more poems

(listening: lifehouse, everything/no doubt, ex-girlfriend)

what happens when we buy our English textbooks.

John Donne - The Good Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I 

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then,

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?

'Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;

For love all love of other sights controls,

And makes one little room an everywhere.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,

Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

Where can we find two better hemispheres

Without sharp North, without declining West?

Whatever dies was not mixed equally;

If our two loves be one, or thou and I

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

Margaret Atwood - Variations on the word 'Love'

This is a word we use to plug

holes with. It's the right size for those warm

blanks in speech, for those red heart-

shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing

like real hearts. Add lace

and you can sell

it. We insert it also in the one empty

space on the printed form

that comes with no instructions. There are whole 

magazines with not much in them

but the word love, you can

rub it all over your body and you can

cook with it too. How do we know

it isn't what goes on at the cool

debaucheries of slugs under damp

pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-

seedlings nosing their tough snouts up

among the lettuces, they shout it.

Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising

their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two

of us. This word

is far too short for us, it has only

four letters, too sparse

to fill those deep bare 

vacuums between the stars

that press on us with their deafness.

It's not love we don't wish 

to fall into, but that fear.

This word is not enough but it will

have to do. It's a single

vowel in this metallic 

silence, a mouth that says

O again and again in wonder

and pain, a breath, a finger-

grip on a cliffside. You can

hold on or let go.

Margaret Atwood - Variations on the Word 'Sleep'

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 and 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 centre 

of your dream, from the grief

at the centre. 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.

(oh, I want to put margaret atwood - interlunar on here too, but it's so long. look it up!)

Michael Ondaatje - Bearhug

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight

I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,

then something else, walk slowly round

the corner to my son's room.

He is standing arms outstretched

waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,

give it that dark squeeze of death?

This is the hug which collects

all his small bones and his warm neck against me.

The thin tough body under the pajamas

locks to me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there

like that, before I came?

George Elliott Clarke - Paris Annapolis

There is a light in Paris - Baudelaire's

Or Rimbaud's - that cuts like grey Pernod

Drizzling misery in the brain. You pick

It up in smeared glasses, blurry with tears _

The glycerine light of memory, pale,

Unstable, unholy water, panicked

As paeans and elegies to how Love

Perishes in a thousand sins, famous

And rehearsed, the way it always must die.

Once I floated along the Seine, my brain

Pickled wicked on Belgian beer that's ten

Percent alcohol, and I wrote of her,

And the river cried out to me to drown.

I came here to this valley, to forget -

To lush pastures, to forget a parched love.

But that spectacular, parrhesian light -

The Parisian light of the Annapolis

Valley, that frosty brightness lilting

Over Gothic orchards, gargoyle apple trees

Reaped by apocalyptic autumn,

A thousand white, clapboard Notre Dames

Pastelling the Annapolis as the Seine,

That river, queasy like the Quai d'Orsay -

Shines her image upon my welling heart

That brims at Heaven like a word-swamped page, 

Brooking a delirium that banks clouds

(Their liquid palimpsests), and asks that soul

Steep under unadulterate Beauty.

And I sink, eying Gallic moonlight sculpt

An Arc de Triomphe from frank, conjucting trees

From this flaming stream, a Champs Elysees

Or an ash-white Napoleonic tomb.

ykylm,

rae