1247 Love poems

he’s only a smart-ass when he’s home with Mandrake he’s silent and obedient as a snail his bald pate bowing into the cape’s trail and dreaming of tales he’ll bore me with his one night home once a month that’s what I get like clockwork and always on the full moon half my allowance he reserves for sheets, tearing them with his teeth to vent the forced silence of those other twenty-odd days did I say odd it’s that one day that’s odd his coming home full of half-tricks he’s picked up from the master the hypnotic hunger he so willingly tries on me he claims he stole me, bought me claims he’s Zulu, Bantu, Beja depending on the hour, day, or year says I was the black spot in the white of his eye the speck he turned into leopard that unwittingly turned into woman neither of us no longer knows what’s real and my mother beats her fat tongue against her gums as each month I try to reveal the puzzle stroking the lines from his hairless obsidian crown I hear her rumbling around in the next room I soothe his sweet head and she moans heaven protect us from all the things to which we can become accustomed

Love Is an interruption or an aberration, a force in opposition to the ultimate inertia of the universe, Wrote Marguerite Duras. Whether or not it is worth it it occurs. Whether or not it is to be believed it is. The wind moves us without a frond being needed to be held by a slave girl. The rudiments of sentences are ancient without a mouth needing to remember what it is losing as it lets those words out, something eviller than what they even mean right now, something too evil to be known right now Or ever. I feel sure that even the most culpable people have other qualities secreted away Adjusting their garments in light of fate He turned his head upward, he looked up the white wall. The light from the lamp could be light coming from a great distance, it could be a great distance away, and the wall could be snow it is so beautiful, he said. His head looking up the wall, his eyes looking up it, he said, that nail in the wall could also be beautiful, for so far away.

I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know. How a republic falls because of its backhanded deals, stairwell secrets. My mother does not know I am lying with a man who is darker than me, that we do not have names for how we truly treat our bodies. What we do with them. The other possesses me. Without him the perception of me fails to exist. My mother now is taking her sheers and cutting through live shrimp. When I was a child she peeled each flushed grape until only the pale fleshy bead remained. She placed them onto a plate in one shining mound, deseeded, in front of me. How I sucked and bled the fruit of all their juice, hypnotized in front of the buzz of television in each version of my childhood. I am her daughter. This is certain. I am lying down with a man who is darker than me and maybe this poem is my real republic, my face is my face, or is it stolen from my mother and hung over mine? If I were a dream you could say my countenance was a string of flickering lights made of teeth or an expression unraveling like a carpet into a narrow river of another life. Does truth matter when it's floating face up or face down? The answer to this makes all the difference.

We cannot live, except thus mutually We alternate, aware or unaware, The reflex act of life: and when we bear Our virtue onward most impulsively, Most full of invocation, and to be Most instantly compellant, certes, there We live most life, whoever breathes most air And counts his dying years by sun and sea. But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth Throw out her full force on another soul, The conscience and the concentration both Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole And aim consummated, is Love in sooth, As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I Live o'er again that happy hour, When midway on the mount I lay, Beside the ruined tower. The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene Had blended with the lights of eve; And she was there, my hope, my joy, My own dear Genevieve! She leant against the arm{'e}d man, The statue of the arm{'e}d knight; She stood and listened to my lay, Amid the lingering light. Few sorrows hath she of her own, My hope! my joy! my Genevieve! She loves me best, whene'er I sing The songs that make her grieve. I played a soft and doleful air, I sang an old and moving story— An old rude song, that suited well That ruin wild and hoary. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes and modest grace; For well she knew, I could not choose But gaze upon her face. I told her of the Knight that wore Upon his shield a burning brand; And that for ten long years he wooed The Lady of the Land. I told her how he pined: and ah! The deep, the low, the pleading tone With which I sang another's love, Interpreted my own. She listened with a flitting blush, With downcast eyes, and modest grace; And she forgave me, that I gazed Too fondly on her face! But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely Knight, And that he crossed the mountain-woods, Nor rested day nor night; That sometimes from the savage den, And sometimes from the darksome shade, And sometimes starting up at once In green and sunny glade,— There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a Fiend, This miserable Knight! And that unknowing what he did, He leaped amid a murderous band, And saved from outrage worse than death The Lady of the Land! And how she wept, and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain— And ever strove to expiate The scorn that crazed his brain;— And that she nursed him in a cave; And how his madness went away, When on the yellow forest-leaves A dying man he lay;— His dying words—but when I reached That tenderest strain of all the ditty, My faltering voice and pausing harp Disturbed her soul with pity! All impulses of soul and sense Had thrilled my guileless Genevieve; The music and the doleful tale, The rich and balmy eve; And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng, And gentle wishes long subdued, Subdued and cherished long! She wept with pity and delight, She blushed with love, and virgin-shame; And like the murmur of a dream, I heard her breathe my name. Her bosom heaved—she stepped aside, As conscious of my look she stepped— Then suddenly, with timorous eye She fled to me and wept. She half enclosed me with her arms, She pressed me with a meek embrace; And bending back her head, looked up, And gazed upon my face. 'Twas partly love, and partly fear, And partly 'twas a bashful art, That I might rather feel, than see, The swelling of her heart. I calmed her fears, and she was calm, And told her love with virgin pride; And so I won my Genevieve, My bright and beauteous Bride.

Love again: wanking at ten past three (Surely he’s taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing how To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery. Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, And me supposed to be ignorant, Or find it funny, or not to care, Even ... but why put it into words? Isolate rather this element That spreads through other lives like a tree And sways them on in a sort of sense And say why it never worked for me. Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity.

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep Half-asleep Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop As they crop— Was the site once of a city great and gay, (So they say) Of our country's very capital, its prince Ages since Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far Peace or war. Now the country does not even boast a tree, As you see, To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills From the hills Intersect and give a name to, (else they run Into one) Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires Up like fires O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall Bounding all Made of marble, men might march on nor be prest Twelve abreast. And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass Never was! Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'er-spreads And embeds Every vestige of the city, guessed alone, Stock or stone— Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe Long ago; Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame Struck them tame; And that glory and that shame alike, the gold Bought and sold. Now—the single little turret that remains On the plains, By the caper overrooted, by the gourd Overscored, While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks Through the chinks— Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time Sprang sublime, And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced As they raced, And the monarch and his minions and his dames Viewed the games. And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve Smiles to leave To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece In such peace, And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey Melt away— That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb Till I come. But he looked upon the city, every side, Far and wide, All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades' Colonnades, All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,—and then All the men! When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech Each on each. In one year they sent a million fighters forth South and North, And they built their gods a brazen pillar high As the sky Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force— Gold, of course. O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin! Shut them in, With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best.

A Stranger came to the door at eve, And he spoke the bridegroom fair. He bore a green-white stick in his hand, And, for all burden, care. He asked with the eyes more than the lips For a shelter for the night, And he turned and looked at the road afar Without a window light. The bridegroom came forth into the porch With, ‘Let us look at the sky, And question what of the night to be, Stranger, you and I.’ The woodbine leaves littered the yard, The woodbine berries were blue, Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind; ‘Stranger, I wish I knew.’ Within, the bride in the dusk alone Bent over the open fire, Her face rose-red with the glowing coal And the thought of the heart’s desire. The bridegroom looked at the weary road, Yet saw but her within, And wished her heart in a case of gold And pinned with a silver pin. The bridegroom thought it little to give A dole of bread, a purse, A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God, Or for the rich a curse; But whether or not a man was asked To mar the love of two By harboring woe in the bridal house, The bridegroom wished he knew.

1. I watched thee when the foe was at our side, Ready to strike at him—or thee and me, Were safety hopeless—rather than divide Aught with one loved save love and liberty. 2. I watched thee on the breakers, when the rock, Received our prow, and all was storm and fear, And bade thee cling to me through every shock; This arm would be thy bark, or breast thy bier. 3. I watched thee when the fever glazed thine eyes, Yielding my couch and stretched me on the ground When overworn with watching, ne’er to rise From thence if thou an early grave hadst found. 4. The earthquake came, and rocked the quivering wall, And men and nature reeled as if with wine. Whom did I seek around the tottering hall? For thee. Whose safety first provide for? Thine. 5. And when convulsive throes denied my breath The faintest utterance to my fading thought, To thee—to thee—e’en in the gasp of death My spirit turned, oh! oftener than it ought. 6. Thus much and more; and yet thou lov’st me not, And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.

Love is like the wild rose-briar, Friendship like the holly-tree— The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms But which will bloom most constantly? The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring, Its summer blossoms scent the air; Yet wait till winter comes again And who will call the wild-briar fair? Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now And deck thee with the holly’s sheen, That when December blights thy brow He still may leave thy garland green.