1247 Love poems

For S. S. She reads by the light of a guttering candle and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying herself to turn it. If the wind whips the sycamore branches outside her window, if her nightgowned shoulders shudder once from a sudden chill, so much the better, and the book must tell of children toiling for bread and pennies in a textile mill, or tender brothers doomed to sharpen their bayonets in opposing armies, or a family of refugees, dust in their mouths, gazing with longing at the far shore of a river. And I long only to be the author of that book she reads whose page glows from the same dim flame that illuminates her face, the author whose thought she contemplates as she touches a fingertip to a word to mark her place and turns her head toward the kettle that has begun to whistle.

Of many reasons I love you here is one the way you write me from the gate at the airport so I can tell you everything will be alright so you can tell me there is a bird trapped in the terminal      all the people ignoring it       because they do not know what to do with it       except to leave it alone until it scares itself to death it makes you terribly terribly sad You wish you could take the bird outside and set it free or       (failing that) call a bird-understander to come help the bird All you can do is notice the bird and feel for the bird       and write to tell me how language feels impossibly useless but you are wrong You are a bird-understander better than I could ever be who make so many noises and call them song These are your own words your way of noticing and saying plainly of not turning away from hurt you have offered them to me       I am only giving them back if only I could show you how very useless they are not

It’s true: I almost never smile, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in love: my heart is that black violin played slowly. You know that moment late in the solo when the voice is so pure    you feel the blood in it: the wound between rage and complete surrender. That’s where I’m smiling. You just can’t see it—the sound bleeding perfectly inside me. The first time I killed a vampire    I was sad: I mean we were almost family. But that’s so many lives ago. I believe in the cry that cuts into the melody, the strings calling back the forgotten world. When I think of the madness that has made me    and the midnight I walk inside—all day long: when I think of that one note    that breaks what’s left of what’s human in me, man, I love    everything

Dear love, where the red lillies blossomed and grew, The white snows are falling; And all through the wood, where I wandered with you, The loud winds are calling; And the robin that piped to us tune upon tune, Neath the elm—you remember, Over tree-top and mountain has followed the June, And left us—December. Has left, like a friend that is true in the sun, And false in the shadows. He has found new delights, in the land where he's gone, Greener woodlands and meadows. What care we? let him go! let the snow shroud the lea, Let it drift on the heather! We can sing through it all; I have you—you have me, And we’ll laugh at the weather. The old year may die, and a new one be born That is bleaker and colder; But it cannot dismay us; we dare it—we scorn, For love makes us bolder. Ah Robin! sing loud on the far-distant lea, Thou friend in fair weather; But here is a song sung, that’s fuller of glee, By two warm hearts together.

is my heart. A stranger berry there never was, tartless. Gone sour in the sun, in the sunroom or moonroof, roofless. No poetry. Plain. No fresh, special recipe to bless. All I’ve ever made with these hands and life, less substance, more rind. Mostly rim and trim, meatless but making much smoke in the old smokehouse, no less. Fatted from the day, overripe and even toxic at eve. Nonetheless, in the end, if you must know, if I must bend, waistless, to that excruciation. No marvel, no harvest left me speechless, yet I find myself somehow with heart, aloneless. With heart, fighting fire with fire, fightless. That loud hub of us, meat stub of us, beating us senseless. Spectacular in its way, its way of not seeing, congealing dayless but in everydayness. In that hopeful haunting (a lesser way of saying in darkness) there is silencelessness for the pressing question. Heart, what art you? War, star, part? Or less: playing a part, staying apart from the one who loves, loveless.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Side by side Side by side To see a recent photograph of this tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel that Larkin is describing, click here. , their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits habits Clothes vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd— The little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque pre-baroque In Larkin’s pronunciation, the phrase rhymes with 'shock.' The Baroque period, exemplified by ornamentation, followed the Renaissance. This tomb was sculpted in the Middle Ages. Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet gauntlet An armored glove, worn in the Middle Ages , still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy effigy A sculptured likeness Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base. They would not guess how early in Their supine supine On their backs stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths The endless altered people came, Washing at their identity. Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins skeins Used figuratively, a skein is a quantity of thread Above their scrap of history, Only an Only an When first published in June 1956 in the London Magazine, the line began: Only their attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon blazon Both a coat of arms, and a public proclamation , and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

As we are so wonderfully done with each other We can walk into our separate sleep On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood lies O my lady, my fairest dear, my sweetest, loveliest one Your lips have splashed my dull house with the speech of flowers My hands are hallowed where they touched over your soft curving. It is good to be weary from that brilliant work It is being God to feel your breathing under me A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning . . . Don’t let anyone in to wake us.

Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you small as a girl? What I want most is to have been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and competed against you at the same time.

LaBohem Brown In a package of minutes there is this We. How beautiful. Merry foreigners in our morning, we laugh, we touch each other, are responsible props and posts. A physical light is in the room. Because the world is at the window we cannot wonder very long. You rise. Although genial, you are in yourself again. I observe your direct and respectable stride. You are direct and self-accepting as a lion in Afrikan velvet. You are level, lean, remote. There is a moment in Camaraderie when interruption is not to be understood. I cannot bear an interruption. This is the shining joy; the time of not-to-end. On the street we smile. We go in different directions down the imperturbable street.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,— Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,— I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe; Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain, Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain. But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay; Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows; And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way. Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."