1247 Love poems

In every life there’s a moment or two when the self disappears, the cruel wound takes over, and then again at times we are filled with sky or with birds or simply with the sugary tea on the table said the old woman I know what you mean said the tulip about epiphanies for instance a cloudless April sky the approach of a butterfly but as to the disappearing self no I have not yet experienced that You are creating distinctions that do not exist in reality where “self” and “not-self” are like salt in ocean, cloud in sky oxygen in fire said the philosophical dog under the table scratching his balls

In her absence I created her image: out of the earthly the hidden heavenly commences. I am here weighing the expanse with the Jahili odes ... and absence is the guide, it is the guide. For each rhyme a tent is pitched. And for each thing blowing in the wind a rhyme. Absence teaches me its lesson: If it weren’t for the mirage you wouldn’t have been steadfast ... Then in the emptiness, I disassembled a letter from one of the ancient alphabets, and I leaned on absence. So who am I after the visitation? A bird, or a passerby amid the symbols and the memory vendors? As if I were an antique piece, as if I were a ghost sneaking in from Yabous, telling myself: Let’s go to the seven hills. Then I placed my mask on a stone, and walked as the sleepless walk, led by my dream. And from one moon to another I leapt. There is enough of unconsciousness to liberate things from their history. And there is enough of history to liberate unconsciousness from its ascension. Take me to our early years—my first girlfriend says. Leave the windows open for the house sparrow to enter your dream—I say ... then I awaken, and no city is in the city. No “here” except “there.” And no there but here. If it weren’t for the mirage I wouldn’t have walked to the seven hills ... if it weren’t for the mirage!

In love, his grammar grew rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell madly from the sky like pheasants for the peasantry, and he, as sated as they were, lolled under shade trees until roused by moonlight and the beautiful fraternal twins and and but. Oh that was when he knew he couldn’t resist a conjunction of any kind. One said accumulate, the other was a doubter who loved the wind and the mind that cleans up after it. For love he wanted to break all the rules, light a candle behind a sentence named Sheila, always running on and wishing to be stopped by the hard button of a period. Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look toward a mannequin or a window dresser with a penchant for parsing. But mostly he wanted you, Sheila, and the adjectives that could precede and change you:bluesy,fly-by-night, queen of all that is and might be.

I O what a physical effect it has on me To dive forever into the light blue sea Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends, Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still, It is beautiful, when October Is over, and February is over, To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.” Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian? Aren’t my eyes bigger than love? Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins? Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight! Is love what we are, Or has happiness come to me in a private car That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there? 2 We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you. I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism. 3 Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill, I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing Appear and reappear—electricity! I’d love to be how You are, as if The world were new, and the selves were blue Which we don Until it’s dawn, Until evening puts on The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . . Water! your tear-colored nail polish Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new As a calm On the sea, where, like pigeons, I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated— Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!

In my little room, the emperor removes his robe and we chat about the mechanics of winning an election. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he says. When the moon comes out above the dilapidated warehouse, he asks me the profundity of going to the moon and back again to the same ghetto room. If it pleases your majesty, I say, the gods make the ghettos. “I am King,” says the emperor, “I shall have no gods.” And he shakes, nearly spilling his oolong tea. When he has calmed down enough, I drop two lumps of sugar into his cup. He marvels at my calculus book and integration theory and digital watch. “Had I one of those,” he says, “I would have timed my crossing of the Rubicon at eighteen, and what barbarian woman would not have given herself for that!” He yawns imperially over my utensils, books, and cot and asks me to cross the Rubicon with him. And I nod while doing tax equations for his majesty because the hour is late. He is delighted with the hot chocolate that I make on a hot plate and, after making a rough estimate of the roaches on the wall, he sleeps on my cot as any sovereign would. I rattle my typewriter like a machine- gun all night, partly because it is my habit, and partly to protect my friend, the emperor. For though he has crossed the Rubicon with the bravest of men, he has yet to sleep a single night in the ghetto.

At last I can be with you! The grinding hours since I left your side! The labor of being fully human, working my opposable thumb, talking, and walking upright. Now I have unclasped unzipped, stepped out of. Husked, soft, a be-er only, I do nothing, but point my bare feet into your clean smoothness feel your quiet strength the whole length of my body. I close my eyes, hear myself moan, so grateful to be held this way.

What was it he felt humming beneath his skin? Gaze of a twelve-year-old feasting. The hair on those arms.

—St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.

Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law she thought to violate, man-set as it was, and, here, inconsequential as the sun at midnight, drought at flood-time— when she heard a baby in the tall reeds at the river’s brink, she was nobody’s daughter, subject of no rule but the one his need for her established as she knelt down to quell his crying with a little tune just seeing him there had taught her how to hum. Now as then, it is the same tune, timelessly in time, your mother hums as she kneels down beside your little barge of foam, smiling to see you smile when she wrings out from the sponge a ragged string of water over the chest and belly, the dimpled loins, the bud so far from flowering, and the foot slick as a fish your hand tries to hold up till it slips back splashing with such mild turbulence that she laughs, and you laugh to see her laugh. Here now, as it was then, it is still so many years before the blood’s smeared over doorposts, before the Nile clots with the first-born, and the women wailing,wailing throughout the city; here now again is the kingdom of pleasure, where they are safe still, mother and child, from the chartered rod of the Fathers, and where a father can still pray, Lord, Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep away from them, just keep away.

The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end: I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details. And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.