ask myself the obvious question

  everyone will believe they have the answer to.

  But things return, explained,

  from before I ever knew you:

  Tony, the Cunninghams, the living-room at number 5;

  finding at my guardians house a book of drawings

  by Michelangelo, those thighs and muscles

  the topography of an unknown homeland.

  11

  A decade to the day before I cremated you

  (too neat, the way that everything’s happened to me)

  I was lying in a bed in London with a man

  ten years younger than me, thirty years younger than you...

  He talked of hours wh$n he’d imagined this, as I had:

  the shock, the darkened room, the tenderness.

  All I could want. All he needed from me.

  But I told him nothing about this that’s stayed

  a kind of shame to me. In the morning

  we talked like cousins or strangers.

  He walked me to the Underground,

  vanished for years into his marriage.

  I hear that lock click shut again.

  Now I’m in the back-room in the silence.

  I have opened the cupboard and I’m

  looking through the clothes.

  I know what is expected.

  I try to write the life I haven’t had.

  12

  I listen to another music you’d have hated:

  Ry Cooder’s droning slide guitar, sad across the spaces

  of America.

  I’d like to get away from all of this

  and never come back.

  I’d like to go to the high deserts of Arizona,

  where nothing rusts.

  That man in London shares your first name.

  13

  Before we scattered your ashes (paler

  than I’d expected), I saw where you sat every summer

  in that garden, saw the view you saw.

  Your final, hidden joke,

  so nakedly exposed:

  the scaled-down statue of David

  stood with its back to you, tense

  scapula inviting a lingering caress,

  the thighs so firm and smooth, his buttocks

  peach-plump ... your dream come true in stone.

  Always there’s a question in me

  whose answer does not name your name.

  My fear of becoming you — the shame, the secret

  exultation — the excited torment of the pages of your letters,

  scattered nervously on my floor like discarded clothes.

  Years back, almost emerging from a dream,

  I was in a kind of garden, my fingers lingering

  across a statues smooth nude

  marble buttocks — and then the figure

  came to life (as Alex, as John,

  as Paul or Alan) running away from me,

  turning his head back laughing,

  half jeering, half

  luring me on.

  14

  Now your overcoat is

  hanging in the hall; I guide

  your buzzing razor round my jaw.

  My bare fingers drum the keys

  of the machine you’ve left me,

  its erasing-ribbon jammed, of course.

  I am typing the secret stories of my life.

  They end, don’t they, they finally

  exhaust every trivial, thrilling word.

  This is not the poem I have to write.

  This is not the poem I have to write to you.

  As we drove to burn you,

  I saw through the cars window

  a class of boys, fifteen perhaps,

  playing touch-rugby on a narrow field.

  At home again, I sit

  with more of your whisky in my hand,

  forging my freedom,

  waiting for your effects.

  GREGORY WOODS

  Andy

  Here and again

  here, I keep on

  coming back to

  this place, as though

  I had been born

  in its shadows

  or wanted to

  relive some dead

  passion of my

  youth in its heat.

  It is the kind

  of fastness I

  could move to for

  good, if not for

  the snag that an

  adolescents

  perineum

  offers nothing

  more steady than

  no fixed abode.

  STEVE CRANFIELD

  Gym Class of ’67 (Summer of Love)

  How it was. Pat Stack, lanky, loth to wear

  A top, his tight shorts always lingering

  Over slim hips. Pat Shallow, coal-black hair

  In curls, pellucid nipples blistering

  His marble pecs. Geoff Tompkins, tanned broad chest,

  The first to flaunt an adult’s cock and bush.

  Paul Grubiak, in many ways the thickest,

  Fore and aft. Steve Cranfield, needing a push

  To lose his vest. Kev Hartnett, smart Y-fronts,

  Easing his balls into their soft white pouch.

  Dick Green, gym master, sunning himself once

  On pitch (not showering, alas!). To touch

  This side of sweaty sleep proving unable ...

  Writing, one hand still gropes beneath the table.

  TIM NEAVE

  Poem: L.M.C.

  It was the smallest moment I’ve known

  in some ways. Hardly the start

  of what should change me.

  But its

  with me always, like a mist

  burned off from the beach —

  the familiar details; the knowledge it was there.

  There is not a picture in this.

  Anyone who painted that street

  would miss the closeness almost completely

  of its ordinary grandeur, and

  in trying to write about it like this

  I acknowledge how far I am

  from being a part of what I want.

  Listen to the meaninglessness of this:

  I want an ordinary boy,

  a fishworker in jeans or overalls,

  boots and the stench of fish,

  splashed with the skin and guts of fish;

  I want to drink with him

  in a fishermans pub on Freeman Street

  and lose myself to the same stupor

  he spoke through when we stopped to talk

  outside the Kent Arms a week back.

  If there’s a poetry in this

  is it to do with the beauty of being there,

  the realistic people stunned by alcohol

  into serenity and community, or is it

  an educated outsiders tragic desire

  knocked against the concrete of a hard world?

  I want a particular boy

  in slack jeans and a dirty shirt,

  pulling that smile from his caution

  that lights up everything, like a flare;

  a flare that soars then collapses

  till its brightness penetrates the waters cold

  and the same blackness hasn’t gone

  although there’s someone searching there

  and the rescuer and rescued are as one

  in that the tragedy or heroism of it all

  is not decided, in that we’re both at sea

  hoping to find another human being

  who will reclaim meaning from the shocked void.

  These words I play with here,

  it’s just me laughing at myself,

  enjoying the pretence of largeness

  in my
particular despair. I mock.

  I have touched him and smelled him.

  The basic sensations of my love for him

  are animal, which persuades me

  of their complete worth. How different they are

  from the togetherness of friendship

  or the couples shopping on this street.

  How strange that the image which comes

  if I permit myself an open mind

  is the spurt of my semen against his neck

  that’s newly shaved and raw

  like it was the first time I wanted to touch him

  that November morning in a classroom

  when he showed up for the first time in weeks

  and laughed like he was somehow different

  from the blond-haired boy I had seen before,

  like now he had acquired new needs

  that he needed a different space for

  from the inhumane restrictions of school.

  I don’t know what he wanted from that day,

  nor those later unscheduled meetings we had

  to talk through his prospects for exams;

  but I hope I played my part for him,

  even if that’s to be the end of it.

  It enlarges my heart to know I’ve helped,

  and in some awful sense it’s enough

  if he ever thinks of me and smiles.

  A huge space opens, and these things aren’t real

  so much as abstractions around a theme,

  an essay on the poverty of human love

  between two people of the same sex

  that lacks the awesomeness that made me write it.

  A white-caught gull against the wind

  that’s more a symbol than a bird.

  And that isn’t what I meant.

  PETER WYLES

  Beauty

  Make him into a stained glass window,

  a shrine lit by a thousand candles,

  an icon as big as a wall.

  Hes used to worship.

  We could have the relics here,

  his favourite brand of hair conditioner,

  the button-fly Levis he might have worn,

  the sole remaining photograph.

  We’ve nothing he touched, but us,

  nothing he owned as memento.

  He was the briefest of love’s Messiahs,

  who returned through cloud to Warrington.

  Nothing less than bowing down

  will do. We must contemplate

  the perfection of his outward form,

  the virile beauty of his cock,

  the limp flesh of his excuses.

  IESTYN EDWARDS

  Of Course I Do

  I walked to the end of that street,

  Saw the overshot bridge

  Whose grey walls are warmed

  By tight graffiti;

  Heard, but didn’t see,

  Cars stalking past

  And flutes shrilling

  From a whitewashed Suffolk church:

  Why did you show this to me?

  You know that I scorn,

  In argument and passion,

  The comfort of compromise;

  You darkly cringe to shoulder the burden —

  Burial of together.

  But, grinning mercurially, louche canines glowing,

  You ask me what else can I show?

  A velvet voice, gondola black,

  Dredging our tear-warmed sea,

  Echoes from a backdrop

  Of moon tie-dyed twilight,

  To strengthen my tears

  And coax my vessel on:

  Hearts horizon of our passion bound.

  Ahead, you reach up and shape for me

  A weather shield

  From a corner of heaven.

  Look back into the middle-distance;

  Tell me what you see.

  I see an olive grove,

  A stumbling kid goat

  And silent late afternoon.

  DINYAR GODREJ

  Anyone could succumb ...

  Anyone could succumb to those eyes

  and, being drawn, find

  disconcerting silence.

  Search instead the domestic terrain

  for faultlines,

  mnemonic chinks.

  There are no photographs

  and everything comes from far off,

  settled in dust.

  So, again, imagine

  urgent love beside the steady clock

  a floor above the heaped sink:

  as though our impulse was the sea,

  its rushing spume

  lust not fury.

  This roiling game of getting on top,

  hot exploration,

  sticky end.

  Yet memory stays sealed, adrift.

  We exhale, everything subsides,

  so rest.

  Limbs interlaced in the warm containing bath,

  eyes lock.

  It brims but does not spill.

  IV AS IT IS

  ____________________________

  ‘As it is, plenty ... ’ as Auden said. The poems gathered here tell of gay love as it is: seldom uncomplicated, seldom uninteresting. Some affairs end in tears, others in laughter. Sometimes a moment is etched into a single exact emblem, as in Robert Friends ‘Shirts’ or Francis King’s ‘The Bank-Notes’; elsewhere, the external world intervenes with odd or ironic messages — the mathematician’s ‘true passion’ chalked on a blackboard in Thom Gunn’s ‘The Problem’, the sign warning ‘Beware of Trains’ in Adam Johnson’s ‘Unscheduled Stop’.

  The tones range from heartfelt directness — Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 29’, Edwin Morgan’s ‘Dear man, my love goes out in waves ... ’ — to no less moving obliquity: Paul Wilkins writes, meaningfully, of an inability to say just what he means, while Steve Cranfield contributes a love poem about not writing a love poem.

  MICHELANGELO

  Translated by JA. Symonds

  To Tommaso de’ Cavalieri

  With your fair eyes a charming light I see,

  For which my own blind eyes would peer in vain;

  Stayed by your feet the burden I sustain

  Which my lame feet find all too strong for me;

  Wingless upon your pinions forth I fly;

  Heavenward your spirit stirreth me to strain;

  E’en as you will I blush and blanch again,

  Freeze in the sun, burn ’neath a frosty sky.

  Your will includes and is the lord of mine;

  Life to my thoughts within your heart is given;

  My words begin to breathe upon your breath:

  Like to the moon am I, that cannot shine

  Alone; for lo! our eyes see nought in heaven

  Save what the living sun illumineth.

  *

  Why should I seek to ease intense desire

  With still more tears and windy words of grief,

  When heaven, or late or soon, sends no relief

  To souls whom love hath robed around with fire?

  Why need my aching heart to death aspire,

  When all must die? Nay, death beyond belief

  Unto these eyes would be both sweet and brief,

  Since in my sum of woes all joys expire!

  Therefore, because I cannot shun the blow

  I rather seek, say who must rule my breast,

  Gliding between her gladness and her woe?

  If only chains and bands can make me blest,

  No marvel if alone and bare I go

  An armèd Knights captive and slave confessed.

  MICHAEL DRAYTON

  from Idea

  To nothing fitter can I thee compare

  Than to the son of some rich pennyfather,

  Who, having now brought on his end with care,

  Leaves to his son all he had heaped together;

  This new rich novice, lavish of his chest,

  To one man gives, doth on another spend,

/>   Then here he riots, yet among the rest

  Haps to lend some to one true honest friend.

  Thy gifts thou in obscurity doth waste,

  False friends thy kindness, born but to deceive thee,

  Thy love that is on the unworthy placed,

  Time hath thy beauty, which with age will leave thee;

  Only that little which to me was lent

  I give thee back, when all the rest is spent.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Sonnet 29

  When in disgrace with Fortune and mens eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself and curse my fate,

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

  Desiring this mans art, and that mans scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least;

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

  Like to the lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth, sings hymns at heavens gate;

  For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings,

  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.