Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond



Love Poems, April 17

In CAP: “Lost Love,” p. 12

Baker, “Snow Figure,” p. 26 (and process notes)

Hicok, “Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem,” p. 127

Hirshfield, ”For What Binds Us,” p. 139

Olds, “The Knowing” and “The Promise,” pp. 220-221

Weaver, ”Sub Shop Girl,” p. 299

Williams, “Love Poem With Toast,” p. 311

|somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond | |

|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 will easily 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 color of its countries, |

|rendering death and forever with 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 |

| | |

|True Love |

|Robert Penn Warren |

| |

|In silence the heart raves. It utters words |

|Meaningless, that never had |

|A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed, |

| |

|Freckled. In a big black Buick, |

|Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat |

|In front of the drugstore, sipping something |

| |

|Through a straw. There is nothing like |

|Beauty. It stops your heart. It |

|Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It |

| |

|Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath. |

|I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched. |

|I thought I would die if she saw me. |

| |

|How could I exist in the same world with that brightness? |

|Two years later she smiled at me. She |

|Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead. |

| |

|Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee |

|Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced. |

|Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work. |

| |

|Their father was what is called a drunkard. |

|Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor |

|Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years. |

| |

|He never came down. They brought everything up to him. |

|I did not know what a mortgage was. |

|His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed. |

| |

|When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing |

|An old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing. |

|The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were |

| |

|Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought |

|I would cry. I lay in bed that night |

|And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her. |

| |

|The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered. |

|She never came back. The family |

| |

|Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now. |

| |

|But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives |

|In a beautiful house, far away. |

|She called my name once. I didn't even know she knew it. |

|Sex | |

|Michael Ryan |

| |

|After the earth finally touches the sun, |

|and the long explosion stops suddenly |

|like a heart run down, |

|the world might seem white and quiet |

|to something that watches it in the sky at night, |

|so something might feel small, |

|and feel nearly human pain. |

| |

|But it won't happen again: |

|the long nights wasted alone, what's done |

|in doorways in the dark by the young, |

|and what could have been for some. |

|Think of all the lovers and the friends! |

|Who does not gather his portion of them |

|to himself. at least in his mind? |

| |

|Sex eased through everyone, |

|even when slipping into death |

|as into a beloved's skin, |

|and prying out again to find |

|the body slumped, muscles slack. |

|and bones begun their turn to dust. |

|Then no one minds when one lover |

|holds another, like an unloaded sack. |

| |

|But the truth enters at the end of life. |

|It enters like oxygen into every cell |

|and the madness it feeds there in some |

|is only a lucid metaphor |

|for something long burned to nothing, |

|like a star. |

| |

|How do you get under your desire? |

|How do you peel away each desire |

|like ponderous clothes, one at a time, |

|until what's underneath is known? |

|We knew genitals as small things |

|and we were ashamed they led us around, |

|even if the hill where we'd lie down |

|was the same hill the universe unfolded upon |

|all night, as we watched the stars, |

|when for once our breathing seemed to blend. |

| |

|Each time, from that sweet pressure |

|of hands, or the great relief of the mouth, |

|a person can be led out of himself |

|Isn't it lonely in the body? |

|The myth says we ooze about as spirits |

|until there's a body made to take us, |

|and only flesh is created by sex. |

|That's why we enter sex so relentlessly, |

|toward the pleasure that comes |

|when we push down far enough |

|to nudge the spirit rising to release, |

|and the pleasure is pleasure of pure spirit, |

|for a moment all together again. |

|So sex returns us to beginning, and we moan. |

| |

|Pure sex becomes specific and concrete |

|in a caress of breast or slope of waist: |

|it flies through itself like light, it sails |

|on nothing like a wing, when someone's there |

|to be touched, when there's nothing wrong. |

| |

|So the actual is touched in sex, |

|like a breast through cloth: the actual |

|rising plump and real, the mind |

|darting about it like a tongue. |

|This is where I wanted to be all along: |

|up in the world, in touch with myself. . . |

| |

|Sex, invisible priestess of a good God, |

|I think without you I might just spin off. |

|I know there's no keeping you close, |

|as you flick by underneath a sentence |

|on a train, or transform the last thought |

|of an old nun, or withdraw for one moment alone. |

|Who tells you what to do or ties you down! |

| |

|I'd give up the rest to suck your dark lips. |

|I'd give up the rest to fix you exact |

|in the universe, at the wildest edge |

|where there's no such thing as shape. |

| |

|What a shame I am, if reaching the right person |

|in a dim room, sex holds itself apart |

|from us like an angel in an afterlife, |

|and, with the ideas no one has even dreamed, |

|it wails its odd music for pure mind. |

| |

|After there's nothing, |

|after the big blow-up of the whole shebang, |

|what voice from what throat |

|will tell me who I am? Each throat |

|on which I would have quietly set my lips |

|will be ripped like a cheap sleeve |

|or blown apart like the stopped-up |

|barrel of a gun. What was inside them |

|all the time I wanted always |

|to rest my mouth upon? |

| |

|I thought most everything |

|stuck dartlike in the half-dome of my brain, |

|and hung there like fake stars in a planetarium. |

|It's true that things there changed into names, |

|that even the people I loved were a bunch of signs, |

|so I felt most often alone. |

|This is a way to stay alive and nothing to bemoan. |

|We know the first time we extend an arm: |

|the body reaches so far for so long. |

|We grow and love to grow, then stop, then lie down. |

| |

|I wanted to bear inside me this tender outcome. |

|I wanted to know if it made sex happen: |

|does it show up surely in touch and talk? |

|does it leak from the mind, as heat from the skin? |

|I wanted my touching intelligent, like a beautiful song. |



My Father’s Love Letters

Yusef Komunyakaa

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax

After coming home from the mill,

& ask me to write a letter to my mother

Who sent postcards of desert flowers

Taller than men. He would beg,

Promising to never beat her

Again. Somehow I was happy

She had gone, & sometimes wanted

To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou

Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"

Never made the swelling go down.

His carpenter's apron always bulged

With old nails, a claw hammer

Looped at his side & extension cords

Coiled around his feet.

Words rolled from under the pressure

Of my ballpoint: Love,

Baby, Honey, Please.

We sat in the quiet brutality

Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,

Lost between sentences . . .

The gleam of a five-pound wedge

On the concrete floor

Pulled a sunset

Through the doorway of his toolshed.

I wondered if she laughed

& held them over a gas burner.

My father could only sign

His name, but he'd look at blueprints

& say how many bricks

Formed each wall. This man,

Who stole roses & hyacinth

For his yard, would stand there

With eyes closed & fists balled,

Laboring over a simple word, almost

Redeemed by what he tried to say.

Reunion

Carolyn Forche

Just as he changes himself, in the end eternity changes him.

—Mallarmé

On the phonograph, the voice

of a woman already dead for three

decades, singing of a man

who could make her do anything.

On the table, two fragile

glasses of black wine,

a bottle wrapped in its towel.

It is that room, the one

we took in every city, it is

as I remember: the bed, a block

of moonlight and pillows.

My fingernails, pecks of light

on your thighs.

The stink of the fire escape.

The wet butts of cigarettes

you crushed one after another.

How I watched the morning come

as you slept, more my son

than a man ten years older.

How my breasts feel, years

later, the tongues swishing

in my dress, some yours, some

left by other men.

Since then, I have always

wakened first, I have learned

to leave a bed without being

seen and have stood

at the washbasins, wiping oil

and salt from my skin,

staring at the cupped water

in my two hands.

I have kept everything

you whispered to me then.

I can remember it now as I see you

again, how much tenderness we could

wedge between a stairwell

and a police lock, or as it was,

as it still is, in the voice

of a woman singing of a man

who could make her do anything.

................
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