FOUR LOVE SONGS

I. Dido
The sea forgets her masters: the seaman
turns from her flashing hair, her green eyes,
strips to the muscle for a harbour leman;
and smiles when he dies.

The land forgets the reaper: his sickle 
burrows in strange corn, his tavern tale
is lewd with names of women who were fickle;
he laughs, he drinks his ale.

The air forgets her lightning: the thunder
dies in remoter valleys; the great spout
of spangling water, corn and sea pull under;
she burns, and there is drought.


II. Europa
Fierce from the stoking lech of spring,
dark bulls charge bellowing
their criss-cross night of owls and ghosts;
trains; or like planets curve and swing
with the sounds of stormy coasts.
	Lackaday, lully lullay
	A dragon hath borne my make away.

Sweet her body and most warm,
her scent of rose-geranium;
bitter the blue-lit shed, the smells
of cinder and of ghostly steam;
the empty ladder of the rails.
	Lackaday, lully lullay
	A dragon hath borne my make away.

His burly humming wheels are hands,
tell in the arches of their winds
a dim rosary of towns;
the symbol of their urgent wands
an iron mockery of man's.
	Lackaday, lully lullay
	A dragon hath borne my make away.

Little wonder if he could
but pause to snatch her maidenhood:
they found another continent.
Zeus himself and hardly stood
against so nice a form and quaint.
	Lackaday, lully lullay
	My make doth bear the bull away.


III. Poppy and Mandragora
There's hopeless traffic wailing as the roads run by,
and indigo is chilling all the uncompanioned sky;
the sad lamps lighting up till thirty-nine o'clock;
the blank walls waiting for the crowing of the cock:
with a star inside me and a spirit like a flea,
I have your ghost within the hand of mandrake me.

The past pours nearer like a film-star's face;
tomorrow is a mirror of the locative case;
the wind walks sideways like a nightmare crab in black,
and the streets huddle inwards for a grab at my back:
but with now inside me and with feathers on my knee
I wear your ghost about the land of mandrake me.

The black dog drew me up, the black dog died;
I let the daylight grow me till I reached your side;
witch time is over us like wet red loam,
and every coiling shadow is a spike running home:
but every shuttered window is a sun behind a tree,
and the blood of you is warm within mandrake me.

The crowds have weird-lit features with white statues'-eyes,
lift the rolling tongues of creatures that are dust and lies;
tremble the lights at the laughing savage sudden cock;
the pendulum is icebergs and it's thirty-nine o'clock;
but time is growing in me as a deep green tree
that's you its birds and sun and grass and mandrake me.


IV. The End of the Story
Put out the candle, close the biting rose,
for cock and cony are asleep; the sheep
in her secretive hills, with fleece at peace,
now lies enfolded.

The hungry sceptre-kissing mouth, the moth
behind the fingers, no more eat the night;
the rooting worm has crawled away from play
in his wet burrows.

Now the extremest joys are dreams and toys;
it's darkness in a vast full-tide abed;
over abandoned bodies time shall climb
like the black spider.

Give memory all amazing hours, all showers 
or sharply pouring seas between the knees;
slack as a rope, the flesh is dull, and full
of its perfection.

And all that lately flashed and leapt is gripped
into a knot of symbols; all's grown small,
quiet as curtains: brave be this your grave,
and fresh your garlands.