1247 Love poems

Off rows of windshields in the Amtrak lot rain in sudden clumps like jacks. Parked cars with people in them awaiting people they imagine hurtling through suburbs of silver woods awaiting them. True love needs interference, a certain blizzard distance, for the words to worm through. Remember Iowa? August storms that would self-spark as if our fights could trip the finest wire beneath the sidewalk. And the sunlight, harder after.

It seems to have traveled at night, Supremely ironic, lighting fires, Laying golden eggs in the midst of squalor, Its outer garments, in the latest version, Sumptuous, its linens more than shoddy, Drunk, moreover, at a seedy party The discriminating shunned, and, later, bawdy In a run-down neighborhood, with whores and sailors Chosen as companions while the queen went needy. Now that everything about it is known, Why does it come up purple or threadbare, Thrashing all its sunsets in a fit of pique, Or stripped, in the seamiest hayloft, ready To repeat dull anecdotes the millionth time, Its poise unquestionable, its voice unsteady? It is brilliant, androgynous, and stultifying With its threats and tears, dissembling always Its mad obsession with the blurred distinction. And yet who else Is so elementary and badly needed That fifty cultures rise at the merest rumor Of its presence, and, finally, punctually fall Whenever it departs, as if on schedule? Interviewed, Monday, in the city dump, Which turned, by magic, into a hotel tower, Shedding poems and paintings for its bath (It takes ten centuries of running water To wash it clean), it then emerged, all dirty Again, in a costume of ferocious splendor, A hat some milliner in old Vienna Sweated over, its pumps exchanged for sneakers, And raced across the city, breaking records, Just to prove its powers of endurance. It lies down anywhere, and loves the country, But is so unassuming it can even flourish Beneath electric signs and in railroad stations It goes to for the summer, estivating, It says, near fountains that escape our notice, And comes back in the fall, its ribbons flying, Wheeling through the leaves, singing all the voices Of every opera in the repertoire Plus one no one has ever dreamed of writing. Going about its gigantic business, It masks itself as any shape or hope, Appearing as a vicious telephone call, Or a flat, disturbing message in an envelope. It praises calmness but adores upheaval, Is most to be desired when it apes composure, And much to be distrusted when it boasts it has The only fingerprint that can be changed at will.

I make a knife of words. I sit here waiting. I play with crumbs. Her eyes that should look straight at me are toward the window, glazed— husband’s horizon? Not armored. Only armed with pots and pans. Not out of arm’s reach, beyond curtains of doorbells, garden gates. She puts up ironwork in her eyes; it draws a bolt over what’s real— then looks at me. I wish I’d brought my saw.

Today is a Tuesday, one of many. He has a girl he loves every Tuesday, her day off. He burns at the fine fire of her conscience, tells her they’ll be married someday. He has a wife, Doreen, a freckle-faced fat thing who harbors resentment that during her Tuesday at her mother’s, he insists on going to the movies. Rose petals he picks up in the neighbor’s yard end up at Tuesday’s feet and sprinkled through the sheets. Of course they must make love, since he sees her only once a week. Doreen requires sex after seeing her mother. He feels like an ox on Tuesday, powerful and massive. He tells this to Tuesday and to Doreen. Doreen tells him he is an ox a brute master of the air and his rightful bed. But Tuesday, who knows oxen are slow moving, dim witted, and castrated at birth, follows him home instead of playing her dulcimer, climbs the wall, watches him mounting his wife, leaves rose petals on his doorstep, takes the train to cornfields, steers and heifers watches the city disappear in rain. Thinks briefly of how tenderly he rose in her fingers while the remains of their breakfast, eggs and potatoes cooled on the wooden table with the tattered tablecloth.

A birdless heaven, sea-dusk and a star Sad in the west; And thou, poor heart, love’s image, fond and far, Rememberest: Her silent eyes and her soft foam-white brow And fragrant hair, Falling as in the silence falleth now Dusk from the air. Ah, why wilt thou remember these, or why, Poor heart, repine, If the sweet love she yielded with a sigh Was never thine?

The weight of a man on a woman is like falling into the river without drowning. Above, the world is burning and fighting. Lost worlds flow through others. But down here beneath water’s skin, river floor, sand, everything is floating, rocking. Water falls through our hands as we fall through it. And when a woman and a man come up from water they stand at the elemental edge of difference. Mirrored on water’s skin, they are fired clay, water evaporating into air. They are where water turns away from land and goes back to enter a larger sea. A man and a woman are like those rivers, entering a larger sea greater than the sum of all its parts.

It was your idea to park and watch the elephants swaying among the trees like royalty at that make-believe safari near Laguna. I didn’t know anything that big could be so quiet. And once, you stopped on a dark desert road to show me the stars climbing over each other riotously like insects like an orchestra thrashing its way through time itself I never saw light that way again.

I was looking for your hair, black as old lava on an island of white coral. I dreamed it deserted you and came for me, wrapped me in its funeral ribbons and tied me a bow of salt. Here’s where I put my demise: desiring fire in a web of tide, marrying the smell of wet ashes to the sweet desert of your slate. My intelligent mammal, male of my species, twin sun to a world not of my making, you reduce me to the syrup of the moon, you boil my bones in the absence of hands. Where is your skin, parting me? Where is the cowlick under your kiss teasing into purple valleys? Where are your wings, the imaginary tail and its exercise? Where would I breed you? In the neck of my secret heart where you’ll go to the warmth of me biting into that bread where crumbs crack and scatter and feed us our souls; if only you were a stone I could throw, if only I could have you.

There is no I in teamwork but there is a two maker there is no I in together but there is a got three a get to her the I in relationship is the heart I slip on a lithe prison in all communication we count on a mimic (I am not uncomic) our listening skills are silent killings there is no we in marriage but a grim area there is an I in family also my fail

I. AUBADE The dawn is here—and the long night through I have never seen thy face, Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate of thy dwelling-place. While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found the far world edge, No leaflet stirred of the leaves that climb to garland thy window ledge. Yet the vine had quivered from root to tip, and opened its flowers again, If only the low moon's light had glanced on a moving casement pane. Warm was the wind that entered in where the barrier stood ajar, And the curtain shook with its gentle breath, white as young lilies are; But there came no hand all the slow night through to draw the folds aside, (I longed as the moon and the vine-leaves longed!) or to set the casement wide. Three times in a low-hung nest there dreamed his five sweet notes a bird, And thrice my heart leaped up at the sound I thought thou hadst surely heard. But now that thy praise is caroled aloud by a thousand throats awake, Shall I watch from afar and silently, as under the moon, for thy sake? Nay—bold in the sun I speak thy name, I too, and I wait no more Thy hand, thy face, in the window niche, but thy kiss at the open door! II. NOCTURNE My darling, come!—The wings of the dark have wafted the sunset away, And there's room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay. A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering moon looks up From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in its cup. The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom—elder, viburnum, rose; The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that sighs of love as it goes. The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the greater ones abide, With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside. The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower of the elder gleams, Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest dreams. Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south, That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy sweeter mouth. Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and have naught to see? Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say nothing of thee and me? —My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are guiding her way; There is room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay!