This Talk of Poems

I will tell you this thing,
as I do
(this is the game we play together:
one retracts the half-revealed,
one coaxes out what’s left concealed). This, then,
is what I will say to you,
stumbling over your eyes’ architecture,
a clumsy grasping after words—
I called your eyes cathedrals, was sincere,
and blush to remember how you laughed—
this, then, is what I will say—

no, I can’t. Not yet! Not now,
not when the secret curls and stammers
while you clamour insistence, disbelief—not now,
but later, perhaps, when you don’t expect
a sudden surge of metaphor,
a tidal rush, a rising line of foam and salt
to soak shock into your ankles.

We’re not there yet. Not yet at the place
where I can tell you how I think
of days when you’ll tell some other girl
about this girl who read you poems
thinking you enjoyed them, thinking
you listened to anything more than the sound of her voice,
the funny lilting of her foreign vowels
and her foreign cadence,
mixing syllables and emphases
while longing for yours.

“She even wrote me a poem,” you’ll say,
to this other girl, cool and secure
in her place at the end of your history,
“and it was a bit shit, but what do I know about poetry.”

I won’t tell you this, won’t read you this,
because how could it ever be the time
to tell you I write in self-defence,
to tell you that to write to you
is to think of you hurting me—
to imagine you hurting me
if you haven’t yet—

and to remember that when I said
those poems I wrote for other people
those poems I didn’t write for you
are full of thorns, are healing stings,
are scabbing over wounds—
you said,
you don’t care about me enough
to write a poem—
but meant
you don’t care about me enough
to let me hurt you.

You’ll say this isn’t fair. How could you know
that a poem is a grudge
clutched tight against the liver, bile-steeped,
nursed to savage potency? How could you know
that a poem is catharsis,
is septic in conception, a boil
lanced in execution?

You never listened, after all,
to anything but the sound of my voice.

So I’ll cut you this slack. Here is a poem.
It isn’t pretty, it isn’t built
of honey and spice, isn’t sweet
or savoury, isn’t anything
like what a poem is thought to be.
I won’t call you Green Man, Diamond Jack,
Knight of Coins or Pentacles,
won’t speak of stretching out on graves,
or how the tracery of your irises
might have taught architects to dream
of stained glass.

I certainly won’t tell you I love you.

And maybe once you’ve read it,
to yourself, in quiet,
in your own mind’s voice,
you’ll think twice before asking me
to write you another.