Here you Say "Don't" to me Always.

We sat on the rocks to watch the convoys pass.

I knew the winter
blowing,
plague shaking a bat-like sail
and what youth was, there was no knowing,
not for us, there on the swift grass,
too old for play, too young for the front line.

What are you dreaming of, they asked?
I muttered "ships."
It was safer to answer thus, to be a dissembler,
it could have been the scarlet slips,
the lattice ropes of Drake's trader
or Cochrane's round hull changing color,
an apple in September....
I was shy about love,
that was something,
not to be written on a form,
given a birthplace to, a job,
it was a few lines of poetry, a voice,
a kind of hope, a name scratched on sand
with a bit of shell,
it was America, a land,
raw, they said, blustering, without a past,
as if the vision inside me
could be limned over a mask.

I said -
you do not understand.
Somebody there knows the way that Marlowe felt
pacing along that meadow with the daisies,
(they had the flattened heads of nails in a sword belt)
three windmills hustled round like constables;
he is not using the same words nor the same thoughts
but it is the caravel way a fighter storms through life...
"here you say don't to me always."
There is never any growing.

I saw a skyscraper
stalk to
white over the sea,
felt a people
without prudence, without patience, without black-out
that wanted with passion to be free.

III.

If memory be the color of the world,
to the cell darkness
he must add his mind;
who would recall
the boulders, whortle-lined,
the waterfall,
when their reflected freedom has become
a dumb, regretful show?

He takes farewell
from his beginning,
from the swan and bough,
no longer will the moon
nest while he watches
in the cygnets' rest;
the steps will come too soon,
behind the high, indifferent walls
Time will be waiting to receive him
with the dead courtesy Love gives
the unforgiven lover,
the very old, the January rose....
he asks no pity as he leaves his glory,
yet who shall close the heart
this final morning,
though hope be a crazy catch
of hawthorn falling,
its brief white
so less mortal than his prayer.