1247 Love poems

See the chariot at hand here of Love, Wherein my lady rideth! Each that draws is a swan or a dove, And well the car Love guideth. As she goes, all hearts do duty Unto her beauty; And enamour'd, do wish, so they might But enjoy such a sight, That they still were to run by her side, Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride. Do but look on her eyes, they do light All that Love's world compriseth! Do but look on her hair, it is bright As Love's star when it riseth! Do but mark, her forehead's smoother Than words that soothe her; And from her arched brows, such a grace Sheds itself through the face As alone there triumphs to the life All the gain, all the good, of the elements' strife. Have you seen but a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touch'd it? Ha' you mark'd but the fall o' the snow Before the soil hath smutch'd it? Ha' you felt the wool o' the beaver? Or swan's down ever? Or have smelt o' the bud o' the briar? Or the nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? Oh so white! Oh so soft! Oh so sweet is she!

I know him, that man walking- toward me up the crowded street of the city, I have lived with him seven years now, I know his fast stride, his windy wheatfield hair, his hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets, hands that have known my body, touched its softest part, caused its quick shudders and slow releasings, I have seen his face above my face, his mouth smiling, moaning his eyes closed and opened, I have studied his eyes, the brown turning gold at the centers, I have silently watched him lying beside me in the early morning, I know his loneliness, like mine, human and sad, but different, too, his private pain and pleasure I can never enter even as he comes closer, past trees and cars, trash and flowers, steam rising from the manhole covers, gutters running with rain, he lifts his head, he sees me, we are strangers again, and a rending music of desire and loss— I don’t know him—courses through me, and we kiss and say,It’s good to see you, as if we haven’t seen each other in years when it was just a few hours ago, and we are shy, then, not knowing what to say next.

1 What’s The Word! she cries from her purchase on the iron finial of the front gate to my heart. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And this sparrow with a woman’s face roars in the burdened air — air crowded with voices, but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word, teeming with speech, but no word — this woman with the body of a bird is shrieking fierce buzzed volts in the swarming babble, What’s The Word! This evening is the year of my birth. The country has just gained its independence. Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines. Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come years of mass poverty, decades of starving children and racially-fueled mayhem. Word is armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is burning, looting, curfews, and shoot-to-kill orders. And word is more deadly days lie ahead. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls for more misery, more poverty, more starvation, more families fleeing their homes, more refugees streaming toward every border. More horror is to come, that’s the word. More scapegoating is to come, that’s the word. More violence is to come on the roads, in the streets, in the homes, violence in the churches, in the temples where they preach who to love and who to hate. How to get to heaven, and who to leave behind. How to don the fleece of the blameless and prosecute your neighbor. All against all is to come. That’s the word. Who hasn’t heard that! she spits. You call yourself a poet? You tame high finisher of paltry blots! You publish doubt and call it knowledge! You destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify your envy! You murder benevolence and virtue with condescension. You pretend to poetry and destroy imagination! Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect! You ape The Word made flesh with words made words to multiply more words and words about your words! And you ritualize these sterile pleasures, miming joy, delight, and generation! You celebrate cheap distractions! Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind, starvation of the heart, and mass maladies of the soul. You mock and mimic sincerity! You read and divine by irony! You snare the little ones! You pose stumbling blocks to the lame! You dig pits for the blind! You sell desolation! Your science is despair! What’s The Word! I can tell she’s up to no good, this feathered interval, monument to the nano, this deciding gram, my Geronimo. She’s out to overturn an empire, to usurp principalities and powers, just by swooping into the right assembly, perplexing a senate, baffling a parliament, or bewildering somebody’s crosshairs. Not worth a farthing, and without a cent, she would own the realm her shrill cries measure, trading dying for being. I tell her, I sang in a church choir during one war North American TV made famous. I fled a burning archipelago in the rain, on my mother’s back, in another war nobody televised. In the midst of wars worldwide, many in countries whose names I can’t pronounce, I tucked Christ’s promise and Adam’s disgrace together with my pajamas under my pillow each morning, unable to distinguish which was God’s first thought, and which God’s second. Therefore, I seek asylum in the final word, an exile from the first word, and a refugee of an illegible past. Who hasn’t witnessed the laws of merging and parting, blessing and killing! she says. Who isn’t subject to the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh, the change of the guard, with and without blood, and their own dismembered history fed to the unvanquished flowers? Lift every clock’s face and see the counting angels reckoning, the killing angels busy at their anvils. Say what’s The Word, or die! It’s obvious she’s accounted for what the wind will take, what the moths must eat, the ants carry away, the Caesars keep. She’s a breathing remnant restored to springtime’s living cloth. She’s a pair of scissors trimming lament to allow for all I don’t know. And I can tell by the markings on her coat and her black eyes she knows which dreams to parse, which to heed, and which to bury. And look at those prehistoric feet. No doubt, she’s realized the secret to surviving her own tribe’s slaughter and dispersal. Pocket dictionary packed with signs in another language, blazing shard of the original emanation, Precambrian spark deposit, igneous jot of infinite magnitude, fiery iota, something about her precise little beak convinces me she grasps degree, and knows which i’ s to dot and which to leave large and alone. There are words, I say, and there is The Word. Every word is a fluctuating flame to a wick that dies. But The Word, The Word is a ruling sum and drastic mean, the standard that travels without moving. Words move, but The Word is fixed, the true blank. The Word is the voice of the lamp, and words are soot blackening the glass. The movements of words engender time and death. But The Word lives outside of time and death. Inside time, death rules. Life is death’s kingdom. We live at dying’s rate. Words are a sop for death. But The Word is the mother of thresholds, regulating life and death. The Word begets presences impossible to confirm, given the blinding action of time and the sea and the earth’s turning repose. And who is that supposed to feed? Whose thirst would that quench? she screeches, her voice materializing a greater body of innumerable birds arriving at dominion, increasing to overwhelm every mile of my heart, that bloody aerie branching and leafing, her feathers become all eyes and mouths, her voice coming now from everywhere, booming, When the Lover is ready, the Beloved will appear! Say what’s The Word or we both die! 2 I’ll call her my battle angel, this evangelion. Seraphic herald of the ninth echelon, pleromatic aeon demanding a founding gnosis, her voice electric tekhelet, Septuagint, a two-leaved door opening onto porches, chambers, and courts, her voice a Solomonic column of barley sugar. She’s why I’m crazy. She’s why I can’t sleep. She’s why I never sleep. She’s why I avoid people. She’s why I drill the eight limbs with the mud-step, why I walk the octagon of trigrams inscribed on Wudang, why I practice the Spiral Ox Jaw and the Tiger’s Mouth. She’s why I’m hard to live with and why I say, The bread that rises in a house that fails, The Word, father of zero and one, is our advocate. A shut eye we name Beginning, The Word sleeps, and all is darkness. An open eye we name The Treasure, The Word wakes and voices are heard among the sounds of water. The Word dreams, and worlds appear. And stars beyond and behind our eyes. And the moon with its hair tied up and its hair let down. Bound on every side, and wide open in the center, The Word hosts our breath, our span, the space of our dreaming and our thinking, our stillness and our moving. And the emerging present is one of its bodies. The fulcrum, the eye, the heart enthroned, the dove without person, homing, The Word is a hammer raining down its songs, a river pouring out of the mouth of the anvil. Twin and unlike, The Word is without peer. Black and white, it is a wheeling pair of coincident opposites turning on a point: Existence and Nonexistence hand in hand. Substance and Void begetting life and death. The Word is an open book, and its first and last pages are missing. It is a brother and sister telling each other the missing parts of one another’s stories. It is the lover and the beloved constantly changing places in the fire. And it is the wind in the treetops outside our window, a voice torn to pieces. Hear it? The wind without a house, she says. Time without a gate, she says. A memory of the ocean torments the trees, a homesickness, she says. The wind is leafing through both of our histories, looking for a happy ending. It is my hand moving over your body, I say, finding more and more to know. It is a circle of women reciting in the round the oldest stories of Death disguised as a traveler or overlooked familiar, friend we shunned for less faithful playmates. It is a house, and from inside come the voices of children taking turns reading to one another. It is their own story they read. But why do their voices seem uneasy? Does the moon, giant at the window, frighten them? Does death run amok through all the pages of the story? Do the pages turn by themselves? Are there strangers in the house? Is the house burning? Soldiers with guns are at our door again. Sister, quick. Change into a penny. I’ll fold you in a handkerchief, put you in my pocket, and jump inside a sack of rice, one of the uncooked kernels. Men with knives are looking in our windows again. Brother, hurry. Turn yourself into one of our mother’s dolls sitting on the living room shelf. I’ll be the dust settling on your eyelids. The ones wearing wings are in the yard. The ones adorned with lightning are in the house. The ones decorated with stars are dividing our futures among them. Don’t answer when they call to us in the voice of Nanny. Don’t believe them when they promise sugar. Don’t come out until evening, or when you hear our mother weeping to herself. If only I could become the mirror in her purse, I’d never come back until the end of time. 3 The treetops buck and heave in the night wind. Like drunks at sea leaning too far over a rocking bulwark. Like a woman throwing her green and gold hair in time to a song only she can hear. And from inside that windswept bulk growing darker comes a frenzied uproar of what must be hundreds of hidden birds. All that noise of wind, leaves, and branches, all that uttering from unseen throats, and is there no word? All that shrieking, iterating, crying in the rustling leaves. All that screaming, shrilling, running din of squeaky wheels, radiant numbers of tongues, beaks, hubs, wings, spokes keening in centrifugal spinning, and not one word? Not any? Nor part? No bearing? One hunger, a fanned fire, roars in the voice of the sea. One light eats itself, unconsumed. The wind is taking the night apart, she says. The wind is dismantling the leaves, the branches, the minutes, our listening, and finding more and more moving pieces to index: our hands, our mouths, our voices, recurring stairs of an imperfect past, a rumored present, figures multiplying inside a mirror. Each, alone in his dream of the world, I say, is host and guest, a book and the one who reads it by the light of a vanished childhood. Don’t say that, she says. We see by the light of who we are. Look at us: you inside me inside you. We’ve lived inside each other from the beginning. And from before beginning. Before the world was ever found. Before the world was found, I say, I dwelled inside you, and you breathed all through me, in my body and its happiness, in my body and its loneliness. After I found the world, I had to go looking for you. Ever since the world, I only lose you and find you. Lose you. And find you. The body of the beloved is the lover’s true homeland, she says. I can hear you, but I can’t hear me, I say, your voice a burning gown of song and time, and me with my ghosts, me with my mockingbird. Don’t say that, she says. What is my mind, I wonder, but the reflected light of your voice, O, burning one, O, seeing voice, O, speaking eye that renders us now legible, now indecipherable, now strangers traveling under assumed names. Don’t say that, she says. Look. A single page of the wind copied by hand is the volume of despair the smallest living wing displaces. And your voice will be your cup each day my wings shelter your dear, momentary earth. My mind is several minds, I say, each abiding differently: in your eyes, in the smell of your hair, in your voice moving over me, in my voice moving over you. She says, Don’t look at your hands. Watch the shadows they make. I say, Moving over you, my voice crosses out of forbidden chambers of the Emperor of China, through chronicles of exile and death in a foreign country, to touch the ground I touch in me when I speak to you. She says, A new mind makes the world new. True words are a little blue. And being human makes the saddest music in the world. She says, Postpone all morning bells. The ore lies awake inside the rock, a dream of origin waiting to be rescued. I say, The glare of your nakedness confounds me, a distraction from the darker incandescence of your being. Inside you is the safest place to be. The radio in the kitchen is stuck in the year I was born. The capitals of the world are burning. And of all the things on my mind this evening, words weigh the least, Death weighs the most, and your voice’s body beneath my voice’s moving hand is a green agent of freedom and law, best friend to my earth and my ache. Of all the things keeping me from sleep, words weigh too much, yet not enough. Time weighs nothing at all, but I can’t bear it. And your body, burdened by minutes and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song. One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee, your body is the Lord’s pure geometry. Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies, and the mouth of the falls. And of all the things we’re dying from tonight, being alive is the strangest, surviving our histories is the saddest. Time leaves the smallest wounds, and your body, a mortal occasion of timeless law, is all the word I know.

Blindfold I should to Myra run, And swear to love her ever; Yet when the bandage was undone, Should only think her clever. With the full usage of my eyes, I Chloe should decide for; But when she talks, I her despise, Whom, dumb, I could have died for!

Allegiance is assigned Forever when the mind Chooses and stamps the will. Thus, I must love you still Through good and ill. But though we cannot part We may retract the heart And build such privacies As self-regard agrees Conduce to ease. So manners will repair The ravage of despair Which generous love invites, Preferring quiet nights To vain delights.

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love? What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above? What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised to wave, Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave? Ah, thy luminous eyes! once was their light fed with the fire of day; Now their shadowy lids cover them close, hush them and hide away. Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast; Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passion past. Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me; Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee. Sweet, the kisses of death set on thy lips, colder are they than mine; Colder surely than past kisses that love poured for thy lips as wine. Lov'st thou death? is his face fairer than love's, brighter to look upon? Seest thou light in his eyes, light by which love's pales and is overshone? Lo the roses of death, grey as the dust, chiller of leaf than snow! Why let fall from thy hand love's that were thine, roses that loved thee so? Large red lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see; Thornless blossom of love, full of the sun, fruits that were reared for thee. Now death's poppies alone circle thy hair, girdle thy breasts as white; Bloodless blossoms of death, leaves that have sprung never against the light. Nay then, sleep if thou wilt; love is content; what should he do to weep? Sweet was love to thee once; now in thine eyes sweeter than love is sleep.

“A woman for whom great gods might strive!” I said, and kissed her there: And then I thought of the other five, And of how charms outwear. I thought of the first with her eating eyes, And I thought of the second with hers, green-gray, And I thought of the third, experienced, wise, And I thought of the fourth who sang all day. And I thought of the fifth, whom I'd called a jade. And I thought of them all, tear-fraught; And that each had shown her a passable maid, Yet not of the favour sought. So I traced these words on the bark of a beech, Just at the falling of the mast: “After scanning five; yes, each and each, I've found the woman desired – at last!” “–I feel a strange benumbing spell, As one ill-wished!” said she. And soon it seemed that something fell Was starving her love for me. “I feel some curse. O, five were there?” And wanly she swerved, and went away. I followed sick: night numbed the air, And dark the mournful moorland lay. I cried: “O darling, turn your head!” But never her face I viewed; “O turn, O turn!” again I said, And miserably pursued. At length I came to a Christ-cross stone Which she had passed without discern; And I knelt upon the leaves there strown, And prayed aloud that she might turn. I rose, and looked; and turn she did; I cried, “My heart revives!” “Look more,” she said. I looked as bid; Her face was all the five's. All the five women, clear come back, I saw in her – with her made one, The while she drooped upon the track, And her frail term seemed well-nigh run. She'd half forgot me in her change; “Who are you? Won't you say Who you may be, you man so strange, Following since yesterday?” I took the composite form she was, And carried her to an arbour small, Not passion-moved, but even because In one I could atone to all. And there she lies, and there I tend, Till my life's threads unwind, A various womanhood in blend – Not one, but all combined.

Say I had no choice, this weightless finger touched my tongue and told me to, it taught me; when kinder and more subtle methods failed, it put a gun to my head, a zero seared coldly in one temple, electrode glued chill to the other, the sniffer dogs rooting and snuffling in my crotch, the small white doorless room, the laser flashlight in one eye. You can’t hear the voice when it utters let there be speech, yet I faithfully spoke what I thought I was supposed to, inspired idiot, or dummy on that lap of language, the words themselves more real than I, words here before we were and when we are not again. So I blurted it out, my initial soliloquies, what I could catch through the static, giving my head a good thump now and then like one of those black-and-white tv sets, and projecting, those were some vast stadiums, the first row of faces as far as near stars if there at all, never having the faintest idea what it meant, the microphone dead, I did my best, tell them. Inch-thick rope for ascot, eyes put out, chained to my oars, all the others long vanished: the first minute of death is so long, like the first minute of consciousness there in the infinite darkness of somebody weeping, you never arrive, never reach shore, never mind with what clarity you seem to hear with your lips distant roar of surf breaking. I pulled too for those who’d come later, I’m guessing, singing in their names as well, sort of lip-synching but singing twice as loud, strapped to the mast, earways cleared, though I heard nothing but nothing, blue. Making up what I couldn’t make out, and all that uproarious and pitiless derision I had to raise my voice above, I mere link—out on that unknown ocean beating at my ears, just as at the beginning, the mother’s heart booming softly; from nowhere it came, like me, months before I arrived to take up the sorry job of being me, whatever a month was, whatever I was then, blind little dolphin with a thumb in its mouth, whatever a mouth was; poor mother mourning her own mother’s dying, over the actual ocean she lay, a strong stone’s throw from the Ohio or that poisoned ghost of it. Mother of my mother dying away from this world just as I was about to die into it. I see them there, up to their knees, gathered as for a baptism, cross traced in hydrochloric acid on a tiny forehead, right there at the dead water’s edge a scythe of moon, a meteor in arc of falling axe of gold for the severing of hairy umbilical rope, hear me out! I saw they were standing watch over her, and my mother’s conspicuous absence, wincing at the constant cough; and I saw her whom I would never meet, nearing peace in the scarlet Magdalenean cerements, clenching lightly between thumb and skeletal forefinger the scarlet egg, and the wide river’s sundering undertow sucking to its breast her shrunken body, fetal in her narrow bed, nothing but a huckleberry craft by now just vanishing around the first bend, more and more lost from sight by my mother, twenty-two, unaided by lunatic male she’d been sentenced to, from Goethe-phase to Trakl-phase. And she breaks down in her hotel room, in bullet-pocked Vienna, helplessly swept down the blind unwept current still flowing, sadness’s chemistry, horror’s and guilt’s, to this day through my veins. Months before we met, I listening to her crying, it went on forever, how not hear it, how not be fed it, in a shoreless darkness of sorrowing I listened, still listen, now watch this and pay close attention: nothing else there, only a listening called me, no name even, till they grave it in stone. Until we finally met, I watched her face rise on the horizon. Then there was some loud mutual screaming in the even more terrible blindness called light. Long before I invented the first word it taught me, it told me the others, so many. So only what was never mine is mine; and when no one is listening I sing what it means to me, even now, hearing my voice through my own disappearing, farther away every day, my mother’s mother’s fate and mine now one as I board the ocean liner at three months of age and arrive in New York, filled with space and time.

"Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care, But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair." So sung a little Clod of Clay Trodden with the cattle's feet, But a Pebble of the brook Warbled out these metres meet: "Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

The last light of a July evening drained into the streets below: My love and I had hard things to say and hear, and we sat over wine, faltering, picking our words carefully. The afternoon before I had lain across my bed and my cat leapt up to lie alongside me, purring and slowly growing dozy. By this ritual I could clear some clutter from my baroque brain. And into that brief vacancy the image of a horse cantered, coming straight to me, and I knew it brought hard talk and hurt and fear. How did we do? A medium job, which is well above average. But because she had opened her heart to me as far as she did, I saw her fierce privacy, like a gnarled, luxuriant tree all hung with disappointments, and I knew that to love her I must love the tree and the nothing it cares for me.