Orient by Billy Collins

You are turning me
like someone turning a globe in her hand,
and yes, I have another side
like a China no one,
not even me, has ever seen.
So describe to me what’s there,
say what you are looking at
and I will close my eyes
so I can see it too,
the oxcarts and all the lively flags.
I love the sound of your voice
like a little saxophone
telling me what I could never know
unless I dug a hole all the way down
through the core of myself.
 

Beautiful Women by Stephen Dunn

More things come to them,
and they have more to hide.
All around them: mirror, eyes.
In any case
they are different from other women
and like great athletes have trouble
making friends, and trusting a world
quick to praise.

I admit without shame
I’m talking about superficial beauty,
the beauty unmistakable
to the honest eye, which causes
some of us to pivot and to dream,
to tremble before we dial.

Intelligence warmed by generosity
is inner beauty, and what’s worse
some physically beautiful woman have it,
and we have to be strapped and handcuffed
to the mast, or be ruined.

But I don’t want to talk of inner beauty,
it’s the correct way to talk
and I’d feel too good
about myself, like a parishioner.
Now, in fact,
I feel like I’m talking
to a strange beautiful woman at a bar, I’m
animated, I’m wearing that little fixed
smile, I might say anything at all.

Still, it’s better to treat a beautiful woman
as if she were normal, one of many.
She’ll be impressed that you’re unimpressed,
might start to lean your way.
This is especially true if she has aged
into beauty, for she will have learned
the sweet gestures one learns
in a lifetime of seeking love.
Lucky is the lover of such a woman
and lucky the woman herself.

Beautiful woman who’ve been beautiful girls
are often in some tower of themselves
waiting for us to make the long climb.

But let us have sympathy for the loneliness
of beautiful women.
Let us have no contempt for their
immense privilege, or for the fact
that they never can be wholly ours.

It is not astonishing
when the scared little girl in all of them
says here I am, or when they weep.
But we are always astonished by what
beautiful women do.

“Boxers punch harder when women are around,”
Kenneth Patchen said. Think what happens
when beautiful women are around.
We do not question
that a thousand ships were launched.

In the eye of the beholder? A platitude.
A beautiful woman enters a room,
and everyone beholds. Geography changes.
We watch her everywhere she goes.

The Breather by Billy Collins

Just as in the horror movies 

when someone discovers that the phone calls 

are coming from inside the house 

so too, I realized  

that our tender overlapping 

has been taking place only inside me. 

All that sweetness, the love and desire— 

it’s just been me dialing myself 

then following the ringing to another room 

to find no one on the line, 

well, sometimes a little breathing 

but more often than not, nothing. 

To think that all this time— 

which would include the boat rides, 

the airport embraces, and all the drinks— 

it’s been only me and the two telephones, 

the one on the wall in the kitchen 

and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs.

Always Something More Beautiful by Stephen Dunn

 This time I came to the starting place

with my best running shoes, and pure speed

held back for the finish, came with only love

of the clock and the underfooting

and the other runners. Each of us would 

be testing excellence and endurance

in the other, though in the past I’d often

veer off to follow some feral distraction

down a side path, allowing myself

to pursue something odd or beautiful,

becoming acquainted with a few of the ways

not to blame myself for failing to succeed.

I had come to believe what’s beautiful

had more to do with daring

to take yourself seriously, to stay

the course, whatever the course might be.

The person in front seemed ready to fade,

his long, graceful stride shortening

as I came up along his side. I was sure now

I’d at least exceed my best time.

But the man with the famous final kick

already had begun his move. Beautiful, I heard

a spectator say, as if something inevitable

about to come from nowhere was again on its way.

In the Beginning God Said Light by Mary Szybist

and there was light.
Now God says, Give them a little theatrical lighting

and they’re happy,
and we are. So many of us

dressing each morning, testing
endless combinations, becoming in our mirrors

more ourselves, imagining,
in an entrance, the ecstatic

weight of human eyes.
Now that the sun is sheering

toward us, what is left
but to let it close in

for our close-up? Let us really feel
how good it feels

to be still in it, making
every kind of self that can be

looked at. God, did you make us
to be your bright accomplices?

God, here are our shining spines.
Let there be no more dreams of being

more than a beginning.
Let it be

that to be is to be
backlit, and then to be only that light.

omm:

How was I resentful?

How was I selfish?

How was I dishonest?

How was I afraid?

Do I owe an apology?

What have I wrongly kept secret?

Was I unkind (i.e cruel, harsh, unfeeling)?

Was I unloving (i.e. cold, unresponsive, indifferent)?

What could I have done better?

Was I thinking of myself most of the time?

Was I thinking of what I could do for others?

Was I thinking what I could pack into the stream of life?

Who did I help today?

What did I accomplish today?

What am I grateful for today?

Who needs my prayers today?

To Have Without Holding by Marge Piercy

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.