The New Song- W.S. Merwin

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

Variation On The Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping, 
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you, 
sleeping. I would like to sleep 
with you, to enter 
your sleep as its smooth dark wave 
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent 
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves 
with its watery sun & three moons 
towards the cave where you must descend, 
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver 
branch, the small white flower, the one 
word that will protect you 
from the grief at the center 
of your dream, from the grief 
at the center. I would like to follow 
you up the long stairway 
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands 
to where your body lies 
beside me, and you enter 
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

 

Dedication by Franz Wright

It’s true I never write, but I would gladly die with you.

Gladly lower myself down alone with you into the enormous mouth

that waits, beyond youth, beyond every instant of ecstasy, remember:

before battle we would do each other’s makeup, comb each other’s

                   hair out

saying we are unconquerable, we are terrible and splendid—

the mouth waiting, patiently waiting. And I will meet you there

                   again

beyond bleeding thorns, the endless dilation, the fire that alters

                   nothing;

I am there already past snowy clouds, balding moss, dim

swarm of stars even we can step over, it is easier this time, I promise—

I am already waiting in your personal heaven, here is my hand,

I will help you across. I would gladly die with you still,

although I never write  

from this gray institution. See

they are so busy trying to cure me,

I’m condemned—sorry, I have been given the job

of vacuuming the desert forever, well, no more than eight hours

                   a day.

And it’s really just about a thousand miles of cafeteria;

a large one in any event. With its miniature plastic knives,

its tuna salad and Saran-Wrapped genitalia will somebody

                   please

get me out of here, sorry. I am happy to say that

every method, massive pharmaceuticals, art therapy

and edifying films as well as others I would prefer

not to mention—I mean, every single technique

known to the mouth—sorry!—to our most kindly

compassionate science is being employed

to restore me to normal well-being

and cheerful stability. I go on vacuuming

toward a small diamond light burning

off in the distance. Remember

me. Do you

remember me?   

In the night’s windowless darkness

when I am lying cold and numb

and no one’s fiddling with the lock, or

shining flashlights in my eyes,

although I never write, secretly

I long to die with you,

does that count?

Letters From a Lover From Another Planet by Simone Muench

Here, we listen with our tongues, mouths always
open. When his tongue searches the damp
cellar of my throat, he recalls
stories I’ve forgotten, recites the name
of every lover that’s ever kissed
the inside of my armpits. He knows
what I want and what I don’t
like about the way he reads the history
of my hair as if each strand
were a declarative sentence.
He tells me I’m too eager to please.
You must learn to take, to say “give me”
graciously. He likes what’s inside–
not soul, or metaphysical heart but the real
blood-chugging organ: its russet
muscularity; the way it blooms
bright as an anthurium beneath the white
trellis of ribs; its allegretto beat. The sweeping
of blood through ventricles is sexier
than breasts, he declares as he places his tongue
on my wrist, tells me to pay attention
to the vignettes of legs, the backsides
of knees, for each cell holds a story.
Open your mouth, he says. Leak
the letters of your name into my lungs,
the milkweed smell of your skeleton,
the bloodroot of you

Tracey Emin

Desperately Seeking Inspiration...

Stop-time Frank Conroy
Speak,Memory Vladimir Nabokov 
I know why the caged Bird sings Maya Angelou 
Autobiography of a face Lucy Grealey
Hope Against Hope Nadezhda Mandelstam
My Traitor's Heart, Rian Malan
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy
Black Boy, Richard Wright
Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel
The Orwell Reader
Dispatches, Michael Herr
Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
The Possessed, Elif Batuman
Thomas Merton, Seven Story Mountain
A Mathematician's Apology, GH Hardy
Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown
Childhood, Harry Crews
Confessions, St Augustine
A Moveable Feast, Hemingway
One Writer's Beginnings, Eudora Welty
A Sort of Life, Graham Greene

Tracey Emin

"The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain."

"An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."

Adrienne Rich

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Sonnet # 10 by Hayden Carruth

You rose from our embrace and the small light spread

like an aureole around you. The long parabola

of neck and shoulder, flank and thigh I saw

permute itself through unfolding and unlimited

minuteness in the movement of your tall tread,

the spine-root swaying, the Picasso-like éclat

of scissoring slender legs. I knew some law

of Being was at work. At one time I had said

that love bestows such values, and so it does,

but the old man in his canto was right and wise:

ubi amor ibi ocullus est.

Always I wanted to give and in wanting was

the poet. A man now, aging, I know the best

of love is not to bestow, but to recognize.

Open Letter To Eros by Simone Muench

I want a love that is imprecise, one
that sprawls over the bed, spills out windows,
disrupting churchgoers as they stroll
across the green glow of mowed lawns. I want
a love that commandeers the world, a bone-
clanking, hydrant-splashing, dog-
salivating affair. The ravaged and
the ravenous — those lycanthropes of lust.

No candy hearts or delicacies
of language. Do not ask me
to be demure, clean or to go
with the flow. I am electric.
I sprinkle poison
in the bird feeder, watch blue jays
fall like insatiable kisses.

I want fuck and prick
and cunt. Those delicious monosyllables
of want. I want you in a chair
handcuffed and desiring me so badly
even your feet are on fire. I want
love that is black as a highway
on a starless night, black as madness, sable
smooth and impenetrable. I want love
to write a love poem to me
with bad intentions.

Love is my nemesis,
my neurosurgeon, the unruly
child, the car that won’t steer
straight, the boy on a skateboard
carving the street
into attraction and repulsion.

I want a love that is contradictory, indelible
and edible, a love that relishes
imperfections and requisitions the moon.
A love that isn’t afraid of grief, sadness,
the small crimes we commit
against ourselves; love as cool
as a bruise, sensitive as skin
on eyelids, nipples and ears.

I want a love that listens:
to rain a half mile
before it hits the house; to the feather
brushing sound of morning glories as they close
their petals for rain’s arrival; the soft
shuffle of beetles as they begin a slow
crawl across the orchard into the sweet
red bellies of fallen apples.

The Problem With Celibacy by Simone Muench

The body has its own idea of rebellion.
It leans into strangers, gas-station
attendants, the Piggly Wiggly
check-out boy; it presses itself against
the hot hoods of running cars.

Your body embarrasses you: the
architecture of its plush flesh, its need
for touch. You can’t visit
the local bar without propositioning
the bartender, pressing your pelvis

against the bouncer as you stumble
out of nightclubs into the street
where lampposts illuminate couples
kissing, caressing, grinding
while trees whisper obscenities.

The shuffle of leaves on sidewalks rasp
like skin. The heat from asphalt rises
up your thighs in the tongue of hot air.
The cats in the alley are a constant
remainder of your status.

Even shadows are attractive. You stop
eating chocolate, kiwis, oysters for fear
of mauling the mailman. You lock
yourself in your house where you
rub against the fur of TV static.

You toss out your Turrentine albums, freesia-
scented soap, silk pajamas. Everything
is sex. Your radio goes, magazines, kitchen
towels. Until your house is bare,
sterile. You breathe easier

but then notice the body’s natural
pulsations: heartbeat, eyeblink, breathing.
There is nothing that isn’t a metaphor.
Outside, it is humid, the city smells
like breath, the madness of teeth.

So you throw open windows and doors,
air thick with calendula, heat,
the silver trill of crickets
sends you reeling into spring and
a renegotiation with desire.

Snowdrops by Louise Gluck

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring-

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” David Foster Wallace

Touch-Me-Not by Wendell Berry

There is a flower called touch-me-not,

which means, of course, touch me,

for it depends upon touch for propagation,

as humans do.  The blossom may be

two tones of orange, the darker exquisitely

freckling the lighter, or a clear lovely

yellow, an elegant aperture, inviting entry

by winged emissaries of imagination

actuated by love.  The seed pods are made

of coil springs laid straight in the pod’s

shape; ripe, the seeds are restrained in

suspension of tension.  Touched, they fly.

Things I Didn't Know I Loved by Linda Pastan

I always knew I loved the sky,
the way it seems solid and insubstantial at the same time;
the way it disappears above us
even as we pursue it in a climbing plane,
like wishes or answers to certain questions—always out of reach;
the way it embodies blue,
even when it is gray.

But I didn’t know I loved the clouds,
those shaggy eyebrows glowering
over the face of the sun.
Perhaps I only love the strange shapes clouds can take,
as if they are sketches by an artist
who keeps changing her mind.
Perhaps I love their deceptive softness,
like a bosom I’d like to rest my head against
but never can.

And I know I love the grass, even as I am cutting it as short
as the hair on my grandson’s newly barbered head.
I love the way the smell of grass can fill my nostrils
with intimations of youth and lust;
the way it stains my handkerchief with meanings
that never wash out.

Sometimes I love the rain, staccato on the roof,
and always the snow when I am inside looking out
at the blurring around the edges of parked cars
and trees. And I love trees,
in winter when their austere shapes
are like the cutout silhouettes artists sell at fairs
and in May when their branches
are fuzzy with growth, the leaves poking out
like new green horns on a young deer.

But how about the sound of trains,
those drawn-out whistles of longing in the night,
like coyotes made of steam and steel, no color at all,
reminding me of prisoners on chain gangs I’ve only seen
in movies, defeated men hammering spikes into rails,
the burly guards watching over them?

Those whistles give loneliness and departure a voice.
It is the kind of loneliness I can take in my arms, tasting
of tears that comfort even as they burn, dampening the pillows
and all the feathers of all the geese who were plucked to fill
them.

Perhaps I embrace the music of departure—song without lyrics,
so I can learn to love it, though I don’t love it now.
For at the end of the story, when sky and clouds and grass,
and even you my love of so many years,
have almost disappeared,
it will be all there is left to love.

“Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.” ― José Saramago

I'll be your mirror 
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know 
I'll be the wind, the rain and the sunset 
The light on your door to show that you're home 

When you think the night has seen your mind 
That inside you're twisted and unkind 
Let me stand to show that you are blind 
Please put down your hands 
'Cause I see you 

I find it hard to believe you don't know 
The beauty that you are 
But if you don't let me be your eyes 
A hand in your darkness, so you won't be afraid 

When you think the night has seen your mind 
That inside you're twisted and unkind 
Let me stand to show that you are blind 
Please put down your hands 
'Cause I see you 

I'll be your mirror

A Man Said to the Universe by Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

I want to see you.

Know your voice.

Recognize you when you
first come 'round the corner.

Sense your scent when I come
into a room you've just left.

Know the lift of your heel,
the glide of your foot.

Become familiar with the way
you purse your lips
then let them part,
just the slightest bit,
when I lean in to your space
and kiss you.

I want to know the joy
of how you whisper
"more”

Rumi

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi

The Truly Great by Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

 

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

 

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

"I want to see what the sun/ sees before it tells/ the snow to go."

"The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.” W.B. Yeats

The Free World by Camille Rankine

I bind my old     grievances    
     to a helium balloon.      A long memory,    

I have been warned,
    is a curse.     Everywhere I go,      someone

has something      they must say      about you.
    Nobody knows     who we are.     Wouldn't you say,

nobody     agonizes like we do.    
     Elsewhere

is a promise     and a threat.
    I have been proscribed

compassion     of the wrong sort, and so
    I am alone.      I am

invisible within you.      Seeking companionship    
     I spend     my afternoons      before the windows

of pet shops and      strangers, trying
    to decide.      After all, I was told

I could have everything.
    I thought      this was meant to be

a romance:      I was delivered here
    in order to love you.

I was delivered here
    and ordered

to love you. If      we could be friends.
    I wore this new      dress for you. 

First Desires by C. K. Williams

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew

            anything at all about the music,
what the instruments might sound like, look like, what portion of
             the orchestra each represented:
there were only volumes and velocities, thickenings and thin-
           nings, the winding cries of change
that seemed to touch within you, through your body, to be part of
           you and then apart from you.
And even when you'd learned the grainy timbre of the single
           violin, the ardent arpeggios of the horn,
when you tried again there were still uneases and confusions left,
           an ache, a sense of longing
that held you in chromatic dissonance, droning on beyond the
           dominant's resolve into the tonic,
as though there were a flaw of logic in the structure, or in (you
           knew it was more likely) you.

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ” ― Haruki Murakami