e. e. cummings
it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another's face your sweet hair lay
in such silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;
if this should be, i say if this should be--
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands
e. e. cummings
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what is is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
Lynda Hull - For Ann
The years have verdigrised the fallen leaves
on the pilgrim's monument you loved--horse's
arched necks straining towards autumn, summer's
last sultry declension. The night of the call
was the night of the planets, of gauzy cirrus
whipped, fiery seraphim cruising an atmosphere
of whispered conversations, soft alto laughter
wreathed in smoky helixes, smoke that fogged
Ann's face as she'd lean forward, a cup
held, girlish, in both hands. The night
I learned of her death, we walked
and found again that single child's ballet
slipper at shoreline. Boundaries. Water
and singing stones, day world to night world,
seasons turning one to the other, bay to open ocean.
That was the night the lacquered monkeys wove
their paws through a woman's plaited hair--
the psychic's display, and her crystal globe
of the world marked with its boundaries, winds
and demons turning silently in the window.
On that globe this night must show, the night
of the girl on the rocks tossing garlands
of freesia and dahlias, earrings into the water,
the waves' incantation, over and over, runnel
to ascent and crest, the torn lace of collapse.
The singing stones, the night the bandaged ward
shut down, morphine swaddles her riddled body.
The night somewhere, the first time, a Child kickturns
in its amniotic sea, and a girl walks trailing
from her shoulders a glitter wrap so
the shadow pimps go hey princess,
why you so sad tonight.. Freesias and dahlias
on the water, violet, rippling like a beast
in the breeze, dahlias straggling
the streets of that wooden town by the sea
where I knew her. To say, when I knew her,
is to say I knew something of what she dreamt
when she was young, when she was young
the circle skirt swept below her knees, is
to know something of her style, the gestures--
a flutter of hands. The distance intervenes.
How much is let go, what changes . . . .
The night I had the call someone had a vision
of a ballroom floating music over water.
Glenn Miller? Artie Shaw? And we walked
until the lights of the twilit boat appeared
and the music was carried over the water,
violet ripples, the turning sphere and click
slide of women slow-dancing in strapless
evening gowns, velvet masks, a world distant
from the slashed graffittied splendor of our
park. Distant as you are now, woman small
as a dancer, already half cold springtime
air, my last visit, the fierce consuming
cancer. The psychic's spinning globe
& the music of those dancing feet, your face
in April, lit with pain, & yes, apprehension
radiant above your hands' flying seraphim
attending to the sum & the glory & the flame.
Notes you'd send me pondered, stricken, composed
again on blue paper in your room with its
canopied bed, the desk with its garland
of lilies, casements opening to a garden.
To say, I knew you. The room empty
tonight, dust filtering its sloughed
transparent wings over the spines of books,
the neat half moons of clipped fingernails
in a glazed dish by your bed. The ballroom
floats its melodies until it's spectral,
a radiant drifting to the insect's
furious orchestra, the waves, then gone.
From whence do we come, and whither
do we go--that ancient mystery.
A crystal globe spins its provinces, the city
where your room draws its veils. Beyond
the casements, the garden's iron gate
clicks open, and who is it now that enters?
Galway Kinnell - After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small
he has to screw them on, which one day may make him wonder
about the mental capacity of baseball players—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with the satisfaction of being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across his little, startingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
Mark Doty - Lilacs in NYC
Monday evening, E. 22nd
in front of Jimmy and Vincent's,
a leafing maple, and it's as if
Manhattan existed in order
to point these
leaves, the urbane marvel
of them. Tuesday AM
at the Korean market,
cut, bundled lilacs, in clear
or silvered cellophane-
mist & inebriation,
cyclonic flames in tubs
of galvanized aluminum,
all along Third Avenue,
as if from the hardy rootstocks
of these shops sprouted
every leaf-shine and shade
of panicle: smoke, plum, lavender
like the sky over Hudson,
some spring evenings, held
in that intoxicating window
the horizontal avenues provide.
Numbered avenues,
dumb beautiful ministers... Later,
a whole row of white crabapples
shivering in the wind
of a passing train; later,
a magnolia flaring
in a scatter
of its own fallen petals,
flowering out of a field
of itself. Is that what
we do? I've felt like that,
straddling my lover,
as if I rose
out of something
which resembled me,
joined at the trunk
as if I come flaming
up out of what I am,
the live foam muscling
beneath me...
Strong bole thrust up
into the billow,
into the frills and the insistences
and elaborations,
the self flying open!
They're flowers, they know
to fall if they bloom;
blessed relief of it,
not just myself this little while.
You enter me and we are strangers
to ourselves but not
to each other, I enter you
(strange verb but what else
to call it-to penetrate
to fuck to be inside of
none of the accounts of the body
were ever really useful were they
tell the truth none of them),
I enter you (strange verb,
as if we were each an enclosure
a shelter, imagine actually
considering yourself a temple)
and violet the crush of shadows
that warm wrist that deep-hollowed
collar socket those salt-lustered
lilacy shoulderblades,
in all odd shadings of green and dusk...
blooming in the field
of our shatter. You enter me
and it's Macy's,
some available version of infinity;
I enter you and I'm the grass,
covered with your shock
of petals out of which you rise
Mr. April Mr. Splendor
climbing up with me
inside this rocking, lilac boat.
My candelight master,
who trembles me into smoke-violet,
as April does to lilac-wood.
Mark Doty - Sweet Machine
Glisten fretting the indigo of plum,
silvered chalk of moth-wing dust:
the young man on the subway platform
-twenty maybe-seems almost powdered,
he is so dirty, the dust lighter
than his skin, which is still,
by a slight stretch of the imagination,
lovely. Though it's odd to think
of him that way, this shirtless kid
in hugely oversized jeans that fall,
when he stands, around his thighs,
exposing his skinny ass. He yanks
the waistband up, sits down again,
and begins to writhe, palms roaming,
uncontrollable, over his own face,
his close-cropped hair and ears,
down to his flanks, hands disappearing
inside the big jeans, scratching
and rubbing, until he collapses, exhausted,
head hanging between his knees,
and after a few second starts
it all up again. Does he want
to rub his own skin away? Then
I understand: what's powdering his flesh is
his flesh, the outest layer of himself
rubbed to palest chalk. He repeats
his stream of violent tableaux;
these might be positions of transport,
and all of us waiting for the local
watch, how can we help it? Crackhead,
somebody says, but it's a whisper, a question,
and nothing answers our troubled facination:
nothing to do but watch the pity and terror
of those poses. The express comes and goes,
and the brutal serries grows more synaptic:
these might be flashes of the pornographic,
or classical attitudes, rought trade posing
as a captive slave for Michelangelo. Our context's
neither intimate nor academic, and nothing's
supposed to be so real in the common nowhere
of the on-the-way-to, while we wait
for the 1 or the 9, strangers and witnesses
pressed knee to hem, back to shoulder
on the platform and cars. This month,
on the broad haunches of the buses,
another sleek boy's posed in multiple shots,
black underwear and lean belly laved by rivulets
from a shower or stream. The photographer's
left him headless, his gestures multiplied
on builders' makeshift walls, page after page
of blank torsos already beginning to be inscribed:
on a yard of silvery muscle six feet from Seventh Avenue
someone's scrawled, in black marker: I am a sweet
suck and fuck machine. Take me home. Big buses
nose through the streets, one after the other,
bearing the model of what we're supposed to want,
and do, what we're meant to see and need
but not, unless we have the money, touch.
He doesn't have the money, my boy
on the platform, and I wish... What?
I don't know. Just today, in traffic,
one of those buses eased by my taxi window:
a taut, wet waist bound in black elastic,
huge, luminous emulsion inches
from my face. The endlessly reprinted boy
-is he?-could almost be this man,
whitened by his own degrading skin,
dark stone wearing the dust of the quarry.
He's rubbing himself to flour, he's giving
his name back to airy nothing, I'm figuring him
on the varnished bench. Moth, plum-hear
how the imagery aestheticizes? He's nothing
as fixed as marble, and he touches himself
not for pleasure but because he can't stop.
What unthinkable train is he waiting for?
That boy on the billboard, the headless boy,
could he stop touching himself?
We're all on display in this town,
sweet machines, powerless, consumed,
just as he consumes himself
with those relentless hands,
scratching his barely hidden center,
hanging his head between his knees,
spent, before he jerks himself up
and starts all over again.
Bob Dylan - Visions of Johanna
Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn
Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel
The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can ya man?"
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
Pablo Neruda - Sonnet XVIII
Naked, you are simple as one of your hands
Smooth, Earthy, Small, Transparent, Round
You have moonlines, Apple pathways
Naked you are slendor as a naked grain of wheat
Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba
You have vines and stars in your hair
Naked you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church
Naked you are tiny as one of your nails,
Curved, Subtle, Rosy, Til the day is borne
and you withdraw to the underground world
As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores
Your clear light dims, Gets dressed, Drops its leaves,
Becomes a naked hand again
Pablo Neruda - Saddest Poem
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
Li-Young Lee - From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
John Donne – Song
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids' singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible go see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet,
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.
Seamus Heaney – Act of Union
1
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
2
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act aprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.
Robert Hass – Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Victoria Clausi - Okay, Let's Not Have Sex
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
--Yeats
Let’s not pretend we could be less
complicated than millions before us.
Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only
look at the bottoms of each other’s feet,
or skin on inner forearms, where the sun
has done almost no damage. But let’s not
say we wouldn’t drop to our knees in praise.
Why else would we drop to our knees?
No, let’s not have sex--let’s just learn
curves of each other’s fingers, all the way
to the cuticles, nails, tips; touch every
bony prominence on each other’s faces,
supraorbital tauruses, chins, jaws, teeth,
sinewy cartilage of nostrils, all
the hairs inside the nostrils, the satin
nap of your beard, the dark down on my cheek.
But let’s not have sex--let’s just talk
about bones, listen to patellas grind.
I’ll show you where I broke my arm once, twice,
where three pins held my elbow together;
my hysterectomy scar. You’ll show me
where a CO2 cartridge ricocheted
its way into your chest, a pain that was
nothing compared to a broken heart once, twice...
Agreed, though. No sex--let’s just lie
side by side after late picnics, fireflies
settling, bullfrogs croaking, and wise us
talking about stars we can’t name
though they seem almost touchable.
Knowing that abandonment, alone, is
a great argument for not having sex,
we’ll lie there and lie there, not having sex.
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Song of Nature
Mine are the night and morning,
The pits of air, the gulf of space,
The sportive sun, the gibbous moon,
The innumerable days.
I hid in the solar glory,
I am dumb in the pealing song,
I rest on the pitch of the torrent,
In slumber I am strong.
No numbers have counted my tallies,
No tribes my house can fill,
I sit by the shining Fount of Life,
And pour the deluge still;
And ever by delicate powers
Gathering along the centuries
From race on race the rarest flowers,
My wreath shall nothing miss.
And many a thousand summers
My apples ripened well,
And light from meliorating stars
With firmer glory fell.
I wrote the past in characters
Of rock and fire the scroll,
The building in the coral sea,
The planting of the coal.
And thefts from satellites and rings
And broken stars I drew,
And out of spent and aged things
I formed the world anew;
What time the gods kept carnival,
Tricked out in star and flower,
And in cramp elf and saurian forms
They swathed their too much power.
Time and Thought were my surveyors,
They laid their courses well,
They boiled the sea, and baked the layers
Or granite, marl, and shell.
But he, the man-child glorious,--
Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.
My boreal lights leap upward,
Forthright my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born,
The summit of the whole.
Must time and tide forever run?
Will never my winds go sleep in the west?
Will never my wheels which whirl the sun
And satellites have rest?
Too much of donning and doffing,
Too slow the rainbow fades,
I weary of my robe of snow,
My leaves and my cascades;
I tire of globes and races,
Too long the game is played;
What without him is summer's pomp,
Or winter's frozen shade?
I travail in pain for him,
My creatures travail and wait;
His couriers come by squadrons,
He comes not to the gate.
Twice I have moulded an image,
And thrice outstretched my hand,
Made one of day, and one of night,
And one of the salt sea-sand.
One in a Judaean manger,
And one by Avon stream,
One over against the mouths of Nile,
And one in the Academe.
I moulded kings and saviours,
And bards o'er kings to rule;--
But fell the starry influence short,
The cup was never full.
Yet whirl the glowing wheels once more,
And mix the bowl again;
Seethe, fate! the ancient elements,
Heat, cold, wet, dry, and peace, and pain.
Let war and trade and creeds and song
Blend, ripen race on race,
The sunburnt world a man shall breed
Of all the zones, and countless days.
No ray is dimmed, no atom worn,
My oldest force is good as new,
And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
Gives back the bending heavens in dew.
Ellen Bass - Basket of Figs
Bring me your pain, love. Spread
it out like fine rugs, silk sashes,
warm eggs, cinnamon
and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me
the detail, the intricate embroidery
on the collar, tiny shell buttons,
the hem stitched the way you were taught,
pricking just a thread, almost invisible.
Unclasp it like jewels, the gold
still hot from your body. Empty
your basket of figs. Spill your wine.
That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it,
cradling it on my tongue like the slick
seed of pomegranate. I would lift it
tenderly, as a great animal might
carry a small one in the private
cave of the mouth.