Love, you have brought to me my perfect soul,
More sweet than earthly things, more precious rare,
Hiding its fragrance in my loosened hair
And folding up my body like a scroll.
O, lie with me all night, and let the roll
Of Rapture’s waves wash over us, as, bare
Of anything save Love, we haply share
The joys of our first parents’ chaste control.

My Love, my piece of Heaven God has spilled
Upon my outstretched hands, O, kiss me yet.
Here, lying close to you, I feel—I know,
My being, even now, is charged and filled

In me there is a vast and lonely place,
Where none, not even you, have walked in sight.
A wide, still vale of solitude and light,
Where Silence echoes into ebbing space.
And there I creep at times and hide my face,
While in myself I fathom wrong and right,
And all the timeless ages of the night
That sacred silence of my soul I pace.

And when from there I come to you, love-swift,
My mouth hot-edged with kisses fresh as wine,
Often I find your longings all asleep
And unresponsive from my grasp you drift.

Love is the sepulchre of all my sin,
If it be sin to let the body sink
In that slow dying the sick senses drink
That ne’er have felt true Love’s delight rush in.
Hot Vice may sear the bloom of Beauty’s skin
Polluting Virtue with a painted wink,
But Love smiles lightly at such guilt, I think,
And cures corruption e’er her ills begin.

I cannot tell the wonder of desire
That flames my cheek when you are by my side.
Nor dare I speak the secret of that bliss
That sets the senses of my soul on fire.
Ah Love! all my sin vanished into pride

My true mind makes as many loves of you
As my full heart contentedly can hold.
And when the one grows dull, the other cold,
Yet comes another swifter in to woo.
I could not rue such changing retinue
Nor chastise circumstance that keeps me bold.
I make you young or middle-aged or old
Just as it pleases my own whim to do.

And then to counterbalance what you give
Thus all unwittingly, I smile or frown,
Am thoughtful, mirthful, grave or sunny-eyed
To meet your mood and help you best to live.
In me, all women to your wish bow down.

And then came Science with her torch red-lit
And cosmic marvels round her glowing head—
The primal cell, the worm, the quadruped—
Striving to make each to the other fit.
Tongue-trumpeting her own unchallenged wit,
She offered me the woof of Wisdom’s thread,
And Truth and Purity that hourly tread
The paths where sages in their wonder sit.

And still I smiled and kissed you with a sob.
My lips on yours, I heard, high up above
Love’s feet ring laughter on the starry sod
And felt the echo through our bosoms throb.

My mind and heart both love you utterly.
And so each thought of mine is doubly yours,
And all my will about your body pours
Scents of my blood and fires that flow from me.
Who has created me, so young, so free,
Eager to-day to close convention’s doors,
To-morrow to return and sweep the floors
With my loose hair in blinding memory?

Dearest, you have, who gave my heart such love,
It sang the marriage of our mingling blood;
Sweeping us on in a supreme control,
To those vast stillnesses that move above;

Do not surcharge our souls with that vile blame
To which our bodies are subjected here;
Nor heap them with the horror of dull fear
Base-borrowed from a life of torpid shame.
But let them linger like a lovely flame
Above the clay to which they must cohere,
Lighting the earthly to the heavenly sphere
To meet the mystery from which they came.

As midnight drinks a message from the moon
And morning takes her orders from the sun,
So let our bodies to our souls submit
And live for ever in their still high-noon,

What have you more than I, who crave you so?
Have I not hands and feet and thoughts to tell?
All my sweet senses and fine dreams that swell
Rich with contentments that the star-winds blow?
Yet do I need you everywhere I go,
As if you held me in some stinging spell;
And nothing living but yourself could quell
The conscious longings that tumultuous flow.

I am myself; and yet I cannot move
Hand, foot or eye but I am drawn to you.
I want you all—dreams, kisses, thoughts and eyes.
Dearest, it seems, my very wants would prove

I

Torment of thirty five worlds
Falls away
With your smile

A resplendent star
In the evening
Of my hazel eyes

You have fathered me, Amogh
Before I die
II

I haven't come across yet
Love poems from fathers to their sons
Probably
It is not manly enough
To write a one
But here I am
Looking at the blank paper
In front of me

Remembering
The paper white purity
Of your skin
When the nurse placed you
In my hands for the first time

Your first dark faeces

I have remembered beauty in the night,
Against black silences I waked to see
A shower of sunlight over Italy
And green Ravello dreaming on her height;
I have remembered music in the dark,
The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's,
And running water singing on the rocks
When once in English woods I heard a lark.

But all remembered beauty is no more
Than a vague prelude to the thought of you --
You are the rarest soul I ever knew,
Lover of beauty, knightliest and best;
My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore,