1247 Love poems

If yet I have not all thy love, Dear, I shall never have it all; I cannot breathe one other sigh, to move, Nor can intreat one other tear to fall; And all my treasure, which should purchase thee— Sighs, tears, and oaths, and letters—I have spent. Yet no more can be due to me, Than at the bargain made was meant; If then thy gift of love were partial, That some to me, some should to others fall, Dear, I shall never have thee all. Or if then thou gavest me all, All was but all, which thou hadst then; But if in thy heart, since, there be or shall New love created be, by other men, Which have their stocks entire, and can in tears, In sighs, in oaths, and letters, outbid me, This new love may beget new fears, For this love was not vow'd by thee. And yet it was, thy gift being general; The ground, thy heart, is mine; whatever shall Grow there, dear, I should have it all. Yet I would not have all yet, He that hath all can have no more; And since my love doth every day admit New growth, thou shouldst have new rewards in store; Thou canst not every day give me thy heart, If thou canst give it, then thou never gavest it; Love's riddles are, that though thy heart depart, It stays at home, and thou with losing savest it; But we will have a way more liberal, Than changing hearts, to join them; so we shall Be one, and one another's all.

I was always afraid of the next card the psychic would turn over for us— Forgive me for not knowing how we were every card in the deck.

Magdalen’s Epistle Of Love’s discrete occasions, we observe sufficient catalogue, a likely-sounding lexicon pronounced so as to implicate a wealth of difference, where reclines instead a common element, itself quite like those elements partaken at the table served by Jesus on the night he was betrayed—like those in that the bread was breakable, the wine was red and wet, and met the tongue with bright, intoxicating sweetness, quite like ... wine. None of what I write arrives to compromise that sacrament, the mystery of spirit graved in what is commonplace and plain— the broken, brittle crust, the cup. Quite otherwise, I choose instead to bear again the news that each, each was still itself, substantial in the simplest sense. By now, you will have learned of Magdalen, a name recalled for having won a touch of favor from the one we call the son of man, and what you’ve heard is true enough. I met him first as, mute, he scribbled in the dust to shame some village hypocrites toward leaving me unbloodied, if ill-disposed to taking up again a prior circumstance. I met him in the house of one who was a Pharisee and not prepared to suffer quietly my handling of the master’s feet. Much later, in the garden when, having died and risen, he spoke as to a maid and asked me why I wept. When, at any meeting with the Christ, was I not weeping? For what? I only speculate —brief inability to speak, a weak and giddy troubling near the throat, a wash of gratitude. And early on, I think, some slight abiding sense of shame, a sop I have inferred more recently to do without. Lush poverty! I think that this is what I’m called to say, this mild exhortation that one should still abide all love’s embarrassments, and so resist the new temptation—dangerous, inexpedient mask—of shame. And, well, perhaps one other thing: I have received some little bit about the glib divisions which so lately have occurred to you as right, as necessary, fit That the body is something less than honorable, say, in its ... appetites? That the spirit is something pure, and—if all goes well— potentially unencumbered by the body’s bawdy tastes. This disposition, then, has led to a banal and pious lack of charity, and, worse, has led more than a few to attempt some soul-preserving severance—harsh mortifications, manglings, all manner of ritual excision lately undertaken to prevent the body’s claim upon the heart, or mind, or (blasphemy!)spirit— whatever name you fix upon the supposéd bodiless. I fear that you presume—dissecting the person unto something less complex. I think that you forget you are not Greek. I think that you forget the very issue which induced the Christ to take on flesh. All loves are bodily, require that the lips part, and press their trace of secrecy upon the one beloved—the one, or many, endless array whose aspects turn to face the one who calls, the one whose choice it was one day to lift my own bruised body from the dust, where, it seems to me, I must have met my death, thereafter, this subsequent life and late disinclination toward simple reductions in the name of Jesus, whose image I work daily to retain. I have kissed his feet. I have looked long into the trouble of his face, and met, in that intersection, the sacred place—where body and spirit both abide, both yield, in mutual obsession. Yes, if you’ll recall your Hebrew word. just long enough to glimpse in its dense figure power to produce you’ll see as well the damage Greek has wrought upon your tongue, stolen from your sense of what is holy, wholly good, fully animal— the body which he now prepares.

Someone will push the house over one day, Some spacedozer give it a shove, But the cobbles we laid down here in the yard, These are a labour of love. All winter we set these cobbles in place, Or was it the summer as well? Sorting through lumpy bluestone pitchers For ones that looked suitable. The old house decayed – along with us – Will a strange new resident Admire the patio made in joy Wondering what we meant? Things fall apart, the poet wrote, Certainties crumble and move But the cobbles oddly plotted together, These are our labour of love.

I could make a wardrobe with tufts of wool caught on thistle and bracken. Lost—the scraps I might have woven whole cloth. Come watch, the man says, shearing sheep with the precision of long practice, fleece, removed all of a piece, rolled in a neat bundle. I’ve been so clumsy with people who’ve loved me. Straddling a ewe, the man props its head on his foot, leans down with clippers, each pass across the coat a caress. His dogs, lying nearby, tremble at every move—as I do, loving the hands that have learned to gentle the life beneath them.

Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all, How well pleasant it were your liberty! Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall. But they that sometime liked my company: Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl. Lo what a proof in light adversity! But ye my birds, I swear by all your bells, Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.

She is large and matronly And rather dirty, A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it. Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year And put up with her husband, I don't know. She likes to eat. She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs, When food is going. Oh yes, she can make haste when she likes. She snaps the soft bread from my hand in great mouthfuls, Opening her rather pretty wedge of an iron, pristine face Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth Like sudden curved scissors, And gulping at more than she can swallow, and working her thick, soft tongue, And having the bread hanging over her chin. O Mistress, Mistress, Reptile Mistress, Your eye is very dark, very bright, And it never softens Although you watch. She knows, She knows well enough to come for food, Yet she sees me not; Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything, Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless, Reptile mistress. Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless mouth, She has no qualm when she catches my finger in her steel overlapping gums, But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking are nothing to her, She does not even know she is nipping me with her curved beak. Snake-like she draws at my finger, while I drag it in horror away. Mistress, reptile mistress, You are almost too large, I am almost frightened. He is much smaller, Dapper beside her, And ridiculously small. Her laconic eye has an earthy, materialistic look, His, poor darling, is almost fiery. His wimple, his blunt-prowed face, His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs, So striving, striving, Are all more delicate than she, And he has a cruel scar on his shell. Poor darling, biting at her feet, Running beside her like a dog, biting her earthy, splay feet, Nipping her ankles, Which she drags apathetic away, though without retreating into her shell. Agelessly silent, And with a grim, reptile determination, Cold, voiceless age-after-age behind him, serpents' long obstinacy Of horizontal persistence. Little old man Scuffling beside her, bending down, catching his opportunity, Parting his steel-trap face, so suddenly, and seizing her scaly ankle, And hanging grimly on, Letting go at last as she drags away, And closing his steel-trap face. His steel-trap, stoic, ageless, handsome face. Alas, what a fool he looks in this scuffle. And how he feels it! The lonely rambler, the stoic, dignified stalker through chaos, The immune, the animate, Enveloped in isolation, Forerunner. Now look at him! Alas, the spear is through the side of his isolation. His adolescence saw him crucified into sex, Doomed, in the long crucifixion of desire, to seek his consummation beyond himself. Divided into passionate duality, He, so finished and immune, now broken into desirous fragmentariness, Doomed to make an intolerable fool of himself In his effort toward completion again. Poor little earthy house-inhabiting Osiris, The mysterious bull tore him at adolescence into pieces, And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously. And so behold him following the tail Of that mud-hovel of his slowly-rambling spouse, Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow, But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence, Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk, Roaming over the sods, Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell. Their two shells like domed boats bumping, Hers huge, his small; Their splay feet rambling and rowing like paddles, And stumbling mixed up in one another, In the race of love — Two tortoises, She huge, he small. She seems earthily apathetic, And he has a reptile's awful persistence. I heard a woman pitying her, pitying the Mère Tortue. While I, I pity Monsieur. "He pesters her and torments her," said the woman. How much more is he pestered and tormented, say I. What can he do? He is dumb, he is visionless, Conceptionless. His black, sad-lidded eye sees but beholds not As her earthen mound moves on, But he catches the folds of vulnerable, leathery skin, Nail-studded, that shake beneath her shell, And drags at these with his beak, Drags and drags and bites, While she pulls herself free, and rows her dull mound along.

Sing lullaby, as women do, Wherewith they bring their babes to rest, And lullaby can I sing too As womanly as can the best. With lullaby they still the child, And if I be not much beguiled, Full many wanton babes have I Which must be stilled with lullaby. First lullaby my youthful years; It is now time to go to bed, For crooked age and hoary hairs Have won the haven within my head. With lullaby, then, youth be still; With lullaby content thy will; Since courage quails and comes behind, Go sleep, and so beguile thy mind. Next, lullaby my gazing eyes, Which wonted were to glance apace. For every glass may now suffice To show the furrows in my face; With lullaby then wink awhile, With lullaby your looks beguile; Let no fair face nor beauty bright Entice you eft with vain delight. And lullaby, my wanton will; Let reason's rule now reign thy thought, Since all too late I find by skill How dear I have thy fancies bought; With lullaby now take thine ease, With lullaby thy doubts appease. For trust to this: if thou be still, My body shall obey thy will. Eke lullaby, my loving boy, My little Robin, take thy rest; Since age is cold and nothing coy, Keep close thy coin, for so is best; With lullaby be thou content, With lullaby thy lusts relent, Let others pay which hath mo pence; Thou art too poor for such expense. Thus lullaby, my youth, mine eyes, My will, my ware, and all that was. I can no mo delays devise, But welcome pain, let pleasure pass; With lullaby now take your leave, With lullaby your dreams deceive; And when you rise with waking eye, Remember then this lullaby.

Inside my lunch to my surprise a perfect heart-shaped love note lies. The outside says, “Will you be mine?” and, “Will you be my valentine?” I take it out and wonder who would want to tell me “I love you.” Perhaps a girl who’s much too shy to hand it to me eye to eye. Or maybe it was sweetly penned in private by a secret friend Who found my lunchbox sitting by and slid the note in on the sly. Oh, I’d be thrilled if it were Jo, the cute one in the second row. Or could it be from Jennifer? Has she found out I’m sweet on her? My mind’s abuzz, my shoulders tense. I need no more of this suspense. My stomach lurching in my throat, I open up my little note. Then wham! as if it were a bomb, inside it reads, “I love you—Mom.”

Lying in bed I think about you, your ugly empty airless apartment and your eyes. It’s noon, and tired I look into the rest of the awake day incapable of even awe, just a presence of particle and wave, just that closed and deliberate human observance. Your thin fingers and the dissolution of all ability. Lay open now to only me that white body, and I will, as the awkward butterfly, land quietly upon you. A grace and staying. A sight and ease. A spell entangled. A span. I am inside you. And so both projected, we are now part of a garden, that is part of a landscape, that is part of a world that no one believes in.