fleshly apples




valentine ammo, here for you until the 14th ...💘


.


 

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 & 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 center 

of your dream, from the grief 

at the center. 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.


—Margaret Atwood
Variation on the Word Sleep



.



Coming together it is easier to work after our bodies meet paper and pen, neither care nor profit whether we write or not, but as your body moves under my hands charged and waiting, we cut the leash, you create me against your thighs, hilly with images moving through our word countries my body writes into your flesh the poem you make of me. 
Touching you I catch midnight, as moon fires set in my throat I love you, flesh into blossom I made you, and take you made, into me.

 

Audre Lorde


.


consider this place.
consider this place
as safe
when you take off your throat.
lay your voice in the middle of the bed.
open your back up to me.

 

nayyirah waheed
slow, from salt


.

 

Lanterned but by the longing in the eye,
And warmed but by the fever of the vein.


Edna St. Vincent Millay
Peril upon the paths of this desire; Collected Sonnets.


.

 

For a week my heart has pointed elsewhere: it brings us here tonight, and ties our hands–if we leaned forward, and should dip a finger into this river’s momentary black flow, infinite small stars would break like fish.


—Robert Lowell
The Charles River


.



I have been ten days in this temple
and my heart is restless.
The scarlet thread of lust at my feet
has reached up long.
If someday you come looking for me,
I will be in a shop that sells fine seafood,
a good drinking place,
or a brothel.


–Ikkyu
15th c. Zen Buddhist high priest





.



Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses.
you make him call before
he visits. you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.
—Marty McConnell


. . .






.

You are the companion of my heart
Though my body I offer to those who desire it.

My body is friendly to guests

But you the companion of my heart
Are the guest of my soul.


–Rabia
712 - 801

.



Sun stone willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever: the calm course of a star or the spring, appearing without urgency, water behind a stillness of closed eyelids flowing all night and pouring out prophecies, a single presence in the procession of waves wave over wave until all is overlapped, in a green sovereignty without decline a bright hallucination of many wings when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities of the days of the future and the fateful brilliance of misery shining like a bird that petrifies the forest with its singing and the annunciations of happiness among the branches which go disappearing, hours of light even now pecked away by the birds, omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing, like the song of the wind in a burning building, a long look holding the whole world suspended, the world with all its seas and all its mountains, body of light as it is filtered through agate, the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays, the solar rock and the cloud-colored body, color of day that goes racing and leaping, the hour glitters and assumes its body, now the world stands, visible through your body, and is transparent through your transparency, I go a journey in galleries of sound, I flow among the resonant presences going, a blind man passing transparencies, one mirror cancels me, I rise from another, forest whose trees are the pillars of magic, under the arches of light I go among the corridors of a dissolving autumn, I go among your body as among the world, your belly the sunlit center of the city, your breasts two churches where are celebrated the great parallel mysteries of the blood, the looks of my eyes cover you like ivy, you are a city by the sea assaulted, you are a rampart by the light divided into two halves, distinct, color of peaches, and you are saltiness, you are rocks and birds beneath the edict of concentrated noon and dressed in the coloring of my desires you go as naked as my thoughts go naked, I go among your eyes as I swim water, the tigers come to these eyes to drink their dreams, the hummingbird is burning among these flames, I go upon your forehead as on the moon, like cloud I go among your imagining journey your belly as I journey your dream, your loins are harvest, a field of waves and singing, your loins are crystal and your loins are water, your lips, your hair, the looks you give me, they all night shower down like rain, and all day long you open up my breast with your fingers of water, you close my eyelids with your mouth of water, raining upon my bones, and in my breast the roots of water drive deep a liquid tree, I travel through your waist as through a river, I voyage your body as through a grove going, as by a footpath going up a mountain and suddenly coming upon a steep ravine I go the straitened way of your keen thoughts break through to daylight upon your white forehead and there my spirit flings itself down, is shattered now I collect my fragments one by one and go on, bodiless, searching, in the dark.... you take on the likeness of a tree, a cloud, you are all birds and now you are a star, now you resemble the sharp edge of a sword and now the executioner's bowl of blood, the encroaching ivy that over grows and then roots out the soul and divides it from itself, writing of fire on the slab of jade, the cleft in the rock, serpent-goddess and queen, pillar of cloud, and fountain struck from the stone, the nest of eagles, the circle of the moon, the seed of anise, mortal and smallest thorn that has the power to give immortal pain, shepherd of valleys underneath the sea and guardian of the valley of the dead, liana that hangs at the pitch of vertigo, climber and bindweed and the venomous plant, flower of resurrection and grape of life, lady of the flute and of the lightning-flash, terrace of jasmine, and salt rubbed in the wound, a branch of roses for the man shot down, snowstorm in August, moon of the harrowing, the writing of the sea cut in basalt, the writing of the wind upon the desert, testament of the sun, pomegranate, wheat-ear.... life and death are reconciled in thee, lady of midnight, tower of clarity, empress of daybreak, moon virgin, mother of all mother liquids, body and flesh of the world, the house of death, I have been endlessly falling since my birth, I fall in my own self, never touch my depth, gather me in your eyes, at last bring together my scattered dust, make peace among my ashes, bind the dismemberment of my bones, and breathe upon my being, bring me to earth in your earth, your silence of peace to the intellectual act against itself aroused; open now your hand lady of the seeds of life, seeds that are days, day is an immortality, it rises, it grows, is done with being born and never is done, every day is a birth, and every daybreak another birthplace and I am the break of day, we all dawn on the day, the sun dawns and daybreak is the face of the sun.... gate of our being, awaken me, bring dawn, grant that I see the face of the living day, grant that I see the face of this live night, everything speaks now, everything is transformed, O arch of blood, bridge of our pulse beating, carry me through to the far side of this night.... gateway of being: open your being, awaken, learn then to be, begin to carve your face, develop your elements, and keep your vision keen to look at my face, as I at yours, keen to look full at life right through to death, faces of sea, of bread, of rock, of fountain, the spring of origin which will dissolve our faces in the nameless face, existence without face the inexpressible presence of presences... I want to go on, to go beyond; I cannot; the moment scatters itself in many things, I have slept the dreams of the stone that never dreams and deep among the dreams of years like stones have heard the singing of my imprisoned blood, with a premonition of light the sea sang, and one by one the barriers give way, all of the gates have fallen to decay, the sun has forced an entrance through my forehead, has opened my eyelids at last that were kept closed, unfastened my being of its swaddling clothes, has rooted me out of my self, and separated me from my animal sleep centuries of stone and the magic of reflections resurrects willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever: —Octavio Paz


.


Axis

Through the conduits of blood
my body in your body
spring of night
my tongue of sun in your forest
your body a kneading trough
I red wheat
Through conduits of bone
I night I water
I forest that moves forward
I tongue
I body
I sun-bone
Through the conduits of night
spring of bodies
You night of wheat
you forest in the sun
you waiting water
you kneading trough of bones
Through the conduits of sun
my night in your night
my sun in your sun
my wheat in your kneading trough
your forest in my tongue
Through the conduits of the body
water in the night
your body in my body
Spring of bones
Spring of suns








.



When it’s mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world - as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.  

–William Boyd 


.







.




They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.

But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.


–Rumi


.



You don’t know nights of love? No
petals of soft words float on your blood?
No secret places on your body
throb with memories, like eyes?
 
–Rainer Maria Rilke
Paris, summer 1909, from Uncollected Poems



... 



In my body you search the mountain
for the sun buried in its forest.
In your body I search for the boat
adrift in the middle of the night.


—Octavio Paz
Counterparts



.



Our bodies are not final.
 
We are moving, all of us, in our common humankind,
through the forms we love so deeply in one another,
to what our hands have already touched in lovemaking and our
bodies strain towards in each other’s darkness.


—David Malouf
An Imaginary Life, excerpt



.





 

Detail from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata 
(Lips That Have Been Kissed) 1859




.




if the rise of the Fish


If for a moment
the leaves fell upward,

if it seemed a small flock
of brown-orange birds
circled over the trees,

if they circled then scattered each in 
its own direction for the lost seed
they had spotted in tall, gold-checkered grass.

If the bloom of flies on the window
in morning sun, if their singing insistence
on grief and desire.  If the fish.
 If the rise of the fish.

If the blue morning held in the glass of the window,
if my fingers, my palms.  If my thighs.
 If your hands, if my thighs.

If the seeds, among all the lost gold of the grass.
If your hands on my thighs, if your tongue.

If the leaves. If the singing fell upward.  If grief.
For a moment if singing and grief.

If the blue of the body fell upward, out of our hands.
If the morning held it like leaves.


—Jane Hirshfield
The Lives of the Heart



.




At the Poetry Reading


I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s
wife’s legs—they’re so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I’m no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood—
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff—the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he’s on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining
myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him.

—John Brehm

 
.



A garland, quick, a wreath: I come and die.
Braid flowers as they fade. Sing, cry, and sing!
Heart in my throat, a storm swelling a gorge
shadowed and silvered by a thousand falls.
Between your own desire and my desire
the space is starry, each step quakes the ground,
and forests of anemones will spring
to round the year, making their secret sound.
Lovers in my wound’s landscape, overjoyed,
can watch the reeds bend in the crossing currents,
can drink from red pools in the honeyed thigh.
But hurry, let’s entwine ourselves as one,
our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love,
so time discovers us safely destroyed.

—Federico Garcia Lorca
Sonnet of the Garland of Roses



.




Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness.
And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. 

This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.


—Octavio Paz



.










.



up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me(will go)



—E. E. Cummings 



.




How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt.  Yet
you have taken me and quieted me.
You have been such light to me
that other women have been
your shadows.  You come near me
with the nearness of sleep.
And yet I am not quiet.
It is to be broken.  It is to be
torn open.  It is not to be
reached and come to rest in
ever.  I turn against you,
I break from you, I turn to you.
We hurt, and are hurt,
and have each other for healing.
It is healing.  It is never whole.


—Wendell Berry
Marriage (to Tanya)



.



They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath
out of the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.

Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
 as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean
of whale blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip,
and comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking
the wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing,
back and forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended
in the waves of the sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling
their whale-tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves
in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim
facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.

And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love
and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and
happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.


—D. H. Lawrence
wales weep not!


.




She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts.
Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged,
she went and wrote:

‘If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down.’


—D. H. Lawrence
The Rainbow




 .




Breathing, all creatures are

Brighter then than brightest star
You are by far

You come right inside of me
Close as you can be

You kiss my blood
and my blood kiss me.


–Mike Heron 



.



You still come to me like a fresh lover
Woman of brown and pale pink
I should have left everything for you
should have gone so deep into your heart
I'd get lost in yellow aspen leaves
stand on the straw of your autumn

I should never have taken another lover
I should have walked your hills
till my soles burned
till the sky, that old dwarf,
opened its secrets
till someone stopped whispering your name 1,000 miles away

—Natalie Goldberg
 


  .


Blue.
The word itself has another color. It's not a
word with any resonance, although the e was
once pronounced. There is only the bump now
between b and l, the relief at the end, the
whew. It hasn't the sly turn which crimson takes
halfway through, yellow's deceptive jelly, or the
rolled-down shudder in brown. It hasn't violet's
rapid sexual shudder, or like a rough road the
irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in
mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the
disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity
of red, the whine of green.

—William Gass
On Being Blue

from A Philisophical Inquiry




.
 



The elephant, the huge old beast,
     is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
     they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
     slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
     and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
     of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
     together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
     grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
     hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
     so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
     for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
     their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
     till they touch in flood.
 
—D.H. Lawrence



.
 

 

you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body,to have in your fingers
(trembling ever so little)?
                           Looking into
your eyes Nothing,i said,except the
air of spring smelling of never and forever.

....and through the lattice which moved as
if a hand is touched by a
hand(which
moved as though
fingers touch a girl's
breast,
lightly)
        Do you believe in always,the wind
said to the rain
I am too busy with
my flowers to believe,the rain answered


—E. E. Cummings



.


I want a soul mate who can sit me down,
shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh.


I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on.
And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow.
I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth.

I will do your windows.
I will care about your feelings.
Just have something in there.


–Henry Rollins




.



 







.




i like my body when it is with your
body,  It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body.  i like what it does,
i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss,  i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric fur,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh.....And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly like the thrill
of under me you so quite new

—E. E. Cummings




.


It was among ferns I learned about eternity.
Below your belly there is a curly place.

—Robert Bly


.



Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. 
Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. 
You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. 
Don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes; your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. 

And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. 

Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. 

Don’t lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. 

You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.


—Frida Kahlo




...




When I am at the centre of my unrequited love
I cannot hold it as an object
It has no sharp edges to torture anyone
I breathe the fragrance of the longing
and the longing has no proprietor

"O my love" embraces the great wide sky
as the night picks through the constellations
lifting necklace after dripping necklace
for the delight of my true beloved

"O my love" cries out from every pore of snow
and the forest answers as from great height:
"O my love"

And one heart appears and one heart dissolves
and they clasp in the place where I am held up in the storm

And I walk to you on the waves of desire
walk across the distance with something new to tell you

about your beauty your good legs and
your relentless absence


—Leonard Cohen



.



sometimes i am alive because with
me her alert treelike body sleeps
which i will feel slowly sharpening
becoming distinct with love slowly,
who in my shoulder sinks sweetly teeth
until we shall attain the Springsmelling
intense large togethercoloured instant
the moment pleasantly frightful

when, her mouth suddenly rising, wholly
begins with mine fiercely to fool
(and from my thighs which shrug and pant
a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward
singular deepest flower

which she
carries in a gesture of her hips)


—E. E. Cummings



...







.



If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it. 
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words. 
No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.
 
—Naomi Shihab Nye



.



When I love you
A new language springs up,
New cities, new countries discovered.

The hours breathe like puppies,
Wheat grows between the pages of books,
Birds fly from your eyes with tidings of honey,
Caravans ride from your breasts carrying Indian herbs,
The mangoes fall all around, the forests catch fire
And Nubian drums beat.

When I love you your breasts shake off their shame,
Turn into lightning and thunder, a sword, a sandy storm.

When I love you the Arab cities leap up and demonstrate
Against the ages of repression
And the ages
Of revenge against the laws of the tribe.

And I, when I love you,
March against ugliness,
Against the kings of salt,
Against the institutionalization of the desert.

And I shall continue to love you until the world flood arrives;
I shall continue to love you until the world flood arrives. 


—Pablo Neruda

 

.



I draw you close to me, you woman
I cannot let you go, I would do you good,

I am for you, and you are for me, not only for our own sake,
but for others' sakes,

Envelop'd in you sleep greater heroes and bards,
They refuse to awake at the touch of any man but me. 


—Walt Whitman



.



There is a fork in a branch
of an ancient, enormous maple,
one of a grove of such trees,
where I climb sometimes and sit and look out
over miles of valleys and low hills.
 
Today on skis I took a friend
to show her the trees. We set out
down the road, turned in at
the lane which a few weeks ago,
when the trees were almost empty
and the November snows had not yet come,
lay thickly covered in bright red
and yellow leaves, crossed the swamp,
passed the cellar hole holding
the remains of the 1850s farmhouse
that had slid down into it by stages
in the thirties and forties, followed
the overgrown logging road
and came to the trees. I climbed up
to the perch, and this time looked
not into the distance but at
the tree itself, its trunk
contorted by the terrible struggle
of that time when it had its hard time.
After the trauma it grows less solid.
 
It may be some such time now comes upon me.
 
It would have to do with the unaccomplished,
and with the attempted marriage
of solitude and happiness. Then a rifle
sounded, several times, quite loud,
from across the valley, percussions
of the custom of male mastery
over the earth -- the most graceful,
most alert of the animals
being chosen to die. I looked
to see if my friend had heard,
but she was stepping about on her skis,
studying the trees, smiling to herself,
her lips still filled, for all
we had drained them, with hundreds
and thousands of kisses. Just then
she looked up -- the way, from low
to high, the god blesses -- and the blue
of her eyes shone out of the black
and white of bark and snow, as lovers
who are walking on a freezing day
touch icy cheek to icy cheek,
kiss, then shudder to discover
the heat waiting inside their mouths. 



—Galway Kinnell
The Perch



.



Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,
Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
And without any feet can go to you;
And tongueless, I can conjure you at will.

Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
And grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
And if you set this brain of mine afire,
Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.


—Rainer Maria Rilke



.









.



When you love a man, he becomes more than a body.
His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. 
He is rich and sweet and right. 
He is part of the world, the atmosphere,
the blue sky and the blue water.


—Gwendolyn Brooks



.





So when the fire is extinguished, and the moon sinks,
the man says to the woman:

"Oh, woman, be very soft, be very soft and deep towards me,
with the deep silence.

Oh, woman, do not speak and stir and wound me with
the sharp horns of yourself.  

Let me come into the deep, soft places, the dark, soft places
deep as between the stars.
Oh, let me lose there the weariness of the day:
let me come in the power of the night. 
Oh, do not speak to me, nor break the deep night of
my silence and my power. 
Be softer than dust, and darker than any flower.
 

Oh, woman, wonderful is the craft of your softness,
the distance of your dark depths. 
Oh, open silently the deep that has no end,
and do not turn the horns of the moon against me."



—D. H. Lawrence



.








.



My eyes want to kiss your face.
I have no power over my eyes.
They just want to kiss your face.

I flow towards you out of my eyes,
A fine heat trembles round your shoulders,
It slowly dissolves your contours
And I am there with you, your mouth
And everywhere around you -
I have no power over my eyes.


—Solveig von Schultz



.



Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.


—Pablo Neruda

.



Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
 

Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
 

They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.
 

They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal,
washed up on the shore of a world—
or huddled against the gate of a garden—
to which they can't admit they can never be admitted.

 

—Robert Hass
Misery and Splendor




.



Lesson
Wait for her with an azure cup.
Wait for her in the evening at the spring, among perfumed roses.
Wait for her with the patience of a horse trained for mountains.
Wait for her with the distinctive aesthetic knowledge of a prince.
Wait for her with the seven pillows of cloud.
Wait for her with strands of womanly incense wafting.
Wait for her with the manly scent of sandalwood on horseback.
Wait for her and do not rush.
If she arrives late, wait for her.
If she arrives early, wait for her.
Do not frighten the birds in her braided hair.
Wait for her so that she may sit in a garden at the peak of its flowering.
Wait for her so that she may breathe this air so strange to her heart.
Wait for her to lift her garment from her leg cloud by cloud.
And wait for her.
Take her to the balcony to watch the moon drowning in milk.
Wait for her and offer her water before wine.
Do not glance at the twin partridges sleeping on her chest.
Wait and gently touch her hand as she sets a cup on marble.
As if you are carrying the dew from her wait.
Speak to her as a flute would to a frightened violin string,
As if you knew what tomorrow would bring.
Wait, and polish the night for her ring by ring.
Wait for her until night speaks to you thus:
There is no one alive other than the two of you.
So take her gently to the death you so desire,
and wait.

—Mahmoud Darwish
Lesson From The Kamasutra
Translated by Carolyn Forché 



.


In this world
love has no color–
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.


—Izumi Shikibu
The Ink Dark Moon
trans. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani



.


All night I have slept with you
next to the sea, on the island.
Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,
between fire and water.
Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,
up above like branches moved by a common wind,
down below like red roots that touch.

Perhaps your dream
drifted from mine
and through the dark sea
was seeking me
as before,
when you did not yet exist,
when without sighting you
I sailed by your side,
and your eyes sought
what now–
bread, wine, love and anger–
I heap upon you
because you are the cup
that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.
Neither night nor sleep
could separate us.

I have slept with you
and on waking, your mouth,
come from your dream,
gave me the taste of earth,
of sea water, of seaweed,
of the depths of your life,
and I received your kiss
moistened by the dawn
as if it came to me
from the sea that surrounds us.


—Pablo Neruda
Night On The Island




.
  



Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt.
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
"made her bed in his ear" and "slept him the world."
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me.
As we fell into long-distance love talk
a squeaky chittering started up all around,
and every few seconds came a sudden loud 
buzzing. I half expected to find
the insulation on the telephone line
laid open under the pressure of our talk
leaking low-frequency noises.
But a few yards away a dozen hummingbirds,
gorgets going drab or blazing
according as the sun struck them,
stood on their tail rudders in a circle 
around my head, transfixed
by the flower-likeness of the shirt.
And perhaps also by a flush rising into my face,
for a word -- one with a thick sound,
as if a porous vowel had sat soaking up
saliva while waiting to get spoken,
possibly the name of some flower
that hummingbirds love, perhaps
"honeysuckle" or "hollyhock"
or "phlox" -- just then shocked me
with its suddenness, and this time
apparently did burst the insulation,
letting the word sound in the open
where all could hear, for these tiny, irascible,
nectar-addicted puritans jumped back
all at once, as if the air gasped.
 
—Galway Kinnell 
Telephoning in Mexican Sunlight




.




After you flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.



—Sharon Olds




.








.



Breathing, all creatures are
Brighter than the brightest star
You are by far
You come right inside of me
Close as you can be

You kiss my blood
And my blood kiss me.

–Mike Heron 



...



f-i-r-e-fly:

.




.




Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

Kiss by kiss I move across your small infinity,
your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages,
and the genital fire transformed into delight

runs through the narrow pathways of the blood
until it plunges down, like a dark carnation,
until it is and is no more than a flash in the night.


—Pablo Neruda


.



Brutal
for you to parade

in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.


—Andrea Cohen 
from Brutal


.




The love that we will never
make together is the most beautiful,
the most violent, the most pure,

the most heady.


—Serge Gainsbourg







...









 .



Flora Street
For T.E. Lawrence

Now that I know what love is
I understand why it had to be given a wild horse and a
white djellabah
and sent out, howling across the desert, to win a war
That is its place, I think, at the head of raging armies,
planning battle, setting out on quests
or it should be locked up in a spice box and given to a king
Let love be immortal, let love make the king immortal,let him be holy and pure and born again in madrigals and poems
Or let love manifest itself in archeology, let it be a
revelation on the road to Petra, an incantation carved on
a Hittite Shard
Or let it streak across the sky in incandescence, ten thousand
years ago, ten thousand years from now
Let love define us. Let it burn

And now that I know what love is
I understand why it had to be punished in a cottage on a heath
for turning back into its human form
I understand why it had to be outrun, outraced, why
it had to be called by another name
And so I will not object when love is defiled
when it is unburied, buried all across the world,
when its finest robes turn out to be rags, its lovers, liars
its mythology, suspect, its kindest act, rape
when it cannot walk without stumbling, speak without
screaming, when it cannot
embrace without thinking about murder, lust, jealousy, revenge,
I will take no action, nor will I be surprised
Let love struggle in vain. Let it be damned

And then… let it return
Because even now that I know what love is
and has been and will be
I still remember you on Flora Street. It is summer;
there is music from someone’s radio and church bells
ringing in the distance
You are standing on the corner, holding a box of bakery cookies
and you — your heart, being, kisses, body and bone — you are
waiting for me
And that alone may be enough to stay the hand of banishment,
to journey out to where love wanders in its white djellabah,
innocent and arrogant,
posing itself against the setting sun. And though its terms remain
forever unacceptable,
its promises broken before they are even made, you alone,
alive in me in memories of Flora Street, may be the reason
to pretend I have seen nothing
as love, in its finery or tatters, slips back into the world

—Eleanor Lerman



sleep-prettydarling:

YES YES YES.



 

.

  

takeover


Because of my compelling and insatiable desire
to solve the mystery of your perplexing behavior,
I propose to steal quietly into your head
one day while you are out visiting a friend.

Then I will discover and photograph those secret
maps and documents you file behind your eyes.
I will enlarge them and pin them to my walls.
I will assemble whole sections with scotch tape

and examine them with floodlights and microscope
on my bedroom floor after I remove the mirrors.
But this is only a preliminary step.  My goal is
to have extended contact with theconcave side

of your contact lenses, so I am planning
a surprise invasion and occupation of your entire
visceral and musculo-skeleton nervous system,
not to control, but merely to monitor,

the network of your sensibility. Then
when we make love I will finally feel
the intensity and depth of your pleasure
and learn the exquisite details of your

other intimacies. At last I will know the ecstasy
of your inflamed passion. Forgive me, I am
only seeking another point of view, so that
when you turn on me again and ask

“Who is this I who is asking? ‘Who is this you?’”
It will be this you who is asking this I. 

 

—Lionel Kearns



.







.



You said ‘I love you.’

Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still
the thing we long to hear?
‘I love you’ is always a quotation. 

You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.


—Jeanette Winterson
Written on the Body


.



 .


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?

—Michael Ryan



.




The planes bound for all points everywhere
etch lines on my office window. From the top floor
London recedes in all directions, and beyond:
the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map;
I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes.
The pact we made to read our farewells exactly
at two in the afternoon with you in the air
holds me like a heavy winter coat.

Your unopened letter is in my pocket, beating.


—John Stammers



.

 





 .





It took all my energy to want you
and the rest of me to go after you
and then one day I knew
that I had you.
I was standing at the sink rinsing dust
from a bunch of grapes.

All my energy had been spent
pursuing you and then I had you
and then
I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the grapes.

The day was hot, that day
when I knew I had you. The man
in the house across the street
was cursing his wife.

An hour later I went to see about a job,
and the woman behind the desk
with her gold spectacles
caused me to remember that I had you.

Outside the sky was blue as a china plate.
There is nothing to do
on a day like that
but go to the beach. I caught three fish,
black and heavy as paperweights.

After the third I stopped to clean them in the ribboning surf,
three black fish flecked gold as the capes
of Egyptian kings,
strong swimmers, broad across the backs.

I slit the bellies, tossed the guts and roe
to the waiting gulls, cut the heads off slant
and lay them one by one on the gurgling sand
while I thought of you. Three small boys
picked them up
and carried them away,
holding them aloft as if on pikes.

Even as I fry these fish I think of
their heads against the sky
while the birds worked on a patch of sea
on the lee side of a sand bar that split the water
like the broken spine of a ship,
and as I turn these fish in the pan
I think of the day when I knew I had you,
and then the next, and then the day after that.

—Tony Wallace



 




.


He takes my body with both his hands — the same way he raises a piece of fruit to his lips. Like a hungry child! With both his hands!
—Rikki Ducornet
The Word “Desire”

.



Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Mirror in the Well



.











.


She anchored
Her hips
In his eyes
And brought him
To port.

—Malcolm de Chazal
Sens-Plastique



.




Having used every subterfuge
To shake you, lies, fatigue, or even that of passion,
Now I see no way but a clean break. 
I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.
You nod assent. Autumn turns windy, huge,
A clear vase of dry leaves vibrating on and on. 
We sit, watching. When I next speak
Love buries itself in me, up to the hilt.



—James Merrill

A Renewal 



.



Didn’t I stand there once, white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper, swearing I’d never go back? And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth?
And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid, knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire into the further room of love? And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness we licked
from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not as lovely
as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?
 
—cecilia woloch


.




 



.




You are driving to the airport
Along the glittering highway
Through the warm night,
Humming to yourself.
The yellow rose buds that stood
On the commode faded and fell
Two days ago. Last night the
Petals dropped from the tulips
On the dresser. The signs of
Your presence are leaving the
House one by one. Being without
You was almost more than I
Could bear. Now the work is squared
Away. All the arrangements
Have been made. All the delays
Are past and I am thirty
Thousand feet in the air over
A dark lustrous sea, under
A low half moon that makes the wings
Gleam like fish under water –
Rushing south four hundred miles
Down the California coast
To your curving lips and your
Ivory thighs.


—Kenneth Rexroth



.




My eyes want to kiss your face.
I have no power over my eyes.
They just want to kiss your face.

I flow towards you out of my eyes,
A fine heat trembles round your shoulders,
It slowly dissolves your contours
And I am there with you, your mouth
And everywhere around you -
I have no power over my eyes.


—Solveig von Schultz




.



Her lips on his could tell him better than all her stumbling words.  


–Margaret Mitchell



.



Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

—Jack Gilbert



.




I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
 
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
 
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
 
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.



—Pablo Neruda



.




Exchange of Fire

When your left arm touched my right
as we both reached for the dessert
menu in the all-night diner, a spark
began smouldering in my sleeve, broke
a hole the size of a heart in the patched
elbow of your jacket. 

 Dirty white smoke enveloped our bodies
as the conversation turned
to the underground fire we'd all seen
on the news, a fire that had raged up
to consume everything in its path.
The air in the diner stank of charred meat;
under the table I took my husband's right
hand and placed it on my left thigh
where flesh and garter meet. 
I wanted only that, until your left knee
grazed my right, and this time
there was an explosion, just as our waiter
lit the Crepes Suzette your wife had ordered
for you. Flames engulfed our table
and we moved to another booth, my husband
and your wife saying we can't take
you two anywhere simultaneously.
I had to decide: should I risk
asking for something sweet now, or abstain? -
when you said think of the women on the Titanic
who pushed away from dessert that night
because their skirts were getting tight.
It made me think all right
and then when we were all friends again,
laughing, the whole length of your left leg
rubbed the length of my right and every
light in the joint went out, life stopped
for me, it meant a scandal somewhere in the future.
I tried to focus on the scorched dessert
menu feeling the beginnings of violent
pleasure. I reached for my knee where the hair
had been singed off, where the flesh was
already oozing, and I remember thinking,
I like this. It was the beginning
of loneliness, also.
For when the lights came back on I was
afraid to move from my seat; when we rose
to say goodnight we would be expected
to embrace. We had to: the flesh
of your body down the length of my trembling
body, the thin cloth covering my breasts
covered with flames, the apologies to your wife
for the plastic buttons on your shirt front melting,
your belt buckle welding us together in our heat.
At home I'm still burning when my husband
pours lighter fluid on his hands and feet and sets
himself on fire: only by entering fire can I
put the fire out. This time I might finally
do it. It may be a threat, an end to pain,
or all there is left to make of love. 


—Susan Musgrave 



.




Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers
 Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.
Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses. 

—Pablo Neruda
Translation by Christopher Logue


.

 

Two bicyclers pause for a kiss on the overlook of
the Valle Grande, their helmets a pair of hungry
electrons colliding as our mouths melt down and
the heart reaches critical mass.
 
—Jim Sagel


.



I watch your fingers
press around a pen
cruise words across a page

a gentle pulse of muscle
ripples your skin smooth, it’s silk
in lamplight glimmers

Suddenly, just this
is sensuous

each freckle on your forearm
must be kissed

and I
send breathless caresses


—Sandy Shreve



.



When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. 

His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. 

He is rich and sweet and right. 

He is part of the world, the atmosphere,
the blue sky and the blue water.


—Gwendolyn Brooks

 

.




I’m sorry all the kisses
I scrawled on your neck were written
in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you
so hard one of your legs would pop out
of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press
your face against the porthole of my submarine.
I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years
to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding
off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding
over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate
to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy
of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph
from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.


—Jeffrey McDaniel
The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy




.







.


I want
to do with you what spring does with
the cherry trees. 
—Pablo Neruda


.



Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.

They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.

If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.

If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.


Anne Stevenson



.




But what lovers we were, what lover,
Even when it was all over

the deadweight bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang

like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port

and watched our unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;

The candlelight strange on our faces
like the silent tiny blazes

And coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs

Into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,

Gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down

To mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back

To back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.

—Don Paterson



.



Some kinds of love, Marguerita told Tom
Between thought and expression lies a lifetime

Situations arise because of the weather
And no kinds of love are better than others



Some kinds of love, Marguerita told Tom
Like a dirty French novel, the absurd courts the vulgar

And some kinds of love, the possibilities are endless
And for me to miss one would seem to be groundless



I heard what you said, Marguerita heard Tom 
And of course you're a boy, but in that you're not charmless

For a boy is a straight line, that finds a wealth in division
And some kinds of love are mistaken for vision



Put jelly on your shoulder, let us do what you fear most
That from which you recoil, but which still makes your eyes moist

Put jelly on your shoulder, lie down upon the carpet
Between thought and expression, let us now kiss the culprit



I don't know just what it's all about
Put on your red pajamas and find out


—Lou Reed



.




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 it’s smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with it’s 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 center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway

again and; 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
and; that necessary.


—Margaret Atwood
variation on the word sleep




.




This first interview was what every rendezvous must be between persons of passionate disposition, who have stepped over a wide distance quickly, who desire each other ardently, and who, nevertheless, do not know each other.
It is impossible that at first there should not occur certain discordant notes in the situation, which is embarrassing until the moment when two souls find themselves in unison.

If desire gives a man boldness and disposes him to lay restraint aside, the mistress, under pain of ceasing to be woman, however great may be her love, is afraid of arriving at the end so promptly, and face to face with the necessity of giving herself, which to many women is equivalent to a fall into an abyss, at the bottom of which they know not what they shall find. The involuntary coldness of the woman contrasts with her confessed passion, and necessarily reacts upon the most passionate lover. Thus ideas, which often float around souls like vapours, determine in them a sort of temporary malady. In the sweet journey which two beings undertake through the fair domains of love, this moment is like a wasteland to be traversed, a land without a tree, alternatively damp and warm, full of scorching sand, traversed by marshes, which leads to smiling groves clad with roses, where Love and his retinue of pleasures disport themselves on carpets of soft verdure.


–Honore De Balzac



.





night writing





 this doesn’t compare to the feel of your skin



...




The Dalliance Of The Eagles

Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,
Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate divorce flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.


—Walt Whitman




.




may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she
 
(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she
 
(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she) 

may i stay said he
which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she
 
(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)


—E. E. Cummings



 .




Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet  
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not  

but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash

 
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body writes into your flesh

the poem you make of me.
Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.


—Audre Lorde 


.


 




Kubla Khan


In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.


—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798



.




sometimes i am alive because with
me her alert treelike body sleeps
which i will feel slowly sharpening
becoming distinct with love slowly,

who in my shoulder sinks sweetly teeth
until we shall attain the Springsmelling
intense large togethercoloured instant
the moment pleasantly frightful

when, her mouth suddenly rising, wholly
begins with mine fiercely to fool
(and from my thighs which shrug and pant
a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward
singular deepest flower

which she
carries in a gesture of her hips)


—E. E. Cummings




.




So when the fire is extinguished, and the moon sinks,
the man says to the woman:
"Oh, woman, be very soft, be very soft and deep towards me,
with the deep silence.

Oh, woman, do not speak and stir and wound me with
the sharp horns of yourself. 

Let me come into the deep, soft places, the dark, soft places
deep as between the stars. 

Oh, let me lose there the weariness of the day:
let me come in the power of the night. 

Oh, do not speak to me, nor break the deep night of
my silence and my power. 

Be softer than dust, and darker than any flower. 

Oh, woman, wonderful is the craft of your softness,
the distance of your dark depths. 

Oh, open silently the deep that has no end,
and do not turn the horns of the moon against me."

—D. H. Lawrence


.



Above the lawn the wild beetles mate
and mate, skew their tough wings
and join. They light in our hair,
on our arms, fall twirling and twinning
into our laps. And below us, in the grass,
the bugs are seeking each other out,
antennae lifted and trembling, tiny legs
scuttling, then the infinitesimal
ah’s of their meeting, the awkward joy
of their turnings around. O end to end
they meet again and swoon as only bugs can.
This is why, sometimes, the grass feels electric
under our feet, each blade quivering, and why
the air comes undone over our heads
and washes down around our ears like rain.
But it has to be spring, and you have to be
in love—acutely, painfully, achingly in love—
to hear the black-robed choir of their sighs.


—Dorianne Laux,
The Orgasms of Organisms



.










.




Inhabited Body

Body on a horizon of water,
body open
to the slow intoxication of fingers,
body defended
by the splendour of apples,
surrendered hill by hill,
body lovingly made moist
by the tongue’s pliant sun.

Body with the taste of cropped grass
in a secret garden,
body where I am at home,
body where I lie down
to suck up silence,
to hear
the murmur of blades of grain,
to breathe
the deep dark sweetness of the bramble bush.

Body of a thousand mouths,
all tawny with joy,
all ready to sip,
ready to bite till a scream
bursts from the bowels
and mounts to the towers
and pleads for a dagger.
Body for surrendering to tears.
Body ripe for death.

Body for imbibing to the end –
my ocean, brief
and white,
my secret vessel,
my propitious wind,
my errant, unknown,
endless navigation.


Eugénio de Andrade
 Translated by Alexis Levitin



.



because i love you)last night
clothed in sealace
appeared to me
your mind drifting
with chuckling rubbish
of pearl weed coral and stones; 
 
lifted,and(before my
eyes sinking)inward,fled;softly
your face smile breasts gargled
by death:drowned only 
 
again carefully through deepness to rise
these your wrists
thighs feet hands

—E. E. Cummings
  
 
.
 
 
For women
the best aphrodisiacs are woThe G-spot is in the ears.

He who looks for it below there
is wasting his time.

—Isabel Allende
 


.




Young Sycamore


I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily
into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its height-
and then
dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sides-
hung with cocoons
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top



—William Carlos Williams




.



Genesis



It was late, of course,
just the two of us still at the table
working on a second bottle of wine

when you speculated that maybe Eve came first
and Adam began as a rib
that leaped out of her side one paradisal afternoon.

Maybe, I remember saying,
because much was possible back then,
and I mentioned the talking snake
and the giraffes sticking their necks out of the ark,
their noses up in the pouring Old Testament rain.

I like a man with a flexible mind, you said then,
lifting your candlelit glass to me
and I raised mine to you and began to wonder
what life would be like as one of your ribs—
to be with you all the time
riding under your blouse and skin,
caged under the soft weight of your breasts,

your favorite rib, I am assuming,
if you ever bothered to stop and count them

which is just what I did later that night
after you had fallen asleep
and we were fitted tightly back to front,
your long legs against the length of mine,
my fingers doing the crazy numbering that comes of love.


—Billy Collins
Horoscopes for the Dead



.




Misery and Splendor


Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.

Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.

They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.

They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal,
washed up on the shore of a world—
or huddled against the gate of a garden—
to which they can't admit they can never be admitted.


—Robert Hass


.


 

"I'm about", you announce,
"as drunk as you're going to get me."
As if I had gotten you drunk.
As if the only way to proceed
was for you to be weak,
and for me to exploit your weakness.
You take me to your room.

I had loved your body for years,
its compact curves half seen, half imagined
under the drab clothing you favor.
Protective coloration,
as if you feared being noticed.
I didn't mind; I've never believed
in gilding the lily.

But now your camouflage is coming off
and breasts are spilling into my hands
like a soft warm jackpot.
I always liked the delicate line of your neck
and now I nuzzle it under the edge
of your short straight hair.
You seem frightened,
as if this could only be due to my being blind,
as if you had nothing to offer
and any moment might expose your deception.

"Do you know how beautiful you are?" I ask,
and you answer "No!" in near panic,
as if it couldn't be possible,
as if you'd be punished for acknowledging it.
So without words, I show you how beautiful you are
by drowning in your sweetness,
by drowning you in mine.

I sense that you want to be held, restrained,
as if you think: - This isn't my doing, (no),
This isn't my fault. So as we approach the terror (no)
more beautiful than beauty,
I hold you - (no), tight, tight,
hold you down - (no)
keep you from moving at all,
so that no one (no) will ever blame you
for our (no, no!) upwelling bliss.

for W.
November 18, 1999



—Howard A. Landman



.




When I was learning words
and you were in the bath
there was a flurry of small birds
and in the aftermath
of all that panicked flight,
as if the red dusk willed
a concentration of its light:
a falcon on the sill.

It scanned the orchard's bowers,
then pane by pane it eyed
the stories facing ours
but never looked inside.
I called you in to see.

And when you steamed the room
and naked next to me
stood dripping, as a bloom
of blood formed in your cheek
and slowly seemed to melt,
I could almost speak
the love I almost felt.

Wish for something, you said.
A shiver pricked your spine.
The falcon turned its head
and locked its eyes on mine,
And for a long moment I'm still in
I wished and wished and wished
the moment would not end.
And just like that it vanished.


—Christian Wiman


.



For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves.
I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand,
I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair.

I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine.

I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air.

I do it for love. For love, I disappear.


—Kim Addonizio


.








  
.




I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I would go to him where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles,
his calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I'd open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me-the ship's
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the first man clanging
off the hull's silver ribs, spark of lead
kissing metal, the clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle
and the long drive home. 



—Dorianne Laux



.



 

When my body had forgotten its purpose,
when it just hung off my brainstem like whipped mule.
When my hands only wrote. When my mouth only ate.
When my ass sat, my eyes read, when my reflexes
were answers to questions we all already knew.
Remember how it was then that you slid your hand
into me, a fork in the electric toaster of my body. Jesus,
where did all these sparks come from? Where was all
this heat? Remember what this mouth did last night?
And still, this morning I answer the phone like normal,
still I drink an hour’s worth of strong coffee. And now
I file. And now I send an email. And remember how
my lungs filled with all that everything? Remember
how my heart was an animal you released from its cage?
Remember how we unhinged? Remember all the names
our bodies called each other? Remember how afterwards,
the steam rose from us, like a pair of smiling ghosts?”


—Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz




.




John

He (please don’t tell) is the one man in my life
(almost 70 now?) I’ve ever wanted to grab by the belt buckle
and ride so fast the bed would take off.
but I’d just sit there all those interminable nights
at the Center for the Arts, my thigh grazing his—
through high school, Lucy and I drove to Cambridge
in my mother’s car, hid a few houses from his,
and followed him to the clinic where he worked,
then to all his Saturday afternoon chores.
We’d haunt Café Algiers.
When Lucy died he called me.
When I met my husband, I called him.
I can tell he has come to New York.
I can feel him walking in New York,
I can feel him walking up my block
and stopping to buy water
and looking up my building
up the 40 floors up through my floor
up between my legs
up through my head

—Martha Rhodes




.



Love: Beginnings

They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them,
   so much frank need and want,
 so much absorption in the other and the self
   and the self-admiring entity and unity they make --
 her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back
   so far in her laughter at his laughter
 he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual
   in the headiness of being craved so,
 she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again,
   touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
 every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away
   soaring back in flame into the sexual --
 that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin,
 that filling of the heart,
 the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart,
   snorting again, stamping in its stall.
 
—C. K.  Williams 




💗