1247 Love poems

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel. I want the force of attraction to crush the force of repulsion and my inner and outer worlds to pierce one another, like a horse whipped by a man. I don't want words to sever me from reality. I don't want to need them. I want nothing to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom, or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond, or the sound of water poured in a bowl.

She recognizes its crest in the way he looks at her. The wave is as vast as the roiling mass in the Japanese Print they had paused in front of at the museum, Capped with ringlets of foam, all surging sinew. That little village along the shore would be Totally lost. There is no escaping this. The wave is flooding his heart, And he is sending the flood Her way. It rushes Over her. Can you look at one face For the whole of a life? Does the moon peer down At the tides and hunger for home?

She is sixty. She lives the greatest love of her life. She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one, her hair streams in the wind. Her dear one says: “You have hair like pearls.” Her children say: “Old fool.”

As you told it to me — our clearest, most reflective conversations so often then and there, in the middle of the night, staring into the darkness from wherever the mind has perched in its wanderings — you left your mother and the home aide upstairs, and went down into your father’s basement workroom to look for the right size screws; in her own wanderings, she has tugged off the front door lock. Paneled in warped wood and abandoned like a mine, you find the string for the light in the middle of the room, as he must have known how to find it in the dark, and again you see the pegboard walls covered with constellations of polishing tools, the larger buffers hooked onto the paneling like fuzzy planets, the smaller ones stuck in a Lucite block he customized to hold them like the varied moons those hanging planets might need, or a miniature copse of fantastical trees. So, too, the see-through brick in which he drilled holes for the array of drill bits themselves, their swirled metal tops imitating a skyline of onion domes and tapered gothic towers. The room’s order had been disturbed by time, and the band saw, jigsaw, the sander, and free-standing machines, the sized wrenches, pliers, picks, awls, and extra parts still hanging in their packages, the staple gun, lamps, brushes, gooseneck magnifying glass, soldering wire, conversion charts, the hundreds of other disordered tools, they might have been words in an encyclopedia before you could read more than a few words, and for you they were part of your father’s speech, or maybe more like your mother’s now, jumbled, rarely creating a sentence. With these tools he had sculpted a perfect cluster of grapes, still on their vine and still with their leaves; a wave, and a school of dolphins breaching; a formal replica of the Brooklyn Bridge with all its cabling; a bouquet of flowers — surfaces so smooth and rounded, objects so like their living counterparts we had no choice but to understand the power of creation running through the mind then tools and hands like a current. You looked around for the right size screws and came upon a small box marked Green Permanent. And when you opened it you saw small tubes of paint, now just mud without his attention, you said, holding both the power of what we do, and the sadness that it has to end.

If it had become a competition in which we, Like children desperate for the blue ribbon, Pulled knotted hemp, gripping until certain Of calluses, if our contest awarded the strongest, The boy who could best inflict pain yet not Flinch when injured, then you won, for I must Imagine the brown of your back to reach my Peak, a short thread of breaths, a tug of war With the heaviest child grunting at the end Of the rope until jerked and dragged over The line. That fat kid flounders through muck The way I splash your relentless name In shivers about me. Watch him wallow. If he tastes mud as bitter as this poem Of mine, then I win – and you love me.

No, sweetheart, I said courtly love. I was thinking of John Donne's "Yet this enjoys before it woo," but my big hands were dreaming Pinetop's boogie-woogie piano taking the ubiquitous night apart. Not Courtney. I know "inflated tear" means worlds approaching pain & colliding, or a heavenly body calling to darkness, & that shame has never been my truest garment, because I was born afraid of needles. But I've been shoved up against frayed ropes too, & I had to learn to bob & weave, to duck & hook, till I could jab my way out of a foregone conclusion, till blues reddened a room. All I know is, sometimes a man wants only a hug when something two-steps him toward a little makeshift stage. Somehow, between hellhounds & a guitar solo made of gutstring & wood, I outlived a stormy night with snow on my eyelids.

Where do you want my heart now? Placed next to yours on your pale skin so that I will fall in love with your sweaty pain I have heard your bones crack the dry cement that leafed the frenzied spirit within I witnessed its wildness escape into your body screaming kissy words while your fingers plucked at my guitar your eyes were Koyoti’s & Ska-la-la’s trying to rip a path to my soul & I froze there in my manly state knowing there’s nothing that I can do

We fix you maternally in the mind, orient you in a case of “tut-tut,” “there there,” and “you’re young yet,” but how many times did you posture yourself for the broad body of him or him and open like home — his hands in your hair, your nerves rising kinetically to the cupola of his palms? Lovers’ propensity for being a keep and your saying (when you mean it), “I am yours.” We fix you in the mind as bright-sighted seminar, dipping from the source all that you know, but how often did your eyes light in flirtation or fight, working from his getting your dander up to his oval mouth there, there, your teasing tut-tut in arousing admonition at what he was after, knowing, as you prepared to keep him, that you were young yet and gleaning, gleaning.

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. Samuel Butler II I’m going to murder you with love; I’m going to suffocate you with embraces; I’m going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you’re dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow. You will become my personal Sahara; I’ll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain your remaining brackish well. With my female blade I’ll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I’ll inhale your last oasis whole. But in the total desert you become You’ll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage! Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold. So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move toward me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdure, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green. When you are fed and watered, flourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome, and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you’ll begin to die again.

After the clash of elevator gates And the long sinking, she emerges where, A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare, She looks up toward the window where he waits, Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest Of the huge traffic bound forever west. On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye— Even this other pair whose high romance Had only the duration of a dance, And who, now taking leave with stricken eye, See each in each a whole new life forgone. For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn, Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief And baggage, yet with something like relief, It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas To cancel out their crossing, and unmake The amorous rough and tumble of their wake. We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share The frequent vistas of their large despair, Where love and all are swept to nothingness; Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love Which constant spirits are the keepers of, And which, though taken to be tame and staid, Is a wild sostenuto of the heart, A passion joined to courtesy and art Which has the quality of something made, Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent, Like a rose window or the firmament.