1247 Love poems

Though I am young, and cannot tell Either what Death or Love is well, Yet I have heard they both bear darts, And both do aim at human hearts. And then again, I have been told Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold; So that I fear they do but bring Extremes to touch, and mean one thing. As in a ruin we it call One thing to be blown up, or fall; Or to our end like way may have By a flash of lightning, or a wave; So Love’s inflamèd shaft or brand May kill as soon as Death’s cold hand; Except Love’s fires the virtue have To fright the frost out of the grave.

Though that men do call it dotage, Who loveth not wanteth courage; And whosoever may love get, From Venus sure he must it fet Or else from her which is her heir, And she to him must seem most fair. With eye and mind doth both agree. There is no boot: there must it be. The eye doth look and represent, But mind afformeth with full consent. Thus am I fixed without grudge: Mine eye with heart doth me so judge. Love maintaineth all noble courage. Who love disdaineth is all of the village: Such lovers—though they take pain— It were pity they should obtain, For often times where they do sue They hinder lovers that would be true. For whoso loveth should love but once. Change whoso will, I will be none.

A thousand martyrs I have made, All sacrificed to my desire; A thousand beauties have betrayed, That languish in resistless fire. The untamed heart to hand I brought, And fixed the wild and wandering thought. I never vowed nor sighed in vain But both, though false, were well received. The fair are pleased to give us pain, And what they wish is soon believed. And though I talked of wounds and smart, Love’s pleasures only touched my heart. Alone the glory and the spoil I always laughing bore away; The triumphs, without pain or toil, Without the hell, the heav’n of joy. And while I thus at random rove Despise the fools that whine for love.

I. The earth and its foregoing, this could be horizon. Combined, the radicals pressed into one another. What do we represent lying held in men and arms, to erect gold and sun and legs (running)? I call you disc, sun entangled in the branches of a tree. Rice field over struggle, earth over self. Effacement. Your mouth is a carriage and the carriage plus the tenth of a cubit is turn, bent knuckle revolving around a pivot. Common, is the object beneath the bench. Plant, covers, knife, a weed extended to mean govern, the flame in the middle of the lamp is the man with ample arms, blend and pace in the midst of court. Your torso sings Garden.                       Composes. II. Mastery of weeds extends to mean: plants bending to cover the middle of lamp. A knife for a flame, foregoing the earth, this is the horizon of a man with arms. To move across your body, I am the carriage and the cubit, the disc running tangled in the branches of a tree. I am the common object beneath the bench, the wheel running length of the rutted road down to the garden of abdomen. I struggle over fields to kiss a mouth filled with rice, to put away evil.           This is earth over self. III. Beneath a table of common struggles I blend and pace in ample arms. A rice field foregoing garden on the horizon of your belly. Govern the revolving cubit, the bent knuckle. Me over you, over self, a tree. Earth entangled in the branches of a knife. Plant and cover inside your mouth, the turning disc, the carriage and wheel. To erect lamps in the bend of your gold leg running is to extend the word to mean master, garden or weed.

My throat is full of sparklers making me a lighthouse for a loveship       that can fly Our mother monarchy sweet land paternity I’ll eat their offspring’s money       and let you have a bite In wilder colors       I can love the copy of  you which is great            when we have breasts He will breathe through contractions and she will heal the faceless and use her eyes       to steel his legs You must see that I’m eating for two sexes Minimalism means       nothing making more of  what isn’t there a green preconception divining a baby gender for which I qualified with braids ablaze       and stuck to my back We are going to win       then make extra babies yes we make enough to make a country Text unto the winged baby       the tiny pill of  mystery that makes me want to tickle the world until it starts barfing clouds Make it free       is not the advice we paid for but a long song about the flavor of nowhere and how we never fill it and how I shave my buzzardy wings       to offend the sublime While I’m quick to swallow       the heaviest business and quicker yet to modify that trash you have a poultice       for sudden holes you have a knife in ten minutes you will marry a parent       and make it do whatever you tell it The raptor you were       does an end-run around sorrow but I’m right here sweetness out of  the glass closet                voilà voilà        so what do you make of my baby Tonight we bomb Tonight we blitz Tonight we barrage Tonight we make the greater migration Tonight our fabulous flock shits napalm on the criminal dads For I am a figure       first of girls in orbit the best reason I have to eat your bed I am spangled breasts       I am shaved like any birdboy       only huger than babies or ladybugs one of each is precious a million a menace My inside is a live mine and I’m after the light that sustains the skin of  women scooping the spectacle where everyone freaks everyone They will say how do you do Mister Ms. Thunderbride and I will say I do it distorted and you       will marry a million of  you in your twisted gown of  flames

After Cyndi Lauper I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Autumn encircles a confusion that’s nothing new. Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown. Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head. I can’t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room, the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returns to grass. Secrets doled out deep inside a drum beat out of time. Whatever you said was ghostly slow like a second hand unwinding by match light. Lying back to the wheel, I shirked confusion. You already knew. Suitcases surround me. You picture me too far ahead. Yet I can’t hear what you’ve said. You say: Doldrums, some secondhand wine. Love, you knew my precincts. The stone house turned out black, the scenic tunics were deep inside. Who said home? Oh, I fall behind. That very secret height blinds. Lying like a diamond, the cock-thickening of you: hunchbacked arms, eyes left behind. You’ll picture me walking far, far ahead. I hear what you’ve done. You said: Go slow. I feebly bleed out. Matthew’s sermon turned out to be glass. I wander in windows soft as Sour Patch. No rewind. But something is out of touch and you, you’re Sinbad. That second date totally mine. Lying in a vacuum, the thickening plot thinks of you. The future’s not new. touchdown . Lights. All those celebrity behinds. A suitcase full of weeds. You picture me coming to. You: too close to me to hear what you’ve already said. Then you say: The second wind unwinds. Doves whistle, halving their dovely backs, watching out windows to see if I’m okay. See it, the dulcet moment? I’m like thicket tinkering for you. Fusion nothing you knew. Flash back to seagull-beguiled eyes. Sometimes talking to a barren lad. Such music so unbearably droll. The hand is mine. Random picture frames off the darkness. A Turing machine? Scotch-taping through windows, stolen from deep inside rum-beaded thyme. You say also: Behind sequins & hinds . . . And I’m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you. Clematis enclosures, walking with news, pollinated by a secondary grief, while something reminds you of our love.

Love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. CAMUS All day my husband pounds on the upstairs porch. Screeches and grunts of wood as the wall is opened keep the whole house tormented. He is trying to reach the bees, he is after bees. This is the climax, an end to two summers of small operations with sprays and ladders. Last June on the porch floor I found them dead, a sprinkle of dusty bugs, and next day a still worse death, until, like falling in love, bee-haunted, I swept up bigger and bigger loads of some hatch, I thought, sickened, and sickening me, from what origin? My life centered on bees, all floors were suspect. The search was hopeless. Windows were shut. I never find where anything comes from. But in June my husband’s fierce sallies began, inspections, cracks located and sealed, insecticides shot; outside, the bees’ course watched, charted; books on bees read. I tell you I swept up bodies every day on the porch. Then they’d stop, the problem was solved; then they were there again, as the feelings make themselves known again, as they beseech sleepers who live innocently in will and mind. It is no surprise to those who walk with their tigers that the bees were back, no surprise to me. But they had left themselves so lack-luster, their black and gold furs so deathly faded. Gray bugs that the broom hunted were like a thousand little stops when some great lurch of heart takes place, or a great shift of season. November it came to an end. No bees. And I could watch the floor, clean and cool, and, from windows, the cold land. But this spring the thing began again, and his curse went upstairs again, and his tinkering and reasoning and pride. It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid. And now in July he is tearing out the wall, and each board ripped brings them closer to his hunting hand. It is quiet, has been quiet for a while. He calls me, and I march from a dream of bees to see them, winged and unwinged, such a mess of interrupted life dumped on newspapers— dirty clots of grubs, sawdust, stuck fliers, all smeared together with old honey, they writhe, some of them, but who cares? They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said. But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered enough? This evening we go to a party, the breeze dies, late, we are sticky in our old friendships and light-headed. We tell our funny story about the bees. At two in the morning we come home, and a friend, a scientist, comes with us, in his car. We’re going to save the idea of the thing, a hundred bees, if we can find so many unrotted, still warm but harmless, and leave the rest. We hope that the neighbors are safe in bed, taking no note of these private catastrophes. He wants an enzyme in the flight-wing muscle. Not a bad thing to look into. In the night we rattle and raise the lid of the garbage can. Flashlights in hand, we open newspapers, and the men reach in a salve of happenings. I can’t touch it. I hate the self-examined who’ve killed the self. The dead are darker, but the others have moved in the ooze toward the next moment. My God one half-worm gets its wings right before our eyes. Searching fingers sort and lay bare, they need the idea of bees—and yet, under their touch, the craze for life gets stronger in the squirming, whitish kind. The men do it. Making a claim on the future, as love makes a claim on the future, grasping. And I, underhand, I feel it start, a terrible, lifelong heave taking direction. Unpleading, the men prod till all that grubby softness wants to give,to give.

One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it; One hope is too like despair For prudence to smother, And pity from thee more dear Than that from another. I can give not what men call love, But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And the Heavens reject not,— The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?

Had I a man’s fair form, then might my sighs Be echoed swiftly through that ivory shell Thine ear, and find thy gentle heart; so well Would passion arm me for the enterprise; But ah! I am no knight whose foeman dies; No cuirass glistens on my bosom’s swell; I am no happy shepherd of the dell Whose lips have trembled with a maiden’s eyes. Yet must I dote upon thee—call thee sweet, Sweeter by far than Hybla’s honied roses When steep’d in dew rich to intoxication. Ah! I will taste that dew, for me ‘tis meet, And when the moon her pallid face discloses, I’ll gather some by spells, and incantation.

Vainly my heart had with thy sorceries striven: It had no refuge from thy love,—no Heaven But in thy fatal presence;—from afar It owned thy power and trembled like a star O’erfraught with light and splendor. Could I deem How dark a shadow should obscure its beam?— Could I believe that pain could ever dwell Where thy bright presence cast its blissful spell? Thou wert my proud palladium;—could I fear The avenging Destinies when thou wert near?— Thou wert my Destiny;—thy song, thy fame, The wild enchantments clustering round thy name, Were my soul’s heritage, its royal dower; Its glory and its kingdom and its power!