Do you remember, Margaret, how we came
Out on the heath our first evening
Together? How the pines rose like a name
Cried once by a dying man; and whirriting
Nearby the nightjar’s bell
Rang down reluctant curtain on the day?
Do you remember the brute smell
Of bracken that heaved at the darkness where we lay?
I could hear my heart like a lupin pod
Rattle its wizened dreams. (What now could rally
Hope grown dead pale feeding on its own blood?)
And then I heard your voice say ‘Tell me!’
It was the dew that falls on the castaway –
Honest and small as the dew but far more tender –
A sweetness drugging his dismay,
Though yet no rescuer sail flares up from under
The parched horizon.
So I was happier
Than I had been since loneliness began,
Secure with you, my wise and witty dear,
And Douglas the rabelaisian keen man.
Honeysuckle tuned our world
To roundelays that made the stiff sun nod;
All the summers of Arcady were revealed
In a blackbird’s period.
This hollow, where noon lay down to drowse and blink,
Every night became a bowl
Brimmed by the moon with nectar for me to drink
Rapt in the clear refectory of your soul.
I felt your thought reach out sure fingers
For mine, that had groped so long, so emptily,
Finding no flame but a touch turned it to cinders.
Your hands on mine, we worked the key
(How rustily it stammered!) of this dark mind,
This cupboard crammed with sour forgotten
Live skeletons yammering underground –
Fantastic fears in strait-jackets, all sodden
With solitude.
We turned the key. We let
The brave, bird-echoing sunlight in.
No monster showed: there was only Margaret,
And love, and a dead most laughable mannequin.