1247 Love poems

Kind are her answers, But her performance keeps no day; Breaks time, as dancers From their own music when they stray: All her free favors And smooth words wing my hopes in vain. O did ever voice so sweet but only feign? Can true love yield such delay, Converting joy to pain? Lost is our freedom, When we submit to women so: Why do we need ’em, When in their best they work our woe? There is no wisdom Can alter ends, by Fate prefixed. O why is the good of man with evil mixed? Never were days yet called two, But one night went betwixt.

For Carol Rigolot When deeds splay before us precious as gold & unused chances stripped from the whine-bone, we know the moment kindheartedness walks in. Each praise be echoes us back as the years uncount themselves, eating salt. Though blood first shaped us on the climbing wheel, the human mind lit by the savanna’s ice star & thistle rose, your knowing gaze enters a room & opens the day, saying we were made for fun. Even the bedazzled brute knows when sunlight falls through leaves across honed knives on the table. If we can see it push shadows aside, growing closer, are we less broken? A barometer, temperature gauge, a ruler in minus fractions & pedigrees, a thingmajig, a probe with an all-seeing eye, what do we need to measure kindness, every unheld breath, every unkind leapyear? Sometimes a sober voice is enough to calm the waters & drive away the false witnesses, saying, Look, here are the broken treaties Beauty brought to us earthbound sentinels.

The kindness of others is all they ever wanted, the laughter of neighbors prospering in the blue light of summer. Those of the small sputtering flame and the sudden white sprung hair, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, desire largesse. The role of poor relation evokes a lack they are not apt to admit, or unbearable pity. They prefer to penetrate the giver’s effortless knack of giving they perceive as vitality, a pulsating entity that rewards the kindness of others tenfold. This they have witnessed. This they have tabulated relentlessly. The generosity of others whose spirits, like their long-legged children blossoming into a progeny of orchards and fields, flourish. Those who have never known kindness drag into the privacy of their smallness the baskets of fruit appearing year after year on their porches, to be picked apart in the hushed posture of thieves. They peel skin, probe flesh the color of honey as if the seeds will yield something other than a glimmer of sweet air rising from the roots of trees and licorice-laced, half-opened leaves. Those of the small flame, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, live out their lives hungry, glaring at themselves across the table, wife of the cruel mouth, husband of the thin broth trickling like spittle.

Kissing your lips I try to forget roses or the fruit of palmyra trees sweet and strong Tongue lolling upon tongue heart beating against heart beating, these are my words signifying our human bodies which poetry does not capture, the absolute desire I have to kiss your lips on this hot and sunny afternoon. I do not know how much longer I can walk about the garden kissing roses, or perambulate the toddy tavern of my dreams where black faces and white toddy mix in black and white memories of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, my Tamil countrymen far away on an island across the sea. Far away and far away the palmyra fruit and your lips. To drink toddy now. To kiss your rosy lips now. To uproot the roses in my garden and offer them upon my tongue now. To fly to Sri Lanka and grab the last fruit on the tree before history throws the Tamils into the sea as is said it will do; before all this and everything else, before the apocalypse, I do so sincerely wish, though my words may not fit, to rest my head in your hair and kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead—erases misery. I kiss your forehead. A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness. I kiss your eyes. A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water. I kiss your lips. A kiss on the forehead—erases memory. 1917

By freezing passion at its blossoming perhaps Rodin knew he challenged Sophocles who said as lover you want ice to be ice yet not melt in your hands. How stone, implying permanence, might let us believe, a moment, the seated figures are beyond the leaf that cannot keep from letting go the branch, beyond even stupidly purpling grapes that do not understand the process by which they darken; darken nevertheless.

That kiss I failed to give you. How can you forgive me? The kiss I would have spent on you is still There, within me. It will probably die there. But it will be the last of me to die.

To these I turn, in these I trust— Brother Lead and Sister Steel. To his blind power I make appeal, I guard her beauty clean from rust. He spins and burns and loves the air, And splits a skull to win my praise; But up the nobly marching days She glitters naked, cold and fair. Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this: That in good fury he may feel The body where he sets his heel Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Are you shaken, are you stirred By a whisper of love, Spellbound to a word Does Time cease to move, Till her calm grey eye Expands to a sky And the clouds of her hair Like storms go by? Then the lips that you have kissed Turn to frost and fire, And a white-steaming mist Obscures desire: So back to their birth Fade water, air, earth, And the First Power moves Over void and dearth. Is that Love? no, but Death, A passion, a shout, The deep in-breath, The breath roaring out, And once that is flown, You must lie alone, Without hope, without life, Poor flesh, sad bone.

As in,in the, of course. The body knew the drill by now. Was are we there yet and then never been so, then so long. Heart tied with twine, with shorthairs, trip wires—whispered that bind. Drew the short straw, scared herself apart to spit-sweet shards and into time that counted backwards from two lips ago. Said done is done and is between me and those teeth