1247 Love poems

I. He Thinks of the Chinese Snake Who Is the Beginning and the End If you or I should die That day desire would not renew Itself in any bed. The old snake of the world, eternity That holds his tail in his mouth, Would spit it out And ease off through the grass Like a piece of music To we don’t know where. Then it would be for the living To beat the grass and bring him back. But would he be set tamely To sucking his tail again In that absence? II. He Marvels at the Persistence of Passion Like black duennas the hours sit And read our lips and watch our thighs. The years are pederasts: they wait For boys and will not meet my eyes. And children are cool astronomers Who scan us like old galaxies And calculate how many years Before we’ll turn to gas or freeze. And yet sometimes I have to shave And brush my teeth at dawn to keep My healthy middle-aged alive Hands off you where you lie asleep. III. Sometimes He Contemplates Adultery I had no insanity to excuse this, But for a week my heart ran with another love, Imagined another house, down to its books and bed. My miserable fluttered heart, you understand, chose this. Now I am led home—cold, grave, Contractual as a dog—by my scurrilous head. IV. His Hands, On a Trip to Wisconsin It is night. I am a thousand miles from home. My hands lie awake and are aware of themselves, One on my noisy chest, the other, the right one, A matter of several pounds, oppressing my forehead. It is a week since it fluted the air goodbye. I think of the path in space the thing has made since then, Veering and halting; of the shapes hands make Washing a car, or in the uses of music. Two shapes it has traced honor this right hand: The curve that a plane rides out As it leaves or takes a deck on the scalloped sea; Handily, handily then this two-pound creature Felt the wired air, let the two monsters kiss, The shapes that it graphed then fairer Than the hair of the clouds that watched Or the sea’s own scalloped hair. And he and his gauche fellow, moving symmetrically, Have described one body so well They could dress that shape in air As they long to do now though they lie Laced hunks of flesh on my belly— Ahead of them some years of roving Before the white landscape of age checks them, Your body’s disaster, sure to be traced there, Even so slight a change in a dear shape Halting them, baffled, lascivious suddenly, Or folded cold, or feeling your hands folded cold. V. Lines from His Guest-book Shelley’s houses and walks were always a clutter of women, and god knows what further arrangements he kept in his mind. Drôle de menage , Rimbaud said of himself and Verlaine, As if there were any other kind. In Yeats’ tower, in all that fakery of ghosts, Some solid women came and slept as Mrs. Yeats’ guests. We are most our own strange selves when we are hosts. Here those who have loved or befriended me came to a proof: They must lodge in my head and in company under one roof. Keeping house is the instinct of love; it is always a little ridiculous. Yet it is with no light welcome we welcome the friends of the house.

What stopped her bawling was the doorbell ringing, and a man standing there with five yellow roses, bulked up with green fronds and tied in a dinky knot with olive twine. There was no card to say who the flowers came from. The man’s uniform was blue with a brown insignia of a spider on his right top pocket that she saw he kept unbuttoned. As he waltzed down the path to the gate the Siamese cat that frequented the garden raised its back and hissed. The man laughed and flounced out to his waiting white van. Oh, the shit-faced side streets of life! OK, she’d been born in Madras, in a flowery tea shop while an albino conjurer magicked a hare to leap from his heavily-ringed brown fingers. Five yellow roses? Enough to encourage her to cook saffron rice, with turmeric-tinged prawns and sautéed yellow courgettes. She didn’t play the Ry Cooder where yellow roses say goodbye.

(excerpt) .... O heart, the equal poise of love’s both parts, Big alike with wounds and darts, Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same, And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame; Live here, great heart, and love and die and kill, And bleed and wound, and yield and conquer still. Let this immortal life, where’er it comes, Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms; Let mystic deaths wait on ’t, and wise souls be The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee. O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcass of a hard cold heart, Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that play Among the leaves of thy large books of day, Combin’d against this breast, at once break in And take away from me my self and sin; This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be, And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dow’r of lights and fires, By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, By all thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they, By all thy brim-fill’d bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire, By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seiz’d thy parting soul and seal’d thee his, By all the heav’ns thou hast in him, Fair sister of the seraphim! By all of him we have in thee, Leave nothing of my self in me: Let me so read thy life that I Unto all life of mine may die.

a bed is left open to a mirror a mirror gazes long and hard at a bed light fingers the house with its own acoustics one of them writes this down one has paper bed of swollen creeks and theories and coils bed of eyes and leaky pens much of the night the air touches arms arms extend themselves to air their torsos turning toward a roll of sound: thunder night of coon scat and vandalized headstones night of deep kisses and catamenia his face by this light: saurian hers: ash like the tissue of a hornets’ nest one scans the aisle of firs the faint blue line of them one looks out: sans serif “Didn’t I hear you tell them you were born on a train” what begins with a sough and ends with a groan groan in which the tongue’s true color is revealed the comb’s sough and the denim’s undeniable rub the chair’s stripped back and muddied rung color of stone soup and garden gloves color of meal and treacle and sphagnum hangers clinging to their coat a soft white bulb to its string the footprints inside us iterate the footprints outside the scratched words return to their sleeves the dresses of monday through friday swallow the long hips of weekends a face is studied like a key for the mystery of what it once opened “I didn’t mean to wake you angel brains” ink of eyes and veins and phonemes the ink completes the feeling a mirror silently facing a door door with no lock no lock the room he brings into you the room befalls you like the fir trees he trues her she nears him like the firs if one vanishes one stays if one stays the other will or will not vanish otherwise my beautiful green fly otherwise not a leaf stirs

This morning I was walking upstairs from the kitchen, carrying your beautiful flowers, the flowers you brought me last night, calla lilies and something else, I am not sure what to call them, white flowers, of course you had no way of knowing it has been years since I bought white flowers—but now you have and here they are again. I was carrying your flowers and a coffee cup and a soft yellow handbag and a book of poems by a Chinese poet, in which I had just read the words “come or go but don’t just stand there in the doorway,” as usual I was carrying too many things, you would have laughed if you saw me. It seemed especially important not to spill the coffee as I usually do, as I turned up the stairs, inside the whorl of the house as if I were walking up inside the lilies. I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.

Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet. There, wrapp'd in cloud of sorrow, pity move, And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love: But if she scorns my never-ceasing pain, Then burst with sighing in her sight and ne'er return again. All that I sung still to her praise did tend, Still she was first; still she my songs did end; Yet she my love and music both doth fly, The music that her echo is and beauty's sympathy. Then let my notes pursue her scornful flight: It shall suffice that they were breath'd and died for her delight.

I. One reason to eat is to not speak, said the man with a mouth full of food. When she told me that my silence was worse than her silence, I agreed, even though she was wrong. It is shallow to fight for things, he said, but sometimes it can be fun. You look like a tunnel, she said, and kissed my lips. What I like least about words is their capacity to invoke more words, she said, as she trashed my poem. According to the New York Times, gay teenage boys want monogamy while heterosexual boys prefer “friends with benefits.” My psychiatrist told me it was okay to lie about the important details of my life. As a result, I fell in love with her. I stopped seeing her as a patient but when we dated the spark was gone. If, as Cioran writes, existing is plagiarism, then what is death? I was lost all night in the forest only to discover these were streets I knew quite well. In the Oresteia, Apollo argues that the true parent is “he who mounts.” Because the Furies fail to ask what happens when the woman is on top, they lose the case. In evaluations, a student wrote: “Daniel would be a better teacher if he wasn’t such an asshole.” Weren’t such an asshole, I wanted to tell her, though as her comments were supposed to be anonymous, I could not admit that I recognized her handwriting. On a first date, I innocently went to the bathroom when the check arrived. She thought I was trying to stick her with the bill but when she realized I was unaware of dating etiquette she was charmed.  We had a nice kiss goodnight, but afterwards I was so flustered I went to a bar by myself, drank whiskey, and smoked my first cigarette in years. II. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I knew it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth content of a lie.

:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now? I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing. When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    : a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy. :  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open: Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music, like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me. There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing. :  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now? When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental, fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin, and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept. I want now to be close to you.        I would link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days. :  I am not happy.          I will be open. I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems. There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate On what a tragedy his life was, really. :  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now? When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide, and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   : if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty, if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt. I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me. :  I will be open.          I think he never loved me: He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls: he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me. :  What are you now?          If we could touch one another, if these our separate entities could come to grips, clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday I stood in a crowded street that was live with people, and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone. Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.

Here take my picture; though I bid farewell Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell. 'Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more When we are shadows both, than 'twas before. When weather-beaten I come back, my hand Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun beams tann'd, My face and breast of haircloth, and my head With care's rash sudden storms being o'erspread, My body'a sack of bones, broken within, And powder's blue stains scatter'd on my skin; If rival fools tax thee to'have lov'd a man So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then, This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say, "Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay? Or do they reach his judging mind, that he Should now love less, what he did love to see? That which in him was fair and delicate, Was but the milk which in love's childish state Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough To feed on that, which to disus'd tastes seems tough."

Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love, And in that sophistry, oh, thou dost prove Too subtle: Fool, thou didst not understand The mystic language of the eye nor hand: Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the air Of sighs, and say, this lies, this sounds despair: Nor by the’eye’s water call a malady Desperately hot, or changing feverously. I had not taught thee then, the alphabet Of flowers, how they devicefully being set And bound up, might with speechless secrecy Deliver errands mutely, and mutually. Remember since all thy words used to be To every suitor, “I, ’if my friends agree”; Since, household charms, thy husband’s name to teach, Were all the love-tricks, that thy wit could reach; And since, an hour’s discourse could scarce have made One answer in thee, and that ill arrayed In broken proverbs, and torn sentences. Thou art not by so many duties his, That from the’world’s common having severed thee, Inlaid thee, neither to be seen, nor see, As mine: who have with amorous delicacies Refined thee’into a blissful paradise. Thy graces and good words my creatures be; I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee, Which oh, shall strangers taste? Must I alas Frame and enamel plate, and drink in glass? Chafe wax for others’ seals? break a colt’s force And leave him then, being made a ready horse?