1247 Love poems

Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows such delicate & lasting atrocity. Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach. I leave you the ragged sky, once full of cloud & now not. I leave you these things just as I leave you: graceful passage from one something to the next. Darling, even in this my voice dissipates into hush & whiffs of light, sun-thrown, hurtle into the ground.

Love peruse me, seeke, and finde How each corner of my minde Is a twine Woven to shine. Not a Webb ill made, foule fram’d, Bastard not by Father nam’d, Such in me Cannot bee. Deare behold me, you shall see Faith the Hive, and love the Bee, Which doe bring. Gaine and sting. Pray desect me, sinewes, vaines, Hold, and loves life in those gaines; Lying bare To despaire, When you thus anotamise All my body, my heart prise; Being true Just to you. Close the Truncke, embalme the Chest, Where your power still shall rest, Joy entombe, Loves just doome.

In green water I saw your eye and in it I saw that Arabian palace filled with birds and broken glass. I copy an address into my right hand and fill myself with memories of psalms. A green fish emerges from seaweed as seaweed from a wave that rises like the wailing wall. My sun-baked body at the edge, wind in my lungs, its whistle, my torn world, my grief, my soggy passport, my shell with no pearl, you lift them, delicate cloud, into a liquid world. Last night I dreamed of my father's flabby body and of my blue resolve to run away, to find a way, I dreamed of your eye and for an instant I found the vertex of the road, the imaginary line that falls across the earth: that meridian where the sun on a tiger's back meets the shade at its belly. Waking up, we are swallowed by wakefulness. The house swallows us in its terrible thirst. The routine of taking our children to school swallows us and so does the if only I could. There was something to that dream. You know it. A direction. A way. A forest as green as you and your roots. Give me your premonitions, give me your book, give me your prodigious memory, give me the blue gaze from your dark eye, give me the devotion of your sleeping birds. Sometimes the way is a fire through which the circus tiger leaps, a perfect circle returning to me with its stripes intact and with the endless continuity of this ineluctably feral world.

LE REGARD BLEU Nous connaissons par ouï-dire l'existence de l'amour. Assis sur un rocher ou sous un parasol rouge, allongés dans le pré bourdonnant d'insectes, les deux mains sous la nuque, agenouillés dans la fraîcheur et l'obscurité d'une église, ou tassés sur une chaise de paille entre les quatre murs de la chambre, tête basse, les yeux fixés sur un rectangle de papier blanc, nous rêvons à des estuaires, des tumultes, des ressacs, des embellies et des marées. Nous écoutons monter en nous le chant inépuisable de la mer qui dans nos têtes afflue puis se retire, comme revient puis s'éloigne le curieux désir que nous avons du ciel, de l'amour, et de tout ce que nous ne pourrons jamais toucher des mains. • La mer en nous essaie des phrases. Depuis des lustres, la même voix épelle le même alphabet dans le même cerveau d'enfant. Elle balbutie des mots vite envolés, accrochés aux herbes des plages, à la peau brunie des baigneurs, à la proue des barques, aux mâtures. Des mots quelconques, pour rien et pour quiconque. Il n'y est question que de l'amour. C'est pourquoi nous ne savons trop que dire et souffrons que le regard d'autrui s'attarde sur notre visage quand nous voudrions qu'il se pose à même notre cœur. Nos lèvres sont si maladroites, notre corps invisible dans la nuit opaque, et nos mains mal-habiles, des éclairs ou des ailes pourtant au bout des doigts. from A Story of Blue THE BLUE LOOK We know through hearsay that love exists. Seated on a rock or under a red parasol, lying in the field buzzing with insects, our hands clasped behind our necks, kneeling in the cool darkness of a church, or settled on a straw chair within the four walls of the bedroom, head lowered, eyes fixed on a rectangle of white paper, we dream of estuaries, tumultuous surf, clearing weather and tides. We listen to the inexhaustible chant of the sea within us, as it rises and falls in our heads, like the approach and retreat of the strange desire we have for heaven, for love, and all that we cannot touch with our hands. • Within us the sea tries out sentences. From time immemorial, the same voice spells the same alphabet in the same child's brain. It mutters words which quickly fly off, snagged on the sea grasses, on the bathers' browned skin, on the bows of boats, on the masts. Ordinary words, for nothing and no one in particular. It is only about love. This is why we hardly know what to say and we suffer when someone's gaze fixes on our face, when we would like it to look into our heart. Our lips are so awkward, our body invisible in the opaque night, and our hands inept, yet lightening flashes or wings are at our fingertips.

At the airport, we all take a shot of aguardiente because we all had each other’s faces When I saw my brother I saw my face I saw my grandmother I saw my face I saw my aunt I saw my stupid face On the way up the mountain I saw my face in a pile of trash I saw my face in the mule’s ass I saw my lover I saw my face but it was white&weary I saw my brother again and there was my face; my other brother, my other face I saw my face in the American Apparel ivory chiffon blouse I brought for this occasion In the occasion I saw my face, I did I saw my face in the pankekes the next morning My face was in the talk of death My face was in her teeth, the pavement, etc., There was a jail cell at the Museo Nacional, I saw my face A woman flowercunted & crosslegged, my face & my face Everywhere my face like I didn’t have one Botero’s asses all my faces I took down notes when it came to torture & the inquisition and saw my face in the leather swing set Clavicle spikerest & eye ruptrest Faces, I suppose, are a type of torture to look like one but never be one

It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature whose grotesque beauty is what we adore, whom some people call love, whom we venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always just around the bend. I say all we have is unconditional surrender to the future. So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves that may have scorched into our hearts the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say, look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards, if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end. I’ve heard the world’s never going to end. I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes no more than feeble whispers, all memory shifting like the continental plates. In the future, all science will finally come around; genetic engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage, and we will be a super race in a world infallibly perfected, where trains run on time, love never dies, and hope can be purchased by the pound. It’s called immortalization of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive. Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus, one hand about to touch the pool, his body lurched towards that marvelous reflection. I suppose we’ve always felt compelled to desensitize our failures. My people say, to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself may have chosen to forget a face, a name, some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not, after all the harm is done, intending any pain. And many others may have chosen to forget me. It works both ways. My people say,nasa huli ang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion. It’s what you see when you look back. It’s what’s no longer there.

(for Caroline Ireland) They were to have been a love gift, but when she slit the paper funnel, they both saw they were fake; false flowers he'd picked in haste from the store's display, handmade coloured stuff, stiff as crinoline. Instantly she thought of women's hands cutting in grimy light by a sweatshop window; rough plank tables strewn with cut-out flower heads: lily, iris, primula, scentless chrysanthemums, pistils rigged on wire in crowns of sponge-tipped stamens, sepals and petals perfect, perfectly immune to menaces from the garden. Why so wrong, so...flattening? Why not instead symbols of unchanging love? Yet pretty enough, she considered, arranging them in a vase with dry grass and last summer's hydrangeas whose deadness was still (how to put it?) alive, or maybe the other side of life. Two sides, really, of the same thing? She laughed a little, such ideas were embarrassing even when kept to oneself, but her train of thought carried her in its private tunnel through supper, and at bedtime, brushing her teeth, she happened to look up at the moon. Its sunlit face was turned, as always, in her direction. The full moon, she couldn't help thinking, though we see only half of it. It was an insight she decided she could share with him, but when he joined her and together they lay in the dark, there seemed no reason to say anything. The words, in any case, would be wrong, would escape or disfigure her meaning. Good was the syllable she murmured to him, fading into sleep. And just for a split second, teetering on the verge of it, she believed everything that had to be was understood.

They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, — Oh, they were blind, too blind to see Your faults had made me love you more.

I like that antique tea wagon and small television. I like the computer built by your brother. I like the man in the yellow jacket as the guide. I like free will and predestination and fate. I like how the mind reaches out to touch, literally, the light of the stars. I like how the reader is possessed. I like illusions of self that each new self is born into. I like if you love someone set them on fire. I like how the older lady steals the parking space. I like the sickness of soul. I like how the reader is also being watched by the narrator. The kangaroo leather documentary in the pub really pulled me in. The many levels of watching really pulled me in. I like how the narrator flickers in and out. The last chapter is sharp and honest. The last chapter has many serpents eating their tails. This builds habits of nature. This builds emotional connection. This embodies the novel.

I love you from the sharp tang of the fermentation; in the blissful pulp. Newborn insects, blue. In the unsullied juice, glazed and ductile. Cry that distills the light: through the fissures in fruit trees; under mossy water clinging to the shadows. The papillae, the grottos. In herbaceous dyes, instilled. From the flustered touch. Luster oozing, bittersweet: of feracious pleasures, of play splayed in pulses. Hinge (Wrapped in the night's aura, in violaceous clamor, refined, the boy, with the softened root of his tongue expectant, touches, with that smooth, unsustainable, lubricity—sensitive lily folding into the rocks if it senses the stigma, the ardor of light—the substance, the arris fine and vibrant—in its ecstatic petal, distended—[jewel pulsing half-open; teats], the acid juice bland [ice], the salt marsh, the delicate sap [Kabbalah], the nectar of the firefly.)