1247 Love poems

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately. I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness, For my surrounding air hath a new lightness; Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther; As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness. Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her. No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour, Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers. Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches, As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches, Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour: As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.

As you came from the holy land of Walsinghame Met you not with my true love By the way as you came? How shall I know your true love That have met many one As I went to the holy land That have come, that have gone? She is neither white nor brown But as the heavens fair There is none hath a form so divine In the earth or the air. Such an one did I meet, good Sir, Such an Angelic face, Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear By her gait, by her grace. She hath left me here all alone, All alone as unknown, Who sometimes did me lead with her self, And me loved as her own. What’s the cause that she leaves you alone And a new way doth take; Who loved you once as her own And her joy did you make? I have loved her all my youth, But now old, as you see, Love likes not the falling fruit From the withered tree. Know that love is a careless child And forgets promise past, He is blind, he is deaf when he list And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content And a trustless joy He is won with a world of despair And is lost with a toy. Of womenkind such indeed is the love Or the word Love abused Under which many childish desires And conceits are excused. But true Love is a durable fire In the mind ever burning; Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning.

For love—I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes. Love is dead in us if we forget the virtues of an amulet and quick surprise.

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut That will solve a murder case unsolved for years Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window Through which he saw her head, connecting with Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years; For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us; I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields Always, to be near you, even in my heart When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to The place where I again think of you, a new Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow Of a ship which sails From Hartford to Miami, and I love you Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

Again this morning my eyes woke up too close to your eyes, their almost green orbs too heavy-lidded to really look back. To wake up next to you is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you to see you. But I do look. So when you come to me in your opulent sadness, I see you do not want me to unbutton you so I cannot do the one thing I can do. Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase away from me. Already it is years of you a staircase away from me. To be near you and not near you is ordinary. You are ordinary. Still, how many afternoons have I spent peeling blue paint from our porch steps, peering above hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first glimpse of you. How many hours under the overgrown, pink Camillas, thinking the color was wrong for you, thinking you'd appear after my next blink. Soon you'll come down the stairs to tell me something. And I'll say, okay. Okay. I'll say it like that, say it just like that, I'll go on being your never-enough. It's not the best in you I long for. It's when you're noteless, numb at the ends of my fingers, all is all. I say it is.

The water closing over us and the going down is all. Gills are given. We convert in a town of broken hulls and green doubloons. O you dead pirates hear us! There is no salvage. All you know is the color of warm caramel. All is salt. See how our eyes have migrated to the uphill side? Now we are new round mouths and no spines letting the water cover. It happens over and over, me in your body and you in mine.

I opened the window so I could hear people. Last night we were together and by ourselves. You. You look and look at Diver for Crane by  Johns and want to say something. In the water you are a child without eyes. Yesterday there was nothing on the beach and no one knows where it came from. There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us. There are minutes of peace. Just the feel.   Just this once. Where does the past, where should the period go? What is under the earth followed them home. The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James. We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command. Slow— in black — on an orange street sign. Missing everywhere and unwritten — suddenly — all at once. Him. He misses a person and he is still living. I haven’t missed you for long and you are so gone. Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence    . . . we must have been lonely people to say those things then. But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at. In the perfect field someone has left everything including themselves. You. You should stay here. It’s a brutal and beautiful autumn. With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under time he touched something else. People are mostly what they can’t keep and keeps them. And inside the circular cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world. In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so. . . so if   you’re looking for answers you’re looking at every water tower around here. Why does the sea hold what it loves most below? Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news. How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make? And the leather of   your chair   . . .    it has me marked so good luck forgetting. The world was a home. It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic. Make sure you date and sign here then save all the soft things. Because everyone wants to know when it was, how it happened — say something about it. How the night hail made imprints all over. Our things. Our charming and singular things.

Someone says Tristan & Isolde, the shared cup & broken vows binding them, & someone else says Romeo & Juliet, a lyre & Jew’s harp sighing a forbidden oath, but I say a midnight horn & a voice with a moody angel inside, the two married rib to rib, note for note. Of course, I am thinking of those Tuesdays or Thursdays at Billy Berg’s in LA when Lana Turner would say, “Please sing ‘Strange Fruit’ for me,”& then her dancing nightlong with Mel Torme, as if she knew what it took to make brass & flesh say yes beneath the clandestine stars & a spinning that is so fast we can’t feel the planet moving. Is this why some of us fall in & out of love? Did Lady Day & Prez ever hold each other & plead to those notorious gods? I don’t know. But I do know even if a horn & voice plumb the unknown, what remains unsaid coalesces around an old blues & begs with a hawk’s yellow eyes.

My lady fair with soft arms, what can I say to you—words, words as if all worlds were there.

for: max and alyssa malyyssax worelish tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady, go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns, then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum, on to northampton to see the smith college art museum & greenhouse where we'll see a green heron it would be nice to be able to walk today so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn where we're able to buy riccotta cheese which means twice-baked, with which we're able to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm war what is it good for? absolutely nothing