Listening to the Rain

When I was young I listened to the rain
On the Towers of Song:
Red Candles glowed through thin gauze curtains,
Bedroom curtains, all night long.

In my prime of life I listened to the rain
On the roof of a boat:
From the westering wind a wild goose echoed
The exile's anguish dumb in my throat.

Now that I'm old I listen to the rain
On the temple tiles:
Hair flecked with white, I sit and wonder
Why meetings, partings, tears and smiles
Prove in the end to have had no meaning.

It is nearly day.
I sit and listen as the rain's pit patter
On the steps below me dies away.

The Lonely Pass

The Sun was setting as I struggled
Up to this mountain-pass
Where, for a grip between bare rock,
Stun trees and ragged grass
Struggle with the same dry fierceness
As, between their dry
Leaves, the few small flowers strain
For a smidgin of the sky.

Listening to the nightjars call,
I think I understand
The sadness in all exiles,
That need for a native land
Which, all around me, francolins
Repeatedly insist
In voices tired with homelessness
Must, known or not, exist.

I stand here halted. Suddenly
These things at which I stare,
Sky and mountain, once so loved,
Are seen as solely there
As images on whose half-truths
I need no more rely.

My native land is loneliness,
My only need is I.

invisible

Along the seat-aisle of the jumbo-jet,
As though this weren't the first time we had met,
Her smile advances. Jauntily tipped up,
A navy-blue sailor's hat and in her hand
Whisky-and-water in a plastic cup.

"It's very wide", she says, "a heath-like land
And the light like a Fra Angelico." So shy
Her side-slipped smile and her chuckle shadowed by
Regret not sooner to have helped one there.

"Why not write me a letter," cheekily I say,
"Giving, with pictures, details of your air?"

"Why not," she answers, "join me right away?"

Outside, below eye-level darkly spread,
The cloud-sea pinks with morning's rising red.

"I have terrible jet-lag. Dopey, I can't even
Sneak into my daughter's dream." She is close to tears.

Through the window, slowly, nerve-wracked into heaven,
With her cap and her plastic cup, she disappears.

In Camera

This eye the lens, this blink the shutter,
Mine is a darkroom roofed with hair:
And, for that reason, I've no need
To carry a camera anywhere.

Can you conceive how many studies,
Each of you, I there keep stored?

Your laughing faces in leaf-rinsed sunlight;
Your bodies like a chestnut board
Laid across waves; your heads and hands
Focused to light a cigarette;
And here your child-like orchid-scented
Slumber in the shadow-wet
Woodlands where yourselves as lion
Lived, and in my record lives.

The world has only one such secret
Film-bank of your negatives.