forgive me...especially for having believed

Broad and yellow is the evening light,
The coolness of April is dear.
You, of course, are several years late,
Even so, I'm happy you're here.

Sit close at hand and look at me,
With those eyes, so cheerful and mild:
This blue notebook is full, you see,
Full of poems I wrote as a child.

Forgive me, forgive me, for having grieved
For ignoring the sunlight, too.
And especially for having believed
That so many others were you.
[Anna Akhmatova, 'Broad and yellow is the evening light', from Poems]

both in love *and* foolish

Night has come with silent footsteps,
On the beaches by the ocean;
And the waves, with curious whispers,
Ask the moon, 'Have you a notion

'Who that man is? Is he foolish,
Or with love is he demented?
For he seems so sad and cheerful,
So cast down yet so contented.'

And the moon, with shining laughter,
Answers them, 'If you must know it,
He is both in love and foolish;
And, besides that, he's a poet!
[Heinrich Heine, 'An Dem Stillen Meerestrande', translated by Louis Untermeyer]

we are surrounded in beauty

I was thinking that I might fly today
Just to disprove all the things you say
It doesn't take a talent to be mean
Your words can crush things that are unseen
So please be careful with me, I'm sensitive
And I'd like to stay that way.
You always tell me that is impossible
To be respected and be a girl
Why's it gotta be so complicated?
Why you gotta tell me if I'm hated?
So please be careful with me, I'm sensitive
And I'd like to stay that way.
I was thinking that it might do some good
If we robbed the cynics and took all their food
That way what they believe will have taken place
And we can give it to people who have some faith
So please be careful with me, I'm sensitive
And I'd like to stay that way.
I have this theory that if we're told we're bad
Then that's the only idea we'll ever have
But maybe if we are surrounded in beauty
Someday we will become what we see
'Cause anyone can start a conflict
it's harder yet to disregard it
I'd rather see the world from another angle
We are everyday angels
Be careful with me 'cause I'd like to stay that way
[Jewel, "I'm Sensitive", from Pieces of You]

the place is not found but seeps from our touch

You are already
asleep. I lower
myself in next to
you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits, the patina of
self, the black frost
of outsideness, so that even
unclothed it is
a resilient chilly
hardness, a superficially
malleable, dead
rubbery texture.

You are a mound of
bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.

Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.

You turn and
hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being to
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.

What I, now loosened, sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you, yet
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon, round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
[Thom Gunn, 'Touch']

much more than it can write

That self-same tongue which first did thee entreat
To link thy liking with my lucky love,
That trusty tongue must now these words repeat,
I love thee still, my fancy cannot move,
That dreadless heart which durst attempt the thought
To win thy will with mine for to consent,
Maintains that vow which love in me first wrought,
I love thee still, and never shall repent,
That happy hand which hardly did touch
Thy tender body to my deep delight,
Shall serve with sword to prove my passion such
As loves thee still, much more than it can write.
Thus love I still with tongue, hand, heart and all,
And when I change, let vengeance on me fall.
[George Gascoigne, 'That self-same tongue which first did thee entreat', from The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English]

responses to the thousand curvaceous moments

Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd.
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which the water pours all night
and all day.
But the nature of men is not the nature of silence.
Words are the thunders of the mind.
Words are the refinement of the flesh.
Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments--
we manage it--
sweet and electric, words flow from the brain
and out the gate of the mouth.

We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar.
We are slow, and choosy.
This is the world.
[Mary Oliver, 3, from 'Work', in The Leaf and the Cloud: A Poem]

left it behind

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard,
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange,
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You are still single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.

And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
karma demands.
[Gary Snyder, 'December at Yase' {one of Four Poems for Robin} from No Nature: New and Selected Poems]

still in memory

My beloved friend
You and I had a sweet talk,
Long ago, one autumn night.
Renewing itself,
The year has rumbled along,
That night still in memory.
[Ryokan, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, in Zen Poems {Everyman's Library Pocket Poets}]

enough

4 I have perceiv'd that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

5 This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot,
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor, all falls aside but myself and it,
Books, art, religion, time, the visible and solid earth, and what was expected of heaven or fear'd of hell, are now consumed,
Mad filaments, ungovernable shoots play out of it, the response likewise ungovernable,
Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands all diffused, mine too diffused,
Ebb stung by the flow and flow stung by the ebb, love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh'd day.

This is the nucleus--after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
This is the bath of birth, this the merge of small and large, and the outlet again.

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest,
You are the gates of his body, and you are the gates of the soul.

The female contains all of the qualities and tempers them,
She is in her place and moves with perfect balance,
She is all things duly veil'd, she is both passive and active,
She is to conceive daughters as well as sons, and sons as well as daughters.

As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

6
The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,
He too is all qualities, he is action and power,
The flush of the known universe is in him,
Scorn becomes him well, and appetite and defiance become him well,
The wildest largest passions, bliss that is utmost, sorrow that is utmost become him well, pride is for him,
The full-spread pride of man is calming and excellent to the soul,
Knowledge becomes him, he likes it always, he brings every thing to the test himself,
Whatever the survey, whatever the sea and the sail he strikes soundings at last only here,
(Where else does he strike soundings except here?)
The man's body is sacred and the woman's body is sacred,
No matter who it is, it is sacred--is it the meanest one in the laborer's gang?
Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landed on the wharf?
Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as the well-off, just as much as you,
Each has his or her place in the procession.

(All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion.)

Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight, and he or she has no right to a sight?
Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,
For you only, and not for him and her?
[Walt Whitman, from I Sing the Body Electric in 'Children of Adam', from Complete Poems]

indescribably delicious multitudinous thrills

I love you
because the Earth turns round the sun
because the North wind blows north sometimes
because the Pope is Catholic
and most Rabbis Jewish
because winters flow into springs
and the air clears after a storm
because only my love for you
despite the charms of gravity
keeps me from falling off this Earth
into another dimension

I love you
because it is the natural order of things

I love you
like the habit I picked up in college
of sleeping through lectures
or saying I'm sorry
when I get stopped for speeding
because I drink a glass of water
in the morning
and chain-smoke cigarettes
all through the day
because I take my coffee Black
and my milk with chocolate
because you keep my feet warm
though my life a mess
I love you
because I don't want it
any other way

I am helpless
in my love for you
It makes me so happy
to hear you call my name
I am so amazed you can resist
locking me in an echo chamber
where your voice reverberates
through the four walls
sending me into spasmatic ecstasy
I love you
because it's been so good
for so long
that if I didn't love you
I’d have to be born again
and that is not a theological statement
I am pitiful in my love for you

The Dells tell me Love
is so simple
the thought though of you
sends indescribably delicious multitudinous
thrills throughout and through-in my body
I love you
because no two snowflakes are alike
and it is possible
if you stand on tippy-toe
to walk between the raindrops
I love you
because I am afraid of the dark
and can't sleep in the light
because I rub my eyes
when I wake up in the morning
and find you there
because you with all your magic powers were
determined that
I should love you
because there was nothing for you but that
I would love you

I love you
because you made me
want to love you
more than I love my privacy
my freedom my commitments
and my responsibilities
I love you 'cause I changed my life
to love you
because you saw me one Friday
afternoon and decided that I would
love you
I love you I love you I love you
[Nikki Giovanni, 'Resignation', in Love Poems]

something flooding and flowing / and falling away

Nighttime: my watch dial
burns in your hand
like a glowworm.
I hear
the stretched filament:
like a dry exhalation
that escapes
your invisible hand.
Then your hand
turning back to my breast in the dark
to gather my dream to its breathing.

A delicate tooth
in the watch
saws at a lifetime.
Somewhere in the forest
the fragments are falling:
splinters of wood,
infinitesimal droppings, parings
and nests in the leafage--
but the stillness is changeless,
the chill in the dark does not lessen.

So
from invisible hands
a wristwatch goes whittling
a lifetime,
a lifetime,
the minutes falling like leaves,
fibers of ruining time,
little black plumules.

As though in a forest
we turned with the odor of roots in our nostrils
and somewhere heard water give way
in thickening droplets
like the ooze of a grape.
The smallest of millstones
is milling the night.
The darkness is murmurous,
sifting down from your hand
and brimming the universe--
distances,
dust, and the earth:
the grindstone goes grinding,
my watch on your hand
in the dark.

Blindly
I steady my arm
for your neck, move
under the warmth and weight of your body,
and into my hands
time topples downward--
a night
of diminutive noises,
wood-noises, tree-noises,
night-noises, dividing,
fragments of darkness,
a falling and falling away of the waters.

Till
out of your watch
and the sleep of your hands
the dream of the sleeper falls downward,
falls darkling, a gush
in the forest;
out of your watch
to your body,
out of your flesh to the
countries of darkening water:
time falling,
time coursing us there
from within.

The whole night was like that.
Spaces and shadows, the turning
of time and the earth:
something flooding and flowing
and falling away.
So pass the nights
of the earth,
leaving no more than a vagrant
black odor:
a leaf falls,
a drop falls
to earth
and the sound of it perishes;
sleep falls on the woods and the waters,
on the meadows,
the bells,
and the eyelids.

Breathe, and I hear you,
my darling.

Let us sleep.
[Pablo Neruda, ‘A Watch in the Night’ from Selected Poems, translated by Ben Belitt]

night calls out to you...the fingers of night are amorous

Come away! Come away!
Ye are sober and dull through the common day.
But now it is night!
It is shameful night, and God is asleep!
(Have you not felt the quick fires that creep
Through the hungry flesh, and the lust of delight,
And hot secrets of dreams that day cannot say?).
The house is dumb;
The night calls out to you. Come, ah, come!
Down the dim stairs, through the creaking door,
Naked, crawling on hands and feet
--It is meet! it is meet!
Ye are men no longer, but less and more.
Beast and God ... Down the lampless street,
By little black ways, and secret places,
In the darkness and mire,
Faint laughter around, and evil faces
By the star-glint seen--ah! follow with us!
For the darkness whispers a blind desire,
And the fingers of night are amorous.
Keep close as we speed,
Though mad whispers woo you, and hot hands cling.
And the touch and the smell of bare flesh sting,
Soft flank by your flank, and side brushing side--
To-night, never heed!
Unswerving and silent follow with me,
Till the city ends sheer,
And the crook'd lanes open wide,
Out of the voices of night,
Beyond lust and fear,
To the level waters of moonlight,
To the level waters, quiet and clear,
To the black unresting plains of the calling sea.
[Rupert Brooke, 'The Song of the Beasts', in Collected Poems]

did I search for you?

Before I met you, did I search for you?
I wandered through the woods, on the banks of the ringing brook
I strolled on mountain lanes
Looked for nests of birds on every branch.

Before I met you eyes wide open in the day,
I waited for you in dreams,
I was so drunk with the fragrance
Of what it would be like to meet.

Then I found you
And my dreams were swept away.
You anchored my tossing boat.
I touched nectar, sweeter than honey.

Before I met you
I kept on searching, waiting,
On water and on dry land.
Now the whole world lives in you.
[Umashankar Joshi {an eminent Indian poet}, translated from the Gujarati by Svati Joshi]

humility is the essential ability

Understanding must be on both sides,
Confidence with confidence, and every talk
Be like a long and needed walk
When flowers are picked, and almost--asides
Exchanged. Love is always like this
Even when there's no touch or kiss.

There are many kinds of relationships
But this is the best, as Plato said--
Even when it begins in a bed,
The gentle touching of hands and lips--
It is from such kindness friendship is made
Often, a thing not to be repaid

Since there is no price, no counting up
This and that, gift. Humility
Is the essential ability
Before the loved object. Oh, we can sip
Something that tastes almost divine
In such pure sharing--yours and mine.
[Elizabeth Jennings, 'Relationships']

how could I hope to rule my own desire?

By too long gazing on your flawless face my heart took fire, which such a heat dispersed that with a drought my lips were like to burst,
and speech itself was banished from its place.
You bade them bring well-water of your grace in a bejewelled vase, but in my thirst, I brushed the spot which drinking you brushed first
still royal with your aromatic trace.
And well I knew the moment that I smutched it with mine, the vase, enamored with your kiss,
and to the flame subdued whose splendour touched it, as in a furnace, was consumed with this.
How could I hope to rule my own desire,
when on the instant water changed to fire?
[Pierre de Ronsard, 'By too long gazing on your flawless face', trans. by Humbert Wolfe]

if there were men like this the world could begin

in grievous deity my cat
walks around
he walks around and around
with
electric tail and
push-button
eyes

he is
alive and
plush and
final as a plum tree

neither of us understands
cathedrals or
the man outside
watering his
lawn

if I were all the man
that he is
cat--
if there were men
like this
the world could
begin

he leaps up on the couch
and walks through
porticoes of my
admiration.
[Charles Bukowski, 'startled into life like fire', from Burning in Water Drowning in Flame]

it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion

Orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat.
I hear it, nights when I wake, over the mild sound of the air conditioner.
As I used to hear it over the beloved's heart, or
variety of hearts, owing to there having been several.
And as it beats, it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion.

So many passionate letters never sent!
So many urgent journeys conceived of on summer nights,
surprise visits to men who were nearly complete strangers.
The tickets never bought, the letters never stamped.
And pride spared. And the life, in a sense, never completely lived.
And the art always in some danger of growing repetitious.

Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning
is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond--
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dream as well as the lived--
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
[Louise Glück, 'Summer Night', from The Seven Ages]

we have had it all

Gradually, it occurs to us
that none of it was necessary--
not the heavy proclaiming
the sweat and length of our love
when, together, we thought it the end;
not the care we gave your dress,
smoothing it as we would the sky;
not the inevitable envelope of This-
is-the-time-we-always-knew-would-come,
and good-bye. All that was ever needed
was all that we had to offer,
and we have had it all. I have your absence.
And have left myself inside you.
Now when you come back to me,
or I to you, don't give it a thought.
This time, when first we fall into bed,
we won't know who we are, or where,
or what is going to happen to us.
Time is memory. We have the time.
[Marvin Bell, "Gradually, It Occurs to Us...", from Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000]

fierce and close

Our oneness is the wrestlers', fierce and close,
Thrusting and thrust;
One life in dual effort for one prize, --
We fight, and must;
For soul with soul does battle evermore
Till love be trust.

Our distance is love's severance; sense divides,
Each is but each;
Never the very hidden spirit of thee
My life doth reach;
Twain! since love athwart the gulf that needs
Kisses and speech.

Ah! wrestle closelier! we draw nearer so
Than any bliss
Can bring twain souls who would be whole and one,
Too near to kiss:
To be one thought, one voice before we die, --
Wrestle for this.
[Louisa Bevington, 'Wrestling', from Poems, Lyrics & Sonnets]

one who's been waiting all this time

Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There's a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there'll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There's a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It's not that house. It's
the next house, just over
the rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It's
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing sun in her hair. The one
who's been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
"What's kept you?"
[Raymond Carver, 'Waiting', from All of Us: The Collected Poems]

i do not know what it is about you

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 skilfully, 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 each breathing

(i do not know what it 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
[E.E. Cummings, 'Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond', from Complete Poems 1904-1962]

ride our ill weather out

The posture of the tree
Shows the prevailing wind;
And ours, long misery
When you are long unkind.

But forward, look, we lean--
Not backward as in doubt--
And still with branches green
Ride our ill weather out.
[Robert Graves, 'Lovers in Winter', from Complete Poems in One Volume]

the only thing I had

I went back in the alley
And I opened up my door.
All her clothes was gone:
She wasn't home no more.

I pulled back the covers,
I made down the bed.
A whole lot of room
Was the only thing I had.
[Langston Hughes, 'Homecoming']

sleep draws us down

Desire urges us on deeper
and further into the coral maze
of the body, dense, tropical
where we cannot tell plant
from animal, mind from body
prey from predator, swaying
magenta, teal, green-golden
anemones weaving wide open.

The stronger lusts flash
corn rows of dagger teeth,
but the little desires slip,
sleek frisky neon flowers
into the corners of the eye.
The mouth tastes their strange
sweet and salty blood
burning the back of the tongue.

Deeper and deeper into
the thick warm translucence
where mind and body melt,
where we see with our tongues
and taste with our fingers;
there the horizon of excess
folds as we approach
into plains of not enough.

Now we are returned to ourselves
flung out on the beach
exhausted, flanks heaving
out of oxygen and time,
grinning like childish daubs
of boats. Now it is sleep
draws us down, surrendered
to its dark glimmer.
[Marge Piercy, 'Wet']

the battle was so pure

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor--from breast to knees--
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you.
[Rainer Maria Rilke, 'What Survives', trans. by A. Poulin]

songs never sung

As often-times the too resplendent sun
Hurries the pallid and reluctant moon
Back to her somber cave, ere she hath won
A single ballad from the nightingale,
So doth thy Beauty make my lips to fail,
And all my sweetest singing out of tune.

And as at dawn across the level mead
On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
Which was its only instrument of song,
So me too stormy passions work my wrong,
And for excess of Love my Love is dumb.

But surely unto Thee mine eyes did show
Why I am silent, and my lute unstrung;
Else it were better we should part, and go,
Thou to some lips of sweeter melody,
And I to nurse the barren memory
Of unkissed kisses, and songs never sung.
[Oscar Wilde, 'Silentium Amoris']

the deepest world we share

In the evening we came back
Into our yellow room,
For a moment taken aback
To find the light left on,
Falling on silent flowers,
Table, book, empty chair
While we had gone elsewhere,
Had been away for hours.

When we came home together
We found the inside weather.
All of our love unended
The quiet light demanded,
And we gave, in a look
At yellow walls and open book.
The deepest world we share
And do not talk about
But have to have, was there,
And by that light found out.
[May Sarton, "A Light Left On", from Collected Poems, 1930-1993]

who can be both moth and flame?

In a Dark Time

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

The Sequel

I.
Was I too glib about eternal things,
An intimate of air and all its songs?
Pure aimlessness pursued and yet pursued
And all wild longings of the insatiate blood
Brought me down to my knees. O who can be
Both moth and flame? The weak moth blundering by.
Whom do we love? I thought I knew the truth;
Of grief I died, but no one knew my death.

II.
I saw a body dancing in the wind,
A shape called up out of my natural mind;
I heard a bird stir in its true confine;
A nestling sighed--I called that nestling mine;
A partridge drummed; a minnow nudged its stone;
We danced, we danced, under a dancing moon;
And on the coming of the outrageous dawn,
We danced together, we danced on and on.

III.
Morning's a motion in a happy mind:
She stayed in light, as leaves live in the wind,
Swaying in air, like some long water weed.
She left my body, lighter than a seed;
I gave her body full and grave farewell.
A wind came close, like a shy animal.
A light leaf on a tree, she swayed away
To the dark beginnings of another day.

IV.
Was nature kind? The heart's core tractable?
All waters waver, and all fires fail.
Leaves, leaves, lean forth and tell me what I am;
This single tree turns into purest flame.
I am a man, a man at intervals
Pacing a room, a room with dead-white walls;
I feel the autumn fail--all that slow fire
Denied in me, who has denied desire.

The Right Thing

Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will--
The right thing happens to the happy man.

The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.

God bless the roots!--Body and soul are one!
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Child of the dark, he can outleap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.

Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common-wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,

And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he would surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man.
[Theodore Roethke, from 'Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical', in Selected Poems]

on borders, and poetry

April is National Poetry Month. As I did last year, each day in April I will post a new [as yet unposted by me] poem from a different poet. Today there will be two, since yesterday got away from me somehow.

The first is from Basque poet Kirmen Uribe (watch a film clip here--and consider yourself deprived if you've never heard Basque music!) It is part of his poem "Evil Spirits," from his book, Meanwhile, Take My Hand.

This morning I consider the sheets on my bed.
Your smell rises from them, they show signs of you.
Traces of your soul.

Whether it was evil or good I don't know.
And so, repeating the olden rites with care,
I put on the music we heard last night
and slip by slow degrees into bed.
I hug the sheets to myself,
stroke their finish,
and bring fresh to mind, one by one,
every single moment of this past night.

I've had knowledge of your soul.

---

The second poem is by Michigan native Bob Hicok. It is from his book, This Clumsy Living, and is an excerpt from a poem called "My faith-based initiative."

Sometimes when I touch my wife, I am overcome, I want
to bite her, want no edge, no border between us, I shake.

Is this how you want me to pray, Lord, what if everything
we do is love, every horrible thing we do is love,
and the tiny gestures of notes beside the phone,
and blowing on soup, what if there are no distinctions,
and we, who are nothing but the impulse to distinguish,
to cut one thing from another, are wrong,
if we should have stopped after one word, one sound,
the sigh of breath when making love, of one body
pushing into another, forcing air out, I don't know
if the tongue of that sound is all I can say, Lord,
don't know why my hands are still moving, are these keys
touching you, Lord, are my fingerprints on your skin?