69 Romantic poems

1 Shep. Tell me, thou gentle shepherd swain, Who’s yonder in the vale is set? 2 Shep. Oh, it is she, whose sweets do stain The lily, rose, the violet! 1 Shep. Why doth the sun against his kind, Fix his bright chariot in the skies? 2 Shep. Because the sun is stricken blind With looking on her heavenly eyes. 1 Shep. Why do thy flocks forbear their food, Which sometime were thy chief delight? 2 Shep. Because they need no other good That live in presence of her sight. 1 Shep. Why look these flowers so pale and ill, That once attired this goodly heath? 2 Shep. She hath robb’d Nature of her skill, And sweetens all things with her breath. 1 Shep. Why slide these brooks so slow away, Whose bubbling murmur pleased thine ear? 2 Shep. Oh, marvel not although they stay, When they her heavenly voice do hear! 1 Shep. From whence come all these shepherd swains, And lovely nymphs attired in green? 2 Shep. From gathering garlands on the plains, To crown our fair the shepherds’ queen. Both. The sun that lights this world below, Flocks, flowers, and brooks will witness bear: These nymphs and shepherds all do know, That it is she is only fair.

It will be an island on strings well out to sea and austere bobbing as if at anchor green with enormous fir trees formal as telephone poles. We will arrive there slowly hand over hand without oars. Last out, you will snip the fragile umbilicus white as a beansprout that sewed us into our diaries. We will be two bleached hermits at home in our patches and tears. We will butter the sun with our wisdom. Our days will be grapes on a trellis perfectly oval and furred. At night we will set our poems adrift in ginger ale bottles each with a clamshell rudder each with a piggyback spider waving them off by dogstar and nothing will come from the mainland to tell us who cares, who cares and nothing will come of our lovelock except as our two hearts go soft and black as avocado pears.

Dreamer of purified fury and fabulous habit, your eyes of deserted white afternoons target, stiffen, riot with unicorn candor so I swallow your body like meanings or whisky or as you swallow me. Break rhythm here:      your kiss is my justice: look then now how orange blooms of jubilation unfold in satisfied air! This sex is more than sex, under the will of the God of sex, so I softly invoke transformation of your rueful image of haven –those frozen rocks, that guilty lighthouse isolate from temptation– to warm Flemish landscape green and brighteyed with daisies of dizzying color where pilgrims are dancing after gospelling bird who sing of new springs, good water.

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font. The firefly wakens; waken thou with me. Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me. Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, And slips into the bosom of the lake. So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Summer road the ring around the lake, we drove mostly in silence. Why aren’t I your wife? You swerved around a turtle sunning itself. I wanted to go back. To hold the hot disc of it and place it in the grass. We were late for dinner. One twentieth of a mile an hour, I said.Claws in tar. You turned the car around. Traffic from the direction of the turtle, and you saw before I did, the fifty bones of the carapace, crushed roman dome, the surprise of red blood. I couldn’t help crying, couldn’t keep anything from harm. I’m sorry, you said, and let it hurt. The relief, always, of you in the seat beside me, you’ll never know. Driving that road next winter, you remembered that place in the road.Your turtle. During hibernation, a turtle’s heart beats once for every ten minutes. It cannot voluntarily open its eyes.

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the Rocks, Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow Rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing Madrigals. And I will make thee beds of Roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle; A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty Lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold; A belt of straw and Ivy buds, With Coral clasps and Amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love.

Venice, December Ours are the only mouths to taste with this smothering slow touch, and the only steps to sink like bellsounds and cave deep into the marble snow. Women who go to the window to push their arms out to the snow and then bring the shutters back in follow us as we fall past their eyes where the black night lives. We are snowflakes at last, as the thick never locked, never closed doors follow us through squares of light their windows have left on the snow. Once again, warmth that falls, again, though our tracks fill and slow.

In the years I’ve been at this (Lots, not to be precise) You’d think that once or twice At least I would have seen Some anomalies. I mean Some major ones. As in Not feet but little wheels, Or crests like cockatiels’. Where are they keeping the girls With a chrome exterior, Or an extra derriere? Apparently nowhere. Assuming my sample’s valid, The pool is limited To the standard types I’ve tallied; Such variance as there is In the usual congeries Of   physiognomies — And yet enough of   it To be worth the looking at. The walking by, for that, Of   the same girl over and over Would be no cross to bear If   it were that one there.

She dances only in her necklace, scotch-lit surely. He touches his glasses. Nightie-less, dugs whipping, hair sprung, some music inside, out, wet tongue tip at her lip, no mere palsied shuffle, both bony feet lifted, elbows awful. Shakespeare’s banshee of wailing parts, a woman with hair, a woman with warts. He’s fixed to the floor. Dear Heloise: do other presumed-sane mothers do this— wait in the dark after the ball to strip for their sons at the end of the hall? A dream, insists his sister but his first wife knows better.

1. Someone plays & the breaking mounts. Raw material for worthy forthcoming; indecipherable, discrete. Plays rhapsodies as the air cools and vanquishes: nothing sits still, yet. The land is a result of its use, I explained. Everything else rested while the kids made a girdle removed from classical syntax. Shed, and something breaks, mounting the small hill to its vista: I saw a rope of trees in another country. I could not say I am lost in the proper way. The season is huge. This house is haunted: I planted it. Where? In the shed, and spoiled by attention. You see? Every bit counts, when the morning displays the serious ratio of the given stars. What made us tear the hours into lines? So things became a burden to shed, and astute as a hungry pilgrim but not brave, not expert. It is impolite to stare. Is unwise to plunder the easily forgotten, easily shed, and 2. They drummed and drummed, attached to a vestigial clamor. The heat splayed; sparklers ravished the fog. Morning tore the dead back to shore; enemy ships floundered and were forgotten. Still, nothing was appeased: the living silhouette drifted into view like an ephemeral sail promoting ease between wreckages. Not speaking a word of English she animated the landscape with abundance, a chosen self lively translated into the color of her eyes. Awkward and luminous, a stilted charm separating figure from ground, and solving it. What pushed up toward the abysmal with such new appraisals, such sure interest? The mute girl had seen glories but what had she come to know? A finite figure in a rainy field. A naked figure in a pool. A skipping figure across a bridge. A lost figure on a city street. A moaning figure on a huge bed. A smiling face in a photograph. All summer, I circled the garden for her sake. In memory of my sister Jennifer