Category: Love

I tell you this, you tell me that.
We order a cream tea, I watch your hand
reach for the bowl and hesitate,
as if what’s sweet might turn to sand.

I tell you in exotic banter
of a poem where flowers close.
Blossoms, I tell you, in deep winter
bloom, undaunted, out of loss.

The stops like stars ignite the tracks.
You touch my hair as if it’s smoke
reflected in the window backwards
and the day that’s come and gone.

How I think about her now is how
a thought is said to cross the mind:
like a bird’s shadow as it flies,
dragging its span in darkness along the ground.

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

– John Ashbery

An evening like any other. Nothing
to tell me you were present in the world.
I received no notification

I could have missed you
I could have gone home that evening,
fallen ill, met another instead of you

Someone else would have taken me that night
Isn’t it better to be made of stone?
Or am I glad it was you?

It’s better to be grass
People mow it, weed it and
it grows wild again, never the same

My soul says, Run,
even if it costs you money and love
So says my soul
But I don’t move an inch, I can’t
Because my soul, the snake, still believes
that all that remains of us
is love

Later, my son, said my father,
if he could,
you’ll be an old man.
Later you will yearn to learn the how and why.
They’ll stamp you like luggage.
They’ll hurt you for your wishes and your dreams.
And you’ll try once and for all to photograph
the how and the why of the woman
who turns between your sheets
who sings as you expand in her skin.
And later still, son, your life
will be a scrapbook.
But not for ages yet, no, not for ages yet.

I describe myself as a feathered
friend.
I describe. You watch.
While my plumes grow.

Nights, you search for a fragile cause
set in relief, precise as a loved
face.

Insects dwell in the chapel hidden
in sand.

Many years have gone by
until this moment.