Overwhelming, Michael Blumenthal
If love is an overwhelming thing
and, wanting it, you are sometimes yourself
overwhelming—that is, you roll over
something, or someone, with the sheer weight
of what you want; if you are this way at times
with the wish to rectify your life,
to make a mid-course correction
because it has overwhelmed you,
and you are out, now, in mad pursuit
of an equilibrium, a coming together
that would be slow, yet overwhelming;
if you have arrived, now,
at the overwhelming conclusion
that love heals almost anything
(though never everything), then
you will deserve to be forgiven
for your haste, you will deserve
to be reprimanded, even slowed
in your mad pursuit of what is beautiful
and necessary, to be reminded,
perhaps over quail in a Portuguese restaurant,
that love, however urgent, is always slow,
that you've no right to overwhelm
what has overwhelmed you (overwhelming
as it may seem), but you must proceed
as if the things that happened
had never happened, as if by the mere
certainty of your pursuit you could tame
what is overwhelming in yourself—
an excess of enthusiasm for what was missing,
a lack brought quietly home again and made whole.
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Teachers, W.S. Merwin
Pain is in this dark room like many speakers
of a costly set though mute
as here the needle and the turning
the night lengthens it is winter
a new year
what I live for I can seldom believe in
who I love I cannot go to
what I hope is always divided
but I say to myself you are not a child now
if the night is long remember your unimportance
sleep
then toward morning I dream of the first words
of books of voyages
sure tellings that did not start by justifying
yet at one time it seems
had taught me
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January One, Sharon Auberle
Another year to mend those fences if you can,
those tattered hearts, to water grass on this side
till it's as green as the other.
Let us have champagne and pickled herring,
a chunk of rye bread and poems for breakfast.
Let that pale sun rise far to the south
and ice creep up north windows.
My African friend says
I wish u best of d best.
Funny how beliefs fall away as we age —
dreams, ideas, salvations,
all dropped along the way
till there's just this —
cold ash in the fireplace
and an empty wine bottle.
Still there are rainbows
scattered on the ceiling
from a crystal someone gave me
long ago, and hope,
always there is hope —
that this year will bring us peace
also that thing we most desire
and may they be the same,
forever may they be the same.
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New Year, Carol Ann Duffy
I drop the dying year behind me like a shawl
and let it fall. The urgent fireworks fling themselves
against the night, flowers of desire, love’s fervency.
Out of the space around me, standing here, I shape
your absent body against mine. You touch me as the giving air.
Most far, most near, your arms are darkness, holding me,
so I lean back, lip-read the heavens talking on in light,
syllabic stars. I see, at last, they pray at us. Your breath
is midnight’s, living, on my skin, across the miles between us,
fields and motorways and towns, the million lit-up little homes.
This love we have, grief in reverse, full rhyme, wrong place,
wrong time, sweet work for hands, the heart’s vocation, flares
to guide the new year in, the days and nights far out upon the sky’s
dark sea. Your mouth is snow now on my lips, cool, intimate, first kiss,
a vow. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.
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Resolution # 1,003, June Jordan
I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
in response to passionate and eager love
I will be nobody’s fool
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i am running into a new year, Lucille Clifton
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me
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Travelling Light, Kirsti Simonsuuri
It's as though I saw it all
diminished to the core
the whole day to a minute
the suitcase to a book
the long conversation to a word
looks of longing to a smile
and hopeless choice to what must be
it is so light, so clear
I want nothing more anymore
only wind stroking waves
onto a distant shore
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A Pretty Song, Mary Oliver
From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?
This isn’t a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.
Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.
And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song.
And I say to my heart: rave on.
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from Poem of the End, Marina Tsvetaeva
5
I catch a movement of his
lips, but he won’t
speak — You don’t love me?
— Yes, but in torment
drained and driven to death
(He looks round like an eagle)
— You call this home? That’s
in the heart. — What literature!
Love is flesh, it is a
flower flooded with blood.
Did you think it was just a
little chat across a table
a snatched hour and back home again
the way gentlemen and ladies
play at it? Either love is…
— A shrine?
— or else a scar.
A scar every servant and guest
can see (and I think silently:
love is a bow-string pulled
back to the point of breaking).
Love is a bond. That has snapped for
us our mouths and lives part
(I begged you not to put a
spell on me that holy hour
close on mountain heights of
passion memory is mist).
Yes, love is a matter of gifts
thrown in the fire, for nothing
The shellfish crack of his mouth
is pale, no chance of a smile:
— Love is a large bed.
— Or else an empty gulf.
Now his fingers begin to
beat, no mountains
move. Love is —
— Mine: yes.
I understand. And so?
The drum beat of his fingers
grows (scaffold and square)
— Let's go, he says. For me, let's
die, would be easier.
Enough cheap stuff rhymes
like railway hotel rooms, so:
— love means life although
the ancients had a different
name.
— Well?
— A scrap
of handkerchief in a fist
like a fish. — Shall we go? — How,
bullet rail poison
death anyway, choose! I make no
plans. A Roman, you
survey the men still alive
like an eagle:
Let's say goodbye.
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Four Evasions, Margaret Atwood
Sitting in this car, houses & wind outside,
three in the morning, windows
obliterated by snow
coats & arms around each other hands
cold, no place we can go
unable to say how much I want you
unable even to say
I am unable
*
Not that there is nothing to be
said but that there is
too much: this cripples me.
I watch with envy & desire,
you speak so freely.
*
Tell me something,
you ask at last, Anything.
To love is to let go
of those excuses, habits
we used once for our own safety
but the old words reappear
in the shut throat, decree
themselves: exile,
betrayal, failure
*
Airplane makes it off
the runway, cars & houses deflate,
diesel air & stale upholstery,
smell of you still on my skin;
thinking of my reluctance, way I withdrew
when you came towards me, why did I.
Easier to invent, remember you
than to confront you, fact
of you, admit
you, let you in.
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Love’s Language, Ella Wheeler Wilcox
How does Love speak?
In the faint flush upon the telltale cheek,
And in the pallor that succeeds it; by
The quivering lid of an averted eye—
The smile that proves the parent to a sigh
Thus doth Love speak.
How does Love speak?
By the uneven heart-throbs, and the freak
Of bounding pulses that stand still and ache,
While new emotions, like strange barges, make
Along vein-channels their disturbing course;
Still as the dawn, and with the dawn’s swift force—
Thus doth Love speak.
How does Love speak?
In the avoidance of that which we seek—
The sudden silence and reserve when near—
The eye that glistens with an unshed tear—
The joy that seems the counterpart of fear,
As the alarmed heart leaps in the breast,
And knows, and names, and greets its godlike guest—
Thus doth Love speak.
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Presence, Alejandra Pizarnik
your voice
in this inability to escape
my gaze
things rid themselves of me
if it isn’t your voice
turn me into a boat on a river of stones
a rain isolated in my fevered silence
you undo my eyes
and I ask
you please
to speak to me
forever
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Love Song, Carol Muske-Dukes
Love comes hungry to anyone’s hand.
I found the newborn sparrow next to
the tumbled nest on the grass.
Bravely opening its beak. Cats circled, squirrels.
I tried to set the nest right but the wild
birds had fled. The knot of pin feathers
sat in my hand and spoke. Just because
I’ve raised it by touch, doesn’t mean it
follows. All day it pecks at the tin image of
a faceless bird. It refuses to fly,
though I’ve opened the door. What
sends us to each other? He and I
had a blue landscape, a village street,
some poems, bread on a plate. Love
was a camera in a doorway, love was
a script, a tin bird. Love was faceless,
even when we’d memorized each other’s
lines. Love was hungry, love was faceless,
the sparrow sings, famished, in my hand.
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[I loved you…], Alexander Pushkin
I loved you; and perhaps I love you still,
The flame, perhaps, is not extinguished; yet
It burns so quietly within my soul,
No longer should you feel distressed by it.
Silently and hopelessly I loved you,
At times too jealous and at times too shy.
God grant you find another who will love you
As tenderly and truthfully as I.
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The Truelove, David Whyte
There’s a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them,
and how we are all
waiting for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
when we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love,
so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years,
you don’t want to any more,
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning,
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness,
however fluid and however
dangerous, to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
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Desire, Mary Mackey
in my dreams
I hold my lovers
next to me all at once
and ask them
what was it I desired?
my hands are full
of their heads
like bunches of cut roses
blond hair, brown hair, red, black,
their eyes are pools of bewilderment
staring up at me
from the bouquet
what was it I desired?
I ask again
was it your bodies?
did I hope by draping
your flesh over me
I could escape
boredom
loneliness
gray hairs shooting
towards me
from the future
like thin arrows?
did I think I could escape,
by taking your breath
into my mouth,
did I think I could escape
the responsibility
of breathing?
what did I desire in you?
sex?
knowledge?
power?
love?
did I expect the clouds to
crack
and blue moths to fly out of the stars?
did I expect a voice
to call to me
saying
“Here at last is the answer.”
what
I yell at them
shaking my lovers
what did I desire in you?
their ears fall off like petals
they shed their faces
in a pile at my feet
their bewildered eyes
pucker and close
centers of fallen flowers
the last face
floats down
circling in the darkness
at my feet
what did I desire in you? I whisper
the stems of their bodies
dry in my hands
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from Reflected Light, Hilary Tham
When I was twenty, I said,
All men are false,
their minds like sparrows,
feet hot on electric wires against sky.
They take off and go when the wind blows
long hair, young life.
At thirteen, I despised the unequal,
struggling marriages in my hometown, envied
the serenity of the nuns at school.
I wanted to be a nun.
At sixteen, I had learned Te, Virtue,
too well to abandon my parents as
they aged. Sitting on a curve of rain tree
root, I broke open seed pods, dry with ripeness,
picked out the red seeds. Threw them one by one
into the drain. They stayed where they landed.
No water flowed in the drain.
I remember the dry feel of dust
between my toes, and the light leaving
the sky, the road; the road that ran forever
to where land touched sky. I remember
the crows overheard squawking, bidding
others settles down, quit rocking the branch.
Love is messy, life is messy, I told myself.
The product of love is life. The product
of life is love. Love which does not last.
Babies are delivered in a puddle of blood
and water. When we die, we leave our bodies
leaking for worms. I thought of hospitals
and delivery rooms and postal systems
and said: We are God’s mailing system; each birth
is a solicitation: “Please contribute…”
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