poems for his first love---by stephen richard eng

Ocean City

Immortal day, that far July ago,

We dug our toes inside a Maryland beach,

And didn’t let our first faint feelings show:

Invisibly, they floated out of reach.

And then like anyone who feels unease,

We talked and talked—but all that really did

Was beat and batter us like ocean breeze,

And bloody all the nerve-ends we had hid.

That evening at home we ventured far too near

For safety—both too reckless of how much

We frightened one another, fighting fear

That festered under every bruising touch:

The ache erupted in her furnished room,

And we both felt that first foretaste of gloom.

03-04-75

*

Capitol Hill

She sat in downtown restaurants alone,

And read her book until they shut the doors;

Defiant, seventeen, and on her own,

She made her coffee last an hour or more.

So when I couldn’t find her home I ran

Ridiculously about the neighborhood,

A comic maniac who’d been a man

Behaving like a wounded coyote would:

I circled, almost howling with brute pain

Around dark Washington, through every place

She ought to be but wasn’t—almost insane—

Ashamed of panicking for a mere face.

The restaurants we’re empty of her everywhere:

Could she have drowned in summer’s humid air?

05-11-75

*

The Clown

My condescending friends but smiled in sympathy and shame,

That I had not selected someone slightly prettier;

They didn’t know I hoped I’d trade my name

For something somewhere back inside of her.

Around her I was awkward, quiet, cold,

Sweet agonies like a grey and grave less ghost, 

Or else too loud, impressing her with manly noise,

That was but adolescent, clumsy bold

Bravado that at best but bores, annoys,

And at its worst tells people you’re unsure 

Of love and life, and of yourself the most.  

And so I struggled silly through the pure

I harried friends to make them see her charm—

They changed the subject with their half-amused alarm.

06-13-75

*

Death Cloud

She said she hoped for peace for all mankind,

Made possible by man’s deep-down good will,

And sorrowed when I told her she was blind

To man’s inborn desire to maim and kill.

One universe united under one large law:

Her dream, and dream of countless men before

Who looked at life and made believe they saw

Beyond man’s greed and lust for gore.

Besides, world law meant world police and fear,

I told her gently, and she hated me

For hinting her utopia would not appear.

For checks and balances on law brings liberty--

But still at least we both agreed to dread

The poison mushroom looming overhead.

08-06-75 (rev. 05-07-78)

*

Phil

She had a fellow Quaker waiting back

Behind at school for her Fall return:

My inner rage went red, then inky black,

As coal-hard hate began its bitter burn.

She called him soft—a coward!  So I thought,

A pacifist, a scholar, and a boy,

And in brute bloody fantasies I fought

And fractured him like some cheap toy.

She seldom spoke of him, but when she did

It always caught me with no good defense,

And so the jealousy was hardly hid,

A stinking cancer she could smell and taste and sense:

It ate like acid at our August days,

The dread distrust that when it enters…stays.

09-05-75 

*

Blue Ridge

As August melted from its sticky heat,

September watched us traveling to where

Virginia, South Carolina, both do meet:

The apple-mountains rich with grape and pear.

Her family and sister welcomed me,

Far too polite to ever seem quite real,

I drowned in country hospitality

And careful conversation at each meal.  

But underneath I felt a tense unease:

Her elder sister seemed to look through all

The harmony like some lone bird that sees

An animal below about to fail and fall,

Our mutual hatred and respect were like

The hunted for the hunter as it stalks to strike.

10-04-75

*

Regicide

We harvested so many grapes each day,

Our hands and lips were purpled, stained

The shade of royalty:  kings gone away

To die with queens, till rust remained 

Of each tarnished throne and crumpled gown.

Inside her bed at night she floated far from me,

And like a knight that tugs a queen’s great gown,

I knew my enemy was brute Eternity,

That crushes kingdoms made of stone or dreams.

She often mentioned autumn—back at school,

Her words like shears, slicing well-stitched seams

Upon the royal tapestry, a cruel

And fitting ending to the fading myth,

Once woven lovingly, now scissored with!

04-24-76

*

Mount Airy Station

The ever-yawning distance gaped between

The two of us, those last September days,

And nothing I could say could really mean 

As much as all the silence in her empty gaze.

I packed my summer clothes and hopes,

And dressed for autumn, that last afternoon,

When breezes shook the farm and apple-slopes,

And rain beat down a bitter, time-bleak tune,

Upon the wooden eaves, and winding road,

As we drove down together to the train.

The loss of our idyllic summer showed 

Upon my face, like slashing, whip-struck pain—

Her sister on the platform seemed aware

And glad of what was swiftly dying there.

05-06-76

*

Poet-Birth:  1961

At school I found the spaces in between

Her letters lengthened as the days grew brief,

And letters that I wrote were still as green

As spring before the fall inflames each leaf,

That tumbles to the pavement, brown and dead.

I read her final one that Saturday,

As rage and fierce revenge throbbed in my head,

I knew how futile to believe that she, not he, would pay.

But still I sampled other faces and sweet hair

And throbbing sighs, that couldn’t really last:

In someone else’s eyes her ghost danced there,

Reminding me of grief ahead, not past,

As winter worsened and I learned to write

My first bad poems, full of self-hurt spite.

05-21-76 (rev. 06-16-90)

*

Erasing All Trace of Elaine

It’s true, I have forgotten you, Elaine,

Utterly, as leaves when leaving summer trees

Die unremembering, as they coast along the breeze

Toward autumn ground.  No souvenirs remain.

Blurred images efface and fade.  I cannot see your plain

White dress, bedecked with flowered fineries:

Poppies…yellow, orange, with Death-dark centers.  Please

Believe my love’s dissolved, drowned in Fall’s grey rain.

Through dimming years I’ll rarely, any more

View you in my imaginings.  Your summer-tinted hair

Of golden tawn recedes.  My lust cannot recall

Your criminally-carnal figure, or

Your rose-flushed mouth.  Romance lies in Death’s lair.

In winter’s pall, I have forgotten all.

08-80

*

Telepathy

I sat up writing one long verse-filled night,

I wrote self-pitied, literary lies,

That shrank and shriveled in the scornful light

Of dawn, across the mocking saffron skies.

That very morning she walked in on me,

As if I’d willed her through Time’s speed and space.

She said she’d just come by to stop and see

If I still lived at the same one-room place,

As if we were old friends and nothing more.

I felt my cracked illusions knit and mend,

I hoped my once-wet wounds were drained and dried.

05-11-78

(father refers to her as elaine, which is similar to the name helen. helen levering, the quaker, is the person who broke his heart and influenced him greatly. there may be more poems that belong with these, but i thought it helpful to group them. mother has typed them. kind of amazing of mom, to not mind typing up dad's poems about his old sweetheart who broke his heart so terribly.....)