1247 Love poems

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade, a song for what we did on the floor in the basement of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought: That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and one was the boy, and we paired off—maybe six or eight girls—and turned out the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy: concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry. Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun, plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats. We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost in someone’s hair . . . and we grew up and hardly mentioned who the first kiss really was—a girl like us, still sticky with moisturizer we’d shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire, just before we’d made ourselves stop.

The present that you gave me months ago is still unopened by our bed, sealed in its rich blue paper and bright bow. I’ve even left the card unread and kept the ribbon knotted tight. Why needlessly unfold and bring to light the elegant contrivances that hide the costly secret waiting still inside?

Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea; The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape, With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape; But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee? Ask me no more. Ask me no more: what answer should I give? I love not hollow cheek or faded eye: Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die! Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live; Ask me no more. Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height: What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang) In height and cold, the splendour of the hills? But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine, To sit a star upon the sparkling spire; And come, for Love is of the valley, come, For Love is of the valley, come thou down And find him; by the happy threshold, he, Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize, Or red with spirted purple of the vats, Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk With Death and Morning on the silver horns, Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine, Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice, That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls To roll the torrent out of dusky doors: But follow; let the torrent dance thee down To find him in the valley; let the wild Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, That like a broken purpose waste in air: So waste not thou; but come; for all the vales Await thee; azure pillars of the hearth Arise to thee; the children call, and I Thy shepherd pipe, and sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro' the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves, And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee. O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each, That bright and fierce and fickle is the South, And dark and true and tender is the North. O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill, And cheep and twitter twenty million loves. O were I thou that she might take me in, And lay me on her bosom, and her heart Would rock the snowy cradle till I died. Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, Delaying as the tender ash delays To clothe herself, when all the woods are green? O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown: Say to her, I do but wanton in the South, But in the North long since my nest is made. O tell her, brief is life but love is long, And brief the sun of summer in the North, And brief the moon of beauty in the South. O Swallow, flying from the golden woods, Fly to her, and pipe and woo her, and make her mine, And tell her, tell her, that I follow thee.

How is it that you hold such influence over me: your practiced slouch, your porkpie hat at rakish angle, commending the dumpling-shaped lump atop your pelvis— as if we’ve one more thing to consider amidst the striptease of all your stanzas and all your lines— draws me down into the center of you: the prize peony, so that I’m nothing more than an ant whose singular labor is to gather the beading liquid inside you; bring it to light. I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word. When you arrive, unfasten your notebook, and recite, I am only a schoolboy with a schoolboy’s hard mind. You are the headmaster. Now you must master me.

On starless, windless nights like this I imagine I can hear the wedding dresses Weeping in their closets, Luminescent with hopeless longing, Like hollow angels. They know they will never be worn again. Who wants them now, After their one heroic day in the limelight? Yet they glow with desire In the darkness of closets. A few lucky wedding dresses Get worn by daughters—just once more, Then back to the closet. Most turn yellow over time, Yellow from praying For the moths to come And carry them into the sky. Where is your mother's wedding dress, What closet? Where is your grandmother's wedding dress? What, gone? Eventually they all disappear, Who knows where. Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it. I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill. But what sad story brought it there, And what sad story will take it away? Somewhere a closet is waiting for it. The luckiest wedding dresses Are those of wives Betrayed by their husbands A week after the wedding. They are flung outside the double-wide, Or the condo in Telluride, And doused with gasoline. They ride the candolescent flames, Just smoke now, Into a sky full of congratulations.

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where, I love you directly without problems or pride: I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not nor are you, so close that your hand upon my chest is mine, so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

8 By now you know: I need the words. You'll learn to give me what I seek. It's my sick mind, it feeds on words. I'm begging you, for God's sake: speak! 17 Hurry, pin my wrists in place, nail me to your bed like Christ . . . comfort me, caress my face . . . fuck me when I expect it least. 45 From nerves veins valves ventricles from tendons cartilage nerves ducts from follicles nerves ribs clavicles . . . from every pore my soul erupts. 47 You liked that? you actually came? but how? Explain to me. But why? If you got off on that, you're doomed. A charge I can't and don't deny. 71 Why is even pleasure a kind of chore? Why is what sense I have left leaving me? Come on, explain. Who do you take me for, your personal doctor of philosophy?

At the end of my stepfather’s life when his anger was gone, and the saplings of his failed nursery had grown into trees, my newly feminist mother had him in the kitchen to pay for all those years he only did the carving. “You know where that is,” she would say as he looked for a knife to cut the cheese and a tray to serve it with, his apron wide as a dress above his workboots, confused as a girl. He is the one I think of now, lifting the tray for my family, the guests, until at last he comes to me. And I, no less confused, look down from his hurt eyes as if there were nothing between us except an arrangement of cheese, and not this bafflement, these almost tender hands that once swung hammers and drove machines and insisted that I learn to be a man.