ten more love poems
ETEL ADNAN (for love and its radical nature)
Love Poems
You refused a
voyage to the moon
in order to
stay
a moment more
in bed.
KENNETH REXROTH (for love and its immense appetites)
When We With Sappho
Stop reading. Lean back. Give me your mouth.
Your grace is as beautiful as sleep.
You move against me like a wave
That moves in sleep.
Your body spreads across my brain
Like a bird filled summer;
Not like a body, not like a separate thing,
But like a nimbus that hovers
Over every other thing in all the world.
CHRISTINA PERI ROSSI (for love and its reverence)
Evohé
Silence.
When she opens her legs
let everyone keep quiet.
Let no one whisper
or come to me
with tales or poems
or stories about catastrophes
or cataclysms
FRANCA MANCINELLI (for love and its being a conduit for many other unsayable things)
from Mother Dough
a spoon in sleep, the body
gathers the night. Swarms buried
in our chests arise, spread
their wings. How many animals
migrate within us,
passing through our heart, halting
on the curve of a hip, among the branches
of the ribs, how many
would rather not be us,
not be ensnared
between our human contours.
NÂZIM HIKMET (for love and its urging of us to continue)
I Love You
At night I light a campfire: I touch fire,
water,
cloth,
silver.
You are like a fire lit beneath the stars,
I touch you.
HETTIE JONES (for love and its miraculous conditions)
Love Against Loss
But here with my head in my old scarred
hand I am pulling you back, with you in my arms
I am climbing the ladder to life
JAMES SCHUYLER (for love and its brightening of the minute details)
Having My Say-So
Moon! look down and see the small dark pit of your reflection on this pale
shaded plain of flesh.
Heart, dream no further:
do you want to go off like the rockets on the 4th at the Washington
Monument?
ROSMARIE WALDROP (for love and its directives at once singular and infinite)
A Valentine That Can’t Be Sent
Because we say: we. We are each hour and each minute. Not altogether alone.
I have looked deep in the eyes of men and women. And feared that lastly. We make no contact.
And yet. The space between.
Can fill with love.
VICENTE HUIDOBRO (for love and its cosmic proportions)
Canto II
Yet I warn you we are sewn
To the same star
We are sewn by the same music stretching
From one to the other
By the one giant shadow shaking like a tree
Let’s be that bit of sky
That patch where the mysterious adventure unfolds
The planet’s adventure that erupts in dream-petals
JACQUES-BERNARD BRUNIUS (for love and no object—just itself)
I Love
I love blue I love known—knowing
I love lazy I love spherical
I love liquid beating drum sun if it wavers
I love to the left I love in the fire
I love because I love at the edges
