The Obsession

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

                                                W. B. Yeats, “When You Are Old”

Of love, I have left the best unspoken.

Hundreds of pages I might have filled,

thousands the images comparing you

to every icon of classical beauty.

Instead I wait for the calm reflection,

beamed back from the pool of the mind.

Night cannot know the sun will follow,

     nor the road, the conquering weed,

     nor the truth of love, the worm inside it.

I have a sole thought

in the sombre purity of detached years —

a gold and lapus scarab

untarnished in the pyramid of time —

it moves my pen, my haunted eye,

defies my age’s forgetfulness,

a swan’s lament suspended, held.

If it be not said, this

perennial song,

which I would say in full but that

you and the sun take it away from me

and one of you comes not back —

if it be not sung at last,

     my soul, it dies with me,

nor I nor the world larger for it,

nor you, moved neither to hear

     nor answer it.

You sat at the perfect center

     of grace and beauty:

around you the songs of divas

cast a protective veil. We hovered,
we, your nightly guests and admirers,

in breathless empathy, like courtiers

around your darkened room, cowed

before a pair of expensive speakers,

a turntable no hands but yours

were allowed to touch,

as Streisand twisted

from comedy to bluesy darkness —

as Piaf chansoned herself to death for love

of the boxer, the convict, the forlorn

and nameless man qui me suive

dans la rue, for the cruel one,

Milord Death who sat at her café table —

Inca Yma soaring four-octaves high

in wind song of Andean lament.

And then suddenly, a dash of Horowitz,

or the shriek-scrape of Edgard Varese,

all this so different from my world

of Beethoven, Mahler, and opera.

Your magic was in making it seem

that every love song had you

as its only object, and that we,

each moth and mite of us,

were doomed to circle you

as that last arc on a long playing record

when the needle leaves the fade out

to final orbit, imprisons us

in heart-thump going-nowhere.

Then came the palpable silence

of no more music, our talk exhausted;

our clumsy withdrawal, as one by one

we are not chosen, each home

to a single bed and a shared despair.

If this had been the Renaissance,

dirks might have been drawn

in the darkened alley outside your door,
or poisons purchased from crones

to eliminate all rivals; love poems hurled

into and through your window casements.

Your tribute comes in dark-shadowed eyes,

mumbled confessions or silent hatred,

the red ribbon of a slit wrist.

I did not play the game, I thought.

I watched the moth-dance as from

an amused distance, and told you so.

“I know you know,” you told me,

“and that is why I respect and fear you.”

I never told you that every sight

of you threw me vertiginous

as though we clung to the near apex
of Mount Everest, as though
to leave you were a slide downward
to the bottom-most dark valley.

It was madness. I knew it was madness.

It has never left me:

I have loved you again and again

     in different faces,

weathered your variable storms,

     the deceitful clouds

     that hid you from me

     and from self-judgment.

I asked too much,

you said — my journey was too long and arduous.

So I stood alone in my passion’s temple,

hymning to gods who could not love themselves.
We could storm the citadels of art together,
I said (visions of a Duncan dance in the Parthenon).

All you said, vaguely, was
I don’t want to be thought of
     as part of a couple.

You thought you had no place in these poems,

the making of word-art a mystery to you,

as the making of your sculptures was to me:

the poem a thing inside too many words

reduced to a few; the sculpted figure

a thing inside a block of stone awaiting

the removal of all that was inessential.

I shuddered each time I touched

    a thing you had made;

perhaps my poems were like fire to you,

a thing too fierce to be endured,
a light you did not wish
to have shined upon you.

I learned from you that I do not write alone:
there is always one reader, and one written of.

That my soul, ensnared in the web of yours

takes without cost and enlarges thereby.

In the moment I confessed to myself

I loved you, I saw in full light

what Beatrice was to Dante, Lara to Zhivago,

the loved boy to Hafiz the madman.

Full many nights we courted, flirted,

     word-circled one another.

One night our talk outlasted

     the guttering candle.

That night, you came to my bed —

    O summer night of which I cannot speak —

almost to curse me by a single giving

you never intended to give again,
as though one touch would cure me
     of my madness.

Years I dreamt of you,

     knowing only the where and how of you,

     not writing, not calling.

I refined, from shattered bits of you,

     the man you might have become

     the words you might have spoken

     the art that might have poured from your hands
         in answer to my words’ urgings.

You had no inkling what children we birthed!

Here in my wordy palace your regency’s intact—

     back on drear earth,

discarded lovers conspired against you,

moths in your aurora,

graying the New England autumn

or bleaching to graveyard white

the coral reef beyond your final place of hiding.

Did you fear me to the end? My harmless love-lie

trapped you only in the realm of angels

where immaterial ghosts of me

came to call, masked, and offered dangerous prizes.
Or perhaps you didn’t think of me at all,
the dark fete poem of my yearning filed away
with diplomas and yearbooks and bric-a-brac.

I waited for seven years, then seven more.

We met, collided, repelled like angry magnets.

Once in a great while I received

     a polite letter;

once in a great while I sent

imprudent poems, my pride and solace.
I said, You are in here somewhere, in some
of these poems. I did not say, You are in them all.

I have, somewhere in a drawer of sad things
two presents you gave me: a beaded Indian
sunwheel, like a captive star,

and a necklace you fashioned
     from a pyrite shard, fool’s gold
I refuse to submit to metaphor,
just as I refuse to wear it.

Now they have told me of your death,
which culminates the silence between us.
On my autumnal journey homeward,
I come to the place of our meeting,
back to the silent, pebbled lakeshore.
I wait beneath a gibbous moon,
chilled as the damp fog enfolds me.
I have no promise of ghosts, or of Heaven,
no cause to hope that some thread, tenuous
as thought in the ether, might draw
you here, touch to my touch, companioning.
So much unfinished business between us,
too few the decades of life in which to do it.
All the wrong people keep dying, I tell myself.

I touch the limestone with its fossil memories.
I taste the water, breathe in
the hovering mist, the bat and maple aura
of the pioneer graveyard. Some blossom,
complex and curled upon itself
like a tropical orchid,
drifts silently toward me in the black water.

Know this as the place of my waiting,
a waiting that will outlive me,
repeated as some other stands here
and reads aloud these words, the vow
I made some thirty years ago:

Know I will wait,
          that I am bound,
               that no other has ever been awaited
                    or will be.