Set Thy Love in Order: New & Selected Poems
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Set Thy Love in Order - Stephen Romer
rose
ONE YEAR
One year on, the shawl is wrapped
soft round my shoulders and you everywhere
no messages since not a one
the vigil the watch and pray I knew not
watch and pray but that night I did
watch and pray for all I could
except you rose to meet my every move
in the looking glass only the fire
saved me from freezing at every move
where you rose to meet me
in the mirror and when I moved my
every move was a wading through time
the red shawl round my shoulders
when I was terrified to take it off again
and fall forever into the ungraspable
without a hand-hold climbed the stairs
the comfort blanket my shroud
and you not leaving the night-light.
Then you cleared your throat
at the end of the passage
this is and is not, you.
THE BARN
The Barn! Was your burden,
we must clean out the barn!
Your burden, and your cross –
but when at last we made a start
you came storming from the house
and told us to stop,
these were sacred things, not to be
disinterred or discarded lightly,
family things we had no right to handle.
Now it is clean, it is swept right through,
and the archive boxed,
and the boxes removed
at Ferragosta, on the eve
of the Assumption; as Catholic Europe
revelled in cracked bells and fireworks
perhaps in our cool northern air
you rose some echelons
being lighter, the barn empty.
APPLES
Guilt for those things
we have left undone
was your péché mignon,
even the apples
became a burden;
belatedly then, this note
to you not to worry
if they went unharvested.
Now in the rigours
an orange beak
uncovers them in the snow,
scores of cherubic reds;
you have laid up
for the hungry a feast.
I MUST LEARN TO SIT STILL
In the little black notebooks
it is always Ash-Wednesday,
create and make in us
new and contrite hearts
runs the Collect, and the preacher
on that Retreat banged on,
the day is far spent, and we are stranded
on the road to Damascus…
In your private collect, you confessed
to the desert in the garden,
to the ‘deadness’ and the ‘emptiness’,
and formed your resolution
to sit still, to banish impurities
and dress yourself in Christ,
your peace in His will, and to seek Him
in the faces of strangers,
commending us your family
all the while, into Christ’s safe keeping,
for which bless you, while you struggled
with every variant of the modal must.
IN THAT HIGH TENT
To the man on the bus
who thrust some tissues in my hand
today I say
thank you, kind sir
I’d weep myself away
or as if I were being wept
by an overriding force
into a salt and mucus stream
every jointure of the journey
a breakage in the body
and every light red
out of Oxford into London
where you shake against the side
*
You know everything
it is written
the sms gaining in urgency
I recite them still
like scripture
Can you come back?…
Come back if you possibly can…
We go on quietly here…
Just grow wings!
The injunction to ecstasy
stays with me
I saw strong white wings
they were her wings