the dark dialogues (2)

René Magritte, Les Amants [The Lovers], 1928

I am the shell held 
To Time's ear and you
May hear the lonely leagues
Of the kittiwake and the fulmar.

Or I am always only 
Thinking is this the time
To look elsewhere to turn
Towards what was it
I put myself out 
Away from home to meet?
Was it this only? Surely
It is more than these words
See on my side
I went halfway to meet.

And there are other times.
But the times are always 
Other and now what I meant
To say or hear or be 
Lies hidden where exile 
Too easily beckons.
What if the terrible times
Moving away find 
Me in the end only 
Staying where I am always 
Unheard by a fault.

So to begin to return
At last neither early 
Nor late and go my way
Somehow home across
This gesture become
Inhabited out of hand.
I stop and listen over
My shoulder and listen back
On language for that step
That seems to fall after
My own step in the dark.

Always must be the lost
Or where we turn, and all
For a sight of the dark again.
The farthest away, the least
To answer back come nearest.

And this place is taking
Its time from us though these
Two people or voices 
Are not us nor has
The time they seem to move in
To do with what we think
Our own times are. Even
Where they are is only
This one inhuman place.
Yet somewhere a stone
Speaks and maybe a leaf
In the dark turns over.
And whoever I meant
To think I had met
Turns away further
Before me blinded by
This word and this word.

See how presently 
The bull and the girl turn
From what they seemed to say,
And turn there above me
With that star-plotted head
Snorting on silence.
The legend turns. And on 
Her starry face descried
Faintly astonishment.
The formal meadow fades
Over the ever-widening
Firth and in their time
That not unnatural pair
Turn slowly home.

This is no other place
Than where I am, between
This word and the next.
Maybe I should expect
To find myself only 
Saying that again
Here now at the end.
Yet over the great
Gantries and cantilevers
Of love, a sky, real and 
Particular is slowly 
Startled into light.


W. S. Graham, from 'The Dark Dialogues' in Malcom Mooney's Land (1970). Collected Poems 1942-1977 (London: Faber, 1979), pp. 164-65.