1247 Love poems

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler That's what the first line says of the song I've been playing all summer at the keyboard—trying to get my hands around its dark, melancholy chords, its story line of a melody that twists up like snakes from melodic minor scales that I've also been trying to learn, though I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales. Come to think of it, neither am I much when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean. Not that I haven't had my chances. Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband, half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby than a grown man, the poet laureate of the self-induced coma when it came to doing anything for anybody but me. "Now and then he took his thumb out of his mouth to write an ode to or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day." That's what I imagined my ex-wife said to our therapist near the end. She did say: "It's all about Bill." She was right. And suddenly it frightens me, remembering how, at our wedding, our poet friends read poems of (mostly) utter depression to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love had double-crossed our union, if strange snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden had hissed at us, and now I worry, on your wedding day, if I'm not doing the same damned thing . . . . I haven't come to spring up and put my curse on your bliss. Here's what I want to say: You're young. You don’t know what love is. And as the next line of the song goes, you won't —"Until you know the meaning of the blues." Darlings, the blues will come (though not often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords against your paradise. A little of that you unwittingly got today, when it rained and you couldn't be married outside under the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard. But paradise doesn't have to be structured so that we can never reenter it. After you've kicked each other out of it once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course), teach yourself how to say a few kind words to each other. Don't stand there angry, stony. Each of you let the other know what you are feeling and thinking and then it may be possible to return to each other smiling, hand in hand. For arm in arm, you are your best Eden. Remember the advice the old poet sang to you on the afternoon of August 4, 2001, the day you got married. May you enjoy a good laugh thinking of him and his silver thumb now that you've turned the key into your new life in the beautiful Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soul Lambent flames; purple passion lurks In your dusk eyes. Red mouth; flower soft, Your soul leaps up—and flashes Star-like, white, flame-hot. Curving arms, encircling a world of love, You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

You know where you did despise (Tother day) my little Eyes, Little Legs, and little Thighs, And some things, of little Size, You know where. You, tis true, have fine black eyes, Taper legs, and tempting Thighs, Yet what more than all we prize Is a Thing of little Size, You know where.

You left me – Sire – two Legacies – A Legacy of Love A Heavenly Father would suffice Had He the offer of – You left me Boundaries of Pain – Capacious as the Sea – Between Eternity and Time – Your Consciousness – and me –

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked- out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth. You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see. You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut. How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud, you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all. But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her. You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down. You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.

You that I loved all my life long, you are not the one. You that I followed, my line or path or way, that I followed singing, and you earth and air of the world the way went through, and you who stood around it so it could be the way, you forests and cities, you deer and opossums struck by the lonely hunter and left decaying, you paralyzed obese ones who sat on a falling porch in a deep green holler and observed me, your bald dog barking, as I stumbled past in a hurry along my line, you are not the one. But you are the one, you that I loved all my life long, you I still love so in my dying mind I grasp me loving you when we are gone. You are the one, you path or way or line that winds beside the house where she and I live on, still longing though long gone for the health of all forests and cities, and one day to visit them, one day be rich and free enough to go and see the restricted wonders of the earth. And you are the one, old ladies fated from birth to ugliness, obesity and dearth, who sat beside my path one day as I flashed by. And you are the one, all tumble-down shacks in disregarded hills and animals the car on the road kills and leaves stinking in the sun.

For Robert Philen You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind), which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name

For G A small thing crawling toward me across this dark lawn. Bright eyes the only thing I’m sure I see. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, my sweet? From long ago, and very far. Through crawling dark, my sweet, you’ve come back to me, have you? Even smaller this time than the stars.

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish only as one i contain the complications in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts the actors bow gently to me and i envy them their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another only as one i contain the complications and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing re-running the reels of my presence in this world the difficulties vanish and the images are the same eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications only as one walking gently storing my dream

Come, little infant, love me now, While thine unsuspected years Clear thine agèd father’s brow From cold jealousy and fears. Pretty, surely, ’twere to see By young love old time beguiled, While our sportings are as free As the nurse’s with the child. Common beauties stay fifteen; Such as yours should swifter move, Whose fair blossoms are too green Yet for lust, but not for love. Love as much the snowy lamb, Or the wanton kid, does prize, As the lusty bull or ram, For his morning sacrifice. Now then love me: time may take Thee before thy time away: Of this need we’ll virtue make, And learn love before we may. So we win of doubtful fate; And if good she to us meant, We that good shall antedate, Or, if ill, that ill prevent. Thus as kingdoms, frustrating Other titles to their crown, In the cradle crown their king, So all foreign claims to drown, So, to make all rivals vain, Now I crown thee with my love: Crown me with thy love again, And we both shall monarchs prove.