1247 Love poems

Love's balustrade, love's balcony a few iron words that can be seen anywhere still in grocery lists, in laundry hung between two objects, an e-mail, in an apology, in a thought about the weather these rusty words, these rusting gates before a breath, Standing in the cold morning on a cold blue stairs, with a curlicue of coffee you look at the word Love written on the side of the Pharmacy in cherry-vanilla flavored cursive because this is where a love poem once stood, what I am saying right now is secretly built over a love poem, the fossils of a cupola, pink buildings with red hyphens and dashes and three red dots, You, second person pink with shutters you could open with a fingernail like in an advent calendar to see sticker scenes of apartments inside: a radiator, a bare arm, two cups by themselves on a table The mind of the attic still persists up there meditative water and the chairs talking quietly to one another It's now pink rubble, rhyming bricks, and an illicit balcony the heart had such a fancy elevator that it started to look like a bird cage and once in a lemon-scented fog near springtime-fresh trees, I heard two people say, "Yellow kiss-shaped flowers, telephone flowers, are falling from my mouth now" Now, it's a set of blue and white checkered apartment buildings math problems that are eight stories high a long division jutting as pollution into the sky laundry, cooking spills, gasoline shirts commas, theories or arguments of boyfriends & girlfriends boyfriends & boyfriends, girlfriends & girlfriends, all hanging out of the window that you opened.

Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?

When you said that you wanted to be useful as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.” Then you said you would not trade our Mondays, useful for two thousand years, for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. I said, “Endless are the wonders to which I can only say ‘ah,’ that our ‘Ah’ who art in heaven can easily become the ‘ah, ah’ that comforts a baby.” Then you said, “Go make a living on metaphors for ‘ah,’” that I, a lunatic, secretly want to be the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a fifty-story-high collaboration of art and science, a mirror of light that might be seen five or ten days out to sea, Poseidon standing on my shoulders, the Library of Alexandria at my back, all the wonders of Greek Africa. I said, “Today is Monday. I want little more than to be a hand-mirror my wife carries in her purse with a hankie to stop my hemorrhaging humility.”

The water sings along our keel, The wind falls to a whispering breath; I look into your eyes and feel No fear of life or death; So near is love, so far away The losing strife of yesterday. We watch the swallow skim and dip; Some magic bids the world be still; Life stands with finger upon lip; Love hath his gentle will; Though hearts have bled, and tears have burned, The river floweth unconcerned. We pray the fickle flag of truce Still float deceitfully and fair; Our eyes must love its sweet abuse; This hour we will not care, Though just beyond to-morrow's gate, Arrayed and strong, the battle wait.

While lovers sleep, I dig my nails into the earth, holding up traffic. Just now a cloud has pulled up while I was talking to the Emptiness of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves at the bottom of the ocean. My heart is taped up like a child’s drawing of the moon over the broken window of the sky where the wind always comes back to fill my lungs. I will dance on my shadow. I will open my mouth with the air inside my mother’s coffin. I will be the arrow breaking apart in the body of the blackbird, which appears at my window, singing.

When a beautiful woman wakes up, she checks to see if her beauty is still there. When a sick person wakes up, he checks to see if he continues to be sick. He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day, looks out the window at a sky where a time-release sun is crawling through the milky X ray of a cloud. * * * * * I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box, the wires crossed, the panel lit by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing out of sequence, the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls, and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam, the message doesn’t reach its destination, the angel falls down into the body of a dog and is speechless, tearing at itself with fast white teeth; and the consciousness twists evasively, like a sheet of paper, traveled by blue tongues of flame. * * * * * In the famous painting, the saint looks steadfastly heavenward, away from the physical indignity below, the fascinating spectacle of his own body bristling with arrows; he looks up as if he were already adamantly elsewhere, exerting that power of denial the soul is famous for, that ability to say, “None of this is real: Nothing that happened here on earth and who I thought I was, and nothing that I did or that was done to me, was ever real.”

Speak to her heart! That manic force When wits depart Forbids remorse. Dream with her dreaming Until her lust Seems to her seeming An act of trust! Do without doing! Love’s wilful potion Veils the ensuing, And brief, commotion.

The man I love most says one day he will take a ballpoint pen and connect the stars across this freckled scoop of chest and milky way. We’ll cross the slope of pale belly and name the new constellation after a god who shows people all the places they might shine.

only the manners of centuries ago can teach me how to address you my lover as who you are O Sestius, how could you put up with my children thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn't matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke I wouldn't sleep with you or any man if you paid me and most of you poets don't have the cash anyway so please rejoin your fraternal books forever while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn who might've been induced to digitalize a part of you were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness it's good to live without a refrigerator! why bother to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter? and of the lonesome Sappho. let's have it warm for now.

For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on— and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child. In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body— this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.