Six Love Songs

             I
We are both silver sea-trout
And have risen to delicate flies on streams
And got away.
The young ferns balance on the wet earth
Like green smoke above a coal.
Let us watch the sun throw gold plates
Down to us through lake water
Where none fish.

             II
The Recreation Gardens are smothered over
With a bottle-coloured wood of wet trees
And the gates were shut at ten.
With your straight thin pipe and your face and arms
Stamped black as against mauve paper
You sit piping in our open window.
It may be only a very large daintily-moving dog
Shut in the Gardens, and that I did not hear 
The few notes like a sleepy quail.

             III
I have bought a pound of jade wool
Of the color of the round bases of toy trees
And a quarter of mole wool
Coloured like the smoke of a steamer.
In two or three weels
You, whose spirit is as quick as silver dust
Stirred into the sea,
Shall have the appearance of a tinted 
Jacinth laughing in the rain.

            IV
There is frost
As if a cutter of images of you
Had dropped powder of geranium marble
On the coarse dark grass.
I have left you asleep
And feel that if the candle
Set down inside the open door
To throw continuous William Allen Richardson roses
Into the cold lavender morning
Does not blow out before I get back
You will still be there.

             V
Because of the glass shade
Our marble table was ever the cross-bar
Of a white A
And the rest angles of broken lemon light
With a drowned sprig of mountain-ash berries,
A peat-coloured crystal carrying
Cherries and crushed mint against your lips.
Now the nights are a cool
Pattern of thin black wood bed-bars
With spread of orange and another orange,
Firm black letters lightly carrying eyes
Among white margins,
And brown tea.

             VI
The night is so full of movement
That the stars seem like corn being threshed
Against a blue barn.
The wind is a black river
And just for a moment
The moon a small green fish
Swimming in your hair.