{"id":6056,"date":"2020-06-22T12:00:08","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/?p=6056"},"modified":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T10:19:41","slug":"of-flares-of-flowers-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/posts\/of-flares-of-flowers-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Of flares, of flowers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Loving one face, and the soul that animates it
\n142 erotic sonnets<\/em><\/p>\n

\nRIVER READ TALKING INTRO FOR “OF FLARES, OF FLOWERS”
\n<\/h2>\n

\nAs talking apes, we handle the matter of urgent mating in a way quite different from our hairier cousins. For us musing humans, loving someone seems to be equal parts artifice and fascination. We love someone, first, not for who they are, but for whom we make them out to be through the mists of dim recognition\u2013across the roomful of phony fog and the pulsing rainbows of the disco ball. This fascination, combined with the artifice of who they present themselves to be, is just the initial sauce of the gourmand’s smorgasbord of attraction and affection we term “love.”\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd where the imagination latches its mollusk, it secretes its magic\u2013transforming the rottenest rowboat into Cleopatra’s bejeweled barge.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe courtship between two adult humans contains, on average, one million words\u2013roughly 100,000 more words than Shakespeare’s complete plays. This is the titanic effort that the imagination brings to bed with us. And from this art, we weave the dreams of our sexual lives, our tenderest expressions of affection. And, indeed, we weave our own families.\n<\/p>\n

\nHow we imagine love is important. To be raw, to be vulnerable, to weave our dreams of love in utter nakedness, is important. It’s what we talking apes do. We do it incessantly and, in all the animal kingdom, we do it with an artifice and fascination compounded mainly of words.\n<\/p>\n

\nThis human intrusion of the heart and cock into one’s interpersonal affairs can be awkward, embarrassing, and nearly impossible to winningly negotiate.\n<\/p>\n

\nGGB
\nJuly, 2012\n<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

SONNETS LIST<\/h3>\n
    \n
  1. My eyes are weary of looking for lovers
    \n<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. This is the first morning of the first da<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. My backpack is weighted with lilies and candle<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. I know you minimally only<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Let us play a game then, you and I<\/a><\/li>\n
  6. Magnolia petals on a tank… fall lightly…<\/a><\/li>\n
  7. It’s enough. To play with scarves in summer air<\/a><\/li>\n
  8. What is time, and how is it our own<\/a><\/li>\n
  9. The fierce being you would have spring from you<\/a><\/li>\n
  10. If Cezanne painted you, what village would you be<\/a><\/li>\n
  11. The blossoms that stood out on the branch<\/a><\/li>\n
  12. Calm as ponds let yourself be today<\/a><\/li>\n
  13. Dancing makes a motion of its own<\/a><\/li>\n
  14. I would have you grow invisible<\/a><\/li>\n
  15. Return to me naked, I would have you so<\/a><\/li>\n
  16. You have such a subtle, neutral scent<\/a><\/li>\n
  17. Love me fiercely, though nipples bleed<\/a><\/li>\n
  18. You open for me, a luminous anemone<\/a><\/li>\n
  19. Each night my mantra sounds your name<\/a><\/li>\n
  20. Eros’ rose shed red shreds of petals<\/a><\/li>\n
  21. When the tongue darts tart to the aspic place<\/a><\/li>\n
  22. The soft musk of your pale downy neck<\/a><\/li>\n
  23. Love\u2014-Love thundering, love underlined<\/a><\/li>\n
  24. I’d trade prayerbeads for millstones<\/a><\/li>\n
  25. Why is love my measure and my means<\/a><\/li>\n
  26. Who were you before we entered the trees<\/a><\/li>\n
  27. Out of the bitter snow, I came rattling in<\/a><\/li>\n
  28. Go until the earth lies between us, pregnant<\/a><\/li>\n
  29. The soft fall of flares, of flowers, once the orgasm’s<\/a><\/li>\n
  30. For you, I would be little as the rain, and fall on you<\/a><\/li>\n
  31. Love has nourished us like a beet root, red<\/a><\/li>\n
  32. What is this enigma that has ruined my sleep<\/a><\/li>\n
  33. How one goes on wrestling with destiny<\/a><\/li>\n
  34. My heart clicks on and off, a sacred searchlight<\/a><\/li>\n
  35. Whose face this is I think I know–<\/a><\/li>\n
  36. Every day the poet sat down and thought<\/a><\/li>\n
  37. Adam and Eve, by their garden wall surrounded<\/a><\/li>\n
  38. I kiss your statue, fervid while you vacillate<\/a><\/li>\n
  39. How can tonight come without you her<\/a><\/li>\n
  40. The wind insisted nothing, came to my face<\/a><\/li>\n
  41. When I create my love for you in my heart<\/a><\/li>\n
  42. How should I write a poem of love<\/a><\/li>\n
  43. All day long I have followed this sad dog<\/a><\/li>\n
  44. I can’t have you every day, can I<\/a><\/li>\n
  45. So much time has gone by, sliding and washing<\/a><\/li>\n
  46. Lovers always meet each other twice<\/a><\/li>\n
  47. You are sleeping, a hill where night-snow falls<\/a><\/li>\n
  48. A little pale shy wetness, a little slit<\/a><\/li>\n
  49. If you must go today, shed your skin<\/a><\/li>\n
  50. Say it once and best, unlike the lark<\/a><\/li>\n
  51. Grief is not part of us, part of this loving<\/a><\/li>\n
  52. Venus is bending now above the bow<\/a><\/li>\n
  53. In your mouth there glows a holy rose<\/a><\/li>\n
  54. You come to me encased in a shell of light<\/a><\/li>\n
  55. Your feet are wounded doves walking home<\/a><\/li>\n
  56. You come carrying gifts no other knows<\/a><\/li>\n
  57. Your heart’s composed of grey mourning doves<\/a><\/li>\n
  58. Black butterflies crowd the white church with shadows<\/a><\/li>\n
  59. Someone has written your body on the grass<\/a><\/li>\n
  60. When love spills white on her cloudy breast<\/a><\/li>\n
  61. After the white heat has left the pen<\/a><\/li>\n
  62. The lamp burns in the corner of my room<\/a><\/li>\n
  63. We drive on beautiful white roads until<\/a><\/li>\n
  64. Though packed with joy, I’m starved for joy<\/a><\/li>\n
  65. In you I discover the sea, am lost in waters<\/a><\/li>\n
  66. Your eyes are two moondrops, two bowls<\/a><\/li>\n
  67. Our wings are straight out, our wingtips just<\/a><\/li>\n
  68. In you I taste my death, your mouth the open<\/a><\/li>\n
  69. When you kiss me my face changes<\/a><\/li>\n
  70. Are we sowing daughters when we seesaw<\/a><\/li>\n
  71. You have filled me the way a jug of wine is filled<\/a><\/li>\n
  72. How often have I turned the pages of your book<\/a><\/li>\n
  73. Let us hunt among smallnesses for love<\/a><\/li>\n
  74. Mysteriously each day flares and disappears<\/a><\/li>\n
  75. Come to me, come to me, wild rose who grows<\/a><\/li>\n
  76. A thorny ladder wraps the mountain<\/a><\/li>\n
  77. Death, I don’t get it\u2014Death seems like a fake<\/a><\/li>\n
  78. We’re here to celebrate a life of dust<\/a><\/li>\n
  79. Bury me standing and pennyeyed<\/a><\/li>\n
  80. I am cut, and in my heart is planted<\/a><\/li>\n
  81. We’ve been kissing till our lips are chapped<\/a><\/li>\n
  82. Voyeurs at the wall of Abelard<\/a><\/li>\n
  83. I would break over your body like a wave<\/a><\/li>\n
  84. I tie you to the chair and feel the rough<\/a><\/li>\n
  85. Dear, I am jealous of you, the way a pearl<\/a><\/li>\n
  86. Desire rifles me, disorders my innards<\/a><\/li>\n
  87. Life, I hold you up and look through you<\/a><\/li>\n
  88. I try to go to sleep, but can only think<\/a><\/li>\n
  89. Being here, meeting you, my life, well, my life<\/a><\/li>\n
  90. Life, they say, occurs in the caesuras<\/a><\/li>\n
  91. I am blind, blinded, a lost mole escaped out<\/a><\/li>\n
  92. Your hands prepare a night for us together\u2014-<\/a><\/li>\n
  93. When you abide beside me I am calm<\/a><\/li>\n
  94. When I am feeling troubled and at a loss<\/a><\/li>\n
  95. She is a compass needle going round<\/a><\/li>\n
  96. You held my hand and held me back to make<\/a><\/li>\n
  97. Have you ever wanted to fly<\/a><\/li>\n
  98. Love comes sneaky like the coyote<\/a><\/li>\n
  99. Because my dreams know you, I do not<\/a><\/li>\n
  100. Break like an oak, or keep faith forever\u2014-<\/a><\/li>\n
  101. Shameless is my mistress wetly caught<\/a><\/li>\n
  102. For three dates you remained a mermaid to me<\/a><\/li>\n
  103. My love is not a river, but it is<\/a><\/li>\n
  104. Other constellations have all flashed to ash\u2014-<\/a><\/li>\n
  105. File me down to an unbearable essence<\/a><\/li>\n
  106. Your love’s locked up in her intricate castle<\/a><\/li>\n
  107. In the mist, in the rain<\/a><\/li>\n
  108. Play the sistrum softly, softly<\/a><\/li>\n
  109. As hypnotic as a living fan of coral<\/a><\/li>\n
  110. Love, so great an emblem, a divinest thing<\/a><\/li>\n
  111. I thought I knew just what to do with you<\/a><\/li>\n
  112. Grey’s anatomy and all that crap<\/a><\/li>\n
  113. Miscreant Time has spelt his troubles plain<\/a><\/li>\n
  114. Love cannot choose, but knows it is chosen<\/a><\/li>\n
  115. Although my joy with pain is blistered<\/a><\/li>\n
  116. Death will take you, and I will bless you: “Go.”<\/a><\/li>\n
  117. If I were without whoever you are<\/a><\/li>\n
  118. Tell me, does love have sorrow for its marrow<\/a><\/li>\n
  119. Death holds lovers who forget each other<\/a><\/li>\n
  120. Sitting there so saucily thoughtful<\/a><\/li>\n
  121. I’m not quite sure I quite know quite how<\/a><\/li>\n
  122. What can summer add to what our winter<\/a><\/li>\n
  123. I like to watch you try the new words on your tongue<\/a><\/li>\n
  124. The world is packed tight with Kreons and Medeas<\/a><\/li>\n
  125. I burn through muses like Estes rockets–<\/a><\/li>\n
  126. Would you buy me a backyard full of dreams<\/a><\/li>\n
  127. You had grown quiet in a snowy field<\/a><\/li>\n
  128. Where do the birds go when it rains<\/a><\/li>\n
  129. I do not love you the way fire loves wood<\/a><\/li>\n
  130. At sunset, how it all runs away from one<\/a><\/li>\n
  131. Love is a corpse, nothing but a corpse<\/a><\/li>\n
  132. That night you sang to me shines in me now<\/a><\/li>\n
  133. Shivery as a delicate dart from a blowgun<\/a><\/li>\n
  134. Everywhere people are looking at the heavens<\/a><\/li>\n
  135. I pull you open and divide the loaves<\/a><\/li>\n
  136. Love comes apart, like shards, in the hand<\/a><\/li>\n
  137. If I am living, I must be loving<\/a><\/li>\n
  138. Crying out in my wounds, I do not find you<\/a><\/li>\n
  139. An infinity of needles stick in my thumb<\/a><\/li>\n
  140. Let love’s little sunbeam into your heart<\/a><\/li>\n
  141. Put your hand in the thorny conflagration<\/a><\/li>\n
  142. In the tripping tick of time it’s taken<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    THE FALL<\/h2>\n
    \r\nAh, the small\r\nCavity\r\nThat takes my all....\r\nNo gravity\r\nCould keep me down--\r\nWhen I smell\r\nYour downy mound....\r\nI fell, I fall!\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    TWO, WE TWO<\/h2>\n
    \r\nIt's just a little while\r\nWe've been two, we two.\r\nToo long myself a solitary,\r\nSelf-possessed as a dromedary--\r\nAnd landscape as bleak.\r\nToo, too long my lonely hills\r\nSlanted-- all drift, sift and seethe.\r\nNo wet roll or rill, no river\r\nRushed oceanward open-armed,\r\nDissolving all the river's crazy\r\nHermit-cackle to one tongue's\r\nMore marmoreal, vast\r\nUnknowing murmur.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Blips<\/h2>\n
    \r\nI am desperate to love you, to know you,\r\nLike a bride who burns off her wedding dress,\r\nLike lips waiting, misshapen, to kiss.\r\n\r\nKisses fell out of us like water falls,\r\nBursting to earth and deafening the onlookers!\r\nWhen we kissed, we could hear the sea crashing around us.\r\n\r\nBut where are they now, those slippery kisses?\r\nWhat's left of their vast wetness?\r\nNo child has grown between us.\r\n\r\nEven a puddle leaves its residue of mud,\r\nSome softening of the way\r\nDespite whatever volume of traffic.\r\n\r\nStirring the syrup of your sweet sweet life,\r\nLetting the licks insist their way into me, inside me,\r\nSurely my lips remain sticky? \r\n \r\nHow many feet have been here before us?  Every foot.\r\nEvery pace of the path is hard with old passages, old passions.\r\nEvery route is known;  no star blinks undiscovered--\r\n\r\nExcept by us, two blips on the periphery,\r\nElliptical with longing, our lips chapped by the long wintering over,\r\nToo stiff and dry to even whistle!\r\n\r\nOur veined and florid maps are still tucked in our backpacks.\r\nOur tents are not yet ready to unroll with sleep.\r\nMy eyes keep blinking, keep looking, no matter how dark the way.\r\n\r\nThere's still so much to see, I think,\r\nWhen your hand brushes mine under the pine trees,\r\nAnd the sound of our walking fades into the background,\r\n\r\nAnd I close my eyes to breathe.\r\nIf love is, then love is what happens\r\nWhen you forget where you're going. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    SONNETS<\/h2>\n
      
    \nAssist me, some extempore god of rhyme;  for I am sure I shall turn sonneteer. ~~ Shakespeare\n<\/p>\n
    \nAll my life my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name. ~~ Andre Breton\n<\/p>\n
    \r\nDesire too cosmic and too close to name\r\nA vibrant nothing and a tortured shame.\r\nMy all, my fall--which in one syllable I'll tell\r\nIf you beside me, dear, will ride\r\n     the black thunders to Hell.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 1 My eyes are weary of looking for lovers<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMy eyes are weary of looking for lovers\r\nIn every face, every cinch of the hips,\r\nAll the coffee, the talk, that passes my lips;\r\nTired of my solitude under cold covers.\r\n\r\nA day is a long time, an hour, even a minute\r\nWithout you, stranger who will melt my heart,\r\nWho will hear the doves beating in my chest\r\nAnd fold herself into my arms like a shirt.\r\n\r\nArctic winds cross my forehead,\r\nMy hands chill and splayed as a penguin's orange feet\r\nAs I wait on this ice floe for the one I must meet,\r\nOne who will ignite my nights with lavender heat.\r\nWho are you, hands held before you toward my hands' use....\r\nA sleepwalker?  A zombie?  A mistress, a muse?\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 2 This is the first morning of the first day<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThis is the first morning of the first day.\r\nEven the grass looks like its being born,\r\nIts green is so tender, matching your eyes,\r\nAs we learn to walk together down the unworn path.\r\n\r\nBirds hesitate, amazed by the songs in their throats,\r\nThe wild corollas of sound at their command--\r\nEven the mocking bird, even the warbler, hesitate,\r\nTesting bright notes in the new sky and new land.\r\n\r\nThe trees look as young as fresh pea-tendrils.\r\nToday, water is closest to happy tears.\r\nSmiles cover our faces like big chrome grills--\r\nThe first hour of the first day of the first year!\r\n\r\nI look over at you in your coat and your broach,\r\nAsk your name, and, slowly, approach.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 3 My backpack is weighted with lilies and candle<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMy backpack is weighted with lilies and candles.\r\nI cross argent mountains and oceans to reach you.\r\nI throw a tasseled rug before you\r\nAnd stare into wide eyes no longer dull,\r\nPassing the carafe until dawn fills us\r\nWith rock-candy colors, and our smiles are tired\r\nFrom talking too animatedly wired\r\nWhile night cloaks his blue frills around us.\r\n\r\nHow long have I walked to find your country?\r\nHow long had I slept till I dreamed of you?\r\nHow long has my desire kept me swimming?\r\n\r\nToward you, toward you, my dear, I am swimming!\r\nMy breath breaks the surface seeking shores of you!\r\nComing home to your eyes, I sing \"\u2018Tis of thee!\"\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 4 I know you minimally only<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI know you minimally only,\r\nThe way a head knows hair: an invisible halo,-- \r\nThe way a sleepwalker knows life: fully lonely\r\nAs a blind hand walking across a mirror.\r\nI know you only as a keel knows water:\r\nI divide and unite your surfaces endlessly and seamlessly, \r\nNever knowing the wet of your green interiors.\r\n\r\nBut I know you will know me completely.\r\nYou will know me without any deceit,\r\nFor deceit's too weak to withstand your winds--\r\nThe hurricanes that live in your laughter \r\nAnnouncing: \"It is she!\"  And I'll stand\r\nOpen to you totally, a book without a binding,\r\nAnd our eyes will share tears simple as water.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 5 Let us play a game then, you and I<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLet us play a game then, you and I.\r\nLet the table be raised beneath the sky,\r\nLet the drums be drummed, and on it lie.\r\n\r\nSmoky women bear their burning tapers nigh,\r\nDwarves with gongs come clanging, by-and-by.\r\nEveryone take your seats, let the last one in,\r\nThe ceremony of sex is about to begin.\r\n\r\nMy hand finds you, your hand unknots my tie,\r\nLips as lithe as fishes sip, and we let slip\r\nOur final disguise.  Now at last in naked night\r\nWe plunge the utter dark with light caresses.\r\n\r\nTouching the matter to the heart, they bless us.\r\nFor you and I are nothing when this is,\r\nWhen we are one thing, one mass of blessings.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 6 Magnolia petals on a tank\u2026 fall lightly\u2026<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMagnolia petals on a tank... fall lightly...\r\nAs they fall... on everything, being\r\nThe pink delirious things they are.\r\n\r\nPhilosophers in their overcoats construe\r\nMore meaning than meaning thinks its due,\r\nBeing the grey barristers of the real\r\nThey be.  But you, sweating in your spring attire,\r\nVisit devastation on the sweet magnolia tree,\r\nDeclawing its blossoms... and trimming the wings\r\nOf birds as they return to their warm abode.\r\n\r\nFor you the poet unfolds his ode.\r\nFor you the tank stutters in its tracks.\r\nFor you the petals in my stark heart\r\nFall in flattering loveliness... for a start.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 7 It’s enough. To play with scarves in summer air<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIt's enough.  To play with scarves in summer air\r\nIs enough. The weaving and the waving\r\nOf their colors in the fresh summer air\r\nIs enough.  There is no more to be waved \r\nOr to be woven than what has already occurred.\r\nNo past is prologue when the moment's all.\r\nLook how brightly the colors wave and curve!\r\nThe summer air is here, and that is all.\r\n\r\nThe summer air is heavy in the mind,\r\nThe mind is old and full of dusty thoughts:\r\nHow this becomes that, how the child crawls into the man;\r\nColors wave and curve, and I calculate their sine.\r\n--Ai! You cover me with a hundred scarves uncaught,\r\nAnd the summer air is bright with omen. \r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 8 What is time, and how is it our own<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhat is time, and how is it our own?\r\nI will not recognize the clock hours maybe,\r\nSo bee-like diligent to my task I am,\r\nOr, grown slowly thoughtful looking out to sea,\r\nTime slips by lightly that would govern me.\r\nMy time feels most my own when you and I\r\nTogether spend the gold moments given:\r\nPointing at Venus in her drape of sky,\r\nOr doubling-up downright--with laughter shaken.\r\nOr when moony looks imbue you, dear,\r\n(If I'm not mistaken) the way a clear\r\nPond becomes clouded with the thought of rain\r\nOr a mother disappears into her child's pain.\r\nWe keep time most when we give all our own.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 9 The fierce being you would have spring from you<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe fierce being you would have spring from you\r\nWill yet spring.  The life your life trembles to beget\r\nIs waiting in your snowy body curled.\r\n\r\nShe shall from your eyes drink the honied fire,\r\nAnd her breath your breath will yet sustain,\r\nInspiring in her unborn eyes a thousand worlds.\r\n\r\nThe new-made woman who will step like brightness\r\nToo bright to look at--dances in your likeness\r\nWhen before the mirror you test your tresses.\r\n\r\nThis phantom of your future self shall come yet:\r\nAnd every diamond be her birthright,\r\nAnd every river flutter like her caress.\r\n\r\nOh little mother frowning brownly so,\r\nLet one small smile be born upon you now.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 10 If Cezanne painted you, what village would you be<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIf Cezanne painted you, what village would you be?\r\nWhat pair of Monet's haystacks, soft,\r\nAnd glistening in sunlit serenity?\r\nTo me, too close, you are a crosshatch, crossed\r\nWith empty diamonds and abrasive lines,\r\nA certain blotchey rosacea of the soul\r\nYanking your kite-string down from the divine;\r\nFrom the eternal you wither into the small.\r\n\r\nHere is where we meet, knees beneath the table,\r\nThe traffic staticy, the world unstable\r\nThat goes zagging through the fog beyond us.\r\n\r\nIn our discussion's no accordance--\r\nWe're as different as figs, as cracks\r\nIn the Old Masters, two needles in the haystack.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 11 The blossoms that stood out on the branch<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe blossoms that stood out on the branch\r\nNow blow along pavement wet with runoff;\r\nFall gave way to winter, and winter now to March\r\nWhen early flowers crowd and then fall off.\r\nIt is almost too much of the coming thing,\r\nThis blizzard of blossoms after blizzard in earnest\r\nBefore the azalea really get going--\r\nSuch hazardous blooming should be in jest.\r\nAlmost too much... with the excited whites\r\nBoating toward oblivion in the gutter\r\nWhere the storm drain lurks, all appetite,\r\nAnd the dark beyond the grate is utter.\r\nThere's much to consider while we sit as one,\r\nTouched blonde by the sun,--but no longer young.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 12 Calm as ponds let yourself be today<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nCalm as ponds let yourself be today.\r\nLeadeth thyself to lie down, shut off the TV,\r\nHear the million bees murmur rumor of plenty\r\nWhile kids race at recess in unharried play.\r\nPeace, peace be on your sensitive eyes,\r\nYour fingers steady as new radial tires;\r\nPut up your feet, you're off the highwire,\r\nEach exhale sails another balloon to the sky....\r\nMay contentment come and tuck you in,\r\nPull the clean sheet right up to your chin,\r\nSing lullabies and lieder until you believe\r\nNo one you know will ever again grieve.\r\nToday take this prayer, and light a tea candle:\r\nWhatever comes your way you can handle.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 13 Dancing makes a motion of its own<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nDancing makes a motion of its own.\r\nMy ears are dense with music of the known;\r\nWhat notes the moment's inner ear can sow!\r\nHow like a planet a swaying body goes:\r\nOrbiting we dance, and in such dancing flow.\r\nIs there a blessing in these moves that move us so?\r\n\r\nMy mother used all her days to make amends,\r\nYet all her days were not enough to spend.\r\nWhat moves in us moves without an end,\r\nA dance between the register-marks of stars\r\nWhose spheres revolve high music to the ears.\r\n--We keep turning to become just what we are.\r\n\r\nIs there a blessing in these moves that move us so?\r\nDancing makes a motion of its own.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 14 I would have you grow invisible<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI would have you grow invisible,\r\nShrink down and disappear like blotted tears,\r\nLike wine consumed in hungry drops, or winter\r\nSnow become fantastical in melting March,\r\nLeaving the green hillside patched with wet.\r\n\r\nDo not change your petals for a branch\r\nCurved low with many weighted fruits;\r\nBurn, flash to ashes, and let those ashes blow\r\nTill no grey shred of your greatness waits\r\nBehind, till all colors that compose you are undone.\r\n\r\nBecome some transparent, wingy thing\r\nThey tell about in churches when they sing.\r\nTake all you are with you when you go.\r\nStill, I cannot unknow you.  This I know.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 15 Return to me naked, I would have you so<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nReturn to me naked, I would have you so\r\nAlways and everywhere, like the nude prow\r\nOf a wooden ship, announcing where she goes\r\nWith splashes white as catastrophe, and as loud.\r\n\r\nWhy have you left me for laundry and chores,\r\nYour sails lifted, your hand saluting for shade?\r\nWhy have you left me?  For now you are gone:\r\nThe bed unmade, and my heart unmade.\r\n\r\nWherever you go primly sailing now\r\nThrough cute boutiques or old bodegas\r\nI will wait, for I know that night must follow\r\nAnd your bare moon burst before my window-glass.\r\n\r\nFor this new Life where we squall unadorned,\r\nReturn to me naked as you were naked born.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 16 You have such a subtle, neutral scent<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou have such a subtle, neutral scent,\r\nLike a show-pony before she's ridden hard,\r\nBefore good use turns her breathing scant\r\nAnd she makes a wanton break-out toward the stars\r\nThat leaves the sturdy fencepost rent.\r\n\r\nCleanly we begin, easy in our reins and chaps,\r\nTaking the wide acreage at a simple cant\r\nUntil the rocking saddle slaps.\r\n\r\nThen I cleave to you and cleave in twain\r\nThe sweaty mystery of your sex;\r\nMolten mists of joy and pain inextricably mix.\r\n\r\nRaucous across the finish line,\r\nWe pant and pause and smell as one\r\nTo what rank stench our hard riding's come.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 17 Love me fiercely, though nipples bleed<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove me fiercely, though nipples bleed\r\nAnd lips need stitches where your lips have passed;\r\nLove me fiery until love's pyre is dead,\r\nThe bonfire soaked, the man-in-the moon undressed.\r\nThe heat that creeps through lovers' veins\r\nIgnites silently in eyes and furtive looks\r\nUntil a shared surrender in the brain\r\nIncinerates discretion, undoes every hook.\r\nDo not wait for the duration of a zipper\r\nBut love me instantly, as steam loves the cold air,\r\nHot as torches in huge candelabra.\r\nBurn me until for burning there is no cure,\r\nFor no love comes when lust's coal-red is gone:\r\nNo mother-love, no nurse's hand, no one.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 18 You open for me, a luminous anemone<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou open for me, a luminous anemone;\r\nYou bloom in intense interior colors\r\nAnd wildly give out strong scents of the sea.\r\nAre you plant or animal in your passive pleasure?\r\nI peel you blandly at my manly leisure,\r\nExploring your deep promise of treasure:\r\nThe shine in your eyes is silver with glee.\r\n\r\nHolding our breaths, we bodysurf white combers,\r\nLooking left and right in the tumbling lea\r\nUntil the grating sand our grace encumbers\r\nAnd we land half-dressed on the bedded beach.\r\nYou hand me a towel, if one is in reach,\r\nAnd out-of-breath smile and shyly stretch:\r\nThis is the treasure toward which we lumber.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 19 Each night my mantra sounds your name<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nEach night my mantra sounds your name\r\nWhich in going round undoes itself in sound\r\nUntil all syllables go circling the same.\r\n\r\nNight-owls hoo you, dark winds whistle you, clouds\r\nSpell out what letters tout you, only you,\r\nUntil all alphabets jumble just the same\r\nIn going round, beading prayers of your name.\r\nCrickets crick you, and lapping water begs\r\nThe shore until all oceans go echoing your name....\r\nFaces whirl and blur, merging as they do,\r\nUntil all faces are your face, identical as eggs.\r\n\r\nThis mirror-maze of gladness has no end:\r\nBeauty is not beauty that shares not your name.\r\nAll surfaces reflect you, only you.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 20 Eros\u2019 rose shed red shreds of petals<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nEros' rose shed red shreds of petals\r\nOn your bed, your eyelids, and your long lips--\r\nPressing silence to the secrets that we keep,\r\nJust we two, alone as Adam at the Fall.\r\n\r\nTwins in sin, how redly aches our double-loving\r\n(Spiking with sin-cinnamon our apple pie)\r\nAs mouth-to-groin and groin-to-mouth we lie,\r\nLengthwise mirrors of all our loving's trouble.\r\n\r\nEach slap and grapple leaves temptation's trace\r\nTrailing red rose petals of fingerprints\r\nAcross the landscape of your ass and face.\r\n\r\nAnd, like a gardener in his pints,\r\nI pull the thorns aside for only this:\r\nTo find two lips, your rose, upraised to kiss.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 21 When the tongue darts tart to the aspic place<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhen the tongue darts tart to the aspic place\r\nRanging round the brown aromaed hole\r\nSeeking solace between fundament and face,\r\nBy licks outlining the awkward tale of souls,\r\nI know myself a slave of lust, and lave\r\nThe merry mistress of my cock with praise\r\nNo higher than my lust himself does rise\r\nTo be a sunk spelunker in your caves.\r\nRound and round we go, and soul to soul\r\nWe play bandit and the badman night and day\r\nStealing happiness from the world's decay\r\nWhose carnival commands us stand in sadder roles.\r\nThrough the work week, daybreak to dusk,\r\nI dream of our theater, the husk of your musk.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 22 The soft musk of your pale downy neck<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe soft musk of your pale downy neck,\r\nApple-dappled depth of orchard's wealth,\r\nWreathes through our low-hung boughs of breath\r\nAs we share warm whispers and shining cheeks.\r\nThe bed about us is tumbled as the Andes,\r\nWhite-peaked bedlam of a stormy ocean\r\nFrozen when exhaustion paused our oars again\r\nAnd breath returned to calm our pantings.\r\n\r\nSoft the musk of your downy neck, my peach.\r\nSoft the teased traceries of tongue and tongue\r\nVying redly with teeth and lips and gums\r\nTo bite the splendid fruit our loves unleash.\r\nThe endless hours move in one slow sigh--\r\nOpening on a downy dawn as warm as thighs.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 23 Love\u2014-Love thundering, love underlined<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove--Love thundering, love underlined\r\nDeclares itself no louder than your whisper\r\nWhispered in a moment unrefined\r\nUntil my beaten heart is a burning blister--\r\nAlong with other parts best left undefined.\r\n\r\nThe small things you say to me at midnight\r\nWhen the drapes are drawn and shutters tight\r\n(And day a rumor of remembered sight)--\r\nThose things you say become my private light\r\nAnd blaze behind my eyes in sheer delight.\r\n\r\nAlthough small and quiet as two bugs\r\nSitting aslant a ruby leaf in spring,\r\nOur love's not less that chummily hugs\r\nAnd waits till dark to say the wildest things.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 24 I\u2019d trade prayerbeads for millstones<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI'd trade prayerbeads for millstones\r\nIf stone could grant what lips have wished\r\nAnd manifest for my solitude\r\nAll the weight of kissing I have missed,\r\nBlessing my bed with your beatitude.\r\n\r\nAll the burdens of the awkward ox\r\nI'd shoulder as my own if only\r\nHours, not days, remained till I unroll your socks\r\nNext to mine, white stripes on the lonely\r\nDivan pushed back and piled with busted boxes.\r\n\r\nHere I wait in a penitent's house,\r\nWhose heart's all roses and runaway kites,\r\nWhose curse is time--who has kissed eternity\r\nAnd tossed her socks next to mine.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 25 Why is love my measure and my means<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhy is love my measure and my means?\r\nMy talk, my trouble, my idle thought obscene,\r\nMy crisis, my crux, my cri de coeur supreme?\r\n\r\nOf all the arrows fitted for my ample quiver,\r\nOr wrinkled routes eked out by many rivers,\r\nWhy is my sea love, love my apple ever?\r\n\r\nFlowers come as varied as their seeds began;\r\nVaried fall the fruits, and many the works of man;\r\nEndless are our melodies, destinies, and dreams.\r\n\r\nBut my drum, though struck by a thousand hands,\r\nBangs one love, my harp--though by an angel band\r\nCommanded--pleads love alone through every golden strand.\r\n\r\nFor you are my love, my sun and my seed.\r\nToward you I grow, who answers my every need.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 26 Who were you before we entered the trees<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWho were you before we entered the trees\r\nOf our being together?  What creatures walked\r\nUnder the umbrella of your shadow?\r\nWho has been made cool in your shade?\r\nAnd why, besides death, would they leave?\r\nYou with your brow of hard bread, threshed wheat,\r\nYour breasts full of the scents of strawberries and dough,\r\nYour thighs some mysterious spring has darkened?\r\nDid you exile those others who walked with you?\r\nDid you send them naked down the hillside at midnight,\r\nNo lantern in their hands, the path thorny and burnt?\r\n\r\nHow glad I am they are gone, or, better, dead! Oh!\r\nNo one should touch you save one most supplicant.\r\nOnly one being born should enter your cunt.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 27 Out of the bitter snow, I came rattling in<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nOut of the bitter snow, I came rattling in.\r\nOut of melting March, muddy and wet,\r\nShaking like a harassed dog, I came in.\r\nI came in when summer was not summer yet\r\nAnd the soft air gave me leave to wander\r\nAll night long and stare into the starry sky,\r\nAt one with the celestial order.\r\nAnd when the nights were hot and the grass was dry\r\nAnd all the world slept out-of-doors\r\nTo hear the night things stirring, I came in.\r\nOut of all nights, and out of every weather,\r\nHarassed, tempted, or implored, I came in.\r\nAnd now that autumn's nip is here again\r\n(And you still beside me) I'll stay in, stay in.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 28 Go until the earth lies between us, pregnant<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nGo until the earth lies between us, pregnant,\r\nThe curved horizon blue as a whale's back\r\nAnd every constellation different.\r\n\r\nGo until your memory is black\r\nWith absences where I had been the stars\r\nThat shooed your ship home from her wanderings.\r\n\r\nGo until the sound of talk is strange, far\r\nFrom your childhood chants and gabblings;\r\nWhere ABCs are cuneiform on the blocks.\r\n\r\nGo until time itself has come unsprung\r\nAnd the hands go whirl-a-gig on the clock.\r\nGo, go, and retreat not back one rung.\r\n\r\nFor there's nowhere where you are that I am not,\r\nSeeing what you see--and what touches you, I touch.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 29 The soft fall of flares, of flowers, once the orgasm\u2019s<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe soft fall of flares, of flowers, once the orgasm's\r\nOver... the body's empty tube through which no music\r\nIs moving--a sumptuous trumpet dumped in the museum\r\nAs if no hand no mouth had ever crossed it.\r\nWho could imagine it rampaging erect,\r\nThis piece of rusty history, tucked\r\nWhere the bodies of dead moths collect,\r\nChurning to silvery dust as I walk?\r\n\r\nToo long have you been unbedded by me\r\nWhose arms once held you like a river\r\nAnd covered you buoyantly with balsam and kisses\r\nFalling in flakes from heaven forever\r\nTo dissolve in yourself, in your sea,\r\nYour wet spring tenderness unending and green.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 30 For you, I would be little as the rain, and fall on you<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nFor you, I would be little as the rain, and fall on you\r\nFrom everywhere, on your eyes and in your hair\r\nUntil you turned your mouth up to the blue\r\nTo drink me in in the drenching air.\r\nFor you, I would be as patient as the earth\r\nAnd follow your steps everywhere to feel you go and come,\r\nDancing on my skin until the red dust covers us both.\r\nI would feel you plant grass in me with your strong thumb.\r\nFor you, I would be as ecstatic as the sun,\r\nRadiant everywhere, and happy everywhere too,\r\nLike the abrupt smiles of very old women\r\nWho know the sun wants to own them, but keep the night alone.\r\nBut, oh, for you, I would be the nighttime too!\r\nAnd all the stars, and wrap you up in sleep in my glittering poncho.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 31 Love has nourished us like a beet root, red<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove has nourished us like a beet root, red,\r\nOr a sweet potato pulling candy from the dirt.\r\nFrom one look at you, I know that all I ever said\r\nHas taken root, my tendrils alleviating the hurt\r\nOthers placed inside you the way a bullet \r\nLodges in a tree but does not kill the tree--\r\nA tree whose slow rivers of sap, sweet\r\nMaple syrup, flow from too deep a mystery\r\nTo ever stop until they end in blossoms.\r\nAnd those blossoms are your two eyes\r\nThe color of new leaves, of wings fallen from locusts\r\nWho no longer want to take to the sky\r\nTo sing, but have come down with us among the roots\r\nGiving us their dark hymns and dreams of truth.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 32 What is this enigma that has ruined my sleep<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhat is this enigma that has ruined my sleep?\r\nThis thought that repeats like an epileptic stutter,\r\nLightning always striking the same place, two times, twenty?\r\n\r\nSometimes the sway of a dress will make me weep,\r\nThe cough of a shoe on the sidewalk,--\r\nIf it is your shoe, your feet that do the walking.\r\n\r\nA hundred times I have been in love, and never\r\nHave I lost even one minute's sleep,\r\nNo matter how beautiful the woman, no matter how deep \r\n\r\nThe loves that swam up from my heart to attend her\r\nLike aquarium fish when dinner is sprinkled,\r\nTheir small mouths all Os, hungry and unfed.\r\n\r\nWhat is this enigma that has ruined my sleep?\r\nSometimes the sway of a dress will make me weep. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 33 How one goes on wrestling with destiny<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nHow one goes on wrestling with destiny!\r\nTrying so hard to throw away one beautiful thing\r\nThat has fluttered to your feet like litter, a free gift.\r\n\r\nHere I am, hunched over the trash can, wrestling,\r\nUncomfortable, angry even, with what has come to me freely:\r\nPriceless platinum the world has thrown after me,\r\nChasing me down with free armfuls of ecstasy\r\nWhile I try so hard to throw away one beautiful thing--\r\nMiserably, miserably with my angel wrestling.\r\n\r\nLife is not a medicine to swallow, it is a feast!\r\nJust open yourself to being blessed, you will see!\r\nThe trash will throw itself away, only you will be left\r\nStanding, shining like an angel's wings,\r\nYou, who tried so hard to throw away one beautiful thing.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 34 My heart clicks on and off, a sacred searchlight<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMy heart clicks on and off, a sacred searchlight\r\nSweeping the skies for your spark and your light\r\nUntil our X-ed rays meet in a singular spot\r\nThe way stars press their faces against the glass,\r\nMocking the world with their peculiar taunts:\r\nHere we are above you, pure and pristine!\r\nYou below can never wear our radiant gowns,\r\nTrapped in your tragic habit of being human.\r\n\r\nIf only you and I were perfect, untouchable, one!\r\nThe rest of the world would be nothings and no ones\r\n--Only we two in the immensity of space,\r\nLocked alone in our looking face-to-face--\r\nNot even minding the other stars' conversation \r\nArranged in their envious constellations.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 35 Whose face this is I think I know\u2013<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhose face this is I think I know--\r\nThough time has hurried with his plow\r\n(Leaving alive the eyes);  the face is strafed,\r\nScored with ruts and roofed by snow.\r\n\r\nHad some magic mirror come and chafed\r\nMy younger self with this injured image of her face,\r\nI could not have shuddered with more surprise\r\nAt my darling's disordered fate.\r\n\r\nNothing so wild in wild surmise\r\nWould I have conjured for my eyes\r\nWho now at breakfast contemplates the wreck\r\nTime has drifted to my side.\r\n\r\nStill, her eyes, measuring my old self as we sit,\r\nDemark no damage to my aspect.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 36 Every day the poet sat down and thought<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nEvery day the poet sat down and thought.\r\nThat was his first mistake.  Each day he spent\r\nKnotting and unknotting until it caught\r\nItself, half a line.  Each month his rent\r\nAnd bills piled up higher than his epic\r\nOn the cetaceous era undersea--\r\nNo vorpal sword on that went snicker-snak.\r\n\r\nThe protozoa had proto-souls, you see.\r\nHe had convinced himself, now all he lacked\r\n(In time's green-golden ache and sway)\r\nWas a readership that had his back,\r\nThe discerning few he would show the way.\r\n\r\nA note was found among his apartment stacks\r\nIn neat pink script: \"Going, not coming back.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 37 Adam and Eve, by their garden wall surrounded<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAdam and Eve, by their garden wall surrounded,\r\nMet with the snake innocently enough,\r\nHeard his insurance pitch, had a laugh,\r\nAnd went back to touring their miraculous grounds.\r\n\r\nUnexpectedly, the snake came back again,\r\nHere and there in the shrubs with a hiss,\r\nInsinuating that, inferring this,\r\nUntil the nightmares and migraines began.\r\n\r\nThen he disappeared, gone in a smoky wisp,\r\nAnd Adam and Eve relaxed, had a snack,\r\nIgnored the prickling mounting up their backs\r\nImplying there was something important they'd missed.\r\n\r\nAlmost, they made it.  But their brains, too big\r\nNot to wonder, pulled them under.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 38 I kiss your statue, fervid while you vacillate<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI kiss your statue, fervid while you vacillate.\r\nYour lips are perfect, poised; mine insistent,\r\nNever satisfied, lonelier with each deep pressing,--\r\nImagining the dark with you undressing,\r\nDropping your bra on the carpet, panties flung\r\nHigher than the highest note a soprano sings.\r\n\r\nBut you, being a statue, remain composed.\r\nHands, once warm as bread, lie gracefully reposed.\r\nTake my spark, my soul, my all!  But do not stay so cold.\r\nI keep kissing your coldness, growing old.\r\n\r\nI hope I am not too rude to one not quite alive,\r\nOne toward whose loveliness my whole life has fallen,\r\nLeaving my own dead pedestal behind, praying my passion\r\nIs love enough to bring you back to life.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 39 How can tonight come without you her<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nHow can tonight come without you here?\r\nWhere will I go to bury my sorrow\r\nWhen I am alone and the single stars come clear\r\nFrom behind their invisible cloud as out of a barrow?\r\nWithout your face close, your hair, your breathing,\r\nHow can I endure the darkness yet to come?\r\nOne night alone feels like a civilization ending,\r\nThe pottery shattered, upended the throne.\r\nWhen my hands reach out for the small\r\nThumbhold on your hip, no bigger than a rose\r\nPetal that in our house's garden has fallen,\r\nWhat will my hands hang onto instead, what emptiness?\r\nMust I walk alone through the long midnight in sorrow,\r\nWithout even the company of my shadow?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 40 The wind insisted nothing, came to my face<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe wind insisted nothing, came to my face\r\nWith the frittery gentleness of nothing.\r\nI had not noticed were I running a race\r\nOr had head bent down, pensive, on some one thing.\r\nBut I was doing nothing, and so found grace\r\nGiven by the wind out of nothing.\r\n\r\nThe wind was slightly misty, as I recall,\r\nWith filaments of seaweed threading the bare\r\nBlowsy breath that passed down the empty hall\r\nAnd touched my cheekbone hanging there\r\nBlank as a bank of paper, or a roll\r\nOf scripture with no writing anywhere.\r\n\r\nAnd then in the nothing air there hung, as I recall,\r\nYour perfume, too;  and from that nothing, all.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 41 When I create my love for you in my heart<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhen I create my love for you in my heart,\r\nSecretly, it's a black alchemy, a recipe\r\nWithout directions, accomplished all out\r\nOf order.  Eat of it anyway!  Eat every pie.\r\nThere is a deliciousness in this mystery\r\nWe consume, one that has us lick our fingers\r\nAnd wipe round our lips with our tongues.\r\n\r\nDiscard every question but how to linger\r\nIn the slow soft light that gently comes\r\nAfter our tumultuous lovemaking.\r\nAll the candles of heaven, falling stars and comets,\r\nHave been hushed in our mutual taking.\r\nNow is the time of quiet, and the time \r\nOur murmurs slur most toward the sublime.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 42 How should I write a poem of love<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nHow should I write a poem of love?\r\nI, who am selfish, small, and alone?\r\n\"First, stuff your craw with caviar and doves,\r\nThe best of the best, stolen gold and emperors' bones.\"\r\n\r\nI listened to the voice and ran everywhere\r\nStuffing myself with rarities and riches.\r\nSurely if one is stuffed with beauty up to here\r\nOne's speech will be all eloquence and wishes.\r\n\r\nBut, no.  I did not know it then\r\nBut what I needed most was nothingness--\r\nThat empty feeling, that utter lack\r\nThat would let me be filled with you again and again,\r\nLike a vessel whose emptiness keeps holding more kisses,\r\nAnd hears in your voice every morning the morning lark.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 43 All day long I have followed this sad dog<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAll day long I have followed this sad dog.\r\nMy love for you, mangy and clumsy, wanders\r\nDown windy alleys, snooping through gutters.\r\nAnd now it's 4 A.M., and where is the dog?\r\n\r\nOne day I had gotten mad and kicked it out.\r\nOut of my house, and out of my heart, perhaps.--\r\nMy great love for you must wander in the street!\r\nWhat I'd fed so tenderly must survive on scraps.\r\n\r\nSoon enough, I missed its nails on the floor;\r\nIts needy whomp into the bed when thunder uttered;\r\nEven love's wet dingy smell when the rain would pour\r\nI missed, and missed utterly.\r\n\r\nCome, help me tonight, whistle out loud;\r\nMy love is bound to find me, now I'm no longer proud.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 44 I can\u2019t have you every day, can I<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI can't have you every day, can I?\r\nMy stomach will get swollen, sour, and tight,\r\nAs if candy-gorged on Halloween night.\r\n\r\nI can't have you every day, can I?\r\nYou would blow through your lips \"Oh, alright.\"\r\nBut, in your heart, you'd be bored and uptight.\r\n\r\nI can't have you every day, can I?\r\nBeating a drum too often can blister a thumb.\r\nHow much more gently, then, when loving someone?\r\n\r\nI can't have you every day, can I?\r\nYou can't be hungry every single day, can you?\r\nI want you so bad, but you must tell me what to do.\r\n\r\n\"When you doubt that I would be with you,\r\nLook into my eyes, and see: All I see is you.\"\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 45 So much time has gone by, sliding and washing<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nSo much time has gone by, sliding and washing\r\nAway, the little waves piling into the larger....\r\nBefore you, my life had fallen asleep.\r\nNow I am awake, a little of me is waking,\r\nLike bubbles inching to the top of the lager.\r\nWho knew how years go by, that one could sleep so deeply?\r\n\r\nTogether in bed, we yawn and slap our eyes;\r\nDawn opens the curtain with a sunny spear.\r\nI feel as if, when we walk, my head scrapes the sky.\r\nOur feet are leaping like deer!\r\n\r\nTogether our nights are pink and warm,\r\nThe stars are the tips of a baby's fingers.\r\nWe hold hands and walk across the night lawn;\r\nSomehow the moon looks down at us, laughs. Awake, we linger.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 46 Lovers always meet each other twice<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLovers always meet each other twice.\r\nFirst, in animal excitement, pupils wide,\r\nStamping and pawing and rubbing their sides,\r\nThey leap into each other's mouths; it's nice.\r\n\r\nLater, if they continue consuming each other,\r\nA day comes when their hands are on the same handle\r\nAnd they turn the wheel together, humbly,\r\nAnd their eyes, once wild and hungry, grow tender.\r\n\r\nIt is this tenderness that holds the baby\r\nIn the womb;  the womb that's made of tender netting.\r\nIt is this tenderness that weaves the nest,\r\nThat tells us \"yes\" instead of \"maybe,\"\r\nThat gives tonight's moon the light it's shedding.\r\nIt is in this tenderness you and I may rest.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 47 You are sleeping, a hill where night-snow falls<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou are sleeping, a hill where night-snow falls.\r\nNo longer do you laugh and become a cloud,\r\nCotton pinched between the nurse's able fingers, helping all,\r\nLetting the blood of others enter you, clotting\r\nTheir wounds or applying alcohol before the needle.\r\nNow you are purely sleeping, your breath apples,\r\nYour great shaggy hair-river up in a mop.\r\nTell me, am I remembered in your dreams?\r\nThere where you fly above the world without a cape?\r\nAm I a one-eyed giant crunching bones?\r\nHow I would like to crouch down and enter your dream-tunnels\r\nAnd patter in the water after you, running.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 48 A little pale shy wetness, a little slit<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nA little pale shy wetness, a little slit\r\nIs all it is;  not even a flower is so shy--\r\nNot edelweiss on its rocky sit,\r\nNor bold button pom, nor lazy calla-lily.\r\nYet through this keyhole (and with this minor key)\r\nA prism of delight may print its rainbow\r\nOn all the sky, and all of space, and me.\r\nHow fretfully you guard what nowhere shows\r\nBut is secret with the secretness of souls--\r\nInvisible until given in gift outright\r\nAnd then a purple palimpsest, a slippery miracle,\r\nPerpetual desire emblazoning darky night.\r\nAll of this you gave, and are giving yet\r\nTo one who never can, nor shall, forget.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 49 If you must go today, shed your skin<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIf you must go today, shed your skin\r\nLike a snake, folded over in silken pleats.\r\nI want to roll always in your musky and fragrant muslins.\r\nI want to cover my pillows with you, and stitch moccasins--\r\nMy face on your rosy breast, my feet in your feet.\r\nYour skin pours over me, cream from the pitcher \r\nDousing me head to foot till I'm swimming\r\nIn white memories of touching you, deeper\r\nAnd deeper. You, not God, are my soul's keeper.\r\nWith your beauty, your nearness, your softness, I am brimming.\r\nI smell that one spot behind your ear, you know,\r\nEvery time I close my eyes to pray.\r\nEvery time I close my eyes--as now--\r\nYou are there, luminous in naked ecstasy.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 50 Say it once and best, unlike the lark<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nSay it once and best, unlike the lark\r\nWho goes on going on repeating,\r\nRefreshing voice beyond the boundaries of the park\r\nFar into horizon's pale receding.\r\nSay it once and let that once stand fast,\r\nUnlike the sea seducing the long seashore\r\nWith repetitions of a caress that does not last\r\nBut, mutable and moving, touches less and more.\r\nSay it once, once only, unlike the sun\r\nWhose heartbeat breaks each day from night's breast\r\nBurning as if no other billion days or beats had come,\r\nWarmly consoling all beneath, man and worm and beast.\r\nSay it once, then let all saying rest.\r\nSay \"I love you,\"-- not first, not last, but best.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 51 Grief is not part of us, part of this loving<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nGrief is not part of us, part of this loving.\r\nGrief no longer eats our bodies, cracking bones\r\nAnd finding in our marrow we are lonely.\r\nThat grief is gone which had kept us alone.\r\nThe griefs that blasted us have blown through\r\nLeaving the house refreshed, the shutters tested,\r\nThe waste of tears pooled coolly in the foyer.\r\n\r\nNew light in the garden exalts wet roses' colors.\r\n\r\nNow we discover each other with dry eyes\r\nLooking clearly at each other's shoulders,\r\nThe tilt of hips, cuffed hair, crooked smiles,\r\nAll of us that shows us solider.\r\nYou look at me as I at you must look:\r\nEvenly level, starting to open the book.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 52 Venus is bending now above the bow<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nVenus is bending now above the bow\r\nOf earth, her body shedding Venus-light\r\nInto spirits which had been ember-low,\r\nThe burned-out mascara of the night.\r\nVenus goes stalking among the other stars\r\nWinking in their little admiration\r\nThat so great a lady would come so far\r\nTo let them be gems that hem her graces.\r\nVenus lets me follow too, as, slowly,\r\nWe walk beyond the dusk together\r\nInto whatever the evening is evolving--\r\nThe sunset wind that kicked is now a nothing-feather.\r\nWhen Venus descends to us, rayed so ably,\r\nCupid's bivouacked in the bushes, surely.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 53 In your mouth there glows a holy rose<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIn your mouth there glows a holy rose;\r\nTwo sun-red roses are your fiery eyes.\r\nWhen your palms turn up, they hold roses\r\nWarm and red, blushing and alive\r\nAs your two cheeks, where two more roses open,\r\nOr the rose-loveliness pinning back your hair\r\nSo that roses orbit you like cherry moons.\r\nAnd when you weep, the roses all despair.\r\n\r\nSo like roses are your noble knees, when up\r\nFrom scrubbing you run to greet me\r\nAnd kiss with your rose-mouth--an open cup\r\nFull of rose-blood, which rosy perfumes wreathe.\r\nAnd when your rose brow shadows a look that knows,\r\nMy soul is lost in folds of rose.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 54 You come to me encased in a shell of light<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou come to me encased in a shell of light,\r\nLight dripping from your wet fingertips\r\nUntil swept sparks gather on the mat like sweat,\r\nA slow swirl of flame rising to our hips--\r\nAnd we in the center of this focused rose\r\nTouch like torches our incandescent arms\r\nAnd fall into the whirl of liquid pulses\r\nBeating to our hearts' bruised alarms.\r\n\r\nHere in the center of light is love\r\nAnd silence.  Only your face floats above\r\nThe burning candle end;  only your eyes and mine,\r\nDear, in all the ardent fire remain.\r\nOnly here, in the light's heart of is,\r\nThe earth releases her captives, and we rise.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 55 Your feet are wounded doves walking home<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYour feet are wounded doves walking home,\r\nYour hair a current of motionless water;\r\nMelancholy your eyes, dark daughter,\r\nAnd your high forehead is a sandstone dome\r\nIrritable winds etch and erode.\r\n\r\nThis is your catalog, but not your ark.\r\nWhat you are continues, unwinding like a road\r\nBlessing dusts are paving for your good;\r\nWhat you are reaches out beyond the wind,\r\nBeyond strange stars, far past the last spark.\r\n\r\nThe familiar grip of your loving hands\r\nI love, and because your hands know well\r\nMy intimate recesses intricate as bells,\r\nI love and follow you beyond the wind.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 56 You come carrying gifts no other knows<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou come carrying gifts no other knows\r\nBut me, who loves you the way a seafish\r\nLoves the sea--until my body lives in you entirely,\r\nTransparently--waving in your waves, like so.\r\nThe gift of your body is the first gift,\r\nRound and good, a spicy hand-pinched empanada\r\nFloured and left to sizzle until ripe--la!\r\n\r\n--No, not your body, just your ears are first.\r\nYou listen like a mouse, full of tiny attentiveness,\r\nHearing in my most minor word the major chord;\r\nThis is a gift--I throw off my melancholy shroud \r\nUnder your lemony canopy of giving.\r\nYou stand at the prow, your heart straight out like a flag,\r\nFlying forward to new continents from my crags.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 57 Your heart\u2019s composed of grey mourning doves<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYour heart's composed of grey mourning doves\r\nCooing in circles under the dogwood tree.\r\nCome, my nunnish sis.  Come, break open to love,\r\nAlight upon the budded branch you cannot yet see.\r\nLet light interpenetrate you like honied waters\r\nOr as when lime and garden dirt are mixed;\r\nLet corn stand golden in the blackest rut;\r\nLet seed and need be one;  let the roaring sun be fixed.\r\nIf there's something in the roadway, pick it up.\r\nLet your pockets hang fat as a puppy belly;\r\nLove itself, and love alone, fills fullness up.\r\n--Is that a dime glinting in the gully?\r\nIn my heart, too, a bird is circling, dear,\r\nIts wings fanned wide for loving--or despair.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 58 Black butterflies crowd the white church with shadows<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nBlack butterflies crowd the white church with shadows.\r\nSecretly now I speak, who had been plain before\r\nFear and pain had come and nailed my door.\r\n\r\nI am lost in a world of truculent shadows.\r\nI only approach what's real in whispers,\r\nI am mute before the others.\r\n\r\nAll that was solid is now thrown shadows.\r\nThe black butterflies land on my heart and fold their wings,\r\nMy tongue forgets to sing.\r\n\r\nLove has webbed my ardent hands with shadows.\r\nMy hands, once full of eloquent caresses,\r\nAre folded now in wings of blackness.\r\n\r\nDo not follow me into this twilight,\r\nLove, for after such a dusk must come the night.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 59 Someone has written your body on the grass<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nSomeone has written your body on the grass\r\nIn long erotic brushstrokes loaded with dew.\r\nYou shine on green blades that shimmer as we pass\r\nSighing thigh and eyelash as only you could do.\r\nThe trees' great roots tangle enticingly\r\nRomancing the dark fructification of earth\r\nAs I romance you in the grass blades,\r\nErect in the dirt as iron filings pulled toward magnetic North.\r\n \r\nHow I want to roll in you, breathe in you,\r\nBury myself in you,--pull the lawn up like a coverlet\r\nAnd sleep in the deep mystery I see is you\r\nAlways and everywhere, even in death's regret:\r\nWhen you are gone, let my bones on your bones\r\nLie lingeringly--against death's cold alone.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 60 When love spills white on her cloudy breast<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhen love spills white on her cloudy breast,\r\nAnd stormy brows blow clear of steamy Os,\r\nAnd aching Ahs breeze to their windy rest, \r\nI, new-calm, quiet to calm's no-moan.\r\n\r\nThe placid window opens to a sky\r\nWhere I float alone, unclouded now,\r\nAnd listen to my lying mistress, fly-\r\nIng in her far Afghanistan, unfollow-\r\nEd by harrying lust, the insistent prick-\r\nLing that turns moist \"Maybe\" to \"Hurry, yes!\" \r\nO how we seeded love's tempest to light-\r\nNing desire!--which lies beside, a deflated gust.\r\n\r\nSo we lie apart who had shared one heart\r\nAnd, pant for pant, had each played the stormfront's part.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 61 After the white heat has left the pen<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAfter the white heat has left the pen,\r\nThe tower come to grief, and all our loving\r\nCeased, there will be time for turtle-doving\r\nAnd all the public petting couples plan.\r\nAfter the bed has ceased creak-quaking,\r\nAnd reddened knees and slipping toes uncurl,\r\nThere will be time to be just boy and girl\r\nLaughing at our nasty pelvic snaking.\r\nAfter the sweet tipping, love and shove\r\nOf two bodies burning to be one,\r\nThe shouting out to God and His holy son,\r\nThere will be time to count all the stars above.\r\nBut now I say, looking over at you again,\r\nLet stars remain unnumbered till time's end.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 62 The lamp burns in the corner of my room<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nA lamp burns in the corner of my room,\r\nEvilly-eyed.  Somehow, today, my happiness\r\nIs playing hide-and-seek with me gloomily.\r\nNewspapers pile up.  The room's a mess.\r\nOnly over the bed is there a memory\r\nOf wings, scarlet happiness, ecstasies\r\nWe shared on the fitted sheets of ivory.\r\nThose afternoons come to me now.  Too clear.\r\nMy head rattles like a tin can full of pebbles:\r\nThe pebbles are hard eyes of yesterdays I've seen,\r\nFrom the mildly annoying to the incredible.\r\nRemembering you, our joy, makes me sadder than I've been\r\nIn a long time, a long row of odd days,\r\nRagtag and worsted-ended, without your golden rays.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 63 We drive on beautiful white roads until<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWe drive on beautiful white roads until\r\nThe lake is a single blue eyelid;\r\nStrange fish leap, straining their scarlet gills,\r\nKeeping their watch on humankind.\r\nWe are so young, we people of the earth,\r\nThe other creatures don't understand us\r\nWith our prayers and wars--but they and we both\r\nMount the lovers' excited crucifix.\r\n\r\nThe turtle, the bluejay, and even the jellyfish\r\nSting and huddle--and skim through the mighty sky--\r\nWhen we lie down together as I wish.\r\nAnd you, too, craven and wanting and sly,\r\nCozying over with your pearl skin and fur dish,\r\nThe hollow in your side where we meet and say goodbye.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 64 Though packed with joy, I\u2019m starved for joy<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThough stuffed with joy, I'm starved for joy;\r\nFor you I have devoured every jot,\r\nJammy and seedy as raspberries.\r\nMy ecstatic skin incinerates acres, the starving fire\r\nOf joys consumed by their own desire!\r\nFor you I am made hungry as the sea,\r\nDrinking every river to the lees.\r\nTo my gullet goes all treasure, all junk!\r\nGreedily I gorge on diamonds and rust,\r\nOld anchors, the amber delicacy of sunsets.\r\nAll goes down to my soul with a clank.\r\nFor you, I eat empires and dandelions equally--\r\nFor you, I have made myself open and empty,\r\nStarved to taste, with my being, all of your being.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 65 In you I discover the sea, am lost in waters<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIn you I discover the sea, am lost in waters,\r\nSmelling the bitter brine that floods from my cock,\r\nThe sharp salt exfoliates of our Maker\r\nThat shiver hoarsely in the sweat of our fuck.\r\nWith you, I grab at the reeling gunwales\r\nAnd almost fall overboard each day;\r\nEvery night, biting smiles from the dark, we assail\r\nEach other with our shark-bodies--saw and sway!\r\n\r\nBelow you, I am drowning.  My hands go wide \r\nAs I look up, loving the sky's last uncertain bright\r\nAs the green water's weight breaks me inside.\r\nThere's only you at the surface, only you in the light.\r\nLet me live this adventure, dear woman,\r\nIn your body, by your side, as a man.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 66 Your eyes are two moondrops, two bowls<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYour eyes are two moondrops, two bowls\r\nWith silvery goldfish going lazily inside;\r\nYour white hips are built like a waterslide,\r\nAnd I go down with no owlish thought of rescue at all....\r\nLet me dive in your wetness and paddle refreshed!\r\nWhatever apples the sea offers\r\nYour breasts give me also in our affair;\r\nOur affair of noon shadows and shaded flesh.\r\nLie with me on the salt beach of our bodies,\r\nStretch out into the sand of many hands\r\nAnd dunes of restless thighs, neither land\r\nNor sea really, as we are neither soul nor body only.\r\nWhatever we are, we are in this air\r\nTogether;  this liquid land and hard sea, together.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 67 Our wings are straight out, our wingtips just<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nOur wings are straight out, our wingtips just\r\nTouch as we move motionless over the whole\r\nEarth as we glide without diving over the whole\r\nMap of creation, silent and colored-in, just us.\r\n\r\nWhat do we see from the great height of our love?\r\nMillions crawling over the earth and over each other, larvae\r\nFeasting on their mother's corpse in a red furrow.\r\nThere's more to this earth than our hovering.\r\n\r\nI'd rather fly beside you, lashing our hook-beaks,\r\nAnd starve on the air currents like a dying leaf\r\nThan dive for the fattest lamb, the most ripe beef\r\nIf we must walk among those whose lives are crooked.\r\nCan't these fools see that love is a straight line?\r\nLove stretches straight from your taut heart to mine.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 68 In you I taste my death, your mouth the open<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIn you I taste my death, your mouth the open\r\nCorners of my grave, damp clay ochre and dun;\r\nYour arms like gravediggers hold me round\r\nAnd lower me helpless to the sucking ground.\r\nHere, in your mouth, live the roots of many things,\r\nMany ripening vines;  incantations and songs;\r\nBuried in you are deep emeralds, mines of nickel and lead,\r\nRivers of ore coursing among the buried.\r\nSo much comes so deeply from touching you,\r\nBreathing you in;  even in this final suffocation, you\r\nRemain dark and compelling--of you I can see no end,\r\nAlthough the earth you are composed of has an end.\r\nYou are measureless, endless and supreme--\r\nA depth beneath which no man may dream.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 69 When you kiss me my face changes<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \nWhen you kiss me my face changes,  like a face stamped on a lollipop when it’s licked.  Gradually the face smears to a flatness and disappears, and the tongue gradually becomes the color of the face that is no longer there.  So you are slowly becoming the color of my soul, and I am forgetting my face lick by lick.  Lick by lick, I begin to resemble the smooth personless joy of a red balloon–until (perhaps deliberately, in a fit of hungry ecstasy) you bite through me to the white sweet stick at my core.  And no one knows me any more than the washed-up skeleton of a dead whale, picked clean by diving gulls and rolling back-and-forth in the acid waves.<\/p>\n
    Sonnet 70 Are we sowing daughters when we seesaw<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAre we sowing daughters when we seesaw?\r\nIs any throng of sons arising from our private aching,\r\nThe back-and-forth of our terrifying loving\r\nThat silences to shame the puma and the daw?\r\nIs it enough to just be here and be just us?\r\nDoesn't \"fairest nature desire fair increase,\"\r\nIsn't your body a longboat full of empty seats\r\nWhere antsy children clamor, like on the bus?\r\nIsn't there something in the flower of ourselves\r\nThat desires to be plucked like the heavy magnolia,\r\nPlucked and held up, despite the streaks of purple melancholia?\r\nIs it enough for love to just ask these questions?\r\nOur fears exchange a look of blackest ice;\r\nA shiver comes, and then a kiss;  it will suffice.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 71 You have filled me the way a jug of wine is filled<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou have filled me the way a jug of wine is filled;\r\nDrop by drop your tears have shed: pale joy, dark grief\r\nReplacing fear and solidude and sorrow with belief\r\n--Almost I could not believe, almost my wound of doubting killed\r\nThe new true universe we two have willed.\r\n\r\nOut of my sadness, shedding the black crown\r\nIn the alabaster dust at your feet, on my knees\r\nI have made this pilgrimage through many trees--\r\nOut of the night dances on the wintry lawn,\r\nOut of the first spring day arrived in streaks of dawn.\r\n\r\nAnd now I am here, and you are here,\r\nAnd we drink from the heavy clay jug we've been filling.\r\nNight and day we drink to the dregs, and there, my silly,\r\nWe are empty and happy as a ring tossed in the air.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 72 How often have I turned the pages of your book<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nHow often have I turned the pages of your book,\r\nReading your braille nipples, commas round your mouth--\r\nYour eyebrows the astonished parenthesis of a look\r\nDamp delight engenders for us both.\r\nI read in the firelight stirred by your fingertips:\r\nHow you yearn to be warm bread and warm earth\r\nRising and restless, the air whipping!\r\n\r\nThere are so many marvelous stories to touch\r\nAs I run my tongue across your fragrant words,\r\nSwashbuckling over the mossy moat of ooh and aah\r\nTo reach the climax: castle, cave, treasure or fabulous bird.\r\nAnd there in the dogeared dark of bed and book,\r\nThe phoenix erupts like a hydrant!  Ah, fabulous bird!\r\nAnd your eyebrows almost contain your fireworks look.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 73 Let us hunt among smallnesses for love<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLet us hunt among smallnesses for love:\r\nThe tapering end, held tight, of the elephant's tail,\r\nOr how a condor's aiming wing ends in a single quill--\r\nThey way your nose reaches me before your lips from above.\r\nThese little things, littler and littler,\r\nThe kindness one might extend to a mouse;\r\nIt is in these small wonders that we build our house,\r\nYou and I, meeting alone, thumb and thimble.\r\n\r\nNotice the tininess of quiet:\r\nThe ballerina leaping in the barn by herself\r\n--So small a gesture--or the inchling elf\r\nWho goes on tiptoe to view love's riot.\r\n\r\nPrayerfully, we fold ourselves into bed,\r\nClose our eyes, and dream the littlest dream in one head.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 74 Mysteriously each day flares and disappears<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMysteriously each day flares and disappears,\r\nStars are thrown over us in a glimmering net\r\nAnd we swim in our dreams through an unforgettable wet\r\nUntil dawn ignites its sheet of crimson paper.\r\nEverything goes up in the fire, daily;  vagueness\r\nHas my kisses mingle with others' kisses;\r\nIn a week, my face is merging with the visage\r\nOf a half-dozen half-remembered masterpieces....\r\n\r\nWhen oblivion unplugs the phone, and the line goes dead\r\nYour friends discuss the stranger whom they loved;\r\nWho you were has come and gone like a matchstick's red;\r\nThose who swore you oaths forget your voice.\r\nSince you and I must succumb to such severe severing,\r\nLet's play today as if today we were forevering. \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 75 Come to me, come to me, wild rose who grows<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nCome to me, come to me, wild rose who grows\r\nApart--I climb the thorny mountain,\r\nAnd I tread the thorny path to know\r\nThe thorny secret of your thorny heart.\r\nBitter the wind and long, long the way\r\nTo come to the dancing brook, your fountain;\r\nThe thorny rock I climb both night and day.\r\n\r\nAnd there at your root I slept, a day and night,\r\nAnd dreamed a pilgrim dream that has not\r\nGone away: O little mountain rose, who bent\r\nAnd said the words my heart still hears: Come to me--\r\nCome to me, walker and stranger, come drink\r\nBeside my rocks and my roots, come drink\r\nMy dreams and kiss the bitter thorn of me.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 76 A thorny ladder wraps the mountain<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nA thorny ladder wraps the mountain\r\nAs I stride to attend your musky rose;\r\nI come for your body's garden, mossy and open:\r\nOf your musky skin, I breath the rose.\r\nI climb the ladder as I climb you, daily\r\nHeaving my weight up toward your unconquerable eyes,--\r\nMy heavy regrets, my dank past, my disguises.\r\nHurrying, I plunge into the thorns.  Ai!\r\n\r\nSuddenly, the angry angel's red-hot rapier is everywhere,\r\nHissing into my neck, my lungs, my sides, \r\nLancing the blue coil of my intestines.\r\nWill loving you and climbing you leave me dying?\r\n\r\nFrom the highest rock you bend, dusky rose;\r\nI attend your soft musk's music, and I arise.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 77 Death, I don\u2019t get it\u2014Death seems like a fake<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nDeath, I don't get it--Death seems like a fake\r\nWhen (right next to you) my eyes snap awake\r\nLike blinds rolled up in the alert light of dawn.\r\n\r\nEveryone's always mooning over some grave,\r\nSome president or lover or bloke awfully brave\r\n--At best I manage to stifle my yawns.\r\n\r\nMicrobes and cancers and blanks on the map\r\nSteal time from their eyes they'll never get back.\r\nWhy don't they get wise and do what I do?\r\n\r\nBuilding big monuments is hard on the back,\r\nAnd who cares what's there in the blanks on the maps?\r\nSo why don't the world shut up and just love you?\r\n\r\nThey'd see crystal-clear how Death was a fake\r\nWhen (right next to you) their eyes snapped awake.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 78 We\u2019re here to celebrate a life of dust<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWe're here to celebrate a life of dust.\r\nWe're born passing away, as we must.\r\nDying we crawl to our parents' knees,\r\nChoking clutch our holy rosaries.\r\nCrippled we round the bases at stickball,\r\nHamstrung pitch pennies against the back wall.\r\nWe count our raises on fingers of bone;\r\nThe dying crowd cheers, but we're still alone.\r\n\r\nNothing and no one can stop the sands shift-\r\nIng down the hourglass and over the cliff;\r\nWe're dead at our prayers, and dead at our song;\r\nDead in the mirror; dead all the day long.\r\nWhen across the bed your kiss comes like a knife,\r\nI open my mouth, I surrender my life.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 79 Bury me standing and pennyeyed<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nBury me standing and pennyeyed,\r\nA pagan and a fighter I have died,\r\nNor expect to be alive again--\r\nSo loving you must have an end.\r\n\r\nAlthough intimations came and went\r\nOf a meaning more eternal when we kissed,\r\nI kept to my convictions and now am spent.--\r\nLight a penny-candle if I'm missed.\r\n\r\nDon't imagine that from heaven I would frown\r\nIf you still cavort and canter like a lass;\r\nSomething there is that loves a clown,\r\nAnd I loved you when I saw you last.\r\n\r\nSo leave a stone and raise a glass to me,\r\nWho when he kissed you, kissed you;  as it was meant to be.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 80 I am cut, and in my heart is planted<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI am cut, and in my heart is planted\r\nA grafting of your luxurious bough--\r\nSome gesture you made, some grace half-granted\r\nRinsing kitchen mangoes beneath the faucet.\r\n\r\nYour eyes were black and hungry, your mouth too,\r\nAs you shook out of your pants--\r\nRound the rickety chairs we wheeled, rich and slow,\r\nA sweet molasses movement in our dance.\r\n\r\nThe mango juice oiled your open breasts\r\nOlive-toned and slanted, and the green smell of tea\r\nRose wreathed from your hair--I lost my breath\r\nAnd rode your slipping hips for certainty.\r\n\r\nAnd now from the grafted tree that grows,\r\nI shake a thousand hours of our mangoes.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 81 We\u2019ve been kissing till our lips are chapped<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWe've been kissing till our lips are chapped \r\nAnd happy, our eyes hypnotized from a gazing-fest\r\nThat out-stared the sap in their sockets.\r\nToo long we've lain with sex on the brain\r\nAnd the groin--oh, the groans!--we must stop it.\r\nWe need to rest, shut up, get dressed,\r\nAnd see if the blue world still rolls outdoors.\r\n\r\nSore as a sigh, we depart on our lark,\r\nCreaking weak keisters to the car:\r\nThe movies, the mall, or Seaside Park?\r\nWe drive until five on our dutiful tryst\r\nAnd ask: Did a longer day ever exist?\r\n\r\nWe laugh as we dash madly back to bed\r\nWhere we align half-divine and (half the time) head-to-head.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 82 Voyeurs at the wall of Abelard<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nVoyeurs at the wall of Abelard\r\nAnd his heaving Heloise heard love made,\r\nForged from iron fires groaning hard\r\nWhere bellows hiss and the hot poker's laid.\r\n\r\nCleopatra paddling on her barge\r\nProffered pink enticements to Antony\r\nWhile excited slaves looked on with eyes quite large\r\nAnd the sinuous Nile slinked into the sea.\r\n\r\nWhen Salome threw her seventh veil away\r\nAnd shone before Herod as God intended,\r\nUnashamed as sunshine at midday,\r\nEven John the Baptist lost his head.\r\n\r\nSo ardent are our toe-to-toe romances,\r\nPrudence peeps between her fingers at us!\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 83 I would break over your body like a wave<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI would break over your body like a wave\r\nEvery night, over and over, over your back,\r\nYour hair, dissolving into the shadows I crave\r\nThat inhabit the nape of your neck.\r\nI would bear you distances to hidden sands\r\nLike pirate booty, alone beneath the palm trees;\r\nI would not share you, even with the moonlight, on our island!\r\nTo me you have come, to me remain.  To me.\r\nI open your heavy chest and count the treasures there:\r\nZion and Taj Mahal in a single body!\r\nYour lips are memorable as a cut lemon;\r\nYour tongue persuades me to love's duty....\r\nTonight I break upon you a million ways\r\nAnd break and break until my breaking stays.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 84 I tie you to the chair and feel the rough<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI tie you to the chair and feel the rough\r\nOf wood and soft of skin compete and play\r\nFor where my wet attention goes and stays,\r\nAlthough the sport's sniggered at as uncouth.\r\n\r\nStill, there is a time to bring the rope and bind\r\nThe love-object to her astute pedestal\r\nAnd grant her darkest wish therewithal:\r\nTo feel assured that mating's sting is blind.\r\n\r\nI with she and she with he and they with them\r\nPlay a roundel merry Mozart could commend,\r\nSo difficult's't to parse the beginning from the end\r\nUntil the music stops and draws the curtain.\r\n\r\nI would tie you to me more gently, though:\r\nBe thou the butterfly on which my breezes blow.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 85 Dear, I am jealous of you, the way a pearl<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nDear, I am jealous of you, the way a pearl\r\nIs jealous of the moon.--Vanity, my girl,\r\nHas brought me singing here beside you\r\nAlthough I am small as a child's first \"O.\"\r\nTeach me your light, how you throw yourself\r\nOver every roof and field, and all the items on the shelf,\r\nDetailing the dust on the clock... even its hands you enhance--\r\nInfinite and infinitesimal at once!\r\n\r\nI stay stung inside myself like an eyeball,\r\nGreedy to see, yet selfishly pearled as a shut shell.\r\nHow can I break open like a moon-gleam,\r\nTraveling the nothing, and giving even dogs dreams?\r\nTeach me your light;  its depth, its height--\r\nI would crest with the sea-wave, and give lovers light.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 86 Desire rifles me, disorders my innards<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nDesire rifles me, disorders my innards,\r\nChars my hugging arms to black, helpless studs,\r\nUntongues the eloquence of my familiar patter\r\nAnd leaves my heaving soul standing mute.\r\nI'd shredded myself to spastic tatters\r\nDisobeying love's laws and rescinding old statutes,\r\nFrisking suspects for tinder to ignite with desire--\r\nDesire the fever that burned down my house.\r\n\r\nI was wrecked with wanting until you came, \r\nPlain as a square of sunlight on the oaken floor....\r\nThen I saw: how overwrought and strange my pain!\r\nHow simple to acquit desire's rave and roar;\r\nDesire is nothing when love is--which, fussless,\r\nOverpours the brim desire desires.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 87 Life, I hold you up and look through you<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLife, I hold you up and look through you,\r\nA clear pane of ice skimmed from a puddle\r\nHeld only a desperate moment in the muddle\r\nUntil fingers go numb and you slip through....\r\nOnly a moment, and what I saw\r\nWas the color and contour of conchs,\r\nThe sweet center of a woman's haunch\r\nOpen and thirsty--for a man's peck, a lover's paw.\r\n\r\nLife, if you have a meaning, what else\r\nIs it?  Today a man and a woman are meeting,\r\nWords pass between them, a sleet of bees,\r\nUntil night finds them naked as a racing pulse.\r\nLife, share with me all of your secret whispers.\r\nWife, kiss me with your fresh lips like cinders.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 88 I try to go to sleep, but can only think<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI try to go to sleep, but can only think.\r\nStrange shades of death assault me,\r\nDrown me in their inks, squids of the sea\r\nConstricting the peaceful measure of my soul.\r\nA tomtom is rapping in my awake ears\r\nFrom inside the cork corridors of my skull;\r\nWhatever's left of me is not my will,\r\nJust this red repeat of sound that sears.\r\nI watch the animated faces go by\r\nIn a silent film, every mouth sealed with cellophane;\r\nAre they laughing haphazardly or crying out in pain?\r\nI watch the animated faces go by.\r\nThe moon rolls into my room, a bloodshot eye.\r\nWe stare the night out.  We do not blink.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 89 Being here, meeting you, my life, well, my life<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nBeing here, meeting you, my life, well, my life\r\nIs feeling complete.  I almost don't want\r\nTo jinx it by saying so much about my life.\r\nAlmost, too, I don't want what I want.\r\nHow can his be?  We are two humans,\r\nAlike as mirrors facing each other,\r\nSame sets of hands, toes, same talk, same tongues, lungs\r\nThe same, and yet.... I feel your alien center out there.\r\n\r\nYour pride and determination to teach well,\r\nHow love has sucked you up like a vacuum\r\nAnd now you are afraid.  All this I feel,\r\nAnd myself going around humming Te Deum.\r\nBeing here, meeting you, my life, well, my life\r\nFeels complete. And yet, almost, I don't want my life.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 90 Life, they say, occurs in the caesuras<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLife, they say, occurs in the caesuras,\r\nThe pauses when passion's breath is breaking\r\nOr the mired eye at dawn is mildly peering,\r\nAnd lovers lie replaying their old overtures.\r\nLife is what's happening when it's not,\r\nWhen nothing much is foremost in our thoughts,\r\nA finger caught in some stray weft of webbing\r\nWhile over Miami the blue moon is ebbing.\r\nLife, elusive fish, is not captured when it's caught;\r\nIt's not the adding and subtracting of pensive thought\r\nOr any other species of abstract thinking.\r\nLife is just the waits between the blinking.\r\nSo long as I lollygag (between the birth pang\r\nAnd oblivion) with you--I'm content to hang.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 91 I am blind, blinded, a lost mole escaped out<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI am blind, blinded, a lost mole escaped out\r\nOf his long house, for now my home is in your self;\r\nIn you, my soul falls up out of itself\r\nThe way a lotus floats over its roots.\r\nIn you, I am so close to being air, to flying!\r\nYou pull my umbilical cord through my mouth,\r\nAnd in my center forms a silver pool of truth;\r\nAlmost, in you, my me, my I, is dying.\r\nWe are together as the cords of a twisted rope.\r\nTogether, we turn back from frogs into tadpoles;\r\nSoon we'll be egg-sacks, then a single egg, pale.\r\nWe kiss with our mouths open as if saying \"Hope.\"\r\nYou, who have my sight, my life, my sighing,\r\nCome be blind with me beyond our dying.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 92 Your hands prepare a night for us together\u2014-<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYour hands prepare a night for us together--\r\nCandles and glasses, the eats chopped and prepped;\r\nHow carefully, how thoroughly, I am in your debt!\r\nThe bed turned down, the rum-topaz light soft as feathers.\r\nA hundred times I have walked around you, sighing,\r\nWhile you hung up the moon and arranged the plates,\r\nPreparing even the corners of our life until very late.\r\nAnd all I can think to do is undress you, and kiss your feet, crying.\r\nMy gratitude fills me, like wetness in cactus--\r\nDon't let my sharp whiskers deceive you!\r\nInside I am sweet and full of grateful dews.\r\nThat you should live our life so intently.... Without practice\r\nYou throw love everywhere like streamers from a spotlight,\r\nAnd happiness explodes in me like a burst pi\u00f1ata.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 93 When you abide beside me I am calm<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhen you abide beside me I am calm,\r\nAll my tempests by temperance overtaken.\r\nLife's hazards hurry in, but not their harm;\r\nAlthough my leaves do rattle, no root is shaken.\r\nWhen my hot forehead meets with your tender palm\r\nMy fever breaks, my delirium mistaken.\r\nI do not know what others do, madam,\r\nBut with the seal of your solace I am so blazoned\r\nI feel myself a lion who was a lamb,\r\nYet mellow in my marrow as a Shaker.\r\nI hope to be no more than what I am:\r\nGratefully alive, and grateful for thy Maker--\r\nFor nothing could surpass, in the world to come,\r\nThan this I have, when I by thee awaken.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 94 When I am feeling troubled and at a loss<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhen I am feeling troubled and at a loss\r\nFor no other reason than I'd forgot\r\nMy own reasons for getting too hot,\r\nShe comes to me with a cool compress\r\n(And rustles near me in her silken dress)\r\nAnd manages without managing at all\r\nTo manage away my worry with her skill\r\nAnd save me from my own self-caused duress.\r\n\r\nAnd for this aid I have no help to give,\r\nNone at all, but school my truant gratitude\r\nTo look on her with love,--me, whose natively rude,\r\nAnd petty too, and, so, condemned to live....\r\nThen she comes again with her talk, her touch,\r\nHer tender balm, making smooth the rough.  \r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 95 She is a compass needle going round<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nShe is a compass needle going round,\r\nAnd seems in all her spin and waver\r\nMore like something lost than something found.\r\n\r\nStill, how the blue point endeavors!\r\nAnd will not be put off her trying harder\r\n(No matter that she'll earn no extra chevrons).\r\n\r\nWhat lodestone rubbed to make her so endure?\r\nSomething there is perhaps in her being pinned\r\nTo house and job and child and filling the larder.\r\n\r\nFor round she goes, feeding us and filling bins\r\nWith fine fidelity for one so scattered,\r\nSo torn between her going out and coming in.\r\n\r\nStill, she knows her North despite all hazard\r\n--As if loving us were all that really mattered.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 96 You held my hand and held me back to make<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou held my hand and held me back to make\r\nMe stay, who would have walked on without a thought\r\nTo reach the ready bench past the woodland brake\r\nAnd there sit content, and have no further thought.\r\n\r\nYou held me back, and pointed without a word--\r\nThere, between the slant and screen of trunks, \r\nA fox returned to her nesting brood, \r\nHer mouth blooded, and in that mouth a skunk.\r\nSuch dedication had the young ones yip\r\nAnd tear at the striped carcass, black and white,\r\nLove had brought dragging for their sup--\r\nAnd kept the mother-skunk from her kits.\r\n\r\nYou held my hand, and may you always\r\nBe so wise of eye and wise to nature's ways.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 97 Have you ever wanted to fly<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nHave you ever wanted to fly?\r\nThere was a frog who wanted to fly\r\nAnd got his chance.  First, he was lonely,\r\nAnd cried at the pond's edge in his great loneliness.\r\nHis voice was like a drum.  Other frogs\r\nCovered their ears.  Dragonflies flew off in fog\r\nTo avoid the cacophony. What was the frog lonely for?\r\n\r\nI'll tell you.  He was lonely for the sky\r\n--Just that.  That's where his froggish dreaming was tacked.\r\nLow, low in his frog-throat, who knows why,\r\nThe great loneliness gathered, like the great\r\nTension of a bowstring pulled back.\r\nAnd out of that came the frog's dark cry\r\nLike a lover's lament.  He was in love--just that.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 98 Love comes sneaky like the coyote<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove comes sneaky like the coyote,\r\nStealing hearts left trashed and discarded;\r\nLove cannot enter a gate when guarded\r\nFor love is soft and secret as midnight smoke,\r\nEasily spooked by a too-attentive hoot\r\nOr too-oft remembrance of an antique hurt.\r\n\r\nBut let down pride and let down vigilance\r\nAnd love like moss on every root will grow;\r\nLove will come slinking by for kitchen scraps\r\nWith eyes as big as moons in a puddle's overflow--\r\nLove will live on iffy maybes and a half-perhaps.\r\nOnce love's pennant's pitched upon the parapet,\r\nShe waves her colors gaily, victorious in surfeit.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 99 Because my dreams know you, I do not<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nBecause my dreams know you, I do not,\r\nBecause I do not know my dreams.  Sad eyes\r\nCome glancing, and then suddenly hide themselves\r\nIn the blackness of wells, in a pine board's knot.\r\nIn my dreams there are rumors of your beauty,\r\nAnd I follow the noble words like stepping stones\r\nOver the abyss, my old bachelor home--\r\nSweep me: winds, words!  I weave songs of fealty.\r\nI curl around what you might be, white lady,\r\nLike a dog around a stove, the tongue around \"love.\"\r\nHow everything below curves toward what's above!\r\nEvery plant and every eye is trained on the butane sky.\r\nAnd so, white lady, whenever you want\r\nYou may appear here, as my dreams you already haunt.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 100 Break like an oak, or keep faith forever\u2014-<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nBreak like an oak, or keep faith forever--\r\nDie in the harness, your heart a furnace of effort:\r\nThe oath of a bull is not the oath of a feather.\r\n\r\nLove with your will and not your body only,\r\nThe way virgins married Vesuvius alive\r\nAnd died in a silence terribly lonely.\r\n\r\nCondors mate with their wild kind on the crags\r\nAs sky and rock mate in ravening winter,\r\nTheir high crying caught in the wind's brag.\r\n\r\nCome take me, maiden, with your Amazon mind!\r\nCome kiss lips till lips blaze and splinter!\r\nCome ravish the man who climbs to marry your kind!\r\n\r\nThe oath of a bull is not the oath of a feather:\r\nBreak like an oak, or keep faith forever.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 101 Shameless is my mistress wetly caught<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nShameless is my mistress wetly caught,\r\nWily in her seeking freedom thence--\r\nDemure when spanked as though she would be taught,\r\nYet still runs wild at her third offense.\r\nWho could teach much to such wantonness,\r\nFrenzied to be free, when freed all frenzy still?\r\nUnbidden, she'll curl upon a lap to rest--\r\nAll things her way always is her only will.\r\nShe charms at first with an off-hand gesture,\r\nComes for pets, is damned attentive;\r\nYour good opinion seems her only pleasure\u2026.\r\nNext day proves her unretentive.\r\nHow can one instruct such a flitting wisp?\r\nNo way but enjoy each shimmer as she shifts.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 102 For three dates you remained a mermaid to me<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nFor three dates you remained a mermaid to me,\r\nSwimming away and flashing your tail.\r\nI didn't even know if you had two legs, and the sea\r\nKept foaming right up to your navel.\r\n\r\nWhen would I feel your slick body climb into bed,\r\nYour clothes lumped in a disordered heap,\r\nYour half half-sinking, taking ballast aboard,\r\nAnd you naked as a newly-sheared sheep?\r\n\r\nSomething was fishy, my little mermaid;\r\nWas our romancing faux or spurious?\r\nThe course you set was cunningly laid,\r\nAnd my suspicion kept me curious.\r\n\r\nBut then you swam up, and sailed home to my bed,\r\nAnd wrapped your legs around my head.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 103 My love is not a river, but it is<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMy love is not a river, but it is\r\nIn the river, flowing among the yeasty curls,\r\nWetting itself in the wavery spray and the spritz\r\nPlayfully as an otter with two balls.\r\nMy love is not grand like a church bell\r\nForged lovingly from parishioners' pennies,\r\nCalling in the blackclad faithful to solemnly kneel;\r\n(But my love does have a tongue for you, Jenny.)\r\nMy love is not as vast as the Great Plains'\r\nMajesties--fertile and broad and deep;\r\nBut my love does peep like a prairie dog, is game\r\nTo pop up and play hide-and-seek.\r\nMy love is a funny sort of thing, and a small:\r\nA paper plane thrown in a cathedral.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 104 Other constellations have all flashed to ash\u2014-<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nOther constellations have all flashed to ash--\r\nOld photo-bulbs, popped and nude,\r\nHeaven's eons reduced to interludes\r\nSince your starry being has come to pass.\r\nI doodle the lines of your constellation, dotting spots\r\nThat limn your chin or trace your waist\r\nWith my hands and mouth, pausing at each place\r\nTo braise my pallor on your burning body's hot.\r\nMy ardent lips come back bruised and burnt\r\nAs burls, and tears shine hard where lust had lurked--\r\nSurprising eyes, and leaving me unsure how this works.\r\nLoving is not loving that will not learn to hurt.\r\nNow I lay me down on the grassy floor\r\nAnd memorize stars that are all yours.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 105 File me down to an unbearable essence<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nFile me down to an unbearable essence,\r\nPinch me tight like ground spices, and haul\r\nMy granular essence up to your curious nose.\r\nInhale my sharpness;  love is at the core.\r\nIt has taken me a long time to arrive,\r\nA long time I paddled in love's tanning vat\r\nDisputing causes, examining the sieve,\r\nAdding up my love-lists like an accountant.\r\nBut now I am soaked, dunked, drenched, a whore\r\nWholly open and wholly possessed;\r\nI love all of you, your least eyelash adore;\r\nI love you stripped, or bathing, or dressed.\r\nLove is at my center, love up to the teeth;\r\nNow love me too--quick--or love must come to grief.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 106 Your love\u2019s locked up in her intricate castle<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYour love's locked up in her intricate castle.\r\nHigh, high the parapet!  In the moat, a crocodile.\r\nI slip into the black water anyway, the way\r\nThe moon slips into your mouth when you raise it, singing.\r\nMy desire for you has made me brave--\r\nNot brave to conquer, nor to save,\r\nBut brave to kiss you and to be kissed\r\nRegardless of what the interference is.\r\n\r\nBold lions lean yellow in your feline eyes,\r\nCrouched to kill with womanly surmise;\r\nIn your mouth, ten thousand snakes lie limply curled--\r\nReady to haunt and hiss at a word.\r\nAll this I dare who never dared before:\r\nI throw down my heart before your farthest shore.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 107 In the mist, in the rain<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIn the mist, in the rain,\r\nComes illimitable pain;\r\nHere your face remains a memory\r\nOf insuperable agony....\r\n\r\nWe who had been lovers, closer\r\nThan diodes anodyne and chosen\r\nNow separate like trees in fog,\r\nDull white columns half-sogged\r\n\r\nUntil I and all I feel\r\nIs insubstantial, ephemeral....\r\nI myself a ghost\r\nInvisible in mist, lost\r\n\r\nWithout you as my anchor, dear,\r\nMy source, my succor.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 108 Play the sistrum softly, softly<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nPlay the sistrum softly, softly. \r\nHer image glides all ghostly\r\nWhen the refrigerator hums\r\nAnd dead of night is come.\r\n\r\nI am haunted by her now\r\nWho knows the strength and hour\r\nOf her presence, of her power--\r\nOh ghost at once sweet and sour!\r\n\r\nIllusory, frightful,\r\nHysterical, delightful,\r\nThe woman in the mirror\r\nHaunts and appears.\r\n\r\nOn my shoulder like a parrot\r\nShe hops, my ghoul, my Pierrot!\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 109 As hypnotic as a living fan of coral<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAs hypnotic as a living fan of coral,\r\nAs delicate in their blue aurorals\r\nThe veins on your legs wave their traceries,\r\nSturdy pillars of impious ecstasy.\r\nYou climb aboard me, and I sink beneath\r\nBreathless as a turtle swimming in a reef;\r\nChains of bubbles from my hooked lips\r\nEnclose my moans of sinful happiness, \r\nAudible only when they pop open.\r\n\r\nSo I sigh with the sea....  Do I sigh in vain,\r\nEvoking only my lady's harsh laugh?\r\n\r\nO My lady of marble with marbled thighs,\r\nPunch me, crush me with desire til I sigh\r\nYour praises upward in a silent prayer of pain!\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 110 Love, so great an emblem, a divinest thing<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove, so great an emblem, a divinest thing\r\nLike Himalayas beyond Himalayas' aspiring:\r\nSo tall, so fierce--an Amazon from the moon\r\nLoitering on the porch between us now it's June.\r\nLove, once remote beyond ebony pearls of Cathay,\r\nStrolls by with baskets of daily laundry;\r\nLove sits knit in the pearl of \"purl one, purl two\"\r\nAs we lounge of an evening with pay-per-view.\r\nLove, when I was ignorant and young,\r\nLay locked in a castle beyond my tongue\r\nWhich knew not the secret keys of a kiss:\r\nHolding hands in the rain, the nearness of bliss.\r\nSo long have I stood imagining wings\r\nWho, knowing you, flies over everything.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 111 I thought I knew just what to do with you<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI thought I knew just what to do with you:\r\nKeep you in a box on my Friday night shelf,\r\nFeed you snickers and movies and romantic fluff\r\nAbout stars in your eyes and kisses like wine\r\nAnd other such fabulous stuff.\r\n\r\nBut, oh, how mistaken!  My heart was taken\r\nWhen your body spooned glued to mine.\r\nMy will swam away under a tidal wave\r\nTo tropic, Tahitian moons. I thought I knew\r\nYou, I thought I knew me. But, today,\r\nI am a man lost at sea, the sea gorgeous,\r\nA man on an island washing away under his feet....\r\nAnd I need you, in your wooden canoe, to come\r\nAnd take me to wherever you came from.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 112 Grey\u2019s anatomy and all that crap<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nGrey's anatomy and all that crap:\r\nBodies blueprinted and expertly dissected,\r\nDrawn and quartered from arse to cap\r\nAs that curious scalpel the eye directed.\r\nNo diagram can master what you are:\r\nLusty stardust fallen to our sphere.\r\n\r\nHere, you present yourself humanly:\r\nSwearing at the buckles on your mackintosh,\r\nSpilling the last soggy bag of groceries,\r\nStamping your rain boots free of fresh slush.\r\nThat's the you who you are--whose eyes see deep,\r\nWhose breath is half roses when you're half asleep,\r\nWhose kiss is integral, and whose calm arms are just\r\nThe skinsoft thing that wakes the whole of my lust.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 113 Miscreant Time has spelt his troubles plain<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nMiscreant Time has spelt his troubles plain\r\nOn papery forehead and chill cheeks eaten\r\nBy the wind.  Lacing my sneakers at dawn,\r\nI ran, once, and raced the wind unbeaten.\r\nWhile still a boy by the barefoot pond,\r\nI saw my face resolve past hanging fronds\r\nUnlined by any lesson of the Lord's;\r\nAll was still penny-a-wish and open hope.\r\n\r\nNow past my zenith, on the far shore lodged,\r\nWhere snows heap up and the hillside steepens,\r\nI reach weakly across the wrinkled gorge\r\nTo one who keeps my heart within her steeple.\r\nWill you take this hand and creak on crutches?--\r\nThere's a place past the peak where the church is.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 114 Love cannot choose, but knows it is chosen<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove cannot choose, but knows it is chosen\r\nTo undertake all that love can endeavor:\r\nHurl rocks from the heights, or love you forever,\r\nWhichever is hardest, more burning, more frozen.\r\nOne big love is better than any half dozen;\r\nOne Mississippi masters ten cataracts--\r\nThose, my lover, are simply the facts.\r\nLove cannot choose, but knows it is chosen.\r\nA hunchback haranguing the town with his bell,\r\nA lady pirouetting herself off a cliff,\r\nHamlet pondering Ophelia's sweet \"If....\"\r\nThat man with the Nose who knows words all too well;\r\nThey all knew nothing, but one thing knew then--\r\nLove cannot choose, but knew love chose them.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 115 Although my joy with pain is blistered<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAlthough my joy with pain is blistered\r\nAnd I choke on every luau larded at my feet:\r\nPurple whortle-berries, vintage of San Griet,\r\nStill I eat, still drink to life and leisure.\r\nEach hike I take toward some higher good,\r\nEach leap I make, induces some new seizure;\r\nEach trial into undiscovered pleasure\r\nLeaves a trail of bodies through the wood....\r\nStill I trod, having found no higher God\r\nThan duty to what beauty here appears--\r\nLeaves that come and go throughout the year,\r\nMilkweed seeds drifting slowly from their pods.\r\nWhatever cost our private Christmases incur, \r\nI'll pay the pain, so long as you and I continue us.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 116 Death will take you, and I will bless you: “Go.”<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nDeath will take you, and I will bless you: \"Go.\"\r\nNot like demented Edgar shall I wander and weep,\r\nClasping for golden sandgrains on the margin of the deep\r\nWhere every wave is saying, sweep, sweep, sweep.\r\nNo, no.  Not in tragic sadness all alone\r\nWill I face the inevitable lightning:\r\nYour face yellow, or wan, dead and frightening \r\nDown in the dark new box black with lacquering.\r\n\r\nInstead, I'll stand happy and mad as the rain,\r\nWatching the deep drops, like sucked gumdrops, fall\r\nOn the gathered mourners, and wetly roll\r\nPrescient and perfect and round as crystal balls.\r\nMy time continuing, your time remains,\r\nFor I will praise you, darling, till you are come again.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 117 If I were without whoever you are<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIf I were without whoever you are\r\nWould I feel the loss, and miss it?\r\nThe spoon licked clean, the talk at the bar,\r\nThe bree and crackers, the hand at whist?\r\nIf I were without whoever you are\r\nWould your memory enlarge to a shade?\r\nWould you haunt me at midnight with a twanged guitar,\r\nMisplace my keys, ruin parades?\r\nWould I bury my head in your pillow,\r\nSniff the drawer where your sweaters were left?\r\nAt movies, would I weep like a willow?\r\nWould I feel like a victim of theft?\r\nWho would it be who was driving my car\r\nIf I were without whoever you are?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 119 Tell me, does love have sorrow for its marrow<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nTell me, does love have sorrow for its marrow?\r\nIs a dandelion lovely only\r\nBecause its baldness leaves us lonely?\r\n\r\nWhen the player prates \"Tomorrow, tomorrow...\"\r\nOr the expired milk curls its lip,\r\nTheir change of state makes us moue and weep.\r\n\r\nIs it the same with love and her tears--\r\nWiping our noses or blinking them back\r\nStops our hearts as if under attack.\r\n\r\nO, look in the mirror with that look of fear:\r\nThe horseman is coming to trample our dears.\r\nThe x-ray, once backlit, the cancer is clear.\r\n\r\nThe test returned positive from the hospital staff,\r\nOur hearts are in our throats, and we cannot gasp.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 119 Death holds lovers who forget each other<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nDeath holds lovers who forget each other,\r\nWho pretend the soft pulsings in a wrist\r\nEverlastingly unroll.--Death's cold furs\r\nWrap up those proud hearts' hot velvets\r\nIn a chill no quilt can conquer.\r\n\r\nIt is no idle boast of coffins\r\nTo say they box us best that box us last.--\r\nIn satin trim and eternal dim\r\nWe kiss goodbye our past.\r\nNo lovers' squalls within such walls remain.\r\n\r\nSo hold me now, and thou to thou,\r\nWe'll build a house of love and pillows\r\nPlumped with such subtle human powers\r\nDeath's retreat will last our lifetimes' hours.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 120 Sitting there so saucily thoughtful<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nSitting there so saucily thoughtful,\r\nYour firm legs a-dangle, uncrossed,\r\nYour eyes milky and mildly unfocused\r\nAs your lips taste tart thoughts that are lustful:\r\nWhat pictures are you painting in your mind?\r\nDo azure sands unfurl below tan skies?\r\nDo proud men crouch between your thighs\r\nFlashing dark looks beneath hair wildly curled?\r\n\r\nYou sit on your tall fantasist's throne\r\nCruel and adored, the barstool worn flat\r\nFrom daily use (chopping carrots and all that),\r\nA woman who shy-slyly transforms her home\r\nInto Pan's Cavern, where white firelight dances,\r\nAnonymous hands strip us, and we grow frantic.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 121 I\u2019m not quite sure I quite know quite how<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI'm not quite sure I quite know quite how\r\nOr quite why you love me even now.\r\nAfter so many leerings and pairings,\r\nSo many hesitations and darings,\r\nAssignations, arrangements and trysts, \r\nAllurements, procurements and back alley kisses,\r\nStill you return, still make me feel missed.\r\n\r\nAt each meeting the mystery deepens,\r\nYet no abyss intervenes with its weeping,\r\nNo catastrophe clatters, no shinbone shatters,\r\nIn fact, almost nothing at all's the matter!\r\nOnly you and I standing in the clear air,\r\nNo moon romancing the contented pair\r\nWaiting for nothing else to appear.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 122 What can summer add to what our winter<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhat can summer add to what our winter\r\nLove has found?  The heat and desperate damp of days\r\nLeaning from the sill with a sangria pitcher,\r\nMoonlight looming through a greasy lens,\r\nThe stacked smoke of apartment grills\r\nConfusing fuzzy flavors and leaving palettes burnt,\r\nThe noise of neighbor kids grinding by on big wheels\r\nFloating through summer screens green with bugs and lint.\r\n\r\nOh summer is one-thousand annoyances\r\nCompressed into ninety sweaty nights\r\nWhile Bennies scoop up spots on all the beaches....\r\n\r\nLove me to the depth, love me to the height\r\nOf all the loving any human heart has vowed.\r\nOnly, do not wait for summer;  love me now.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 123 I like to watch you try the new words on your tongue<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI like to watch you try the new words on your tongue,\r\nMouthing \"missus\" and the house address\r\nStrange as Demosthenes with his pebble-tongue.\r\n\r\nAll of this had come of your trying \"Yes\"\r\nOnce before the parson's congregation:\r\nA new household, and a man, and all this strangeness.\r\n\r\nNew wife, is all your world a wedding?\r\nIs stepping past a traffic light like passing arches garlanded?\r\nIs love brand new, or just the Sears bedding?\r\n\r\nYour married life, you say, began in childhood\r\nDressing dolls;  in middleschool there came petting;\r\nThen all the mercenary ads in \"Modern Bride\"....\r\n\r\nKnock the domestic idols from the shelf!\r\nStep in, my merry love, and be yourself.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 124 The world is packed tight with Kreons and Medeas<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe world is packed tight with Kreons and Medeas,\r\nThe Antigones go wobbly, the Electras are mad;\r\nTragedy springs bubbling from each tongue-tip, you'll see,\r\nThe good are driven into the arms of the bad.\r\nHelter-skelter harpies darken the trees;\r\nIt's chaos at home and confusion abroad--\r\nThe sad children are all abandoning God,\r\nThey sing no more carols and never say \"Please.\"\r\nWhen the good life has gone from golden to black,\r\nWhen virtue is threatened and evil triumphant,\r\nWhen all the old dears are under attack,\r\nWhat kind of love can two lovers want?\r\nWe lock eyes and lock horns and threaten a fight\r\nBut coo soft as doves when we spend the night.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 125 I burn through muses like Estes rockets\u2013<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI burn through muses like Estes rockets--\r\nSkirts and faces whirl in a grand fandango,\r\nThe shipboard romances tucked in a pocket\r\nReal and unreal as a fabulous go-go.\r\n\"Love\" crumbles at my lips, a communion wafer\r\nEaten when blood and wine are not enough,\r\nNor I transformed by what I have quaffed.\r\n\r\nLove's no drug to make us feel safer;\r\nIt's a razor on which we willingly tango\r\nTo a personal oblivion we have crafted\r\nCunningly, from basement to rafters.\r\nAnd in this morose house, my soul\r\nWinds the empty stairs and surveys the windows\r\nHoping I do not know what I know.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 126 Would you buy me a backyard full of dreams<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWould you buy me a backyard full of dreams?\r\nI see the fence, pale, a little rattled.\r\nI see the tiger-lilies growing boldly along the seam.\r\nI see the mole's house, by his round door the dottle.\r\nThere's room enough for vegetables, some bamboo,\r\nA clothesline dancing from the house to the tree,\r\nMaybe a swing below a low branch, too.\r\nI see us there, happy, and the huge moon makes three.\r\n\r\nSo many dreams vibrate above this square of ground;\r\nSo many terrible, lovely things live in our bodies.\r\nWhen will this dreaming and wanting have an end?\r\nAfter long enough, even pure dreams seem shoddy.\r\nWould you buy me a backyard full of dreams?\r\nStand beside me, just here.  Do not dream.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 127 You had grown quiet in a snowy field<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nYou had grown quiet in a snowy field, \r\nStood a little near the fence, did not move \r\nBut led sleeping flakes on your blushing tongue to yield \r\nTheir bodies back to water, misting love. \r\nHow like those little crystals, though in large, \r\nMy solemn wishes harmless fall on your magnificence \r\nTo dissolve in the huge waters of your marge \r\nAnd, losing all themselves, add nothing to your sense. \r\nFor you are more, in your silent warmth, \r\nLike constant earth that wears seasons for her veils, \r\nChanging summer green for autumn's gaiety, -- \r\nMore constant, more true, more everything of worth \r\nThan the fretful melts that touch your least detail \r\nAnd must, with touching, the seasons of their being interchange, \r\nLosing their winter dignity in your kissing spring.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 128 Where do the birds go when it rains<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nWhere do the birds go when it rains? \r\nTheir wings like little snippers are still,\r\nBlack wings, yellow wings, grey wings, again\r\nAnd again they flash... and, like knives, are still.\r\nAgain and again the pain of tears is falling;\r\nAll over the world and my block it is raining,\r\nOn the little birds especially--in their walls\r\nOf bushes, their deep green bushes, they're wailing.\r\n\r\nA bird wails with silence, for a bird\r\nIs born to be always singing;  it is not born\r\nTo be silent in the rain, in a bush, like a word\r\nUnspoken.  So much silence!  My heart is torn\r\nWith words I have not spoken, cannot speak\r\nWhen you look at me like rain beginning to break.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 129 I do not love you the way fire loves wood<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI do not love you the way fire loves wood\r\nAlthough my heat's as great, my hunger greater;\r\nI do not love you as saints crave the good\r\nAlthough my devotion's deeper than saint's prayer.\r\nNot by any measure of heart, hope, or greed\r\nDoes my loving come round to loving you;\r\nNot by comparison's calipers does my love exceed\r\nWhat others' love may be for those they do.\r\nNo;  it is by excess of gentleness \r\nAnd superlatives of softest care,\r\nBy exquisite forethought for your happiness\r\nThat my love arrives when you are least aware\r\nAnd prepares the wide ground with downy flakes\r\nFor your descent from clouds into the love I make.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 130 At sunset, how it all runs away from one<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAt sunset, how it all runs away from one,\r\nDay slips by day slippery till days are done;\r\nWhatever we were is not what we become.\r\n\r\n\"Old age should rage,\" but we are infant beings\r\nAnd do not know our ends and meanings--\r\nCarved from scrap, and, erected, leaning.\r\n\r\nWhat comes to us and comes of us is scattered;\r\nWe moon by mirrors as if mirrors mattered\r\n--But the self is fugitive, identity shattered.\r\n\r\nWe are a rift in the jazzman's riff,\r\nA glass-bottomed boat lazily adrift\r\nSighing into slender reeds that whistle rough.\r\n\r\nAnd so, our only music's not our own\r\nBut time's, whose ticking hands leave none alone.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 131 Love is a corpse, nothing but a corpse<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove is a corpse, nothing but a corpse\r\nOf joy, of memory, until the next minute\r\nLips incinerate, fire goes up in the copse,\r\nFire-fingers through the furze spread enchantment,\r\nAnd the body, momentarily present,\r\nManifests for its own self-destruction:--\r\nWhen what is you has escaped its vent\r\nAnd enters me, hissing whispers of perfection.\r\n\r\nSo long and lovingly do we circle \r\nIn this clasp, scientists at our instruments\r\nHooked to reality's terrifying lure,\r\nThe self at the telescope knows not where it went.\r\nThe fishing line cuts until soul's bones show\r\nThat cadaverous look, that ecstatic glow.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 132 That night you sang to me shines in me now<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nThat night you sang to me shines in me now,\r\nLong streamers of notes poured from a bucket;\r\nI am wrapped in your song, the long hair shadowy,\r\nCompletely contained in your voice as in a locket.\r\n\r\nMove your voice over the fluid night,\r\nLift hosannas from your throat like fireflies,\r\nSparks flung arrowlike from the flames' light\r\nWhen green wood goes yearning to the campfire.\r\n\r\nNow your voice is dark, black pools in a cave,\r\nLiquid with the deep auguries of earth,\r\nBaptismal of beginnings, the underground nave\r\nWhere songs spring among the first things of life.\r\n\r\nYou carry me around your neck, your voice full;\r\nI flow with you into everything beautiful.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 133 Shivery as a delicate dart from a blowgun<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nShivery as a delicate dart from a blowgun\r\nYou entered my blood, and my blood responded.\r\nShivering, I leave behind my lonely skin\r\nAnd dance entranced where I had only wandered.\r\nNow my heart's set loose among the stars....\r\n\r\nI visit the constellations, my neighbors;\r\nThe Plieades are in my arms, not strangers;\r\nAndromeda's my roommate, borrowing my car\r\nTo drive the dark wilderness behind your eyes.\r\nAnd there I am, too, licking, flickering.\r\n\r\nO, such wildernesses!  Beyond known skies\r\nI gather the fiery flowers continually,\r\nFattening my basket, fat to overflowing\r\nWith just you, all the you I am knowing.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 134 Everywhere people are looking at the heavens<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nEverywhere people are looking to the heavens\r\nFor perfection, for completion, for\r\nA patch to cover the holes in themselves.\r\n\r\nEven the man, the woman at an auction,\r\nBidding low and hoping for a bargain,\r\nAre looking for a cheap perfection.\r\n\r\nThe ears of the fox twitch again and again,\r\nAlertly aware of the wind's siftings,\r\nNose lifted to sniff a vulnerable perfection.\r\n\r\nEven the vole, even the sandflea sings\r\nThis song of seeking that will not hush.\r\nThis song is revolving through everything\r\n\r\nSlowly and grandly as gravity's deep crush....\r\nSomewhere, with great perfection, you holster your toothbrush.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 135 I pull you open and divide the loaves<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nI pull you open and divide the loaves\r\nOf your lovely body over and over--\r\nYou are shared and consumed, our molten moves\r\nThe everlasting communion of all lovers.\r\nYour shoulders rise whitely as round hills,\r\nYour buttocks tell of eternal life,\r\nHow all the long loving that we spill \r\nGoes on flowing for centuries, life\r\nAfter life.  On your bedstand a handful\r\nOf earrings, a litter of glittering\r\nSuch as might flutter from a beautiful\r\nNight--a splash of discarded things, of rings--\r\nMeaningless with no central singleness to adorn,\r\nThe pin in the pinwheel where our motion is born.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 136 Love comes apart, like shards, in the hand<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLove comes apart, like shards, in the hand,\r\nDefies the twine of the newspaper bundle;\r\nDecrepit as autumn, love creeps toward the cold\r\nDissolution entombed in earth's snowy mantle.\r\nWhen the body departs, love departs;\r\nLove does not endure among the bones.\r\n\r\nLove is the flesh's unconquerable throne,\r\nAn elegance of kisses, a masterpiece of hearts.\r\nTwo hands, when they cross, build cathedrals;\r\nTwo hearts, when they meet, come to summer\r\nIn an instant, like ringing a bell.\r\nLove, in this life, is all life's shimmer.\r\n\r\nSo take this hand.  Today, take this hand\r\nAnd kneel with me, and knead our daily bread.\r\n \r\n \r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 137 If I am living, I must be loving<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIf I am living, I must be loving.\r\nAs air enters the lungs, as words exit the mouth,\r\nMy diamond toward your diamond is craving--\r\nTwin lights entwined as self within self,\r\nShine within shine, our beauties exchanging.\r\n\r\nHow lightly we touch the deep-hidden beacon\r\nThat flares unwearied, unwary of loss,\r\nA lighthouse that gives all to all who may come:\r\nIllumination's essence, simple, unglossed--\r\nA lamp where we read our hearts' simple tome:\r\nLoving is living with the extravagance of grass.\r\n\r\nExtravagant we shimmer as dew shines in the grass!\r\nAs dew lives a moment (and that moment must pass)\r\nOur loving is dew, and must vanish at last.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 138 Crying out in my wounds, I do not find you<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nCrying out in my wounds, I do not find you.\r\nCrying out in midnight misery, you are gone.\r\nCrying out from inside the mountain, I hear no reply.\r\nCrying out from under seas of tears, I drown.\r\nIs there nothing to find in this thin agony?\r\nHas pain no standing with love's ecstasies?\r\nSweet, sweet the shame of wanting you only.\r\nSweeter than honeysuckle is being unworthy,\r\nBeing a bark-wasp on the great tree of your beauty,\r\nBeing the dust blown about by your eagle's wings.\r\nI crawl before the thrown light of your glance,\r\nI shrivel like burning tissue to nothing.\r\nCrying out of my emptiness, I empty myself--\r\nBreathing in at last the nectar of yourself.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 139 An infinity of needles stick in my thumb<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nAn infinity of needles stick in my thumb\r\nWhenever I try to write this love,\r\nThis cargo of roses, this boxcar of honeycombs,\r\nAll the things unearthed by your eyes from above.\r\n\r\nWhen you and I talk, it is two rivers meeting,\r\nThe white ropes of foam go on riding\r\nTogether among many rocks, our silver notes greeting\r\nThe silver sky--and our laughter keeps striding.\r\n\r\nWhen you and I sleep, our dreams exchange clothes\r\nAnd we stand up in each others' shadow-world\r\nLike puppets unfolded from a magic chest of souls--\r\nOur faces gigantic in rouge and wood.\r\n\r\nOnly in dreams, where our strings tangle,\r\nCan I write like a river alive with sun-spangles.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 140 Let love\u2019s little sunbeam into your heart<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nLet love's little sunbeam into your heart;\r\nDo not fear love's indelible dart\r\nWhose impact, whose crater, can blow hearts apart.\r\n\r\nLet love's little sunbeam into your heart;\r\nLet blossom love's seed in your most indwelling part\r\nWhose wild vines kudzu the field where they start.\r\n\r\nLet love's little sunbeam into your heart;\r\nDon't yelp when love's hammer and tongs make you smart,\r\nReconcile pain and love and all that.\r\n\r\nLet love's little sunbeam into your heart;\r\nThrough stained-glass parables and great works of art\r\nLove comes crashing until bright glitter results.\r\n\r\nLet love's little sunbeam into your heart\r\nAnd we'll endure every turn, till love flips our cart.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 141 Put your hand in the thorny conflagration<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nPut your hand in the thorny conflagration,\r\nJump in with your whole body and soul!\r\nLeave not one shred of indecision\r\nUnburnt in the bonfire love engulfs.\r\nOur love is both the light and the heat.\r\nStrangers warm their naked feet, their faces\r\nBlazed bald from the glare of two undefeated hearts.\r\nDark is driven out;  all the spotlit night-opossums \r\nSnooze confused;  bats hang dazed in their belfries,\r\nWaiting for stars to pinhole evening's curtain.\r\nNone of them know a star has fallen by the highway\r\nSinging and whistling unbearable matins.\r\nJump in with your whole life--right now!\r\nTo your great soul this fire is a small flower.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Sonnet 142 In the tripping tick of time it\u2019s taken<\/span><\/h2>\n
    \r\nIn the tripping tick of time it's taken\r\nThis fist of flowers, these cut daisies\r\nTo wither brown in their cobalt vases,\r\nI've tapped out my hymns of being shaken.\r\n\r\nYou found me wild among old shadows\r\nAnd with careful eye overlooked my petals:\r\nTrimmed, arranged, and displayed me gently \r\nIn vibrant vases of your own.\r\n\r\nNow my carnations red and jonquils yellow\r\nBranch and bunch as you would have me\r\n(Who from moody singleness hath saved me).\r\n\r\nBut will you still love a wild thing so mellowed?\r\nDo not discard me when I am brown and drear--\r\nLet me be wild again, tucked behind your ear.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    CODA: The Night Janitor<\/h2>\n
    \r\nEach eve, whatever came for me to push\r\n(Mash notes, tissues, cups) I was content to crush--\r\nNot caring its meaning or intent.\r\nI thought all that nosed me thus irrelevant.\r\n\r\nI had a schedule and sought to keep it\r\nTight.  When dust purled about me, I'd sweep it\r\nOut of sight.  Litter of the day in piles\r\nFed the starry furnace basement-style.\r\n\r\nMy fire did not care my fire's source\r\nSo long as burning never lost its force;\r\nMy face sweat as I handed in the trash,\r\nReddening when words their hidden cache\r\n\r\nOf light revealed.  So I spent my nights.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Ode to an Earlobe<\/h2>\n
    \r\nO to the ear, entering in in lullaby lilt\r\nGoes O against the sweet strength of eardrum\r\nAnd hums O down the lovely length of the ear tube.\r\nO starts the sound with my mouth on your earlobe\r\nAnd O goes the round of your mouth with a moan\r\nAnd O go our days, each round into the next\r\nO of the time that O is dwindling!\r\n\r\nO is the end of the flute that is sighing\r\nAnd O is the lambent moon that is prying\r\nO upon our loving by waves that are trying\r\nTo reach O your toes in sand-spray waving\r\nO with the ecstasy of our slow loving\r\nTo moons of our eyes O-open and crying\r\nWhile lying down together and sighing--\r\nO you say, O God, am I dying?\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    Leda After Lunch<\/h2>\n
    \r\nThe park had invited us, we did not wait\r\nBut walked out, out beyond the sound of gates,\r\nOur hands unhinged and dropping to our waists.\r\n\r\nI held my lover down and gave her gall.\r\nShe turned her angry face to the half-fallen wall.\r\n\"Life is good,\" I crowed, rowing her home.\r\n\r\nFor a minute in her midst, I was not alone.\r\nHaunches on heels, I left her quiet after that--\r\nWatching her breathe, retrieving my hat\r\n\r\nRolled past my grasp in the flattened grass.\r\n\"Life is good,\" she sighed, she swore,\r\nAnd slit her eyes and said no more.\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n
    The Unnameable<\/h2>\n
    \r\nThis is the color that crawls along chasms,\r\nThat spurns the moon and mocks good luck\r\nIn laughing spasms.\r\n\r\nThis is the color that counts down to null,  \r\nReverses years, and peels the skin\r\nFrom the skull.\r\n\r\nThis is the color of grimace and grime,\r\nOf \"murder most foul\" \r\nAnd troubled times.\r\n\r\nThis is the color that steals pens' souls,\r\nLays waste the vastest fields\r\nAnd heighs the Devil home.\r\n\r\nThis is the color bells hide in their bellies,\r\nThat creeps in cracks and smells\r\nOf napalm jelly.\r\n\r\nThis is the color that empties every eye,\r\nThat pitches tents in tumors\r\nAnd blots out the sky.\r\n\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    Loving one face, and the soul that animates it 142 erotic sonnets RIVER READ TALKING INTRO FOR “OF FLARES, OF FLOWERS” As talking apes, we handle the matter of urgent mating in a way quite different from our hairier cousins. For us musing humans, loving someone seems to be equal parts artifice and fascination. We […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1721],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-of-flares-of-flowers","category-1721-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7364,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6056\/revisions\/7364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregglory.com\/blastpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}