1247 Love poems

Half the women are asleep on the floor on pieces of cardboard. One is face down under a blanket with her feet and ankle bracelet showing. Her spear leans against the wall by her head where she can reach it. The woman who sits on a chair won’t speak because this is not her dress. An old woman sings an Italian song in English and says she wants her name in lights: Faye Runaway. Tells about her grown children. One asks for any kind of medicine. One says she has a rock that means honor and a piece of fur. One woman’s feet are wrapped in rags. One keeps talking about how fat she is so nobody will know she’s pregnant. They lie about getting letters. One lies about a beautiful dead man. One lies about Denver. Outside it’s Thirtieth Street and hot and no sun.

Escape me? Never— Beloved! While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue. My life is a fault at last, I fear: It seems too much like a fate, indeed! Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed. But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, And, baffled, get up and begin again,— So the chase takes up one's life, that's all. While, look but once from your farthest bound At me so deep in the dust and dark, No sooner the old hope goes to ground Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark, I shape me— Ever Removed!

I want the hole in my ear to be quiet And inside the hole in my ear to be quiet And I want it to tell me what to do Or I will go to my lover’s mouth And say oh my quiet I am coming And tell the quiet how its kingdom should be made Though the quiet has already eaten me Because the quiet loves me But does the lover love me And why must the quiet be so quiet And why can’t the quiet have a cock And where is its violet mouth Its ten fingers with which to fix me And where is its belly breathing And O I want to be fixed But I am already fixed Why don’t I feel it

Dedicated to the Federal and Late Confederate Soldiers Like heart-loving brothers we meet, And still the loud thunders of strife, The blaze of fraternity kindles most sweet, There’s nothing more pleasing in life. The black cloud of faction retreats, The poor is no longer depressed, See those once discarded resuming their seats, The lost strangers soon will find rest. The soldier no longer shall roam, But soon shall land safely ashore, Each soon will arrive at his own native home, And struggle in warfare no more. The union of brothers is sweet, Whose wives and children do come, Their sons and fair daughters with pleasure they greet, When long absent fathers come home. They never shall languish again, Nor discord their union shall break, When brothers no longer lament and complain, Hence never each other forsake. Hang closely together like friends, By peace killing foes never driven, The storm of commotion eternally ends, And earth will soon turn into Heaven.

Like our  bodies' imprint Not a sign will remain that we were in this place. The world closes behind us, The sand straightens itself. Dates are already in view In which you no longer exist, Already a wind blows clouds Which will not rain on us both. And your name is already in the passenger lists of ships, And in the registers of hotels, Whose names alone Deaden the heart. The three languages I know, All the colors in which I see and dream: None will help me.

Lie down, you are horizontal. Stand up, you are not. I wanted my fate to be human. Like a perfume that does not choose the direction it travels, that cannot be straight or crooked, kept out or kept. Yes,No,Or —a day, a life, slips through them, taking off the third skin, taking off the fourth. And the logic of shoes becomes at last simple, an animal question, scuffing. Old shoes, old roads— the questions keep being new ones. Like two negative numbers multiplied by rain into oranges and olives.

The shine on her buckle took precedence in sun Her shine, I should say, could take me anywhere It feels right to be up this close in tight wind It feels right to notice all the shiny things about you About you there is nothing I wouldn’t want to know With you nothing is simple yet nothing is simpler About you many good things come into relation I think of proofs and grammar, vowel sounds, like A is for knee socks, E for panties I is for buttondown, O the blouse you wear U is for hair clip, and Y your tight skirt The music picks up again, I am the man I hope to be The bright air hangs freely near your newly cut hair It is so easy now to see gravity at work in your face Easy to understand time, that dark process To accept it as a beautiful process, your face

who took heroin, then sleeping pills, and who lies in a New York hospital The florist was told, cyclamen or azalea; White in either case, for you are pale As they are, “blooming early and profusely” Though the azalea grows in sandier soil, Needing less care; while cyclamen’s fleshy tubers Are adored, yes, rooted out by some. One flourishes in aridness, while the other Feeds the love which devours. But what has flung you here for salvaging From a city’s dereliction, this New York? A world against whose finger-and-breath-marked windows These weak flares may be set. Our only bulwark is the frailest cover: Lovers touch from terror of being alone. The urban surface: tough and granular, Poor ground for the affections to take root. Left to our own devices, we devise Such curious deaths, comas, or mutilations! You may buy peace, white, in sugary tincture, No way of knowing its strength, or your own, Until you lie quite still, your perfect limbs In meditation: the spirit rouses, flutters Like a handkerchief at a cell window, signaling, Self-amazed, its willingness to endure. The thing to cling to is the sense of expectation. Who knows what may occur in the next breath? In the pallor of another morning we neither Anticipated nor wanted! Eve, waken to flowers Unforeseen, from someone you don’t even know. Azalea or cyclamen ... we live in wonder, Blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension Though once we lay and waited for a death.

What is the structure of lips That take care of sounds, That can scream loud and long, That can wait and be silent? Yesterday I was mastering words And kissing lips lightly— Their loving weakness Now remains on my own Hardworking lips, Exacting, as if forever, My terrible punishment.

Last night I traced with my finger the long scar on my love’s stomach as if I was following a road on a map. I heard the scream of tires, saw the flash of chrome, her six-year-old body a rag doll bleeding at the seams. It is foolish of me to wish I was there before it happened, to reach back thirty years, clasp her small hand and pull her away from that speeding car that turned her organs into bruised fruit. How easily she could have missed her seventh birthday, the lit candles waiting for her to blow out their tiny flames. How easily I could’ve spent last night in a crowded bar instead, my shoulders brushing against strangers, a man on the jukebox singing his heart out to a woman with the prettiest eyes he’s ever seen.