1247 Love poems

When the motorboat man asked me to love him I whispered precipice the word for the no-more-boyfriend feeling because precipice contains ice(practically twice) because I wanted teetering— What? he said Yes His ears from the engines—so hard of hearing—his hands always so hot Mid our first winter—I’d clung so long to the dock he had to crowbar my fingers off Each digit cracked so cleanly Would you say they break like icicles? I asked sweetly I knew I was nothing! But if I could sustain one song— I is, I is, I is I is I is I could be:ice Sex on the bathroom’s cold marble counter was best I whispered statuette,monument What? he, sculpting my legs, said Yes The child? I named her Cecily It sounded like iced lily For pure, I said pristine At the ocean, I said brine Isle for vacation; for flowers,edelweiss But when I said (only of late, late!)I choose ice Brittle pearls broke behind my syllables Did he hear me? Again, twice, thrice: For my love we would need to live in a great pyramid We would need to sleep beneath the continental shelf with Antarctic crust blanketing us The only driveway to any kind of house is an iceberg-ridden Northwest Passage When I whispered universe you were to translate it as one bright line one bright rime

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around The castle o' Montgomery, Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, Your waters never drumlie! There Simmer first unfald her robes, And there the langest tarry: For there I took the last Fareweel O' my sweet Highland Mary. How sweetly bloom'd the gay, green birk, How rich the hawthorn's blossom; As underneath their fragrant shade, I clasp'd her to my bosom! The golden Hours, on angel wings, Flew o'er me and my Dearie; For dear to me as light and life Was my sweet Highland Mary. Wi' mony a vow, and lock'd embrace, Our parting was fu' tender; And pledging aft to meet again, We tore oursels asunder: But Oh! fell Death's untimely frost, That nipt my Flower sae early! Now green's the sod, and cauld's the clay, That wraps my Highland Mary! O pale, pale now, those rosy lips, I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly! And clos'd for ay the sparkling glance, That dwalt on me sae kindly! And mouldering now in silent dust, That heart that lo'ed me dearly! But still within my bosom's core Shall live my Highland Mary.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, 1939 Dear One, Do you have the time? Can you take the time? Can you make the time? To visit me? The hospital doors have opened to spring, and its land is high, dear one, each slope with a vapor of crocuses. Its citizens, alas, are low. Despondent, in fact, though a jar of sun tea tans on the sill. The woman beside me has opened the gift of a china doll, an antique Frozen Charlotte. Glass face, a cap of china hair, shellacked to the sheen of a chestnut. At breakfast the shifting returned, dreadful within me:colors were infinite, part of the air. . . lines were free of the masses they held. The melon, a cloud; and the melon, an empty, oval lariat. They have moved the canvas chair from the window. Sun, enhanced by the brewing jar, threw an apricot scorch on the fabric. The fruit, a cloud. The fruit, a doll-sized, empty lariat. D. O., into what shape will our shaplessness flow? Dear One, Italian escapes me. Still, I float to the operas of Hasse and Handel, a word now and then lifting through . . .sole,libertà. In an earlier time, the thrum-plumped voice of a countertenor—half male, half female—might place him among us, we who are thickened by fracturings. D. O., now and then, my words break free of the masses they hold. Think of wind, how it barks through the reeds of a dog's throat. How the pungent, meaty stream of it cracks into something like words—but not. I just sit in the sun room then, slumped in my fur and slabber, feeling the wolf begin, back away, then some great-jawed, prehistoric other begin, back away, then the gill-less, the gilled, then the first pulsed flecks begin, back away, until only a wind remains, vast and seamless. No earth, no heavens. No rise, no dip. No single flash of syllable that might be me. Or you. D. O., Now a gauze of snow on the crocuses! I woke to its first brilliance—midnight, great moon— and walked through the hallways. The pin-shaped leaves of the potted cosmos threw a netted shadow, and I stopped in its fragile harmony, my arms, bare feet, the folds of my limp gown striped by such weightless symmetry I might have been myself again. Through an open screen door I saw a patient, drawn out by the brightness perhaps, her naked body a ghastly white, her face a ghastly, frozen white, fixed in a bow-mouthed syncope, like something out of time. As we are, D. O., here in the Highland, time's infinite, cyclic now-and-then one simple flake of consciousness against the heated tongue. Dear One, My Italian improves: sole,libertà, and Dio, of course, D. O.! (Although He has forsaken me.) The tea at the window gleams like the flank of a chestnut horse. It darkens imperceptibly, as madness does, or dusk. All morning, I held a length of cotton twine— a shaggy, oakum filament— between the jar and brewing sun. We made a budding universe: the solar disc, the glassy globe of reddish sea, the stillness in the firmament. At last across the cotton twine a smoke began, a little ashless burn, Dio, that flared and died so suddenly its light has yet to reach me.

After Miguel and Erykah Badu If you be the needle I be the LP. If you be the buffed wall, I be the Krylon. If you be the backspin, I be the break. If you be the head nod, I be the bass line. If you be a Phillie, I be the razor. If you be microphone, then I be palm. If you be cipher, then I be beatbox. If you be hands thrown up, then I be yes, yes, y’all. If you be throwback, then I be remix. If you be footwork, then I be uprock. If you be turntable, then I be crossfader. If you be downtown C train, then I be southbound Red Line. If you be shell toes, then I be hoodie. If you be freestyle, then I be piece book. If you be Sharpie, then I be tag. If you be boy, then I be girl who wants to sync samples into classic.

We are walking our very public attraction through eighteenth-century Philadelphia. I am simultaneously butch girlfriend and suburban child on a school trip, Independence Hall, 1775, home to the Second Continental Congress. Although she is wearing her leather jacket, although we have made love for the first time in a hotel room on Rittenhouse Square, I am preparing my teenage escape from Philadelphia, from Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously occupied residential street in the nation, from Carpenters’ Hall, from Congress Hall, from Graff House where the young Thomas Jefferson lived, summer of 1776. In my starched shirt and waistcoat, in my leggings and buckled shoes, in postmodern drag, as a young eighteenth-century statesman, I am seventeen and tired of fighting for freedom and the rights of men. I am already dreaming of Boston— city of women, demonstrations, and revolution on a grand and personal scale. Then the maître d’ is pulling out our chairs for brunch, we have the surprised look of people who have been kissing and now find themselves dressed and dining in a Locust Street townhouse turned café, who do not know one another very well, who continue with optimism to pursue relationship.Eternity may simply be our mortal default mechanism set on hope despite all evidence. In this mood, I roll up my shirtsleeves and she touches my elbow. I refuse the seedy view from the hotel window. I picture instead their silver inkstands, the hoopskirt factory on Arch Street, the Wireworks, their eighteenth-century herb gardens, their nineteenth-century row houses restored with period door knockers. Step outside. We have been deeded the largest landscaped space within a city anywhere in the world. In Fairmount Park, on horseback, among the ancient ginkgoes, oaks, persimmons, and magnolias, we are seventeen and imperishable, cutting classes May of our senior year. And I am happy as the young Tom Jefferson, unbuttoning my collar, imagining his power, considering my healthy body, how I might use it in the service of the country of my pleasure.

He fancies his chances are good with her, unaware that in the years since the war she has come to prefer women whose cunts taste like mustard. To pin one’s hopes on a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled like crepe paper, a moth affixed high on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where it will likely die in noble clinging mode just under the cobwebby heating vent, is to confirm your need for more friends and a greater daily quota of sunlight. To raise C.’s hopes that T. can stop drinking and then to liken those hopes to fields of undulating grain, alfalfa perhaps, is to wish C. hip deep in acres of unscythed denial. The blind typist hopes she’ll be hired tonight without her disability becoming an issue. L. said he felt hope’s rhizomes race throughout his body, radiating in all directions, like some incipient disease he’d been fighting since childhood. Hope, he said, it’s as insidious as bitterness. If mother earth only knew how much we loved one another she would creak, shudder, and split like a macheted melon, releasing the fiery ball of molten hope at her core.

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,— The finger-points look through like rosy blooms: Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms 'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, Are golden kingcup fields with silver edge Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge. 'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass. Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:— So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love.

Sometimes she is a child within mine arms, Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,— With still tears showering and averted face, Inexplicably fill'd with faint alarms: And oft from mine own spirit's hurtling harms I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,— Against all ills the fortified strong place And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms. And Love, our light at night and shade at noon, Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day. Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune; And as soft waters warble to the moon, Our answering spirits chime one roundelay.

Not in thy body is thy life at all But in this lady's lips and hands and eyes; Through these she yields thee life that vivifies What else were sorrow's servant and death's thrall. Look on thyself without her, and recall The waste remembrance and forlorn surmise That liv'd but in a dead-drawn breath of sighs O'er vanish'd hours and hours eventual. Even so much life hath the poor tress of hair Which, stor'd apart, is all love hath to show For heart-beats and for fire-heats long ago; Even so much life endures unknown, even where, 'Mid change the changeless night environeth, Lies all that golden hair undimm'd in death.

Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,— Like multiform circumfluence manifold Of night's flood-tide,—like terrors that agree Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,— Even such, within some glass dimm'd by our breath, Our hearts discern wild images of Death, Shadows and shoals that edge eternity. Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar One Power, than flow of stream or flight of dove Sweeter to glide around, to brood above. Tell me, my heart,—what angel-greeted door Or threshold of wing-winnow'd threshing-floor Hath guest fire-fledg'd as thine, whose lord is Love?