Himalayan Balsam
BY ANNE STEVENSON
Orchid-lipped, loose-jointed, purplish, indolent flowers,
with a ripe smell of peaches, like a girl’s breath through lipstick,
delicate and coarse in the weedlap of late summer rivers,
dishevelled, weak-stemmed, common as brambles, as love which

subtracts us from seasons, their courtships and murders,
(Meta segmentata in her web, and the male waiting,
between blossom and violent blossom, meticulous spiders
repeated in gossamer, and the slim males waiting).

Fragrance too rich for keeping, too light to remember,
like grief for the cat’s sparrow and the wild gull’s
beach-hatched embryo. (She ran from the reaching water
with the broken egg in her hand, but the clamped bill

refused brandy and grubs, a shred too naked and perilous for
life, offered freely in cardboard boxes, little windowsill
coffins for bird death, kitten death, squirrel death, summer
repeated and ended in heartbreak, in sad small funerals.)

Sometimes, shaping bread or scraping potatoes for supper,
I have stood in the kitchen, transfixed by what I’d call love,
if love were a whiff, a wanting for no particular lover,
no child, or baby, or creature. ‘Love, dear love,’

I could cry to these scent-spilling ragged flowers,
and mean nothing but ‘no’, in that word’s breath,
to their evident going, their important descent through red towering
stalks to the riverbed. It’s not, as I thought, that death

creates love. More that love knows death. Therefore
tears, therefore poems, therefore long stone sobs of cathedrals
that speak to no ferret or fox, that prevent no massacre.
(I am combing abundant leaves from these icy shallows.)

Love, it was you who said, ‘Murder the killer
we have to call life and we’d be a bare planet under a dead sun.’
Then I loved you with the usual soft lust of October
that says ‘yes’ to the coming winter and a summoning odour of balsa

Sylvia Plath - The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me