3 Poems by Benton

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Entry June 27 I stood long where you left me. Night was all around me and the stars pecked at it with fierce acetylene silver beaks. A little thin moon scarred the sky. Then I walked... my arm around the emptiness of you beside me. And because you were total in my eyes like sudden blindness, I saw only you. You were my purpose and my way, you were the bright articulate lights and dark lonely streets, you were each door and window, and every passing face. And because you were indelible in my blood and brain in infinite copies, without drink or delirium, my mine conceived you. My senses registered you dimensionally. And it was beautiful, O then it was beautiful in a high beautiful city, in a tall lighted beautiful world. The moon

was young and the stars winked like fireflies in tall grass; Night was a jeweled tent around us and we were wonderfully alone and sleepy as we always are just after love. Entry August 9 (part 3) Each time I know beauty, it shall be through you. When joy lifts me high, or sorrow breaks me. When I love again, my senses conditioned to you will be forgetting you anew. Each kiss that fills my mouth shall fill it with your lips. Yes, each time my eyelids crumble and close under blood's fired impact, when love strikes home, yours will be the mouth, and yours the disengaging arms. Your heart it will be leaping in your throat and beating in your thighs. Your relieved breasts, your simmering loins, your soft happy eyes. I will be forgetting you in

silence and in song. In silence will I dream dreams of you too wonderful to dare aloud, and of words I shall not use for anyone but you I shall make poems. When a star falls, I shall wish for you. When the moon is new, I shall wish for you. When a bird looks into my window, when a leaf falls before me, when I find a fern in flower, I shall wish for you. And when autumn lays out her lavish colors, her warm browns, ripe yellow, her exciting red all over the hills and fields like a lovely woman undressing, I shall look for you. Entry October 15 Everyone is sleeping. Nothing wakes. The woods are motionless. The wind is down to a whisper. Sleep hums like current, yes, audibly through the bright steel night. The evening star rises like a flaming

wick. Hills fit hills like lovers, their great dark straddling thighs clasping still greater darkness where they meet. A star breaks, arcs down the night like God striking a match across the cathedral ceiling. Therefore I wish: See my lips move making your name. It is so still, so still. I am sure that you must hear me- -Walter Benton from: This Is My Beloved