Category: Love
Everything I know, I know because of love – (Tolstoy)
Behind Glass
Don’t, they say, don’t,
like all things behind glass.
Unlatched Stars
Love, accepting that we are not pure and lucent hearts, ricocheting towards each other like unlatched stars—no, we are tainted with self. We sometimes believe the self is an invisible glass, just as we believe the body is a suit made of meat. Doubt all things invisible. Doubt all things visible.
– Descartes
The Here is Her
“The here is her,” he said, over and over
without turning round. Wait he kept
thinking, and he waited in that waiting
and knew every time we speak we stun
the word, so he hummed, but the humming
grew, each bee’d syllable toward
a name, and as he turned
almost surprised to read its sign—Eurydice
Eurydice—now the radio of his voice
dismantling sound.
– from Eurydice & Orpheus by Mark Iwin
The Book of Funnels
sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I drag my sleeping bag
into the meadow’s precise center
& crawl inside, head first. Fräulein, there is the stars’
ceaseless drilling. I close my eyes. Somewhere below me
a star-nosed mole cuts its webbed hand
on a shard of glass. I close my ears
& over my body the current of a young doe
eddies, ripples across the field, a low-lying midnight fog
swirling after her, falling back, suspended. I know you are close.
The scar on my cheek burns. I think of reentering
your atmosphere,
your long, burning hair
Don’t move. The slightest motion
& this landscape, erased by floodlights
– Christian Hawkey
Torture
You are falling in love again. This time
it is a South American general’s daughter.
You want to be stretched on the rack again.
You want to hear awful things said to you
and to admit these things are true.
You want to have unspeakable acts
committed against your person, things
nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.
You want to tell everything you know
on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,
on yourself most of all.
You want to implicate everyone in this!
Even when it’s four o’clock in the morning
and the lights are burning still –
those lights that have been burning night and day
in your eyes and brain for two weeks –
and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,
but she won’t turn off the lights that woman
with the green eyes and little ways about her,
even when you want to be her gaucho.
Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say
as you reach for the empty beaker of water.
Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.
She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,
to get up and dance with her in the nude.
No, you don’t have the strength of a fallen leaf,
not the strength of a little reed basket
battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.
But you bound out of bed
just the same, amigo, you dance
across wide open spaces.
– Raymond Carver
The Bridge
Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.
Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.
From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.
– Octavio Paz
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