1247 Love poems

When the sun and moon were in quadrature, when the garden had become a wilderness and the clock refused to strike When the old year died and the sand walked into the sea with the neap tide When you had been too long away and your old snowblue footprints clotted and hesitated in the clay When the worry of this undone song unsung so long so loud my head I went inside and under to let the flood run free

There is an ash tree behind this house. You can see it from our bedroom window. If you stare at it for long enough, you’ll see it drop a leaf. Stare at it now, you said, and notice the moment a leaf strips away from its branch, giving a twirl. Consider this. The ash tree unclothes itself Octoberly. From beside our bed, fingering the curtain, observe the dark candles at the top of that tree, naked and alert, tending to the breeze. A sheet of ice between the rooftops and this noiseless sky has turned the air inside out. Black veins of branches shake against the blue screen on which they hang. Small mammals are hibernating in pellets of warm air under ground. But, in spite of the cold, this ash tree does not shy from shrugging off its coat, sloping its nude shoulders to the night. So, you said, undo, unbutton, unclasp, slowly remove. Let down your hair, breathe out. Stand stark in this room until we remember how not to feel the chill. Stand at the window, lift your arms right up like a tree. Yes — like that. Watch leaves drop.

Falling in love with a mustache is like saying you can fall in love with the way a man polishes his shoes which, of course, is one of the things that turns on my tuned-up engine those trim buckled boots (I feel like an advertisement for men’s fashions when I think of your ankles) Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face and I find myself a bad moralist, a failing aesthetician, a sad poet, wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles that make a man’s body have so much substance, that makes a woman lean and yearn in that direction that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day in your presence the pool of wax under a burning candle the foam from a waterfall You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson She is the rain, waits in it for you, finds blood spotting her legs from the long ride.

I sowed the seeds of love To blossom all the spring, In April, May, or else in June, When the small birds do sing: A gardener standing by, I desired him to choose for me; He picked out the lily, the violet, and pink, But I refused all three. The lily I refused, Because it faded so soon; The violet and pink I overlooked, Resolved was to tarry till June: In June the red roses bud, Oh, that is a lover for me; But I have often aimed at the red rose-bud, And I have gained the willow tree. The gardener standing by, He prayed me to have a care, For the thorn that grew on the red rose-bush, A venomous thorn they were: A venomous thorn indeed, For still I feel the smart; And every time I did it touch, It pricked my tender heart. Away you fading flowers, No more I will you touch, That all the world may plainly see I loved one flower too much.

Alas, how pleasant are their days With whom the infant Love yet plays! Sorted by pairs, they still are seen By fountains cool, and shadows green. But soon these flames do lose their light, Like meteors of a summer’s night: Nor can they to that region climb, To make impression upon time. ’Twas in a shipwreck, when the seas Ruled, and the winds did what they please, That my poor lover floating lay, And, ere brought forth, was cast away: Till at the last the master-wave Upon the rock his mother drave; And there she split against the stone, In a Caesarean sectión. The sea him lent those bitter tears Which at his eyes he always wears; And from the winds the sighs he bore, Which through his surging breast do roar. No day he saw but that which breaks Through frighted clouds in forkèd streaks, While round the rattling thunder hurled, As at the funeral of the world. While Nature to his birth presents This masque of quarrelling elements, A numerous fleet of cormorants black, That sailed insulting o’er the wrack, Received into their cruel care Th’ unfortunate and abject heir: Guardians most fit to entertain The orphan of the hurricane. They fed him up with hopes and air, Which soon digested to despair, And as one cormorant fed him, still Another on his heart did bill, Thus while they famish him, and feast, He both consumèd, and increased: And languishèd with doubtful breath, The amphibíum of life and death. And now, when angry heaven would Behold a spectacle of blood, Fortune and he are called to play At sharp before it all the day: And tyrant Love his breast does ply With all his winged artillery, Whilst he, betwixt the flames and waves, Like Ajax, the mad tempest braves. See how he nak’d and fierce does stand, Cuffing the thunder with one hand, While with the other he does lock, And grapple, with the stubborn rock: From which he with each wave rebounds, Torn into flames, and ragg’d with wounds, And all he ’says, a lover dressed In his own blood does relish best. This is the only banneret That ever Love created yet: Who though, by the malignant stars, Forcèd to live in storms and wars, Yet dying leaves a perfume here, And music within every ear: And he in story only rules, In a field sable a lover gules.

No one loves you more ... more ... more ... There were sincere lies everywhere placed directly before the next step. Does everyone pretend, part of alive I am proposing words — All structures have crumbled in earliest death. I’m crossing the yellow sands It’s so hard to know without relating it, to you shaping a heart, take hold of me and someone says I don’t get it! You don’t have to have love, or you do, which? I don’t think you do; before the explosion? I was here without it and have been in many places loveless. I don’t want you to know what I’m really thinking or do I, before creation when there might be no “I knew” Everything one’s ever said not quite true. He or she be- trays you; why you want to hurt me ... bad Want to, or just do? Treason was provoked everywhere even here, by knowing one was one and I was alone, a pale hue. The sky of death is milky green today, like a poison pool near a desert mine. Picked prickly pear fruit and I tasted it, then we drove on, maybe to Yarnell. These outposts where I grew up; I didn’t do that I have no ... identity, and the love is an object to kick as you walk on the blazing bare ground, where ... sentimental, when what I love, I ... don’t have that one word. This fire all there is ... to find ... I find it You have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?

Colleen, this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my virulent love for you. The Cowturdville Star-Times, which usually has a typo in every damn column, says the grasshoppers this year “are as big as Buicks” and that’s not bad, but then we get two eight-point pages of who had dinner with whom at the bowling alley café and who went shopping at Target in Rapid City and thus the high church of Adrian the Obscure is sacked. Even my old Dylan tapes are fading, becoming near-comic antiques. The grasshoppers are destroying our yard and they’re as big as my middle finger saluting God. The grass is yellow. The trees look like Agent Orange has hit but it’s only the jaw-work of those drab armored insects who dance in profusion and pure destruction. Sweet woman, dear love of my life, when you’re not angry and sputtering at everything and everyone, you become so childlike, so pure. Your voice seems to have grown higher recently, almost a little-girl pitch. Today, like most days, I have you home for your two-hour reprieve from the nursing home prison. We’re sitting at the picnic table in the backyard staring at the defoliation of lilacs, brain matter, and honeysuckle. You’re eating a Hershey Bar and a crystal glob of snot is hanging from your nose. I reach over, pinch it off, and wipe it on my jeans. You thrust the last bite of chocolate into my mouth as a demented grasshopper jumps onto your ear. You scream. I howl with laughter until you do too. Happiness comes with a price. This is the times of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my swarming love for you. Last night on PBS some lesioned guy being screwed to death by legions of viral invisibility blurted the great cliché of regret: I wish I could be twenty again and know what I know now … My own regrets are equally foolish. And, I wonder, how the hell is it I’ve reached a place where I’d give what’s left of my allotment of sunsets and frozen dinners for some unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place? Darling, in the baked soil of the far west, I first saw the ant lions, those hairy little bugs who dug funnel traps for ants in the dry earth. At twelve, looking over the edge of one such funnel surrounded by a circle of tiny stones in the sand, I aimed a beam of white light from my magnifying glass and found I could re-create a hell of my own accord. Poverty and boredom made me cruel early on. The next summer while digging postholes I found a cache of those grotesque yellow bugs we called Children of the Earth so I piled matches atop them and barbecued their ugliness. I was at war with insects. In my fifteenth summer I got covered with ticks in the sagebrush and that fall I nervously lost my cherry in a cathouse called the Green Front and got cursed with crabs but that’s not what I want to sing about at all… come on now. This is no bug progression. This ain’t no insect sonata. This is only misdirection, a sleight of hand upon the keys and the unholy replay of just one hour in some nearly forgotten time and place that I’d like to return to will remain myth or maybe a holy, tumescent mystery. And let’s not call these bloodwords POETRY or a winter count of desperate dreams when reality is much simpler. Colleen, I swear to Christ this is the time of grasshoppers and all that I see is dying except for my sparkling love for you.

Even if you didn’t have green eyes (in the bathtub, blue). Even if you didn’t have a lovely singing voice, or care for Alexandrine champagne some slow Saturday evenings to sing it through, it pleases me, your lips close to my ear, or when you’re a big girl, and I’m a big girl too. Five years difference between we two. Sometimes it hardly matters. I’ve decided to worship you, Diana, goddess of the forest— or is she the one of the hunt? Who cares? You remind me of her too. Some woman caught me up, breathless, in her strong arms, said breathe, darling. Her eyes were green-blue. Vague resemblances: that’s the daily news. Meaning: I’m willingly a fool for you any hour past midnight, and almost anytime in three-quarter view. Consider this, too: stumbling back, after a fight, to someplace we could call home, you and I have been known to duet a jubilee so funky it sounds like the blues. What steady arrows you shoot, Diana, become a goddess of the hearth: you whisper time to put the porchlight on, and we do. Who am I talking to? What is this strange glare, this prescience that you won’t be true? Sometimes you say something like even so, boo, and it sounds like breathe, darling. That’s why this one’s for you.

Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I’ll need what I know so clearly this moment. I am making use of the one thing I learned of all the things my father tried to teach me: the art of memory. I am letting this room and everything in it stand for my ideas about love and its difficulties. I’ll let your love-cries, those spacious notes of a moment ago, stand for distance. Your scent, that scent of spice and a wound, I’ll let stand for mystery. Your sunken belly is the daily cup of milk I drank as a boy before morning prayer. The sun on the face of the wall is God, the face I can’t see, my soul, and so on, each thing standing for a separate idea, and those ideas forming the constellation of my greater idea. And one day, when I need to tell myself something intelligent about love, I’ll close my eyes and recall this room and everything in it: My body is estrangement. This desire, perfection. Your closed eyes my extinction. Now I’ve forgotten my idea. The book on the windowsill, riffled by wind . . . the even-numbered pages are the past, the odd- numbered pages, the future. The sun is God, your body is milk . . . useless, useless . . . your cries are song, my body’s not me . . . no good . . . my idea has evaporated . . . your hair is time, your thighs are song . . . it had something to do with death . . . it had something to do with love.

Thou art my lute, by thee I sing,— My being is attuned to thee. Thou settest all my words a-wing, And meltest me to melody. Thou art my life, by thee I live, From thee proceed the joys I know; Sweetheart, thy hand has power to give The meed of love—the cup of woe. Thou art my love, by thee I lead My soul the paths of light along, From vale to vale, from mead to mead, And home it in the hills of song. My song, my soul, my life, my all, Why need I pray or make my plea, Since my petition cannot fall; For I’m already one with thee!