Poems Archives — Tom Stacey

If you take as time

all the threshing and winnowing

then the grain is

what you have carried outside time.

You cup them in your hand –

glimpses, glimpses.

From such fine grain

life once escaped the inert

and made the dust bring forth for ever.

the flowering weed

For generations we had waited

as incomplete as all the others standing in their doorways.

And even yet we steal each other,

a double theft, my Lara, your Zhivago –

our love illicit, not a garden flower

but a flowering weed that grew

brilliantly in crevices of rock

long before man ever cleared a plot of ground

and planted by intent.

trees’ end

trees' end

We seem to know

the place already, meeting at the trees' end.

Have our ancestors been here? Each

know the path the other has come by,

though I've not tracked through your bright fields

nor you my woods.

We seemed to know

that something was expected,

and we found we loved

neither was surprised

but only glad this was the place

our blood remembered a thousand years

since we were children first.

summer

Of all my seasons this

has been the longest and the sweetest summer

and it's to stay for ever.

Sap in our green is bliss

running through all our stems so wilfully

no season's cold can sever

the wild exquisite flow.

You lie at my roots, I at yours,

our green oak spanning

where we lie loving low.

We came together, two springing streams, two dawns,

two single visions scanning

adjacent valleys that led -

how could we guess? - each to the same deep stream.

Oh what a sunny river

what a clear stream-bed

what green and secret banks and lazy bends,

swift lights that quiver

through leaves on our surfaces.

Your in unfathomable eyes and limbs

are summer's sap and stream

and all that by nature nurses,

By love, life back into life where life

had all but ceased to gleam.

letter on the Upper Nile

And taking our your letter under dusk's long firmament

I let the words you wrote fly upwards like fleeing birds,

and high among their fellow birds they swung and swirled

and wove the whole deep sky into a seamless garment

of blue gone to black and star-gold, in which we two were furled.

So we lay all that night, wrapped in your canopy of words.

And all that was created wild, river and rock and air,

lay in complicity with us: the water swirled the stone,

found out its crevices, the river's bed a bed

for lovers; and air lay with earth and made a fervent pair.

The torrents of our eyes spated the water, our love-sighs fed

the wind, and in our triumph nothing was loveless or alone.

Blue Nile Gorge

O shall I find a way to conjure you

Across the wandering spaces?

Or in the bombardment of black and broken water

And in these canyoned places

That magnify all sound and wash my skull

Ear through to ear, shall I capture

One single cry from you, one smile or sigh

That recollects our rapture?

The cascading of your love is far too sweet

To share such savaging,

And the depths of your wild eyes too silent and clear

To mingle in this blind raging.

Yet here within, beyond all space and sound

That are themselves messageless,

In the beat of my own heart I catch a throb of yours

That slakes my loneliness.

winter’s morning

winter's morning

What is this love to you? – no more

than a web woven of parting and absence,

a cradle the frost spins for evanescence

and fixes at three trembling points or four

between reed and reed at the lake's brink

on a winter's morning? Or do you see

us two linked only by fragile tracery

of long-wintered beeches? Or think

we run ripples on the lake?

Patternings

as frail as these have a place in nature,

vanishing always between past and future,

and in love too is a place for yearnings

and the torture of wind in the web and high

mockery of leafless twigs.

But where am I?

O come and find me where the rock gives birth

in the deep luxurious hollows of the earth

and find me in the boles of mighty trees.

Find me and love me in the mosses of my ease

where lusty roots and limbs timelessly writhe,

where our long summer's buried but alive.

at destination

Do you know there are two roads?

We take them both.

We take the hard highway, scuffing the gravel

with determined stride; and with us travel

innumerable friends and strangers, loath

within the crowd to hazard separation

on the sun-drummed route towards a destination

not one of us shall ever reach.

But you and I

take also another road that the high-grassed fell

hides from the mob – a pathway plunging a dell

undergrown too deep for any raiding eye

to delve our leaf-funnelled passage.

Darling girl,

here in this tree-borne birdsong and the hollow curl

of water at our feet, we two can stray

where we will – at destination all the way.

Atlantis

At first it was only the rock-face that I saw,

a distant majesty of white, a hint

across the bleak sea, a glimmer reflecting,

a sun not risen yet.

Is it a rock-face?

So early in the morning there can be no certainty.

I’ve sailed this patch of empty sea before

and I had been told this was a landless ocean:

the drooped horizon and the motion of hurrying

waves the interminable narrative.

But then this rock

suggesting land – a geographic point

at which a continent leaned out and turned the dark sea

green and white.

I would not try to explore

the continent behind the shore. If this was

a swelling of firm earth out of the flux,

a site of fixity and love, I would not seek

for any further knowledge than that this land

lay here against the sea, an anchorage,

a place of stillness, joy and resolution always.

It has risen like Atlantis overnight!

These white citadels and palaces of rock

still glisten from the oceanic suck.

And now I’m anchored here and gone ashore,

climbing again and again above the rhyming

breakers into our tilted fields to lie

beside you in the sun, I ask if this land

that claims eternity will not sink back

another night beneath the impenetrable drift.

the river

You stood on the other bank,

the river between.

Each waded into the mainstream

to touch fingers

before the force and depth

swept us away for ever.

Fingers touched and more, clasped

four-legged against the current,

then were we lifted, borne away

and could not clamber back

nor even drown,

for we’d become the river.