1247 Love poems

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned In the river of not having you, we lived Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms And we were parted for a thousand years. Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover The earth and have forgotten that we existed. It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection, It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth. When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world Without regret but with stormy recriminations. Someday far down that corridor of horror the future Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face And decide to harbor it for a little while longer From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

You are a ukulele beyond my microphone You are a Yukon beyond my Micronesia You are a union beyond my meiosis You are a unicycle beyond my migration You are a universe beyond my mitochondria You are a Eucharist beyond my Miles Davis You are a euphony beyond my myocardiogram You are a unicorn beyond my Minotaur You are a eureka beyond my maitai You are a Yuletide beyond my minesweeper You are a euphemism beyond my myna bird You are a unit beyond my mileage You are a Yugoslavia beyond my mind’s eye You are a yoo-hoo beyond my minor key You are a Euripides beyond my mime troupe You are a Utah beyond my microcosm You are a Uranus beyond my Miami You are a youth beyond my mylar You are a euphoria beyond my myalgia You are a Ukranian beyond my Maimonides You are a Euclid beyond my miter box You are a Univac beyond my minus sign You are a Eurydice beyond my maestro You are a eugenics beyond my Mayan You are a U-boat beyond my mind control You are a euthanasia beyond my miasma You are a urethra beyond my Mysore You are a Euterpe beyond my Mighty Sparrow You are a ubiquity beyond my minority You are a eunuch beyond my migraine You are a Eurodollar beyond my miserliness You are a urinal beyond my Midol You are a uselessness beyond my myopia

Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered, sibilant similes and promises sotto voce. It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard, the form and content clash, create this weird distortion like an echo or a tape delay. Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered. On which do you place emphasis: The words? Or the breath? The farfetched or the foreplay? It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard when objectivity has disappeared and your lover is getting further carried away. Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered vows? It ’ s hard to take him at his word, or hers: Speak up! Proclaim! you want to say. It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard, hard to admit one sharp as you is stirred. You need to back off, cool down, act blasé. Love ’ s language is hyperbole, but whispered. It ’ s easy to imagine you ’ ve misheard.

"Myrtle loves Harry"—It is sometimes hard to remember a thing like that, Hard to think about it, and no one knows what to do with it when he has it, So write it out on a billboard that stands under the yellow light of an "L" platform among popcorn wrappers and crushed cigars, A poster that says "Mama I Love Crispy Wafers So." Leave it on a placard where somebody else gave the blonde lady a pencil moustache, and another perplexed citizen deposited: "Jesus Saves. Jesus Saves." One can lay this bundle down there with the others, And never lose it, or forget it, or want it. "Myrtle loves Harry." They live somewhere.

Harry loves Myrtle—He has strong arms, from the warehouse, And on Sunday when they take the bus to emerald meadows he doesn't say: "What will your chastity amount to when your flesh withers in a little while?" No, On Sunday, when they picnic in emerald meadows they look at the Sunday paper: GIRL SLAYS BANKER-BETRAYER They spread it around on the grass BATH-TUB STIRS JERSEY ROW And then they sit down on it, nice. Harry doesn't say "Ziggin's Ointment for withered flesh, Cures thousands of men and women of moles, warts, red veins, flabby throat, scalp and hair diseases, Not expensive, and fully guaranteed." No, Harry says nothing at all, He smiles, And they kiss in the emerald meadows on the Sunday paper.

Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me and I believe you. How could I not feel you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass, or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving. If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you. It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant. Maybe you darken, already too much changed, maybe in your house you would be content where no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air, such things held simply to be voiceless. And if you mean me, I believe you. Or if you should darken, this inwardness would be misspent, and flinching I might pause, and add to these meager incidents the words. Some books should stay formal on the shelves. So surely I heard you, in your complication aware, snow holding where it might weightless rest, and should you fold into me—trackless, misspent, too much arranged—I might believe you but swiftly shut, lines of smoke rising through snow, here where it seems no good word emerges. Though it is cold, I am aware such reluctance could lose these blinking hours to simple safety. Here is an inwardless purpose. In these hours when snow shuts, it may be we empty, amounting to something. How could I not wait for those few words, which we might enter.

You love apples So let’s speak Of apples Say I were to hold you in my hand like an apple round and red And kiss you in bites on the table or Under the tree where you droppedtump And you reached up in cool shadow on the grass And bit back crunch: God I’d laugh knowing dreams Ask like this swallow by swallow

... between impulses and repentances, between advances and retreats. —Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun? Here I am posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets sonnets as rare as a live Aegean rhino absorbing the cracklings of my craft its riverine volcanoes its spectacular lightning peninsulas emitting plentiful creosote phantoms from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas scouring through years of unrecognized pablums of constant arch-rivalry with extinction bringing up skulls of intensive discourse by the claws in one’s mind which seem to burn with systemic reduction one then suffers poetic scorching by debris by inaugural timber which flashes by friction which flares up & harries by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass of initial intuitive neglect as if one’s fangs were fatally stifled by incipience by verbal range war didactics by territorial driftwood by sudden undemonstrative detractions awed by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante one’s youngish body stands devoured by reverential print trails momentarily cancelled by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval stung by demeaning neutralities ravaged by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis by a tasteless collision of rums in transition by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees there exists irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche with indeterminate earthenware splinters taking up from aboriginal density a forge of Sumerian verbal signs cooked with a tendency towards starfish hypnosis towards psychic confrontational drainage conducting one’s frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire yes apprenticeship means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper’s mosaic cringed in smoky interior cubicles releasing various deleriums as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star with its dark incapable tints with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna poetics an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies stretching under a blue marsupial sun like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed fugaciously transfixed upon an anomalous totem of glints upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise of course kinetic like magical malachite rivers flowing from moons blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas I’ve looked for only the tonalities that scorch which bring to my lips wave after wave of sensitivity by virulence yes a merciless bitterness brewed by a blue-black tornado of verbs in a surge of flashing scorpion chatter in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage like a scattered igneous wind co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath resolved by flash point edicts by consumptive stellar limes by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue mixing magnets juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas yes hatcheries floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette its mysteriums always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas or leaking moon spun alloestrophas* as if speaking in irregular glossological green Dutch a frenetic seminar on febricity a reitteration of hendecasyllabic agitation & stinging a ferocious vacillation explosive as random “aggregational” nodes mimed by a black consonantal dissection its maximal priority forked at “hypotactic inclusion” with isochronous internal procedure with ratios with phonic penetralia by distortion primed by anomalous “nuclear accent” by a cadence composing syllables & compounds yes poetics its force jettisoned by “hypotaxis” by ... paratactic co-ordination & fire

She was changing on the inside it was true what had been written The new syntax of love both sucked and burned The secret clung around them She took in the smell Walking down a road to nowhere every sound was relevant The sun fell behind them now he seemed strangely moved She would take her clothes off for the camera she said in plain english but she wasn’t holding that snake

We have walked in Love's land a little way, We have learnt his lesson a little while, And shall we not part at the end of day, With a sigh, a smile? A little while in the shine of the sun, We were twined together, joined lips, forgot How the shadows fall when the day is done, And when Love is not. We have made no vows--there will none be broke, Our love was free as the wind on the hill, There was no word said we need wish unspoke, We have wrought no ill. So shall we not part at the end of day, Who have loved and lingered a little while, Join lips for the last time, go our way, With a sigh, a smile?