Wordswithweight

EE Cummings 'i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

2007-08-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

Octavio Paz 'Coda'

2007-08-03T06:55:00.000-07:00

Perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
To learn to be silent
like the oak and the linden of the fable.
To learn to see.
Your glance scattered seeds.
It planted a tree.
I talk
because you shake its leaves.

Charlotte Mew 'Rooms'

2007-08-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

I remember rooms that have had their part
in the steady slowing of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room in Geneva,
the little damp room with the seaweed smell,
and that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide-
rooms where for good or for ill- things died.
But there is the room where we two lie dead,
though every morning we seem to wake and might just
as well seem to sleep again
as we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
out there in the sun- in the rain.

Theodore Roethke 'My Papa's Waltz'

2007-08-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

The whiskey on your breath
could make a small boy dizzy;
but I hung on like death:
such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
slid from the kitchen shelf;
my mother's countenance
could not unfrown itself

The hand that held my wrist
was battered on one knuckle;
at every step you missed
my right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
with a palm caked hard by dirt,
then waltzed me off to bed
still clinging to your shirt.

Edwin Morgan 'The Glass'

2007-08-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

To love you in shadow as in the light
is light itself. In subterranean night
you sow the fields with fireflies of delight.

Lanarkshire holds you, under its grim grass.
But I hold what you were, like a bright glass
I carry brimming through the darkening pass.

Michele Roberts 'Lacrimae recum'

2007-08-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

Another leak
in the lavatory roof
drip drip down the lightbulb.
I pissed in the dark, raindrops
smacking my shoulder-blades.

This morning I woke
to fresh wet birdsong
under a cloud of quilt
last night's hot sweetness
still fizzing between my legs.

I was fooled into swallowing spring
jumping up to make tea
and rinse dishes, whistle
a liquid kitchen oratorio.

It's your birthday next week.
This time next year
I think you'll be gone
quietly as this water
slipping over my hands.

After your funeral
we'll return
to your parched house.
We'll try to hold our mother up
like this exhausted roof.

I carry your dying
inside me
as real as milk

as I'll carry on
getting the roof fixed
making love
weeping into the washing-up

Robert Creeley 'The Rain'

2007-08-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

All night the sound had come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon,
so often? It is

that never he ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent-
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indiffernece.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Stephen Crane 'I saw a man pursuing the horizon'

2007-08-03T06:38:00.000-07:00

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
'It is futile,' I said,
'You can never-'

'You lie,' he cried,
and ran on

Charles Bukowski 'startled into life like fire'

2007-08-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

in grievous deity my cat
walks around
he walks and around and around
with
electric tail and
push-button
eyes

he is
alive and
plush and
final as a plum tree

neither of us understands
cathedrals or
the man outside
watering his
lawn

if I were all the man
that he is
cat-
if there were men
like this
the world would
begin

he leaps up on the couch
and walks through
porticoes of my
admiration

Meg Bateman 'Lightness'

2007-08-03T04:30:00.000-07:00

It was your lightness that drew me,
the lightness of your talk and your laughter,
the lightness of your cheek in my hands,
your sweet gentle modest lightness;
and it is the lightness of your kiss
that is starving my mouth,
and the lightness of your embrace
that will let me go adrift.

Maxine Kumin 'After love'

2007-08-03T04:27:00.000-07:00

Afterwards, the compromise.
bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine
your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs, coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Stephen Crane 'In the Desert III'-

2007-08-03T04:22:00.000-07:00

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
who, squatting upon the ground,
held his heart in his hands,
and ate of it.
I said, 'Is it good, friend?'
'It is bitter- bitter,' he answered;
'But I like it
because it is bitter,
and because it is my heart'.

Sylvia Plath 'Sheep in fog'- Ariel

2007-08-03T04:12:00.000-07:00

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells-
all morning the
morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
fields melt my heart.

They threaten
to let me through to a heaven
starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Sylvia Plath 'Poppies in October'- Ariel

2007-08-03T04:06:00.000-07:00

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
nor the woman in the ambulance
whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly-

A gift, a love gift
utterly unasked for
by a sky

palely and flamily
igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
that these late mouths should cry open
in a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers

John Haines 'The Snowbound City'- The owl in the mask of the dreamer

2007-08-03T03:58:00.000-07:00

I believe in this stalled magnificence,
this churning chaos of traffic,
a beast with broken spine,
its hoarse voice hooded in feather
sand mist; the baffled eyes
wink amber and slowly darken.

Of men and women suddenly walking,
stumbling with little sleighs
in search of Tibetan houses-
dust from a far-off mountain
already whitens their shoulders.

When evening falls in blurred heaps,
a man losing his way among churches
and schoolyards feels under his cold hand
the stone thoughts of that city,

impassable to all but a few children
who went on into the hidden life
of caves and winter fires,
their faces glowing with disaster.