1247 Love poems

You follow close behind me, for a thousand miles responsive to my movements. I signal, you signal back. We will meet at the next exit. You blow kisses, which I return. You mouth "I love you," a message for my rearview mirror. We do a slow tango as we change lanes in tandem, gracefully, as though music were guiding us. It is tighter than bodies locked in heat, this caring, this ardent watching.

ke pwoahn Pohnpei I told him as we kissed is that a good thing? he asked hell yea I wanted to say replaced it with another kiss inhaling the mix of last night’s sakau en Pohnpei seir en wai, sweat rain intoxicating taking me home he left that smell behind it would barely linger by the time he reached his destination I was headed for it so the smell stayed bittersweet and blue on my skin, in my hair I carried it with me there where it grew mixed with mangoes, coughs, handshakes, pigs, babies, and old people I’m back it now reeks won’t wash away with the other smells get in my car it hits me pungent remnants of the mwaramwar he left behind.

There is a Smile of Love And there is a Smile of Deceit And there is a Smile of Smiles In which these two Smiles meet And there is a Frown of Hate And there is a Frown of disdain And there is a Frown of Frowns Which you strive to forget in vain For it sticks in the Hearts deep Core And it sticks in the deep Back bone And no Smile that ever was smild But only one Smile alone That betwixt the Cradle & Grave It only once Smild can be But when it once is Smild Theres an end to all Misery

Mother and father gave birth to a snail Night and day I crawl in smelly weeds Dear prince, if you love me, unfasten my door Stop, don't poke your finger up my tail!

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,” Serge told me in New York one December night. “So when I look at the sky, I see the past?” “Yes, Yes," he said. “especially on a clear day.” On January 19, 1987, as I very early in the morning drove my sister to Tucson International, suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street the sliding doors of the fog were opened, and the snow, which had fallen all night, now sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants, its mineral-hard colors extinguished, wine frozen in the veins of the cactus. *   *   * The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read: The syrup from which sacred wine is made is extracted from the saguaros each summer. The Papagos place it in jars, where the last of it softens, then darkens into a color of blood though it tastes strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine. As I tell Sameetah this, we are still seven miles away. “And you know the flowers of the saguaros bloom only at night?” We are driving slowly, the road is glass. “Imagine where we are was a sea once. Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly sapphire, and the past is happening quickly: the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched out their arms to rays millions of years old, in each ray a secret of the planet’s origin, the rays hurting each cactus into memory, a human memory for they are human, the Papagos say: not only because they have arms and veins and secrets. But because they too are a tribe, vulnerable to massacre. “It is like the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,” Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved arms. And we are driving by the ocean that evaporated here, by its shores, the past now happening so quickly that each stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky taking rapid notes on us as we turn at Tucson Boulevard and drive into the airport, and I realize that the earth is thawing from longing into longing and that we are being forgotten by those arms. *   *   * At the airport I stared after her plane till the window was again a mirror. As I drove back to the foothills, the fog shut its doors behind me on Alvernon, and I breathed the dried seas the earth had lost, their forsaken shores. And I remembered another moment that refers only to itself: in New Delhi one night as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out. It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War, perhaps there were sirens, air-raid warnings. But the audience, hushed, did not stir. The microphone was dead, but she went on singing, and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died. And just before the lights did flood her again, melting the frost of her diamond into rays, it was, like this turning dark of fog, a moment when only a lost sea can be heard, a time to recollect every shadow, everything the earth was losing, a time to think of everything the earth and I had lost, of all that I would lose, of all that I was losing.

I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker. Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver. How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you, the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today. Curiouser and curiouser, your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes. In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry. You put on my heat, (that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly, hungering down the valley, no one question to cover all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use. You’re wrong and right at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring chopping down the back door. You slap my attention all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime? Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love, But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another (I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d, Yet out of that I have written these songs).

Stranger, you who hide my love In the curved cheek of a smile And sleep with her upon a tongue Of soft lies that beguile, Your paradisal ecstasy Is justified is justified By hunger of the beasts beneath The overhanging cloud Who to snatch quick pleasures run Before their momentary sun Be eclipsed by death. Lightly, lightly from my sleep She stole, our vows of dew to break Upon a day of melting rain Another love to take: Her happy happy perfidy Was justified was justified Since compulsive needs of sense Clamour to be satisfied And she was never one to miss Plausible happiness Of a new experience. I, who stand beneath a bitter Blasted tree, with the green life Of summer joy cut from my side By that self-justifying knife, In my exiled misery Were justified were justified If upon two lives I preyed Or punished with my suicide, Or murdered pity in my heart Or two other lives did part To make the world pay what I paid. Oh, but supposing that I climb Alone to a high room of clouds Up a ladder of the time And lie upon a bed alone And tear a feather from a wing And listen to the world below And write round my high paper walls Anything and everything Which I know and do not know!

O Love! that stronger art than wine, Pleasing delusion, witchery divine, Wont to be prized above all wealth, Disease that has more joys than health; Though we blaspheme thee in our pain, And of thy tyranny complain, We are all bettered by they reign. What reason never can bestow We to this useful passion owe; Love wakes the dull from sluggish ease, And learns a clown the art to please, Humbles the vain, kindles the cold, Makes misers free, and cowards bold; ’Tis he reforms the sot from drink, And teaches airy fops to think. When full brute appetite is fed, And choked the glutton lies and dead, Thou new spirits dost dispense And ’finest the gross delights of sense: Virtue’s unconquerable aid That against Nature can persuade, And makes a roving mind retire Within the bounds of just desire; Cheerer of age, youth’s kind unrest, And half the heaven of the blest!

A Scholar first my Love implor’d, And then an empty, titled Lord; The Pedant talk’d in lofty Strains; Alas! his Lordship wanted Brains: I list’ned not, to one or t’other, But straight referr’d them to my Mother. A Poet next my Love assail’d, A Lawyer hop’d to have prevail’d; The Bard too much approv’d himself, The Lawyer thirsted after Pelf: I list’ned not, to one or t’other, But still referr’d them to my Mother. An Officer my Heart wou’d storm, A Miser, sought me too, in Form; But Mars was over-free and bold, The miser’s Heart was in his Gold: I list’ned not, to one or t’other, Referring still unto my Mother. And after them, some twenty more, Successless were, as those before; When Damon , lovely Damon came! Our Hearts strait felt a mutual Flame; I vow’d I’d have him, and no other, Without referring, to my Mother.