Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
* * *
With Friends Like You …
Even bright moonlight sucks the colors out of a landscape, which seems to be Plath’s complaint about the reflected brilliance of her lover here — presumably her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The lesson for poets is simple: don’t marry another poet.
Carbon monoxide = An odorless poison gas.
* * *
* * *
FRIENDS AND LOVERS
Can ex-lovers stay friends? Can friendship continue between lovers? Poets keep trying to answer questions like these, but the answers remain ambiguous. In these poems, Robert Browning tries ignoring his feelings and putting on a civil public face, while John Updike entertains a moment of alienation in the privacy of a shared bed.
* * *
THE LOST MISTRESS
Robert Browning
All’s over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark, ’tis the sparrows’ good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!
And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that, to-day;
One day more bursts them open fully
— You know the red turns grey.
To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we, — well, friends the merest
Keep much that I resign:
For each glance of that eye so bright and black,
Though I keep with heart’s endeavour, —
Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
Though it stay in my soul for ever! —
Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger;
I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
Or so very little longer!
* * *
Second Thoughts
Victorian gentlemen were so polite! Here, the need to appear civilized forces the poet to bite back deeper feelings.
* * *
SLEEPING WITH YOU
John Updike
One creature, not the mollusk
clamped around an orgasm, but
more loosely biune, we are linked
by tugs of the blanket and dreams whose disquiet
unsettles night’s oily depths, creating
those eddies of semi-wakefulness wherein
we acknowledge the other is there
as an arm is there, or an ancestor,
or any fact admitted yet not known.
What body is warm beside mine,
what corpse has been slain
on this soft battlefield where we wounded
lift our heads to cry for water
and ask what forces prevailed?
It is you, not dead, but entrusted
at my side to the flight the chemical mind
must take or be crazed, leaving the body
behind like matériel in a trench.
The moon throws back sunlight into the woods,
but whiter, cleansed by its bounce
amid the cold stars, and the owls
fly their unthinkable paths to pluck
the velvet mole from her tunnel of leaves.
Dreaming rotates us, but fear
leads us to cling each to each as a spar
is clung to by the shipwrecked
till dawn brings sky-fire and rescue.
Your breathing, relaxed to its center,
scrapes like a stone on rough fiber,
over and over. Your skin, steeped
in its forgetting, sweats,
and flurries of footwork bring you near
the surface; but then your rapt lungs slip
with a sigh back into the healing,
that unpoliced swirling of spirit
whose sharing is a synonym for love.
* * *
An Imperfect Fit
Waking up in the middle of the night, while his lover sleeps and dreams, Updike finds both alienation and union in the trust of two people sharing the same bed.
Mollusk = A hinged shellfish, such as a clam.
Biune = Consisting of two combined in one.
Corpse = The imagery is that of World War I trench warfare.
Chemical mind = Going without dreaming sleep for extended periods produces imbalances in brain chemistry that lead to psychosis.
Matériel = War supplies.
* * *
10
SECOND TIME AROUND
Go and leave me if you wish to.
Never let it cross your mind.
If in your heart you love another
leave me little darling. I don’t mind.
—“Columbus Stockade Blues,” Traditional
* * *
ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
How many lovers have broken up only to get back together? That’s the direction in which Michael Drayton’s heading. But William Shakespeare suggests that you might as well keep walking, make a clean break and get on to the next thing.
* * *
* * *
Doctor, Doctor!
“Physician, heal thyself!” the Gospel advises. “The heck with that, “the Elizabethan poet Drayton replies in this sonnet from Idea. “Heal me.”
* * *
“SINCE THERE’S NO HELP, COME, LET US KISS AND PART”
Michael Drayton
Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou would’st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover.
“SIGH NO MORE, LADIES” (FROM MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING)
William Shakespeare
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny.
Sing no more ditties, sing no moe,
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny nonny.
* * *
Nothing New under the Sun
Shakespeare’s take draws more on the wisdom of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. As much as we try to understand and control the world, finally it’s futile. So, with faith and hope, we accept what�
��s past and cheerfully move on to what’s next.
Hey nonny nonny = A medieval nonsense phrase, which Shakespeare uses to suggest words like nonce and a non that convey the nowness of love.
Moe = More.
Dumps = Depression.
Leavy = Leafy.
* * *
* * *
STEPPING INTO TIME
A parable offered by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus says that you cannot step into the same river twice. Here, two poets venture into the river of time and let it carry them where it will, realizing that there’s no going back to the beginning and doing it again. Love’s like that too.
* * *
* * *
Hoagland = A friend of the poet’s, in a remembered conversation.
* * *
SOURCES OF THE DELAWARE
Dean Young
I love you he said but saying it took twenty years
so it was like listening to mountains grow.
I love you she says fifty times into a balloon
then releases the balloon into a room
whose volume she calculated to fit
the breath it would take to read
the complete works of Charlotte Bronte aloud.
Someone else pours green dust into the entryway
and puts rice paper on the floor. The door
is painted black. On the clothesline
shirttails snap above the berserk daffodils.
Hoagland says you’ve got to plunge the sword
into the charging bull. You’ve got
to sew yourself into a suit of light.
For the vacuum tube, it’s easy,
just heat the metal to incandescence
and all that dark energy becomes radiance.
A kind of hatching, syntactic and full of buzz.
No contraindications, no laws forbidding
buying gin on Sundays. No if you’re pregnant,
if you’re operating heavy machinery because
who isn’t towing the scuttled tonnage
of some self? Sometimes just rubbing
her feet is enough. Just putting out
a new cake of soap. Sure, the contents
are under pressure and everyone knows
that last step was never intended to bear
any weight but isn’t that why we’re standing there?
Ripples in her hair, I love you she hollers
over the propellers. Yellow scarf in mist.
When I planted all those daffodils,
I didn’t know I was planting them
in my own chest. Play irretrievably
with the lid closed, Satie wrote on the score.
But Hoagland says he’s sick of opening
the door each morning not on diamonds
but piles of coal, and he’s sick of being
responsible for the eons of pressure needed
and the sea is sick of being responsible
for the rain, and the river is sick of the sea.
So the people who need the river
to float waste to New Jersey
throw in antidepressants. So the river
is still sick but nervous now too,
its legs keep thrashing out involuntarily,
flooding going concerns, keeping the president
awake. So the people throw in beta-blockers
to make it sleep which it does, sort of,
dreaming it’s a snake again but this time
with fifty heads belching ammonia
which is nothing like the dreams it once had
of children splashing in the blue of its eyes.
So the president gets on the airways
with positive vectors and vows
to give every child a computer
but all this time, behind the podium,
his penis is shouting, Put me in, Coach,
I can be the river! So I love you say
the flashbulbs but then the captions
say something else. I love you says
the hammer to the nail. I love Tamescha
someone sprays across the For Sale sign.
So I tell Hoagland it’s a fucked-up ruined
world in such palatial detail, he’s stuck
for hours on the phone. Look at those crows,
they think they’re in on the joke and
they don’t love a thing. They think
they have to be that black to keep
all their radiance inside. I love you
the man says as his mother dies
so now nothing ties him to the earth,
not fistfuls of dirt, not the silly songs
he remembers singing as a child.
I love you I say meaning lend me twenty bucks.
* * *
Like a River
Dean Young wrote that a sense of an “unavoidable and unopposable forward flood” of images led him to make this a love poem. Notice how they swirl and eddy with the current, somehow united in the direction they’re going.
Satie = French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925).
Coal = Diamonds and coal are both produced by pressure on carbon deposits.
Beta-blockers = Drugs that moderate the heartbeat and lower blood pressure.
* * *
* * *
What Could Have Been
Gary Snyder’s long study of Zen Buddhism informs this poem. Zen teaches the student to focus on the moment — the now—as a way of removing oneself from the operations of karma, the actions of past lives that determine present conditions.
Yase = A village in the mountains north of Kyoto, Japan, where Snyder lived for some years.
* * *
DECEMBER AT YASE
Gary Snyder
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 still are 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.
* * *
NEW BEGINNINGS
Tragedy, in the classical sense, doesn’t happen to ordinary folks. You have to be a king or a hero to be eligible. Here, then, are poems by two ordinary poets, one glad to be normal again, and another glad not to be.
* * *
* * *
Just Another Day
The life of the hymn-writer and novelist Jan Struther, the pen name of Joyce Maxtone Graham (born Joyce Anstruther), was one of striking highs and lows, including several passionate marriages and bitter breakups.
* * *
FREEDOM
Jan Struther
Now, heaven be thanked, I am out of love again!
I have been long a slave, and now am free;
I have been tortured, and am eased of pain;
I have been blind, and now my eyes can see;
I have been lost, and now the way lies plain;
I have been caged, and now I hold the key;
I have been mad, and now at last am sane;
I am wholly I, that was but a half of me.
So, a free man, my du
ll proud path I plod,
Who, tortured, blind, mad, caged, was once a God.
* * *
To-do List
Here’s a glimpse into a day in the life of Paul Blackburn, a poet and translator who was a follower of Ezra Pound. He wrote this in 1958, at a time when he had recently separated from his first wife. Blackburn went on to marry twice more.
* * *
GOOD MORNING, LOVE!
Paul Blackburn
Rise at 7:15
study the
artifacts
(2 books
1 photo
1 gouache sketch
2 unclean socks
perform the necessary ablutions
hands
face, feet
crotch
even answer the door
with good grace, even
if it’s the light-and-gas man
announcing himself as “EDISON!
Readjer meter, mister?”
For Chrissake yes
read my meter
Nothing can alter the euphoria
The blister is still on one finger
There just are
some mornings worth getting up
& making a cup
of coffee,
that’s all
I SO LIKED SPRING
Charlotte Mew
I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here; —
The thrushes too —
Because it was these you so liked to hear —
I so liked you.
This year’s a different thing, —
I’ll not think of you.
But I’ll like Spring because it is simply Spring
As the thrushes do.
* * *
LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK
Love Poetry Out Loud Page 12