1247 Love poems

If I could only get hold of the whole of you, How could I ever get hold of the whole of you, Even more than the most beloved idols, More than mountains quarried whole, More than mines Of burning coal, Let’s say mines of extinguished coal And the breath of day like a fiery furnace. If one could get hold of you for all the years, How could one get hold of you from all the years, How could one lengthen a single arm, Like a single branch of an African river, As one sees in a dream the Bay of Storms, As one sees in a dream a ship that went down, The way one imagines a cushion of clouds, Lily-clouds as the body’s cushion, But though you will it, they will not convey you, Do not believe that they will convey you. If one could get hold of all-of-the-whole-of-you, If one could get hold of you like metal, Say like pillars of copper, Say like a pillar of purple copper (That pillar I remembered last summer)— And the bottom of the ocean I have never seen, And the bottom of the ocean that I can see With its thousand heavy thickets of air, A thousand and one laden breaths. If one could only get hold of the-whole-of-you-now, How could you ever be for me what I myself am?

Suddenly with a shy, sad grace She turns to me her lighted face, And I, who hear some idle phrase, Watch how her wry lips move And guess that the poor words they frame Mean naught for they would speak the same Message I read in the dark flame Within her eyes, which say, “I love.” But I can only turn away. I, that have heard the deep voice break Into a sing-song, sobbing shake, Whose flutter made my being quake, What ears have I for women's cries? I, that have seen the turquoise glaze Fixed in the blue and quivering gaze Of one whom cocaine cannot daze, How can I yield to women's eyes? I, who can only turn away. I, that have held strong hands which palter, Borne the full weight of limbs that falter, Bound live flesh on the surgeon's altar, What need have I of women's hand? I, that have felt the dead's embrace? I, whose arms were his resting-place? I, that have kissed a dead man's face? Ah, but how should you understand? Now I can only turn away.

There is a chair the heart of which is wooden split five ways and grass pressed flat where we kissed where others later kissed on the same mattress and solemn nothing happening under a canopy— Have you forgotten me? I will go down wonderfully as was told in proverbs though for a long time I thought I should not go. Here are things that have no Latin names or none that men would know.

You flinch. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. My Heart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongue To turn it down. Too late. The something climbs, leaps, is Falling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainy Lord. I chose the wrong word. I am wrong for not choosing Merely to smile, to pull you toward me and away from What you think of as that other me, who wanders lost among ... Among whom? The many? The rare? I wish you didn’t care. I watch you watching her. Her very shadow is a rage That trashes the rooms of your eyes. Do you claim surprise At what she wants, the poor girl, pelted with despair, Who flits from grief to grief? Isn’t it you she seeks? And If you blame her, know that she blames you for choosing Not her, but me. Love is never fair. But do we — should we — care?

for C. Like shoes she chose for comfort, not for style, that fit her contours without chafe or blistering Here is sanity. It took her years to arrive, like an explorer settling at last into uneasy retirement, a small cottage at the edge of the sea. How the breakers crash against the underpinnings; still, the walls hold firm. Hearth blazing steadily, she tries to warm to it tells herself she is mature now, this is good. The days of stalking, done, the rabid pulse, the blood-drenched kisses, all behind her now. Wearied, finally, of careless cruelties, she will stay here, grow old with you. And, sensible, lacking her gift for self-deception, you know she struggles with devotion, you listen as she moans inside her dreams, and watch, without remarking, as she tracks the tap of high heels just beyond the window, their rhythm growing fainter with each step.

She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. I saw her upon nearer view, A Spirit, yet a Woman too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin-liberty; A countenance in which did meet Sweet records, promises as sweet; A Creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine; A Being breathing thoughtful breath, A Traveller between life and death; The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; A perfect Woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light.

After I.F. Annensky First the sky was yellow then white snow followed. On a hand was an amethyst: a cube of  lilac in hospital light. • Whose fault is it when no one visits? • Last night I dreamed I was in a peaceful place but woke up freezing and ashamed. On a side street (on my sheets) one I loved passed as a shadow. Maddish, reddish, his fist clenched for a fight. • I recalled his body color being soft like a child. The drunken nipples. • Honey I called. We were too late. God and the gods have moved outside the jeweled air and sun motes   ... to where a star is: an amethyst minus a poet.

Essentially, for some time, in an effort to determine whether I loved you or not, I've been praying to you, even though the inside of the tabernacle, as I thought, is empty: oxygen, carbon dioxide, brass, nickel, and a sheet, a sheet of gilded plywood. (And in the rectory, the housekeeper is cooking pasta, stamped in the shape of shells, all of a uniform size and color.) In an effort to determine, in an effort to determine whether I loved you, whether I loved you or not, I learned old lovers are christs or bodhisattvas. Slowly at first, and then with greater skill, in an effort to determine whether I loved you, I loved you or not, I've been praying without knowing it, in the daylight, in the white afternoon, and singing, and singing with records, my head tilted up into the black walnut, the windows alive with listening ravens to whom I sing about your boxy feet with rind of callus at the heel, (as elsewhere noted), your smiting eyes, your nose pugged slightly, like Socrates, your dark skin, your dark. Your voice like a woodwind, a basset clarinet; the wind you went out on, the wind you came in on, your hair the color of a violin, the unambiguous quality of many of your pronouncements, i.e., the time you said I was tortured by life, your eyes boring through me, right for the wrong reasons, again. The time in New Orleans you were so angry, I was so drunk, lurching in the curio shops full of shells. A shell grows around itself, folding over the first pattern, calcified into a whorled shape, not dissimilar to the whorl on the top of our two heads, the pattern of gorgeous irreplaceable error, and for a while the only assurance we belonged, we belonged to the same species. And the joy was piercing, this piercing joy came up in me, a whirring train, night, on the way home, somewhere before Memphis. The singing in my ears. A hurricane, a hurricane outside to my right was photographed from a satellite even as a criminal was being printed, his thumb whorl down, twisted clockwise, and the trees out in the dark strained, growing, forming knots, their flesh burled in the timedrift. I've wondered: does the twisting hurt them, and did all your turnings and hidings wound you as they did me, and did you notice my imprint, my concealment in that fold of air beside you, when into your boxy feet and brown hands nails, nails were driven, when you got into that car and went west, when you sat under that tree almost forever?

Here, at your feet, all the gargoyles of heaven— kneel upon your furnace, their tongues worship you. You can love only one, the one you rest your hand upon, his head so sharp, his sulphur breath...Even now a saint makes his way up your steps, on his knees he is coming, he will find you, with his sword he will kill the beasts, all of them— he swears this will save you. • Earlier, a deer stood by the side of the road deciding whether or not to kill me. I cannot blame her, I cannot blame anyone—many animals were hurt in the production of this book just as many trees were hurt & all the clouds. Open any book & the cloud above you bursts into flame, you know this & yet nothing stops you, the sky stuck to the end of your finger as you point to it. • This is how it works—the master does not bow before his servant, he does not stand naked before her robes, his hands are empty yet he does not offer— not even a cupful—of his emptiness, how could he? How could the world then keep spinning? He made his money (as they say) the old-fashioned way, meaning he earned it, meaning slaves, meaning go fuck yourself. • Geometry deals with properties of space. Figs (a "multiple fruit") are like strawberries only inside out—its skin is a receptacle. Saint Francis didn't eat for forty days, until his body erupted & now we call it ecstasy. Years later Frankenstein found a way to raise the dead.Friend, his creation mutters,flower. • A storm will come the radio says find a ditch & lie facedown in it. Find your ditch & lie facedown & pray we will all lie down & pray after all there's only so many places to hide. We all need help the land is vast & dense & full of eyes & so many flowers the soil inside us is darker than oil lie down in it & pray. • Remember: it's not that everything has to look like something else, or even remind you of something else—everything is something else. This is the story we've been telling ourselves since we could speak.Possess nothing, Francis says.Do good everywhere. No one believes those wings will lift you.

My angel, don't think the great stillness is wooing us: We just haven't slept the same among the letters that have a habit of Recognizing us. Those beautiful letters live in Paris all year around. For even the best of men go astray with words within the gentle depths When they are to express something unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without them as a Part of me, as a recreation between hesitations, The boundless ones in moments of doubts. If you have this affection for things that don't really matter to the poor, Then everything will become clear, more coherent and somehow more Conciliatory, not perhaps how I manage to function from day to day Taking Kenneth's last words to be my daily gospel that "we must write Every day," but in your innermost consciousness and wakefulness you will Know I have patience with these black lines that I share with my most Intimate friends to say I'm still writing to you. So I sincerely beg you to have no remorse with matters of the heart, For it is a foolish, overbearing organ that does not have a place to rest Except in our sleep with dreams it cannot have during our times of Playful awareness. I only seek, as well as I can, to serve the last Wishes as a poet. What else is one to do with these unsolved hearts on Paper? Otherwise they are of no use to anyone but the dreamer who tries To cherish matters of the heart, like closed rooms to the public in some Grand museum filled with treasure, or like books written in a strange Tongue hidden in the library of moments we let slip away fearing it was What we wanted from the beginning. We stopped searching for the Answers because we could not live in their blue tents. It's a matter of Living everything. Live now, and perhaps you will then gradually, without Noticing it, one distant day live right into the answers of the heart. 8.3.03