1247 Love poems

for David Cobb Craig At first, we had ways of talking That filled up the evening Until some things could be said. It was a made-up Situation in which lives could be lost. Whatever that was now grows inside Our bodies—a spongy, pulpy cell— Causing pieces of paper we hold In our hands to appear And disappear. All I ask Is to take me away from this place, To another place, very much like This place, where we can meet And six months later Be married. You laughed and went with me.

Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your sculpture factory Turns magical at times Behind its dark blue Druid door.   Last night, Inside you, sweetheart, It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself. And that Indian Summer Sunday afternoon a year ago When the bed became a meadow Of purple thistles, the honey hidden at the bottom of the stem Farm kids know to find For the sweetest suck of all. And sometimes in the winter when the room turns into a Cornell box Filled with the everyday miracles— Soap bubble pipe and thimble, wooden rabbits And old tan magazine illustrations of the Zodiac. Or turns into an igloo in which the only place to go Is to burrow here below the yellow blanket and the pillows To the South Pacific Of ourselves.   And then those mornings on vacation Gentle as the feathers of a light spring rain, and at the same time hard, like the beak Of a hawk.   You are where I belong.

Cherry plums suck a week’s soak, overnight they explode into the scenery of before your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past. Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds. Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds. They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear them through another tongue as the first year of our punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the decks of the cliffs. They take another turn on the spiral of life where the blossoms blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn where the ghost of you webs your limbs through branches of cherry plum. Rare bird, extinct color, you stay in my dreams in x-ray. In rerun, the bone of you stripping sweethearts folds and layers the shedding petals of my grief into a decayed holo- gram—my for ever empty art.

Too high, too high to pluck My heart shall swing. A fruit no bee shall suck, No wasp shall sting. If on some night of cold It falls to ground In apple-leaves of gold I’ll wrap it round. And I shall seal it up With spice and salt, In a carven silver cup, In a deep vault. Before my eyes are blind And my lips mute, I must eat core and rind Of that same fruit. Before my heart is dust At the end of all, Eat it I must, I must Were it bitter gall. But I shall keep it sweet By some strange art; Wild honey I shall eat When I eat my heart. O honey cool and chaste As clover’s breath! Sweet Heaven I shall taste Before my death.

The hunter to the husbandman Pays tribute since our love began, And to love-loyalty dedicates The phantom kills he meditates. Let me embrace, embracing you, Beauty of other shape and hue, Odd glinting graces of which none Shone more than candle to your sun; Your well-kissed hand was beckoning me In unfamiliar imagery. Smile your forgiveness: each bright ghost Dives in love’s glory and is lost Yielding your comprehensive pride A homage, even to suicide.

Four lanes over, a plump helium heart— slipped, maybe, from some kid's wrist or a rushed lover's empty front seat through a half-cracked car window— rises like a shiny purple cloudlet toward today's gray mess of clouds, trailing its gold ribbon like lightning that will never strike anything or anyone here on the forsaken ground, its bold LOVE increasingly illegible as it ascends over the frozen oaks, riding swift currents toward the horizon, a swollen word wobbling out of sight.

Custom, whose laws we all allow, And bow before his shrine, Has so ordained, my friend, that you Are now my Valentine. Ah, could my humble Muse aspire To catch the flame divine! These are the gifts that I’d require For thee, my Valentine! May virtue o’er thy steps preside And in thy conduct shine; May truth and wisdom ever guide And guard my Valentine. May piety, seraphic maid, Her influence divine Shed on thy head, and ever lead, And bless my Valentine. Life’s dangerous paths safe may’st thou tread, Shielded by Grace divine; And when these artless lines are read, Think on my Valentine!

Valentine, valentine you arrive in a town car with a chauffered envelope, scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old with red-rimmed "loves," red-rhymed lies in lace. The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in bloom where swamps settle down and drowse by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely winter, almost skipping February.

Tell me, Was Venus more beautiful Than you are, When she topped The crinkled waves, Drifting shoreward On her plaited shell? Was Botticelli’s vision Fairer than mine; And were the painted rosebuds He tossed his lady Of better worth Than the words I blow about you To cover your too great loveliness As with a gauze Of misted silver? For me, You stand poised In the blue and buoyant air, Cinctured by bright winds, Treading the sunlight. And the waves which precede you Ripple and stir The sands at my feet.

Paolo It was not Virgil you read (though I asked you to), but the Peruvian, part Indian, part cousin of Lorca whose words were spiky points, wafts of privet, week-old cod. When you breathed them at me nothing in the outer world ceased its turbulent grim direction. You breathed on my unhooked eyes and uncovered me. Above the roof a windfucker smacked the air, and wind kept eating the island rocks. Francesca We ate along the riverside at sundown. The clear green juice dripped from my mouth. We didn’t fuck missionary on clean sheets. I lost my head between your legs. My nose spreading like honey. A whiff of narcissus swept across us. I ate the flowers whole, tried to outfox Satan with my tongue. I felt as if I shimmied up your legs to find this point on the Jersey cliffs. The sun was God’s eye. I plugged my ears so I wouldn’t hear your crappy verse, then tore into your pants like a scared cat. The Chrysler Building was a pin. I tasted you five hundred feet as the Hudson pulled me under.