On my mind: To have without holding

Learning to love differently is hard,

love with the hands wide open, love

with the doors banging on their hinges,

the cupboard unlocked, the wind

roaring and whimpering in the rooms

rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds

that thwack like rubber bands

in an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open

stretching the muscles that feel

as if they are made of wet plaster,

then of blunt knives, then

of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes

of grab, of clutch ; to love and let

go again and again. It pesters to remember

the lover who is not in the bed,

to hold back what is owed to the work

that gutters like a candle in a cave

without air, to love consciously,

conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can’t do it, you say it’s killing

me, but you thrive, you glow

on the street like a neon raspberry,

You float and sail, a helium balloon

bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing

on the cold and hot winds of our breath,

as we make and unmake in passionate

diastole and systole the rhythm

of our unbound bonding, to have

and not to hold, to love

with minimized malice, hunger

and anger moment by moment balanced.

The Lovers by Timothy Liu

I was always afraid 

of the next card

the psychic would turn 

over for us—

                              Forgive me 

for not knowing 

how we were

every card in the deck.

You can’t say it that way any more.   

Bothered about beauty you have to   

Come out into the open, into a clearing, 

And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you 

Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange 

Of you, you who have so many lovers,   

People who look up to you and are willing   

To do things for you, but you think 

It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . 

So much for self-analysis. Now, 

About what to put in your poem-painting:   

Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.   

Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,   

Skyrockets are good—do they still exist? 

There are a lot of other things of the same quality   

As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must 

Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, 

Dull-sounding ones. She approached me 

About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was   

Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.   

Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head 

Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something   

Ought to be written about how this affects   

You when you write poetry: 

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind 

Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate   

Something between breaths, if only for the sake   

Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you 

For other centers of communication, so that understanding 

May begin, and in doing so be undone.

"My words

reach you as through a telephone

where some submarine echo of my voice

blurts knowledge you can't use"

Androgyne by Stephen Dunn

My lost love, back when Zeus split us in two-

our intelligence and completeness

a threat to the gods-this ache

began, this perpetual wandering…

I’ve seen you in the teeming, concupiscent

streets, I married you, at dusk I followed you

into bars; ever time I found you

I recognized you as someone seen before.

I could not choose not to respond to desire.

Only you understand.

Old now, I admit to you

I’ve been content for hours watching deer

play out their nimble, nervous lives.

I’ve considered flowers and without sadness

watched them drop their yellow leaves.

In dreams you still whisper to me

and in dreams I whisper back.

But we make fewer plans.

I will tell you, Androgyne, what I learned today

about the sublime. It’s that moment

when a compound changes

from one state to another. It’s chemistry.

All lovers know it’s chemistry,

not physics, that makes the world go round.

And maybe when we meet again

after one of our long journeys toward the other,

you will find me wishing

to do little more than brush back

a lock of hair that’s fallen

across your face, too close to an eye.

We’ll be sitting side by side,

noontime, in a park.

We’ll not be able to see the sun

due to the excess of light.

I’ll raise my hand to your face

and you’ll tilt your cheek my way,

and I’ll move that lock of hair, now gray,

to where I’ve always liked it to be.

Custom by Carl Phillips

There is a difference it used to make,

seeing three swans in this versus four in that

quadrant of sky. I am not imagining. It was very large, as its

effects were. Declarations of war, the timing fixed upon for a sea-

             departure; or,

about love, a sudden decision not to, to pretend instead to a kind

of choice. It was dramatic, as it should be. Without drama,

what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere

to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged,

something that could know better, and should, therefore—but does not:

a form of faith, you've said. I call it sacrifice—an instinct for it, or a habit

             at first, that

becomes required, the way art can become, eventually, all we have

of what was true. You shouldn't look at me like that. Like one of those

             saints

on whom the birds once settled freely.

The Tender Gesture Can Resurrect The World by Kate Light

The tender gesture can resurrect the world

that’s fallen out around you, heedlessly, again.

It needn’t be much: a finger lifting your chin,

and lips touching your eyes, cheek on herle

of hair-oh to let out the cry, a skirled

longing that may be as old as the begin-

ning of you, when you screamed. Outside, let me in!

and probably already terribly hurt.

I’ve had the wish to dissolve myself

when it was too much, in a whisper, a stealth

of undoing; to con-, or sub-, or retrovert.

The gesture of despair projects

Louder than words; tenderness surrounds and resurrects

K 

Desire by Jane Hirshfield

For years, the habit of wanting you,

carried like something unnoticed,

lint in a pocket, or manzanita

seed waiting a fire-

you come to me

changed, an old photograph

blurred with motion,

the shutter too low to keep you the same.

After a while, the light, an old habit

between us, drains off:

simple to meet, to walk towards evening

in a park at the continent’s edge;

simple to talk

until conversation drains off,

a newly decanted wine,

and we’re left with the sediment dark

at bottom between us,

desire,

simple to say,

and all the decision pours out of my life,

leaving me buoyant, empty, to float

towards your hand.