Gay Love Poetry

by Neil Powell (ed)

  Sonnet 87

  Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,

  And like enough thou knowst thy estimate:

  The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;

  My bonds in thee are all determinate.

  For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,

  And for that riches where is my deserving?

  The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,

  And so my patent back again is swerving.

  Thyself thou gavst, thy own worth then not knowing,

  Or me, to whom thou gavst it, else mistaking;

  So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,

  Comes home again, on better judgement making.

  Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,

  In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  from Troilus and Cressida

  RICHARD BARNFIELD

  To His Friend Master R.L., in

  Praise of Music and Poetry

  If music and sweet poetry agree,

  As they must needs, the sister and the brother,

  Then must the love be great twixt thee and me,

  Because thou lovst the one, and I the other.

  Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch

  Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;

  Spenser, to me, whose deep conceit is such

  As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.

  Thou lovst to hear the sweet melodious sound

  That Phoebus’ lute, the queen of music, makes;

  And I in deep delight am chiefly drowned

  Whenas himself to singing he betakes:

  One god is god of both, as poets feign;

  One knight loves both, and both in thee remain.

  WALT WHITMAN

  from Calamus

  Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,

  Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and

  unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face

  in my hands;

  Hours sleepless, deep in the night, when I go forth, speeding

  swiftly the country roads, or through the city streets,

  or pacing miles and miles, stifling plaintive cries;

  Hours discouraged, distracted — for the one I cannot content

  myself without, soon I saw him content himself without me;

  Hours when I am forgotten, (O weeks and months are passing,

  but I believe I am never to forget!)

  Sullen and suffering hours! (I am ashamed — but it is useless —

  I am what I am;)

  Hours of my torment — I wonder if other men ever have

  the like, out of the like feelings?

  Is there even one other like me — distracted — his friend,

  his lover, lost to him?

  Is he too as I am now? Does he still rise in the morning,

  dejected, thinking who is lost to him? and at night,

  awaking, think who is lost?

  Does he too harbour his friendship silent and endless?

  harbour his anguish and passion?

  Does some stray reminder, or casual mention of a name,

  bring the fit back upon him, taciturn and deprest?

  Doe he see himself reflected in me? In these hours,

  does he see the face of his hours reflected?

  WILFRED OWEN

  To Eros

  In that I loved you, Love, I worshipped you.

  In that I worshipped well, I sacrificed.

  All of most worth I bound and burnt and slew:

  Old peaceful lives; frail flowers; firm friends; and Christ.

  I slew all falser loves; I slew all true,

  That I might nothing love but your truth, Boy.

  Fair fame I cast away as bridegrooms do

  Their wedding garments in their haste of joy.

  But when I fell upon your sandalled feet,

  You laughed; you loosed away my lips; you rose.

  I heard the singing of your wings’ retreat;

  Far-flown, I watched you flush the Olympian snows,

  Beyond my hoping. Starkly I returned

  To stare upon the ash of all I burned.

  ROBERT FRIEND

  Shirts

  Rereading Cavafy I suddenly remembered

  my own Ionian Sea, and a steamer

  plying between the islands.

  And I remembered, amidst the passengers

  crowding the deck of the steamer,

  a handsome young Greek wearing a shirt I very much admired,

  and he in turn admiring mine.

  We took off our shirts then and there

  and exchanged them.

  I wore his shirt next to my skin for many years.

  But it was never the same on my body

  as on his, and he was not there

  to take it off.

  EDWIN MORGAN

  ‘Dear man, my love goes out in waves . . .’

  Dear man, my love goes out in waves

  and breaks. Whatever is, craves.

  Terrible the cage

  to see all life from, brilliantly about,

  crowds, pavements, cars, or hear the common shout

  of goals in a near park.

  But now the black bars arc blue in my breath — split — part —

  I’m out — it’s art,

  it’s love, it’s rage —

  Standing in rage in decent air

  will never clear the place of care.

  Simply to be

  should be enough, in the same city, and let

  absurd despair tramp and roar off-set.

  Be satisfied with it,

  the gravel and the grit

  the struggling eye can’t lift,

  the veils that drift,

  the weird to dree.

  Press close to me at midnight as

  you say goodbye; that’s what it has

  to offer, life

  I mean. Into the frost with you; into

  the bed with me; and get the light out too.

  Better to shake unseen

  and let real darkness screen

  the shadows of the heart,

  the vacant part—

  ner, husband, wife.

  FRANCIS KING

  The Bank-Notes

  Really there is little enough I shall care now to remember

  And perhaps this only, the thirst, the dust and the terror

  of being alone,

  Darkness that evening of August — or might it have been

  September?

  And flesh that burned on flesh, and the hard, cold touch

  of stone.

  Really there is little enough to remember. And time confuses

  Such nights, reality with dream and loss with lack,

  So perhaps that night does not exist to which my mind

  now chooses,

  Obstinately chooses now to twist and still twist back.

  Yet surely it must exist: for how clearly I remember

  The sound of tearing bank-notes as we struggled beneath

  the trees

  That far-off evening of August — or was it perhaps September? —

  And the sweat upon that face and the blood upon my knees.

  It had all seemed long forgotten; it is only now as I stand

  Waiting for the men to come to carry my trunks away

  That I feel those lips on my lips, that hand within my hand,

  And again the two taut bodies lunge outwards and clutch

  and sway.

  THOM GUNN

  The Problem

  Close to the top

  Of an encrusted dark

  Converted brownstone West of Central Park

  (For this was 1961),

  In his room that

  a narrow hutch

  Was sliced from some once-cavemous flat,

  Where now a window took a whole wall up

  And t
ints were bleached-out by the sun

  Of many a summer day,

  We lay

  upon his hard thin bed.

  He seemed all body, such

  As normally you couldn’t touch,

  Reckless and rough,

  One of Boss Cupid’s red—

  haired errand boys

  Who couldn’t get there fast enough.

  Almost like fighting...

  We forgot about the noise,

  But feeling turned so self-delighting

  That hurry soon gave way

  To give-and-take,

  Till each contested, for the other’s sake,

  To end up not in winning and defeat

  But in a draw.

  Meanwhile beyond the aureate hair

  I saw

  A scrap of blackboard with its groove for chalk,

  Nailed to a strip of lath

  That had half-broken through,

  The problem drafted there

  still incomplete.

  After I found out in the talk

  Companion to a cigarette,

  That he, turning the problem over yet

  In his disorderly and ordered head,

  Attended graduate school to teach

  And study math,

  his true

  Passion cyphered in chalk beyond my reach.

  ROGER FINCH

  A Publicity Photograph

  Butch. You are no poet, you are not

  sweet Thomas Chatterton blacking out

  limply at eighteen across his bed

  in the chiaroscuro of his attic,

  you are Butch, the neighbourhood bully, whose threat

  ‘I’ll beat you to a pulp’ simply because

  I was the neighbourhood sissy almost

  came true, his thumbnail inside my cheek,

  his teeth clamped on my earlobe so hard

  it must have been passion. You, at least,

  have an easy smile and easy eyes.

  But look, you have the same wire-haired terrier hair,

  the same brutal brows, the same bull neck.

  And why are you wearing that black leather

  jacket and that black T-shirt that from where

  I am standing reads ‘...lgar...’ or ‘...dgar...’

  in white? You are threatening me. I touch

  my ear, believing your strong white teeth

  made the scar there, I touch other parts

  of my body, believing your hands can reach

  me from where you are sitting in that white

  kitchen chair, intimately. Your words

  are full of subjected women who moan

  as they twist around you but I believe

  I could teach your body to lie still on the floorboards

  or the moss-softened rocks as I lower

  myself in the attitude of a cross

  upon you, the fluttering white wings

  of my chest beating against your chest.

  I want that first real surreptitious kiss.

  J.D. McCLATCHY

  After Ovid

  Apollo and Hyacinthus

  Guilts dirty hands, memory’s kitchen sink ...

  It’s bad faith makes immortal love.

  Take a closer look at Hyacinth.

  Dark bud-tight curls and poppy-seed stubble,

  The skin over his cheekbones pale as poison

  Slowly dripped from eye to eye,

  And a crotch that whispers its single secret

  Even from behind the waiter’s apron.

  He’s pouting now, staring at the traffic.

  Every year there’s a new one at the bar

  Sprung from whatever nowhere — the country,

  The islands, the middle west ...

  The old man at the far corner table, decades ago

  Called by his critics ‘the sun god

  Of our poetry’, sits stirring

  A third coffee and an opening line,

  Something like So often you renew

  Yourself or You and I resemble

  Nothing else Every other pair of lovers.

  The grease stain on his left sleeve

  Winks as the lights come on.

  He signals the boy and means to ask

  Under cover of settling the check

  If, with the usual understanding

  And for the same pleasures, he’d return again

  Tonight, after work, there was something

  He’d wanted to show the boy, a picture

  Of two sailors that if held upside down ...

  It’s then he notices the gold cufflinks

  The boy is wearing, the pair the poet’s

  Friends had given him when his first book —

  That moist sheaf of stifled longings —

  Appeared in Alexandria.

  To have stolen from one who would give

  Anything: what better pretext

  To put the end to ‘an arrangement’?

  The old man falls silent, gets up from his seat,

  Leaves a few coins on the table

  And walks out through his confusions,

  Homeward through the sidestreets, across the square,

  Up the fifty-two stone steps, up the years

  And back to his study, its iron cot.

  The heaving had stopped. The last sad strokes

  Of the town clock had rung: Anger was one,

  Humiliation the other.

  He sat there until dawn and wrote out the poem

  That has come to be in all the anthologies,

  The one you know, beginning

  You are my sorrow and my fault. The one that goes

  In all my songs; in my mind, in my mouth,

  The sighing still sounds of you.

  The one that ends with the boy — the common,

  Adored, two-timing hustler — turned

  Into a flower, the soft-fleshed lily

  But of a bruised purple that grief will come

  To scar with its initials AI, AI.

  O, the ache insists.

  MICHAEL SCHMIDT

  ‘His father was a baker ... ’

  for A.G.G.

  His father was a baker, he the youngest son.

  I understand they beat him, and they loved him.

  His father was a baker in Oaxaca:

  I understand his bakery was the best

  And his three sons and all his daughters helped

  As children with the baking and the pigs.

  I can imagine chickens in their patio,

  At Christmastime a wattled turkey-cock, a dog

  Weathered like a wash-board, yellow-eyed,

  That no one stroked, but ate the scraps of bread

  And yapped to earn his keep. I understand

  The family prospered though the father drank

  And now the second brother drinks, often

  To excess. I understand as well that love

  Came early, bladed, and then went away

  And came again in other forms, some foreign,

  And took him by the heart away from home.

  His father was a baker in Oaxaca

  And here I smell the loaves that rose in ovens

  Throughout a childhood not yet quite complete

  And smell the fragrance of his jet-black hair,

  Taste his sweet dialect that is mine too,

  Until I understand I am to be a baker,

  Up before dawn wth trays and trays of dough

  To feed him this day, next day and for ever —

  Or for a time — the honey-coloured loaves.

  NEIL POWELL

  The Difference

  We watch the gathering sea through sepia dusk

  Across a beach of fish-heads, glass beads, relics

  Dumped by a careless deity called chance.

  Ferry and trawler exchange a passing glance.

  Dark comes fast: lighthouse and streetlamp pierce it.

  You sit at the window, silent as I writ
e.

  We are no longer locked in self-defence.

  Being with you has made all the difference.

  PAUL WILKINS

  Glasnost’

  The month Ivan’s and Misha’s tank whined

  juddering into Wenceslas Square,

  I passed O-level Russian.

  ‘Fascinating,’ grins Alastair,

  who is listening to these lines.

  August 1968: ‘Socialisms human face’ was

  Dubcek’s, a poster on a Clapham bedroom wall, his thin mouth

  smiling under tired, vulture eyes. In Croydon we heard

  Prague Radio crackling, deciphered the chalked tank-turrets’

  ‘Volodya, go home! Your Anna is with Fyodor!’

  I still have some of the Russian words.

  Kak vas zavoot? I can ask someone.

  ‘What do they call you?’ ‘What is your name?’

  Chai s’limonom, parzhalsta. I can order a cup of lemon tea.

  I know that Glasnost' must be a noun.

  And I remember Lenin’s question: What is to be done?

  The man who taught us how to ask Shto delat'? was

  ‘obviously queer’. That August

  he tried to persuade me I should take the subject further.

  I went for Economics, collaborated in the rumours.