1247 Love poems

The time I’ve lost in wooing, In watching and pursuing The light, that lies In woman’s eyes, Has been my heart’s undoing. Though Wisdom oft has sought me, I scorn’d the lore she brought me, My only books Were woman’s looks, And folly’s all they’ve taught me. Her smile when Beauty granted, I hung with gaze enchanted, Like him the Sprite, Whom maids by night Oft meet in glen that’s haunted. Like him, too, Beauty won me, But while her eyes were on me, If once their ray Was turn’d away, Oh! winds could not outrun me. And are those follies going? And is my proud heart growing Too cold or wise For brilliant eyes Again to set it glowing? No, vain, alas! th’ endeavour From bonds so sweet to sever; Poor Wisdom’s chance Against a glance Is now as weak as ever.

To an army wife, in Sardis: Some say a cavalry corps, some infantry, some, again, will maintain that the swift oars of our fleet are the finest sight on dark earth; but I say that whatever one loves, is. This is easily proved: did not Helen—she who had scanned the flower of the world’s manhood— choose as first among men one who laid Troy’s honor in ruin? warped to his will, forgetting love due her own blood, her own child, she wandered far with him. So Anactoria, although you being far away forget us, the dear sound of your footstep and light glancing in your eyes would move me more than glitter of Lydian horse or armored tread of mainland infantry

Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow; An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For, lady, you deserve this state, Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapped power. Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball, And tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

1 She pressed her ear against the shell: she wanted to hear everything he never told her. 2 A single inch separates their two bodies facing one another in the picture: a framed smile buried beneath the rubble. 3 Whenever you throw stones into the sea it sends ripples through me. 4 My heart’s quite small: that’s why it fills so quickly. 5 Water needs no wars to mix with water and fill up spaces. 6 The tree doesn’t ask why it’s not moving to some other forest nor any other pointless questions. 7 He watches tv while she holds a novel. On the novel’s cover there’s a man watching tv and a woman holding a novel. 8 On the first morning of the new year all of us will look up at the same sun. 9 She raised his head to her chest. He did not respond: he was dead. 10 The person who gazed at me for so long, and whose gaze I returned for just as long . . . That man who never once embraced me, and whom I never once embraced  . . . The rain wrecked the colors around him on that old canvas. 11 He was not with the husbands who were lost and then found; he did not come with the prisoners of war, nor with the kite that took her, in her dream, to some other place, while she stood before the camera to have her smile glued into the passport. 12 Dates piled high beside the road: your way of  kissing me. 13 Rapunzel’s hair reaching down from the window to the earth is how we wait. 14 The shadows the prisoners left on the wall surrounded the jailer and cast light on his loneliness. 15 Homeland, I am not your mother, so why do you weep in my lap like this every time something hurts you? 16 Never mind this bird: it comes every day and stops at the branch’s edge to sing for an hour or two. That’s all it does: nothing makes it happier. 17 House keys, identity cards, faded pictures among the bones . . . All of these are scattered in a single mass grave. 18 The Arabic language loves long sentences and long wars. It loves never-ending songs and late nights and weeping over ruins. It loves working for a long life and a long death. 19 Far away from home — that’s all that changed in us. 20 Cinderella left her slipper in Iraq along with the smell of cardamom wafting from the teapot, and that huge flower, its mouth gaping like death. 21 Instant messages ignite revolutions. They spark new lives waiting for a country to download, a land that’s little more than a handful of dust when faced with these words: “There are no results that match your search.” 22 The dog’s excitement as she brings the stick to her owner is the moment of opening the letter. 23 We cross borders lightly like clouds. Nothing carries us, but as we move on we carry rain, and an accent, and a memory of another place. 24 How thrilling to appear in his eyes. She can’t understand what he’s saying: she’s too busy chewing his voice. She looks at the mouth she’ll never kiss, at the shoulder she’ll never cry on, at the hand she’ll never hold, and at the ground where their shadows meet.

When I go away from you The world beats dead Like a slackened drum. I call out for you against the jutted stars And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast, One after the other, Wedge you away from me, And the lamps of the city prick my eyes So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you, To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

In reality my loves are the strange box of a Polish doll The blonde’s eyes appearing fixed to her hips long after midnight the garret always singular to loosen a massive mane across her back, its strands thick and fine draping her otter-like chin Deliberately she’d peer out from the wall and nothing could be seen but the shadow of  her breasts hidden beneath marmots of  hair And lovely was her skin’s radiance at that unusual hour Her waist’s digressions easily discerned as bees through grass the window neither open nor closed What I saw, yellow like crystal, rose from sleepy thighs amassed in unseemly tourniquets Everything before me, a pale shimmer of  hairs fanning delicately to reveal the pink or green skin I no longer know of  hips a million centimeters from my gaze.

Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate, Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving. O, but with mine compare thou thine own state, And thou shalt find it merits not reproving; Or if it do, not from those lips of thine, That have profaned their scarlet ornaments And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine, Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents. Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee: Root pity in thy heart, that, when it grows, Thy pity may deserve to pitied be. If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide, By self-example mayst thou be denied.

Nude bodies like peeled logs sometimes give off a sweetest odor, man and woman under the trees in full excess matching the cushion of aromatic pine-drift fallen threaded with trailing woodbine a sonnet might be made of it Might be made of it! odor of excess odor of pine needles, odor of peeled logs, odor of no odor other than trailing woodbine that has no odor, odor of a nude woman sometimes, odor of a man.

1 She was twenty-two. He was fifty-three, a duke, a widower with ten children. They met in Paris, each in exile from the English Civil War. Virginal and terrified, still she agreed to marry him. Though women were mere chattel spinsterhood made you invisible in the sixteen hundreds. Marriage was arranged —hers a rare exception. Despite a dowry a woman never could own property. Your womb was just for rent. Birth control contrivances—a paste of ants, cow dung mashed with honey, tree bark with pennyroyal— all too often failed the applicant. 2 If anything went wrong you bled to death. You bore & bore & bore as you were taught screaming sometimes for days in childbirth. To bring forth was a woman’s fate but not for Margaret Cavendish, childless Duchess of Newcastle. After the head of Charles the First had been detached and the Restoration seated a new monarch, she and the duke returned to his estate where nothing discomposed their paradise. How rare, two lovers scribbling away, admiring each other’s words in privacy. He: polymath, equestrian, playwright. She: philosopher, fantasist, poet. 3 His the first book on the art of dressage, till then an untried humane approach to teaching classic paces in the man è ge, the grace of the levade and the piaffe. Hers the goofy utopian fantasy, The Blazing-World. The heroine is adrift with her kidnapper in a wooden skiff. A storm comes up conveniently, and they are blown to the North Pole. He freezes to death but she is carried to a contiguous North Pole, a new world where the emperor falls in love with her, makes her his empress and cedes her all his powers over clans of wildly invented creatures. 4 Poems, plays, philosophical discourses on Platonick love, a chapter on her Birth, Breeding, and Life and an Apology for Writing so Much Upon this Book about herself, even some inquiries into science… years in chosen isolation the Duchess filled with words, and the Duke with reassurance. Even this outburst did not discomfit him: Men are so unconscionable and cruel … they would fain Bury us in their...beds as in a grave…[T]he truth is, we live like Bats or Owls, Labour like Beasts, and die like Worms. Pepys called her mad, conceited, and ridiculous. 5 Virginia Woolf, in 1928, found her Quixotic and high-spirited as well as somewhat crack-brained and bird witted but went on to see in her a vein of authentic fire. Eighty-odd years on, flamboyant, eccentric, admittedly vain, now she’s a respected foremother among women of letters. Founded in 1997, the Margaret Cavendish Society — “international, established to provide communication between scholars worldwide”— is plumped with learned papers, confabs, dues. She’s an aristocrat who advocates —words worn across centuries—for women’s rights. 6 I went to college in the nineteen forties read Gogol, Stendhal, Zola, Flaubert. Read Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and wrote exams that asked: contrast and compare. Male novelists, male profs, male tutors, not a single woman on the faculty nor was there leaven found among the poets I read and loved: G.M. Hopkins, A.E. Housman, Auden, Yeats, only Emily (not quite decoded or yet in the canon). Ten years later, I struggled to break in the almost all-male enclave of poetry. Here’s a small glimpse in the the hierarchy: famed Robert Lowell praising Marianne 7 as the best woman poet in America, put down by Langston Hughes, bless his egalitarian soul, who rose at the dinner to pronounce her the best Negro woman poet in the nation. Terrified of writing domestic poems, poems pungent with motherhood, anathema to the prevailing clique of male pooh-bahs, somehow I balanced teaching freshman comp half-time with kids, meals, pets, errands, spouse. I wrote in secret, read drafts on the phone with another restless mother, Anne Sexton, and poco a poco our poems filled up the house. Then one of us sold a poem to The New Yorker. A week later, the other was welcomed in Harper’s. 8 But even  as we published our first books the visiting male bards required care. We drove them to their readings far and near, thence to the airport just in time to make their flight to the next gig.You drive like a man, they said by way of praise, and if a poem of ours seemed worthy they said,you write like a man. When asked what woman poet they read, with one voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson. Saintly Emily safely dead. Modern women poets were dismissed as immature, their poems pink with the glisten of female organs. The virus of their disdain hung in the air but women were now infected with ambition. 9 We didn’t merely saunter decade by decade. We swept on past de Beauvoir and Friedan, and took courage from Carolyn Kizer’s knife-blade Pro Femina:I will speak about women of letters for I’m in the racket,urging, Stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors. If a woman is to write, Virginia Woolf has Mary Beton declare, she has to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door, a sacred space where Shakespeare’s sister Judith might have equaled his prodigious gift or not. She might have simply floated there, set loose in the privilege of privacy, her self unwritten, under no one else’s eyes… 10 Oh, Duchess, come hurdle five centuries to a land of MFA’s in poetry, of journals in print and even more online, small presses popping up like grapes on vines, reading staking place in every cranny, prizes for first books, some with money. Come to this apex of tenured women professors where sessions on gender and race fill whole semesters and students immerse themselves in women’s studies. Meet famous poets who are also unabashed mothers or singletons by choice or same-sex partners— black, Latina, Asian, native American, white , Christian, Muslim, Jew and atheist— come join us, Duchess Margaret Cavendish.

Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that’s young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died. Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired; Bid her come forth, Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired. Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair!