1247 Love poems

Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair, you are a bloom of uncombed hair. With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals, I make a clear cup of sky. Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue. I am a body of empty husks. Indian corn is in your hair, the tassels, the pollen, fertility. Indelible ink is tattooing our lungs. We speak smoke. We exchange our lunacy for reverence. Respect tornados. Windy Woman. Four Winds. We have extended the edge of expectation by merely living. You have tallied compulsion into currency. I am measured by the excitement my lips stir. I am the bin for castoffs and the weary. I wear my veil. I have no children, but you have many. You dream of heaven and they all run up to meet you.

I found you on Gothtrash.com and saved your picture to my computer desktop it gives me the feeling of something terrible and familiar a space between lives like seeing Marcel seeing Gilberte for the first time how the fact of life itself becomes a thing languished and melancholy I think I would like to lie among southern magnolias in snowfall dark skies above into which I will never enter I'm watching Maya Deren maybe I will smoke weed I called out sick it's the afternoon

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good-fame, Plans, credit and the Muse,— Nothing refuse. ’T is a brave master; Let it have scope: Follow it utterly, Hope beyond hope: High and more high It dives into noon, With wing unspent, Untold intent: But it is a god, Knows its own path And the outlets of the sky. It was never for the mean; It requireth courage stout. Souls above doubt, Valor unbending, It will reward,— They shall return More than they were, And ever ascending. Leave all for love; Yet, hear me, yet, One word more thy heart behoved, One pulse more of firm endeavor,— Keep thee to-day, To-morrow, forever, Free as an Arab Of thy beloved. Cling with life to the maid; But when the surprise, First vague shadow of surmise Flits across her bosom young, Of a joy apart from thee, Free be she, fancy-free; Nor thou detain her vesture’s hem, Nor the palest rose she flung From her summer diadem. Though thou loved her as thyself, As a self of purer clay, Though her parting dims the day, Stealing grace from all alive; Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

If the hope of giving is to love the living, the giver risks madness in the act of giving. Some such lesson I seemed to see in the faces that surrounded me. Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted, what gift would give them the gift to be gifted? The giver is no less adrift than those who are clamouring for the gift. If they cannot claim it, if it is not there, if their empty fingers beat the empty air and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer knows that all of his giving has been for naught and that nothing was ever what he thought and turns in his guilty bed to stare at the starving multitudes standing there and rises from bed to curse at heaven, he must yet understand that to whom much is given much will be taken, and justly so: I cannot tell how much I owe.

So, because you chose to follow me into the subtle sadness of night, And to stand in the half-set moon with the weird fall-light on your glimmering hair, Till your presence hid all of the earth and all of the sky from my sight, And to give me a little scarlet bud, that was dying of frost, to wear, Say, must you taunt me forever, forever? You looked at my hand and you knew That I was the slave of the Ring, while you were as free as the wind is free. When I saw your corpse in your coffin, I flung back your flower to you; It was all of yours that I ever had; you may keep it, and—keep from me. Ah? so God is your witness. Has God, then, no world to look after but ours? May He not have been searching for that wild stat, with the trailing plumage, that flew Far over a part of our darkness while we were there by the freezing flowers, Or else brightening some planet’s luminous rings, instead of thinking of you? Or, if He was near us at all, do you think that He would sit listening there Because you sang “Hear me, Norma,” to a woman in jewels and lace, While, so close to us, down in another street, in the wet, unlighted air, There were children crying for bread and fire, and mothers who questioned His grace? Or perhaps He had gone to the ghastly field where the fight had been that day, To number the bloody stabs that were there, to look at and judge the dead; Or else to the place full of fever and moans where the wretched wounded lay; At least I do not believe that He cares to remember a word that you said. So take back your flowers, I tell you—of its sweetness I now have no need; Yes; take back your flower down into the stillness and mystery to keep; When you wake I will take it, and God, then, perhaps will witness indeed, But go, now, and tell Death he must watch you, and not let you walk in your sleep.

For Ann Saddlemyer, our heartiest welcomer I Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground. The mildest February for twenty years Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors. Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe. Now the good life could be to cross a field And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled. Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense And I am quickened with a redolence Of farmland as a dark unblown rose. Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons, My ghosts come striding into their spring stations. The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows. II Sensings, mountings from the hiding places, Words entering almost the sense of touch Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch— ‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’ Oisin Kelly told me years ago In Belfast, hankering after stone That connived with the chisel, as if the grain Remembered what the mallet tapped to know. Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter That might continue, hold, dispel, appease: Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground, Each verse returning like the plough turned round. III This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake (So much, too much) consorted at twilight. It was all crepuscular and iambic. Out on the field a baby rabbit Took his bearings, and I knew the deer (I’ve seen them too from the window of the house, Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air) Were careful under larch and May-green spruce. I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to. Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts: ‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’ Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze Refreshes and relents. Is cadences. IV I used to lie with an ear to the line For that way, they said, there should come a sound Escaping ahead, an iron tune Of flange and piston pitched along the ground, But I never heard that. Always, instead, Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away Lifted over the woods. The head Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear. Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook Silently across our drinking water (As they are shaking now across my heart) And vanished into where they seemed to start. V Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk, Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder: It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank And snapping memory as I get older. And elderberry I have learned to call it. I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal, Its berries a swart caviar of shot, A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple. Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine. Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’ And felt another’s texture quick on mine. So, etymologist of roots and graftings, I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush. VI He lived there in the unsayable lights. He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon, The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon And green fields greying on the windswept heights. ‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over With perfect mist and peaceful absences’— Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice And raced his bike across the Moyola River. A man we never saw. But in that winter Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow Kept the country bright as a studio, In a cold where things might crystallize or founder, His story quickened us, a wild white goose Heard after dark above the drifted house. VII Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea: Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice, Collapse into a sibilant penumbra. Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra, Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow. L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’ The word deepening, clearing, like the sky Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes. VIII Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops At body heat and lush with omen Spattering dark on the hatchet iron. This morning when a magpie with jerky steps Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood I thought of dew on armour and carrion. What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road? How deep into the woodpile sat the toad? What welters through this dark hush on the crops? Do you remember that pension in Les Landes Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked A mongol in her lap, to little songs? Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking. My all of you birchwood in lightning. IX Outside the kitchen window a black rat Sways on the briar like infected fruit: ‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not Imagining things. Go you out to it.’ Did we come to the wilderness for this? We have our burnished bay tree at the gate, Classical, hung with the reek of silage From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit. Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay, Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing— What is my apology for poetry? The empty briar is swishing When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass. X I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal On turf banks under blankets, with our faces Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle, Pallid as the dripping sapling birches. Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate. Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found. Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out Like breathing effigies on a raised ground. And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?— Our first night years ago in that hotel When you came with your deliberate kiss To raise us towards the lovely and painful Covenants of flesh; our separateness; The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

Un seul verre d’eau éclaire le monde Cocteau Behind the wedding couple, a mirror harbours their reception. Outside, from the verandah, the harbour mirrors the exception of city from sky, hills snug with houses and a glass of water standing on the railing, half empty or half full. In the failing afternoon light brightening buildings counterpoint the darkness, glinting upside- down inside the glass, and the newly-weds, seen from outside joining hand to hand for the wedding reel, glide under its meniscus, head over heels.

my love who shelters in his words sometimes falls silent for a sudden eternity breathes that silence into a bell of glass in which he calms storms he draws lee lines in what was it’s more like a firefirm crackling when he takes up words with ease in a single glance, caressing my body I read him day and night. What will it be like when he withdraws into the word old,

How long can you speak. Without inhaling. How long. Can you inhale without. Bursting apart. History is wagging. Its ass at us. Twirling in its silver. Cape. I want to kiss. Your scalp. I want you to kiss. My friends. Can you see the wet. Azalea quivering. On its vine. Its ripening. Dread. If it never rained again. I would still wear. My coat. Still wrap. My socks in plastic. Doing. One thing is a way. Of not doing everything else. Today I answer only. To my war name. Wise. Salt. I can make. A stone float off into. The sky. I can make. A whole family. Disappear. I know. So many people. Have been awful to you. I’ve given each one. A number. When you’re ready. I will ask you to draw me. Their hands.

you are falling sun shine miracle your lips are wet rain to our hearts floods in every opening on the stoop your skirt rises fingers go up your legs you are falling in the streets the hallways of east harlem the dark hallways of east harlem the dark hallways with mattresses of east harlem you are falling roll with us the avenues you are falling the night queen of the earth you are falling on us with lips & thighs & big round breasts we hold in our hands & hear your bomb tick your blood get hot come out crack your eggs on stupid american heads queen of the earth push us to the walls fall on us kill us with your love & tongue harlem queen fine mama sprinkle us with it there are no bargains pure product you are falling bloom bloom you got all sing dark & you shine grown fat for love in the dark you are like a volcano with a sea of heat explode you are falling explode