1247 Love poems

When I wake up, I can remember touching the back of your neck, the cut of your hair blunt under my fingers. In the dream you have met my mother. My sisters and I are living in a grand house where I have no room of my own. One of my sisters has delineated her property by stringing a rope from which she will hang photographs of our dead father. At the beginning of Christianity, a bishop established what is called the "canon of truth" in order to unify feuding believers into a single way of apprehending the sacred. His teachings excluded the workings of imagination as subjective, vulnerable to self-interest, and possibly insane. Your neck, the blunt cut of your hair sharp and fragrant on my fingers. You come to the big house, you have just met my mother at a party where curtains of royal blue fell to the floor. The music by Scarlatti. My hair is turning gray. I look in the mirror. The familiar dark hairs are fine and smooth, the white are rough and thick like the fiber of which clouds are woven. I want to pluck out the white hairs, but my tweezer falls through them like logic through the sense of dreams. I am getting old, soon it will be too late. Your hand will slide from my skin like silk falling from a polished table. In the big house you come to me, and I show you my rectangle of floor. It is here I will put my couch and desk, separated from my sister and her pictures of our dead father by the edges of my body, myself, my thinking. You consider me. We stand there for a while. My sister is attaching the large photographs of our father to a rope. I look into the mirror at my white hair. I have sworn I will never dye it, but now I must. The white hairs are growing as fast as snow falls across a landscape. Soon snow will obliterate the town and countryside, there will be no houses visible, cars will disappear under the mass of it, trees will become poignant marks on a dangerous blank. My sister strings photographs of our dead father along the rope, attaching them with small invisible clips. I wait for you. I think about your face, how you are becoming bald, and then I remember touching you for the first time, the back of your neck. I was wondering how to find you, what I would discover there. It made me almost cry that you stayed perfectly still, certain, it seemed, that what I was imparting was of utmost consequence. I moved my fingers tentatively, as if finding first knowledge in a terrain I could slip beneath, into a garden. I remembered that when I woke up. That and your sticky skin. Certain early Christian ideologues denigrated imagination as outside the realms of good and evil. My mother is no longer dead, and you have met her. The air is transparent, the colors dark wood and pale amber. I am standing at the mirror watching white hair grow in as fast as snow. What time is the train coming? You sit at the window, your legs crossed. Courtly and at ease, you scrutinize my face until I am self-conscious. I become aware that you are waiting for me. I don't know how to get to you. Some early Christians, those who came to be persecuted as heretics, believed that a part of God is perpetually hidden from us. In relation to that realm of the deity dwells imagination, unceasingly seeking understanding of what is concealed. I can see you on the window seat in an elegantly cut suit, as if wearing such clothes were a form of grace. I remember you in that suit, standing in the hotel, turning on your heel to look for me. Now the window is tall behind you, twilight gathering outside the glass, cedars black beyond the roses. I am not dead, yet I am mute as the dead usually are in dreams. You are speaking in a clear voice, explaining you have met my mother and that I look like her. Before sleep, I was reading about early Christianity. When I woke up from the long dream, there we were in the taxicab, my arms tentative around you, my fingers seeking the back of your neck. I felt clearly the blunt edge of your newly cut hair, the stickiness of your skin, that mortal stickiness– When my mother's mother was sixty, her hair was still dark. When my mother died at fifty, her hair was still black, though as she sickened, it turned white, black receding as life did. I stand at the mirror, its rare wide-beveled glass framed by oak carved to leaves and flowers. I am scrutinizing myself. My face is not ageing, but my hair is turning white, cloaking the trees, falling on the meadow, windblown across the frozen lake. What heresy is it that you come to me in a dream, knowing everything? The tall windows rise to the ceiling, but I don't lift my eyes. I don't want to lose sight of you. Outside, the cedars. Beyond them a smooth body of water.

Go, lovely Rose— Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that’s young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died. Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired: Bid her come forth, Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired. Then die—that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Going down the escalator of the subway, I glanced across and saw on the escalator's partner rising up someone who looked a bit like you but with hair not so soft and clean and warm as yours brushing against mine on those rare occasions when inadvertently our foreheads neared, making me wish it to stay. We were not physical lovers and never could have been. But we were close. Moved three states away, married happily or not, you are now only a person I may hope to meet momentarily, and not really then: merely in my mind, because of what I chance to see. But I am not unhappy about this or think that I am not. Because of your hair. Because of your beautiful hair.

On Christmas Day, Kathleen and I propel a raft with plastic spoons through the hissing fur of surf, stirring as we go an Alka-Seltzer sun. We pass Bolinas-Stinson School, the fire house, and Smiley's dive; extinguished geodesic domes along the mesa road where Cream Saroyan lives. With a telescope, my sister spies the erstwhile chemist of Argonne who left his post to polish glass. As penance, he engraves a glyph of hydrogen on the blank face of every cliff from Monterey to Inverness. Beside us, cormorants describe the chop in grunts, then plunge through thirty feet of grease. I try to hold my breath as long and cheat or fail. As evening comes we pass the final spit of land. Once more around the Horn and then we'll make for home.

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den? ’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee. And now good-morrow to our waking souls, Which watch not one another out of fear; For love, all love of other sights controls, And makes one little room an everywhere. Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown, Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears, And true plain hearts do in the faces rest; Where can we find two better hemispheres, Without sharp north, without declining west? Whatever dies, was not mixed equally; If our two loves be one, or, thou and I Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.

Lying in bed and waiting to find out Whatever is going to happen: the window shade Making its slightest sound as the night wind, Outside, in the night, breathes quietly on it; It is parental hovering over the infantile; Something like that; it is like being a baby, And over the sleep of the baby there is a father, Or mother, breathing, hovering; the streetlight light In the nighttime branches breathing quietly too; Altering; realtering; it is the body breathing; The crib of knowing: something about what the day Will bring; and something about what the night will hold, Safely, at least for the rest of the night, I pray.

On the long shore, lit by the moon To show them properly alone, Two lovers suddenly embraced So that their shadows were as one. The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift tide of blood That silently they took at flood, And for a little time they prized Themselves emparadised. Then, as if shaken by stage-fright Beneath the hard moon’s bony light, They stood together on the sand Embarrassed in each other’s sight But still conspiring hand in hand, Until they saw, there underfoot, As though the world had found them out, The goose fish turning up, though dead, His hugely grinning head. There in the china light he lay, Most ancient and corrupt and grey. They hesitated at his smile, Wondering what it seemed to say To lovers who a little while Before had thought to understand, By violence upon the sand, The only way that could be known To make a world their own. It was a wide and moony grin Together peaceful and obscene; They knew not what he would express, So finished a comedian He might mean failure or success, But took it for an emblem of Their sudden, new and guilty love To be observed by, when they kissed, That rigid optimist. So he became their patriarch, Dreadfully mild in the half-dark. His throat that the sand seemed to choke, His picket teeth, these left their mark But never did explain the joke That so amused him, lying there While the moon went down to disappear Along the still and tilted track That bears the zodiac.

for Darlene Wind and James Welch I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace. Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace. I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn. I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

Wedding night Graciela bled lightly— But enough to stain his thighs— And left an alphabet Of teeth marks on his arm. At this, he was happy. They drank mescal In bed like the rich And smoked cigarettes. She asleep And the bottle empty, he hid A few coins in her left shoe, Earrings in the right. They worked long hours Hoeing crooked rows of maize. Evenings she wove rugs And embroidered curtains To market in Taxco. In short they lived well. However in the seventh month With child, her belly Rising like a portion of the sun, Something knotted inside her. The ribs ached. A fever climbed. Manuel summoned the Partera And though she burned pepper, And tied belts around The stretched belly, The child did not ease out. Days later she turned Onto her belly And between her legs Unraveled a spine of blood.

I cut myself upon the thought of you And yet I come back to it again and again, A kind of fury makes me want to draw you out From the dimness of the present And set you sharply above me in a wheel of roses. Then, going obviously to inhale their fragrance, I touch the blade of you and cling upon it, And only when the blood runs out across my fingers Am I at all satisfied.