Lay for the Day 
17th
March
1938: Rudolf Nureyev is born on board the Trans-Siberian Express. The
poem was inspired by seeing film of him dancing with Margot Fonteyn.
Pas
de Deux
We’ve come by bad adventure to this bay of peace:
harbour
yourself with me.
The weight
of bonds’ remembrance doesn’t cease
as soon
as the cuffed hands are free,
and redeemers have proved captors before,
so let
me range.
Until the sun
and moon exchange
their
mansions, there’s no door
I would not unlock, nor key I’d not throw away,
if just
an eyebrow raised
or finger crooked, or your head’s slighest sway
showed
you so pleased.
Your servitude’s
a mortgage my poor will must meet
with
express desires then?
Be free of me and our freedom’s complete.
I’m
free to be as other men,
untied from you: restricted by the lack
of actual
shape
to my joys, and with no escape
from
searching’s circling track.
A world is in the cell that holds us both; a jail
is the
world where youÕre not.
Once I had
none; now hope, though newborn frail,
is all
IÕve got.
Can I stake my slender means on your well meaning?
The
odds on love are long.
At last the
long-wintered heart is greening
and
the birds taking up their song.
But what
if ice, returning suddenly,
should
shear these shoots
and freeze the slow sap from the roots?
Who
then would revive me?
The earth would
never get round to changing seasons
if she
had metaphors
spun and woven from a stock of reason’s
yarn
rich as yours.
But dropping thaw undoes the frost of friendlessness
in new-found
fire; eyes melt
away the fear of proffered tenderness.
Having
loved and been betrayed, felt
and met unfeeling, I know that danger
waits
in the trust
of arms, and that when, as we must,
we will
love a stranger,
we put ourselves in the way of the harms that crouch
in the
crooks of twined limbs,
that watch for the moment when two fires touch,
wariness
dims,
then leap to sever and leave us clutching the dark.
I
have no spells to fend
nor charms to bend time’s arrow from its mark
except
that, send
against us what assaults it may, until my breath
itself
is forfeit, I’ll
not breathe the killing word Goodbye.
Let
death
alone
aspire to part us; while
we live, in league against tyrannous tears,
the
espionage
of envy and the plot of age,
we’ll
smile among our fears.
This world
has never, whatever its songs may dream,
been
friendly to lovers.
But the
Virgin’s stars from the sky’s extreme
stream
above us.
John Gibbens, from Ballads, One
The
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