1247 Love poems

I cannot change, as others do, Though you unjustly scorn; Since that poor swain, that sighs for you For you alone was born. No, Phyllis, no, your heart to move A surer way I’ll try: And to revenge my slighted love, Will still love on, will still love on, and die. When, kill’d with grief, Amyntas lies; And you to mind shall call The sighs that now unpitied rise; The tears that vainly fall: That welcome hour that ends this smart, Will then begin your pain; For such a faithful, tender heart Can never break, can never break in vain.

Since all that beat about in Nature's range, Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning Thought! that liv'st but in the brain? Call to the Hours, that in the distance play, The faery people of the future day— Fond Thought! not one of all that shining swarm Will breathe on thee with life-enkindling breath, Till when, like strangers shelt'ring from a storm, Hope and Despair meet in the porch of Death! Yet still thou haunt'st me; and though well I see, She is not thou, and only thou are she, Still, still as though some dear embodied Good, Some living Love before my eyes there stood With answering look a ready ear to lend, I mourn to thee and say—'Ah! loveliest friend! That this the meed of all my toils might be, To have a home, an English home, and thee!' Vain repetition! Home and Thou are one. The peacefull'st cot, the moon shall shine upon, Lulled by the thrush and wakened by the lark, Without thee were but a becalméd bark, Whose Helmsman on an ocean waste and wide Sits mute and pale his mouldering helm beside. And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist'ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!

and sex once a day a week a month a year goes by and one hyacinth only returns, frail blue against the militant grass that does cover all in the residential precinct of the New England town its roads long paved old Indian trails the steps they took toward us the first exchange for a fish two biscuits

What is thy thought of me? What is thy feeling? Lov'st thou the veil of sense, Or its revealing? Leav'st thou the maiden rose Drooping and blushing, Or rend'st its bosom with Kissing and crushing? I would be beautiful That thou should'st woo me, Gentle, delightsome, but To draw thee to me. Yet should thy longing eye Ever caress me, And quickened Fantasy Only, possess me, Thus thy heart's highest need Long would I cherish, Lest its more trivial wish Pall, and then perish. Would that Love's fond pursuit Were crownèd never, Or that his virgin kiss Lasted for ever!

O heart of hearts, the chalice of love's fire, Hid round with flowers and all the bounty of bloom; O wonderful and perfect heart, for whom The lyrist liberty made life a lyre; O heavenly heart, at whose most dear desire Dead love, living and singing, cleft his tomb, And with him risen and regent in death's room All day thy choral pulses rang full choir; O heart whose beating blood was running song, O sole thing sweeter than thine own songs were, Help us for thy free love's sake to be free, True for thy truth's sake, for thy strength's sake strong, Till very liberty make clean and fair The nursing earth as the sepulchral sea.

To those who kiss in fear that they shall never kiss again To those that love with fear that they shall never love again To such I dedicate this rhyme and what it may contain. None of us will ever take the transiberian train Which makes a very satisfactory refrain Especially as I can repeat it over and over again Which is the main use of the refrain. I with no middle flight intend the truth to speak out plain Of honour truth and love gone by that has come back again The fact is one grows weary of the love that comes again. I may not know much about gods but I know that Eros is a strong purple god. And that there is a point where incest becomes Tradition. I don’t mean that literally; I don’t love my brother or he me. We have been mutually avoiding each other For years and will continue to do so. Even I know about cross words— Something. The word you want is Dante. He said he loved Beatrice. Whatever he did He didn’t love Beatrice. At least the Beatrice Portinari whom history gives. He knew her and the point about all these Florentines is that they all were Killing each other or dying of rapid Consumption. Beatrice died; Rossetti painted her Cutting Dante in the street. Botticelli Painted the rest: Simonetta Vespucci Died of a rapid consumption (age 23) Giuliano dei Medici murdered by the altar rail (age 19) Guido Cavalcanti died in exile (age 35) Dante dei Aligeri died in exile (age 90) Lorenzo dei Medici who lives for ever Since he stayed there and commissioned The paintings, and poems and statues And if he also commissioned the deaths I don’t blame him. He didn’t feel Very magnificent when his brother Was murdered in sanctuary. Do you realise whoever did that Would be excommunicated if, that is, if He hadn’t also murdered the papal legate, His best friend. I have lived long enough having seen one thing; That term has an end. It was getting dark on the platform of nowhere When I who was anxious and sad came to you Out of the rain. Out of the sound of the cold Wind that blows time before and time after Even Provence knows. And as for this line I stole it from T.S. Eliot And Ezra Pound and A.C. Swinburne. All very good Poets to steal from since they are all three dead. The love that is must always just contain The glory of the love that was whatever be the pain. We played at mates and mating and stopped up the drain. Hear me. O Mister Poster I know You have burnt me too brown you must boil me again You simply have no notion how delightful it will Be when they pick us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea. It is the lark, my love, and not the nightingale. None of us will ever take the trans-siberian train. She wanted to and was collecting people who did I thought I did but now I know I don’t. It is the lark, my love, and not the nightingale. In fact I’ve never heard either bird But people say they sound very similar. And what the devil were Romeo and Juliet About wasting their last moments Listening to birds. Hah. I like kicking up larks or Larking up kicks. So do most poets Including J.H. Prynne, the memorable poet Who is happy to say that the U.L. Has got his middle name wrong. He claims it stands for Hah But there is a limit. I know it all. Riddle me riddle randy ree Round and round in the snotgreen sea When they pick us up and throw us With the Joyces out to sea. Tell us tale of Troy’s downfall We all would have liked to have been there. The infernal Odyssos. He it was whose bile Stirred up by envy and revenge destroyed The mother of womankind. And Swinburne Got a kick out of pain but I don’t I just get kicked. I wish I didn’t keep sounding like Richard the Third Except that if I don't I tend to sound Like Richard the Second. And who wants that. I suppose I must sound like Richard the First. What did he do? Nothing I take it I get a kick out of larking up nightingales. Prynne says that if I don’t come back Safe from Sicily by the thirtieth April They will send a posse. March is the cruellest station Taking on bullying men And were you really afraid they would rape you? No. I thought there would be grave difficulties. Not just that I was actively opposed And so was every other man, woman and child On that there train. I was afraid they would kill me. I may look stupid but I’m not So simple as to think your name Is Elizabeth Brown. Well. All right My name is Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Agamemnon was King of the Achaians at the time, Priam, of the Trojans, Theseus, of the Athenians. And like all Good Kings, they are dead. In my day it was the done thing to side With the Trojans for no better reason Than that they lost. But me I back Winners every time. Mary Shelley may go to hell As she thought she was going to anyway And take Frankinsense with her. I want her husband, alive and well. Who, of course, also got killed. Hardly surprising if he made a habit Of reading Aiscylos while sailing. He wasn’t reading Aiscylos when he drowned. Got cremated like a pagan king. Not Agamemnon who, as I said, was king at the time And lost, murderer of his daughter Killed by his wife and (other) daughter. Killed by his death killing his life. Stabbed in the back in his bath. I think of it every time I have a bath. Though I have no sympathy at all For that daughter and son. I think it is unfair that Helen Had everything, immortal beauty, Lovers, cities destroyed and battles Fought about her. And she just came home And calmly went around being Menelaus' wife While her twin sister, Clytemnestra Was murdered by her son and daughter. And the Athenians acquitted them. They would do, a nation of sophists. Always betraying their allies and torturing Women and children and enslaving people. They even killed Socrates, their one good man, Then Plato tried to be a philosopher king. And got enslaved for his pains. I wish they had kept him enslaved. He escaped, of course, and wrote books About how he would do it better If he was in charge. All poets do that. They are just as incompetent as the rest If they try to organise things. As witness my own efforts in that direction Or those of my avatar, Agamemnon, Who, as I say came home and was killed in his bath Killing his wife and his daughter. And if you don’t know about this you ought to. Read it in the Iliad, read it in the Odyssey, Do not read it in Freud who is always wrong Although even Freud didn’t deserve a son like Lacan. But first and last read me, the beloved Who was killed in the general slaughter. But rise again like John Donne (read him too) I, Helen, I Iseult, I Guenevere, I Clytemnestra and many more to come. I did it, I myself, killing the King my father Killing the King my mother, joining the King my brother. It is the kick, my love, and not the nightingale I like larking up kicks myself But not kicking. They that have power to hurt and do so Should not be blamed by Shakespeare or anyone else For hurting though such is the race of poets That they will blame them anyway. However it is a pretty productive process Especially if one may be plumber as well as poet And thus unstop the drain as well as writing Poetic Artifice“Pain stopped play” and Several other books and poems including 1974 and All That(seriously though) I, Veronica did it, truth-finding, truth-seeking Muck-raking, bringing victory. It was a horse, of course, in which the warriors hid Pretending to bring peace And they wouldn’t speak to me, crouching in the dark Like a lot of fools, hearing the voice of the goddess In an alien city, I speak your tongue in my own city: Cambridge or Camelot and you won’t listen to me Advised, of course, by Odyssos, solicitor, betrayer. And when they had killed all the men, raped all the women etc. Agamemnon came home and, as I said, was stabbed by his wife In his bath. Anyway it is the lark, my love, And not the nightingale. I follow the sacred footsteps of Hippolyta, the blest, the best That has been said or spoken well in any tongue Read John Donne—the memorable dun. Don’t read Matthew Arnold; he’s a fool I am not Prince Thomas Aquinas F.H. Eliot I am not an attendant lord either. I am the king who lives. Spring surprised us, running through the market square And we stopped in Prynne’s rooms in a shower of pain And went on in sunlight into the University Library And ate yogurt and talked for an hour. You, You, grab the reins. Drink as much as you can and love as much as you can And work as much as you can For you can’t do anything when you are dead. The motto of this poem heed And do you it employ: Waste not and want not while you’re here The possibles of joy.

These lovers’ inklings which our loves enmesh, Lost to the cunning and dimensional eye, Though tenemented in the selves we see, Not more perforce than azure to the sky, Were necromancy-juggled to the flesh, And startled from no daylight you or me. For trance and silvemess those moons commend, Which blanch the warm life silver-pale; or look What ghostly portent mist distorts from slight Clay shapes; the willows that the waters took Liquid and brightened in the waters bend, And we, in love’s reflex, seemed loved of right. Then no more think to net forthwith love’s thing, But cast for it by spirit sleight-of-hand; Then only in the slant glass contemplate, Where lineament outstripping line is scanned, Then on the perplexed text leave pondering, Love’s proverb is set down transliterate.

I try to think of the cup of a hand, of legs in a tangle, and not the thistle though even it, purpled, spiking away, wants to be admired, wants to say, whistle a little for me. O every little thing wants to be loved, wants to be marked by the cry that brings desire to it, even blue-eyed fly to the bloated hiss of death. To love is to be remiss: the horse alone in the wide flat field nods its head as if the bridle and bit were missed or mocked; the cow slung with the unmilked weight of her tremendous teats shoots a look back over her shoulder at O lonesome me. I want to say to her need as if crooning could be enough, sweet, sweet mama . . . truth be told, the thousand lisping bees to the milkweeds' honey terrifies me. When the stink of slurry season is over and the greened fields are slathered, fecund, overtall foxgloves tip with the weight of their fruit. Then I dream a little dream of you and me, curled like two grubs on the top of a leaf wind-driven and scudding along the lake's surface. All night we glide to its blue harbor and back again. The fattened slack of us singing O darlin' darlin' darlin'.

1 The woman stands on tiptoe to kiss the man and for a moment, with their twin-teal backpacks, parkas, and other gear— they look like one new creature. A mutation. 2 Seated in La Rosita their gear guards the table where they sip cafe con leche and lean forward, sitting tall, pelvises tilted forward, to talk—whisper?—their physical closeness almost embarrassing (but to whom?) at this early hour— light rivering in her chestnut hair, their foreheads almost touching as they sit further forward straddling their chairs toes pressed down, heels up, wrists crossed; a posture almost too intimate for a public space at breakfast but somehow right in the Spanish café. She says that while it is absurd to sell forsythia it is a small miracle to buy cactus on 107 th Street and Broadway. (If they’re strangers in Manhattan they seem more at home than I’ve ever been.) They listen to the brisk chatter and clatter of plates and music from the Spanish station which now plays “Yellow Submarine”— universal language?—“our friends are all aboard.” They study the menu and note the beautiful sounds words like huevos and arroz make for eggs and rice. The generous syllabic count and vowel length seem like an echo for their love. And their desire to linger. (Other eyes are on them, not only mine.) They have drawn the morning from a sea of newsprint—in at least three languages—toward their window seat. 3 The light changes along with the brisk pace of the walkers. Someone in a tan Mackintosh reaches out to hail a yellow cab, while the sun gilds the fire escapes and people rise energetically from their beds. 4 Don’t their eyes tire of each other? Or is it not the eyes that tire? They’re not looking, they’re drinking, communicating through their skin several inches apart. Love can’t be trusted. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. They linger over coffee; he strokes the back of her neck; she doesn’t feel impelled to look up or stop but, later, she kisses him behind the ear. 5 And in the mountains there is snow melting to get down from the heights to pour through the clefts in the twisted rocks: natural arches, obstacles—horseshoe shapes. And in the plains there is a dropping of the shoulder-armor, a tingling in the hip sockets, so that even a chance touch at the hipbone startles the center and starts a slow convulsion— release of two creatures (peculiarly, perilously at odds), used to training their gaze on the peripheries, like this bicycle tethered to a parking meter, orange handlebars, silver trunk like a treasure chest perched—not locked—on a wrought iron ledge fixed over the chrome wheel-casings— blue shadow-dappled twig-littered canopies, or the small tantalizing cursive c in the blue neon soft as silk, announcing café Equense where the couple might return in the voluptuous dark. The dark, quietly vibrating like a Mouth Harp, or her—noiseless—breathing…or, when they are lost in Olmsted’s misty, labyrinthine rambles and, framed by traffic, they pause beside the lake in the dank air where the water is still, another world from the blood-running pavement, the meat-packing plants gray and dour below the rotting piers— warped—(and will they be replaced with fresh wood or fazed out with poured concrete that knows no give or take—no—swelling—…?) What can love repair? By what force of love can they imagine themselves beyond the squalor that surrounds them onto another plane blessed and blessing! 6 Who invented ecstasy? What man or woman first walked around with its burden? Cold shelter from the street, among the bronze mailboxes, inside the bright red— freshly painted—door jambs. He picks her up under the buttocks, she arches her thighs around his hips, plants her feet on the tiles: tongues firm, yet tentative, learning their own momentum; (the rubbery wall of her mouth takes him further in and in.) Tongue and tongue, freckle and freckle, tears, shuddering, swelling in the places where they used to ache, “ain’t no cure,” knowing this touch, this grave flicking of tongues could never be repeated, or knowing it could— knowing it in another consciousness. 7 He strokes her neck at the junction where the occipital bone and cervical spine cross, engage, spark; coccyx tingles, cock rises toward her, not into her, through her, to her; rises as he plies the inside of her ass and thighs, or rubs the crevice where her right forefinger and thumb divide, stroking her cheek, or the hollow below her earlobe, ankle bone, clavicle, tonguing every millimeter, until sea dissolves into sky (their raft turns over in warm water and they are that water, and bob, afloat, buoyant; at rest in secret knowledge of each other’s darknesses… and now he could weep.) But there is no ice in the water where they would roil and tumble, and where avenues welcome those who walk hand in hand, gait easy, backpacks half-full, half empty— the sun coming out now, as if synchronized to their desires— and as the runners circle the reservoir they lower their eyes to adjust to the light bouncing off the water to ignite the cinders; the green through the dead- ice capped leaves; a small curve, an indent on the track gleams like a bracelet, before an azure haze takes over. 8 It gets warm. She has to peel her Anorak. She cups her hand over her eyes in the light and wind off the reservoir, to see the easy arcs the gulls make as they spiral upward over the all-angle roller coaster of the rooftops, in the comforting thud of other feet, as if lulled by the sound of a lover’s heartbeat; danger, in distraction; she must kick the chain-link fence in order to set off again, get back into the stream, put her mind back into her body; her body: slender; deceptive. There is a power in it she has always known. And feared. Or feared others would fear. But it’s difficult, with others, always—just how to say it? Necessary to hold some one thing back. Whom could she trust to let it out? It might scare her. (Scare him.) 9 Dawn, a smudge of charcoal, lifted by noon and his body, as if heliotropic, was drawn toward the flares of lilacs, and now he knew to move cautiously, keeping his eyes on the ground to not, as he has done several times, catch his foot on a stone or root cluster and fly off, gashed. 10 He’s relieved when night comes on. He doesn’t need his eyes to know swallows congregate on the stark, bare limbs. The darkness grows through the darkness of that winter tree. Soon they will be one and no one will see them.

He crawls through the cracks of my stone foundation, sly and sleek as I tempt him with food. He stays out of habit; I cook out of love for things that move. We grow accustomed to each other’s trails and smells, the skins we’ve shed along the long, long road of rubbing each other smooth. Till all the skins we’ve shed lie sparkling like so many stones in this desert land. I scoop him up in my hand and eat him.