Condensation on a windowpane

1

I want to write something simple,
something simple, few adjectives,
ambiguities disallowed.

Something old-fashioned:
a story of Time perhaps
or, more daringly, of love.

I want to write something simple
that everyone can understand,
something simple as pure water.

But pure water
is H2O
and that’s complicated
like steam, like ice, like clouds.

2

My finger squeaks on glass.
I write JOAN
I write DANNIE.
Imagine! I’m a love-struck
youth again.

I want to say something
without ambiguity.
Imagine! me, old-age pensioner
wants to say something
to do with love and Time,
love that’s simple as water.

But long ago we learnt
water is complicated,
is H2O, is ice, is steam, is cloud.

Our names on the window
begin to fade.
Slowly, slowly.
They weep as they vanish.

The Malham Bird

That long summer a clarity of marvels
yet no morning News announced the great world
had been reinvented and we were new,
in love – you a Gentile and I a Jew!

Dear wife, remember our first illicit
holiday, the rented room, the hidden beach
in Wales, the tame seagull that seemed a portent,
a love message, as if Dafydd’s ghost had sent it?

After our swim we lay on our shadows naked,
more than together, and saw high in the blue
two chalk lines kiss and slowly disappear.
Then the friendly gull swooped down, magnified, near.

Now, three grandchildren later, I think of
a black feathered bird, the malham of Eden,
how it took advice, closed its eyes resolute,
when others singing pecked forbidden fruit;

and how, of all the birds, it was not banished
but stayed, lonely, immortal, forever winging
over the vanished gardens of Paradise.

The Presence

Though not sensible I feel we are married still.
After four years survival guilt endures.
I should have said this, could have done that,
and your absent presence has left a weeping scar.
Like a heartbeat, you are indispensable.

Each year, I think, the cries of the dead retreat,
become smaller, small. Now your nearness is far
and sometimes I sense you’re hardly there at all.
When in company, when my smiles persist,
your distance briefly is like the furthest star.

It’s when I’m most myself, most alone
with all the clamour of my senses dumb,
then, in the confusion of Time’s deletion
by Eternity, I welcome you and you return
improbably close, though of course you cannot come.

These poems were taken from Dannie Abse’s latest book, Two for Joy: Scenes from Married Life, (Random House).