1247 Love poems

A boy came up the street and there was a girl. "Hello," they said in passing, then didn’t pass. They began to imagine. They imagined all night and woke imagining what the other imagined. Later they woke with no need to imagine. They were together. They kept waking together. Once they woke a daughter who got up and went looking for something without looking back. But they had one another. Then one of them died. It makes no difference which. Either. The other tried to imagine dying, and couldn’t really, but died later, maybe to find out, though probably not. Not everything that happens is a learning experience. Maybe nothing is.

for Bobbie Yesterday I wanted to speak of it, that sense above the others to me important because all that I know derives from what it teaches me. Today, what is it that is finally so helpless, different, despairs of its own statement, wants to turn away, endlessly to turn away. If the moon did not ... no, if you did not I wouldn’t either, but what would I not do, what prevention, what thing so quickly stopped. That is love yesterday or tomorrow, not now. Can I eat what you give me. I have not earned it. Must I think of everything as earned. Now love also becomes a reward so remote from me I have only made it with my mind. Here is tedium, despair, a painful sense of isolation and whimsical if pompous self-regard. But that image is only of the mind’s vague structure, vague to me because it is my own. Love, what do I think to say. I cannot say it. What have you become to ask, what have I made you into, companion, good company, crossed legs with skirt, or soft body under the bones of the bed. Nothing says anything but that which it wishes would come true, fears what else might happen in some other place, some other time not this one. A voice in my place, an echo of that only in yours. Let me stumble into not the confession but the obsession I begin with now. For you also (also) some time beyond place, or place beyond time, no mind left to say anything at all, that face gone, now. Into the company of love it all returns.

Nothing better for people than dogs nothing better than ma king you scream here. There were two super new cars and then some pink chicken filets I guess there were berries for sale in Scandinavia a man in a plaid shirt & cookies also they are working in the ceme tery I can see their blue ladder from here. A man has written a book about many deaths or many things to do after. Read it read it they say but what comes after is a small idea. Now is large rainy. Amy I wish you luck

How were we to know, leaving your two kids behind in New Hampshire for our honeymoon at twenty-one, that it was a trick of cheap hotels in New York City to draw customers like us inside by displaying a fancy lobby? Arriving in our fourth-floor room, we found a bed, a scarred bureau, and a bathroom door with a cut on one side the exact shape of the toilet bowl that was in its way when I closed it. I opened and shut the door, admiring the fit and despairing of it. You discovered the initials of lovers carved on the bureau’s top in a zigzag, breaking heart. How wrong the place was to us then, unable to see the portents of our future that seem so clear now in the naiveté of the arrangements we made, the hotel’s disdain for those with little money, the carving of pain and love. Yet in that room we pulled the covers over ourselves and lay our love down, and in this way began our unwise and persistent and lucky life together.

You move around me expertly like the good, round Italian barber I went to in Florence, years before we met, his scissors a razor he sharpened on a belt. But at first when you were learning, I feared for my neck, saw my ears like sliced fruit on the newspapered floor. Taking us back in time, you cleverly clipped my head in a flat-top. The years in between were styles no one had ever seen, or should see again: when the wind rose half my hair floated off in feathers, the other half bristling, brief as a brush. In the chair, almost asleep, I hear the bright scissors dancing. Hear you hum, full-breasted as Aida, carefully trimming the white from my temples, so no one, not even I, will know.

There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they've been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There's a name for it on horses, when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh, as all flesh, is proud of its wounds, wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest— And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud; how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.

For years my heart inquired of me Where Jamshid's sacred cup might be, And what was in its own possession It asked from strangers, constantly; Begging the pearl that's slipped its shell From lost souls wandering by the sea. Last night I took my troubles to The Magian sage whose keen eyes see A hundred answers in the wine Whose cup he, laughing, showed to me. I questioned him, "When was this cup That shows the world's reality Handed to you?" He said, "The day Heaven's vault of lapis lazuli Was raised, and marvelous things took place By Intellect's divine decree, And Moses' miracles were made And Sameri's apostasy." He added then, "That friend they hanged High on the looming gallows tree— His sin was that he spoke of things Which should be pondered secretly, The page of truth his heart enclosed Was annotated publicly. But if the Holy Ghost once more Should lend his aid to us we'd see Others perform what Jesus did— Since in his heartsick anguish he Was unaware that God was there And called His name out ceaselessly." I asked him next, "And beauties' curls That tumble down so sinuously, What is their meaning? Whence do they come?" "Hafez," the sage replied to me, "It's your distracted, lovelorn heart That asks these questions constantly."

For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers, green roses, chrysanthemums, lilies: retrophilia, philocaly, philomath, sarcophilous—all this love, of the past, of beauty, of knowledge, of flesh; this is catalogue & counter: philalethist, negrophile, neophile. A negro man walks down the street, taps Newport out against a brick wall & stares at you. Love that: lygophilia, lithophilous. Be amongst stones, amongst darkness. We are glass house. Philopornist, philotechnical. Why not worship the demimonde? Love that—a corner room, whatever is not there, all the clutter you keep secret. Palaeophile, ornithophilous: you, antiquarian, pollinated by birds. All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love; petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt; for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words for love (for you), all these ways to say believe in symphily, to say let us live near each other.

Forget not yet the tried intent Of such a truth as I have meant; My great travail so gladly spent, Forget not yet. Forget not yet when first began The weary life ye know, since whan The suit, the service, none tell can; Forget not yet. Forget not yet the great assays, The cruel wrong, the scornful ways; The painful patience in denays, Forget not yet. Forget not yet, forget not this, How long ago hath been and is The mind that never meant amiss; Forget not yet. Forget not then thine own approved, The which so long hath thee so loved, Whose steadfast faith yet never moved; Forget not this.

The Chinese concubine feeling has left and the sky hovers like the preparation of a revolutionary speech. You, my long walk with all that expectation the sexy lunches, thousands of them, and then all that religion of eroticism. Beneath the squeeze on my heart is a stranglehold. You, like a little Italian porcelain village that’s all over the shop window saying admire this image of foreverness. The red scarf is factory-made but silky and it’s what I’d flutter over your face if you were here and it would be cheap greasy hypnotism, my own malarkey and we’d be on the southside, at the boat docks, and I’d kiss you beside the stretch of a Russian grain ship, its hammer and sickle like the sending out of rescue choppers.