Alan Gould: Two Poems

 Dream-ballad

 

Last night I dreamed I merely died

then walked with Shakespeare at my side.

His vivid people were in view,

but smaller now like residue.

 

We two were easy, one-to-one

as though from single dust undone,

and in this ultra likelihood

we took all past as understood,

 

and spoke of loves when we grew fond

on by-ways that were demi-monde,

and how, to prompt a truelove’s laugh,

was to unveil our better half,

 

where love was magma, solar flare,

yet also numen of not-there.

“If I loved her and she loved me

where was the edge of entity?”

 

We live, my dream-companion said,

within some now of watershed

where all my darlings chased their good,

both true and phoney through my wood,

 

and some adored what they despised,

and some came early, some disguised,

and some were children, bodies lit

outgrowing papa’s rule and wit

 

to find such nuanced moral round

must bring them to their killing ground.

Now all my darlings make a whole

that in one atom would be small.

 

“Can I show proof I loved,” I asked,

“now Anne lives on while I am masked?”

(My Shakespeare was a watchful man,

gamekeeper’s eye for how love ran.)

 

I walked my truelove through your trees

where we lacked lover’s expertise;

there was no wood before she came

when each new thing appeared the same.

 

I walked my truelove where the lees

of sunlight lit the canopies.

We badinaged and sometimes fought.

Joyous the dailiness days brought.

 

I told him this in that no-place

where being was adrift from face.

We had no path, yet knew the way,

and could forestall what each might say.

 

For we were easy and innate

and all our living inchoate.

Can we show proof we loved? he smiled.

When dust and thought grow reconciled.

 

                         Alan Gould

 

Two Pomegranates Blush Like Mars

 

Two pomegranates blush like Mars,

where butterflies now intervene

like graph lines on our olive green,

data for dreaming as I doze

in this alignment of my stars

where my good luck outstrips my woes.

 

Anne Langridge put this garden here.

She built and stucco’d yellow walls,

then placed pistachios, that their wiles

of male and female tree might flirt

along the pathways of my near.

How can cell-frenzy seem inert?

 

With shells like well-kept fingernails,

pistachio nuts will turn to pink,

and I know I get space to think

in gardens free from enmity

for all the scarlet parrot males

glare down from our black mulberry tree

 

when I have placed my ladder there

to steal the breakfast from milords,

two livelihoods that lack accords.

My periwinkle berries drop

into this scarlet bucket where,

for now, the human claim’s on top.

 

And good-willed folk have sent my screen

footage of Paris youths who ply

their clubs and rage on passers-by,

and this is done to have me learn

I can no longer choose between

the enmities with which they burn.

 

A hammer-hit, a Paris girl

curls like a foetus on the ground …

My YouTube mutes her plaintive sound

to let the commentator talk

us through this routine Paris whirl

where hitters in their hoodies walk.

 

I have been married to my girl

for three decades-and-more that muss

the brush of skirts around our house,

and times of kids and jollity

that speed us to that vortex whirl

will ash her this, will dust this me.

 

How do I know what value is

when I lack time to know our whole?

Is there a viewpoint that can tell

the worth that love and love may find

beside the flexing galaxies

that make themselves remote from mind?

 

I love this girl, and from her learn

how nonchalant, a laugh or glance

will claim some underpinning dance

my colder mind will not accept.

If I have mind, how do I earn

the further view by which I’m rapt

 

while wrapped in days fanatics use

to terrorise some innocent

until their blink-of-spite is spent.

Two pomegranates blush like Mars,

I learn what has and lacks excuse,

and how worth stands among the stars.

 

                               Alan Gould