I subsidenudged by the softeningdriftwood of your body,tangle on you like a water-weed caughton a submerged tree limb with sleep like a swampgrowing, closing around me — Margaret Atwood, from “Pre-Amphibian,” The Circle Game (Contact Press, 1966)
I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green,And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing… Continue reading Walt Whitman
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
I don’t want to see you caught like a word in that last line.What does the nightingale do when it runs out of things to say?Only this: I have never been so astonished at the love of one womanwhich is the way the moon finally closes its eye behind a ridge,the way the wind never… Continue reading Richard Jackson
Every story is us. That’s who we are,from beginning to no-matter-how it ends. —Rumi, from “The Polisher,” Rumi: the Book of Love Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, transl. by Coleman Barks (HarperOne, 2003)
We only imagine it endslike childhood, or rain:fever, the purl in the bone, the amendedlustre of the self, all shell and glitter, as if I had long been decidedthat flesh is a journey,something immense in the blood,like a summer of locusts, or something not quite visible, but quickas birchseed, or the threading of a wirethrough… Continue reading John Burnside
my love is a mad sunflower that forgetsfragments of sun in the silence” — Isabel Fraire, “My Love Reveals Objects,” Isabel Fraire: Poems (Mundus Artium Press, 1975)
Once she even kissed the scar on his neck, felt the pulse against her lips, cadence of his obstinate flesh, and knew then he’d always remain the quiet preceding thunder, the silence which flows before the many voices of the fleeting rain. — Bob Hicok, closing lines to “Nurse,” The Legend of Light (University of… Continue reading Bob Hicok
Letter to Jo from Radovna Valley, Slovenia If I would just hear from you, the wind would no longer huntalong the cliffs, the light would no longer seem forged.If I would hear from you, maybe this sudden fearwould not have tracked me here where the air is stillbruised by these distant deaths. Sept. 20, 1944:this… Continue reading Richard Jackson
Thick mist swirled up from the river. Someone,Who claimed to have known me years before, Approached, saying there were many poetsWandering around who wished to be alive again.They were ready to say the words they had been unable to say— Words whose absence had been the silence of love,Of pain, and even of pleasure.——Mark Strand,… Continue reading Mark Strand
The Vale of Soul-Making 