Nine Stages Towards Knowing

Why do we lie Why do we lie, she questioned, her warm eyes on the grey Autumn wind and its coursing, all afternoon wasted in bed like this? Because we cannot lie all night together. Yes, she said, satisfied at my reasoning, but going on to search her cruel mind for better excuses to leave my narrow bed. Too many flesh suppers Abstracted in art, in architecture, in scholars detail; absorbed by music, by minutiae, by sad trivia; all to efface her, whom I can forget no more than breathing. Theatregoer Somewhere some nights she sees curtains rise on those rites we also knew and felt I sit here desolate in spite of company Love is between people And should she die? And should she die tonight, with this three years difference as well between us now? Or no, be maimed perhaps and bearing pain, to live on damages for life? In any case, I wish her no good, whom I loved as Brunel loved iron. All this Sunday long All this Sunday long it has snowed, and I weighted with the old grief struggling to unseat her from my mind. Yet winnowing our past I cannot find a snow-gilded scene however brief: thus do I wilfully increase my load. Spatial Definition Razed the room in which we made so much love: I try to re-place it in space against the windracked planetrees: my eyes quarter air. Able at last Able at last, she writes, to see things as they were, I wonder we were so blind to think our trust could bind instead of just defer. I shudder at her fall, for that was, from the heights, not how it was at all. Arrived at the place Arrived at the place to which I always said I was going: comfortless for lack of her who chose not to travel with me: too aware of my way to wherever next is also alone. Knowledge Knowledge of her was earned like miners pay: afterwards I sought friends knowledge of her: now I need to know nothing of this girl: she whom once I knew as my tongue my mouth.