1247 Love poems

If by truth you mean hand then yes I hold to be self-evident and hold you in the highest— KO to my OT and bait to my switch, I crown you one-trick pony to my one-horse town, dub you my one-stop shopping, my space heater, juke joint, tourist trap, my peep show, my meter reader, you best batteries-not-included baring all or nothing. Let me begin by saying if he hollers, end with goes the weasel. In between, cream filling.Get over it, meaning,the moon. Tell me you’ll dismember this night forever, you my punch-drunking bag, tar to my feather. More than the sum of our private parts, we are some peekaboo, some peak and valley, some bright equation (if and then but, if er then uh). My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at noduh.

Just let the San Andreas stay put, keeping this tunnel intact, enough to amble out of it, past Louie’s Dim Sum a Saturday afternoon, a breeze detectable off the bay—visible in the distance, carrying with it the smells of open air markets: crab freshly caught and seahorses piled in bins along Stockton . . . or Jack, strolling out of the tube connecting Polk Gulch and North Beach, on his way to Aquatic Park to spread the Sporting Green on his favorite patch of grass . . . He is ferrying the portable radio to his ear, listening for the count in the bottom of the ninth at Candlestick, begins to smooth the pages with the palms before he sits to keep it dry: the split seat of his pants for Jack Spicer (1925-1965)

The sail is so vast when it's laid out on the driveway. I stake it with a screwdriver through the shackle at the tack to stretch it smooth, pulling on the head and clew. Now it's smooth as a night's worth of new snow. My wife, my partner, has been torn from her busy day. We face each other across the sail's foot and with my right hand and her left hand (I'm right handed, she's left handed) we pull an arm's length of the sail down over itself, then do this again, keeping my left hand, and her right hand, towards the foot. Each fold is easier since the sail grows narrower near the top. Then we fold towards each other and I wrap my arms around it, while she holds the bag's mouth open, the gray bag that will cover it through the winter. Then I thank her. And the driveway is visible again as it is in spring, when all the snow has melted.

The afternoon we left our first apartment, we scrubbed it down from ceiling to parquet. Who knew the place could smell like lemon muffins? It suddenly seemed nuts to move away. The morning someone bought our station wagon, it gleamed with wax and every piston purred. That car looked like a centerfold in Hot Rod! Too late, we saw that selling was absurd. And then there was the freshly tuned piano we passed along to neighbors with a wince. We told ourselves we’d find one even better; instead we’ve missed its timbre ever since. So if, God help us, we are ever tempted to ditch our marriage when it’s lost its glow, let’s give the thing our finest spit and polish— and, having learned our lesson, not let go.

The twilight of your face, the unknown bird in your voice, draws me again to your eyes’ green vision, your song about that longest moment, a moon vulnerability, a Natalie I saw alone, at Carolyn’s party years ago, where you called me to your side, and I held my heart, cupped in shadow, as an offering to your smile, our soft-spoken isolation.

The rain whistled. A taxi brought me to your apartment building And there I stood. I had dreamed a dream Of us in a bedroom. The light shining upon us in white sheets. You were singing me a song of your sailing days And in the dream I reached deep in you and pulled out a cardinal Which in bright red Flew out the window. Sometimes when we talk On the phone, I think to myself That the deep perfect of your soul Is what draws me to you. But still what soul is perfect? All souls are misshapen and off-colored. Morning comes within a soul And makes it obey another law In which all souls are snowflakes. Once at a funeral, a man had died And with the prayers said, his soul flew up in a hurry Like it had been let out of something awful. It was strangely colored, that soul. And it was a funny shape and a funny temperature. As it blew away, all of us looking felt the cold.

I, as sinned against as sinning, take small pleasure from the winning of our decades-long guerrilla war. For from my job I've wanted more than victory over one who'd tried to punish me before he died, and now, neither of us dead, we haunt these halls in constant dread of drifting past the other's life while long-term memory is rife with slights that sting like paper cuts. We've occupied our separate ruts yet simmered in a single rage. We've grown absurd in middle age together, and should seek wisdom now together, by ending this row. I therefore decommission you as constant flagship of my rue. Below the threshold of my hate you now my good regard may rate. For I have let my anger pass. But, while you're down there, kiss my ass.

This is how it is with me: so strong, I want to draw the egg from your womb and nourish it in my own. I want to mother your child made only of us, of me, you: no borrowed seed from any man. I want to re-fashion the matrix of creation, make a human being from the human love that passes between our bodies. Sweetheart, this is how it is: when you emerge from the bedroom in a clean cotton shirt, sleeves pushed back over forearms, scented with cologne from an amber bottle—I want to open my heart, the brightest aching slit of my soul, receive your pearl. I watch your hands, wait for the sign that means you’ll touch me, open me, fill me; wait for that moment when your desire leaps inside me.

I have had to write this down in my absence and yours. These things happen. Thinking of a voice added I imagine a sympathy outside us that protects the message from what can’t help, being said. The times you’ve kept your secret, putting on glasses or glancing into a page with interest, give again the hurt you’ve forgiven, pretending to be one of us. So the hope of love translates as a series of hidden moments where we like to think someone was fooled into it. Who was I then who filled these days with illegible warnings: the marriages broken, the land pillaged by speculators, no word for a stranger? This island where I thought the language was mine has left me lonely and innocent as you or that friend who let you copy his themes until the words became pictures of places you would never go. Forgive it then that so much of after depends on these, the words which must find you off the page.

Whatever it may be, we may suppose it is not love, for love must leave its trace like contraband seized and displayed in rows; is not sufficient reason to erase the careful lives we have so far lived through— there is no call for us to undermine the walls we've built; no need to think anew of all the chains and choices that define us still. And yet for all our fine intent a single touch ignites the night and tries resolve past all resisting. What we meant before we mean again; fidelities have yet been known to shift and come undone and all good reasons fail us, one by one.