Lay your heart against my heart that I may hear your love summoning me to forgetfulness…. Lay your mouth on my mouth until all dissolves in mist about me…. – Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, from “The Book of Love,” Poetica Erotica: A Collection Of Rare And Curious Amatory Verse. Edited by Thomas Robert Smith ( Kessinger… Continue reading Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff
Yesterday Down at the Canal You say that everything is very simple and interestingit makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel doesI am terribly boredsometimes it is like seeing a bad movieother days, more often, it’s like having an acute disease of the kidneygod knows it has nothing to do with… Continue reading Frank O’Hara
And her hair was a folded flowerAnd the quiet of love in her feet. — W.B. Yeats, from “The Cap and Bells,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural. ― Fernando Pessoa, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro. (Shearsman Books October 1, 2007) Originally published September 20th 1957.
And the rain is like weeping eyes,as if the eternal moment were going blind–. —Juan Ramón Jiménez, from “A Remembrance is Moving,” Lorca & Jiménez, trans. from the Spanish by Robert Bly (Beacon Press, 1997)
Well, [Dear], our pentameter may seemto foreign ears as if it could not rousethe limp iambus from its pyrrhic dream.But close your eyes and listen to the line.The melody unwinds; the middle wordis marvelously long and serpentine:you hear one beat, but you have also heardthe shadow of another, then the thirdtouches the gong, and then… Continue reading Vladimir Nabokov
This isn’t a poem about the blue cloudslike out of focus angelsthat we saw just south of Lawrence,nor about the way we came upover the rise east of Manhattanand found the Flint Hills spread before us–nor the sunset that carried every bitof grain and speck of dustinto a silver-edged symphonyof gold and neon, and it’s… Continue reading Olive Sullivan
When it’s over, I want to say: all my lifeI was a bride married to amazement. —Mary Oliver, from “When Death Comes” The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (Vintage, 2003)
I’ve lived to se my longings die:My dreams and I have grown apart;Now only sorrow haunts my eye,The wages of a bitter heart. Beneath the storms of hostile fate,My flowery wreath has faded fast;I live alone and sadly waitTo see when death will come at last. Just so, when the winds in winter moanAnd snow… Continue reading Alexander Pushkin
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside youAre not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,Must ask permission to know it and be known.The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,I have made this place around you.If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.No two… Continue reading David Wagoner
The Vale of Soul-Making 