Pablo, e.e., et al

I admit I have become just a bit obsessive with my StumbleUpon account. I am now peeking into complete strangers' lists who seem to match my own interests, but this is just because I don't know anyone else with their own SU account. So what follows is a smattering of poetry pages I've "favorited" since starting out.

Turns out, there were some poets that I knew I liked, and some I was surprised at. (And I somehow marked three different pages with cumming's "I carry your heart" so I must really have a thing for that one.)

XVII (I do not love you...)

I do not love you as if you were salt, or rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
~Pablo Neruda

Poem 20

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine
~Pablo Neruda

Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers I ache from the
perfumes of spring.
I have forgotten your face, I no longer remember your hands;
how did your lips feel on mine?
Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks,
the white statues that have neither voice nor sight.
I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice; I have forgotten
your eyes.
Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound to my vague memory of
you. I live with pain that is like a wound; if you touch me, you will
do me irreparable harm.
Your caresses enfold me, like climbing vines on melancholy walls.
I have forgotten your love, yet I seem to glimpse you in every
window.
Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me; because
of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires: shooting
stars, falling objects.
~Pablo Neruda


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

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

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

~e.e. cummings

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

~e.e. cummings

You are tired,

(I think)

Of the always puzzle of living and doing;

And so am I.



Come with me, then,

And we'll leave it far and far away—

(Only you and I, understand!)



You have played,

(I think)

And broke the toys you were fondest of,

And are a little tired now;

Tired of things that break, and—

Just tired.

So am I.



But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,

And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—

Open to me!

For I will show you the places Nobody knows,

And, if you like,

The perfect places of Sleep.



Ah, come with me!

I'll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,

That floats forever and a day;

I'll sing you the jacinth song

Of the probable stars;

I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,

Until I find the Only Flower,

Which shall keep (I think) your little heart

While the moon comes out of the sea.

~e.e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis
~e.e. cummings

Suffer me gently in your dreams.

My somnambulant sighs

Will warm the edges of your bed.

Embrace my morphic specter,

Kiss illusory lips

That whisper to a sleeping ear.

Dreams are like the life

Unlived and forgot

That haunt our deconstructed lives.

Suffer me gently in your dreams

Caress illusion

And never doubt reality.

The great pain of things that will happen
turned into the most exquisite pleasure
when among a thousand photos that were displayed,
I had the grace and fortune of seeing you.

The kisses and the loving that was loved
recklessly from yours and my desire
flowering once again, will shine
in the misty light of daybreak.

The blessed past which was so cruel
and joyful today presents itself as tender
and makes my voice resonate again.

To exalt the resurrected love
that feeds on memory images,
changes the horror into sweetness.
~Carlos Drummond de Andrade

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer
of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be
hid, I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and
prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these–all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
~Walt Whitman

Ardella

I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.
~Langston Hughes

Where will I rediscover you and will I? The question sits on all the lips of those who lie in bed alone. You is/are the name each of us give to what we love the most or what we have not, will not know. And it is almost always that One, absent, Gone, through circumstance or happenstance. Where did I lose you and when? Did it Happen even as we knew we were discovering each other that first time. Was loss a piece of swelling big as the enlarging heart? Sweet basil growing greener reaches up and through the grass like weeds. Mallards form a rope across the sky coming from the south in secret. Cinnamon Teal bring up the rear. An early thaw has made all canyons into rivulets. The daisies saying love me now or love me not. If I have thought about you more than now it must have been some other me living in a different heartbreak house surrounded by some other hedge of memory. I have been to town and back, to Greece in dreams and in reality. To far shore, near field, streets between and always I have sought you out; on yellow days in yellowed pages, through rages of the mind and heart. I do not start out on a trip to corner or beyond without you for you have never left my head or would be heart. Where will I come upon you, if I do? Perhaps in death or life again. When? Perhaps not ever, what then? I'll give It another day, a week. Another month. A lifetime more or less, then I'll give up.

~Rod McKuen

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.
~Walt Whitman

When You Are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

~William Butler Yeats

Separation

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.
~W. S. Merwin



From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
~Edgar Allen Poe

How to Create an Agnostic

Singing with my son,

I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.

It was dumb luck.

But my son, awed, thought
I’d created the electricity.

He asked, “Dad, how'd you do that?”

Before I could answer,
thunder shook the house

And set off neighborhood car alarms.

“Dad,” he said. “Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?

The one that looks like a giant owl?”

O, my little disciple, my one boy choir,
I can’t do that

because your father,
your half-assed messiah,

is afraid of fire.

~Sherman Alexie

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

Missing Scenes
She knows at once the spaces where stories grow. The chance mention of some frontier planet, or a lost love. Something unresolved. Five days a man spends off-camera. Whatever happens out of sight, implied in a glance, she can fill the gap. She sees them everywhere now, the missing scenes, she can’t read a book or watch a film without shaping sequels, nor leave a man or woman a corner of shadow or a blank page. That day off sick, the week away on business; who knows? What couldn’t you do in three years at college, twenty in a crap job, a fortnight’s escape each summer? When she thinks, these days, of her life, it seems to be all missing scenes where something should have happened, but when she looks for the stories, they won’t come.

~Sheenagh Pugh

The Just

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
~Jorge Luis Borges


Boys and Girls Together
Boys don't want to be princes.
Boys want to be shepherds who slay dragons,
maybe someone gives you half a kingdom and a princess,
but that's just what comes of being a shepherd boy
and slaying a dragon. Or a giant. And you don't really
even have to be a shepherd. Just not a prince.
In stories, even princes don't want to be princes,
disguising themselves as beggars or as shepherd boys,
leaving the kingdom for another kingdom,
princehood only of use once the ogre's dead, the tasks are done,
and the reluctant king, her father, needing to be convinced.

Boys do not dream of princesses who will come for them.
Boys would prefer not to be princes,
and many boys would happily kiss the village girls,
out on the sheep-moors, of an evening,
over the princess, if she didn't come with the territory.
Princesses sometimes disguise themselves as well,
to escape the kings' advances, make themselves ugly,
soot and cinders and donkey girls,
with only their dead mothers' ghosts to aid them,
a voice from a dried tree or from a pumpkin patch.
And then they undisguise, when their time is upon them,
gleam and shine in all their finery. Being princesses.
Girls are secretly princesses.

None of them know that one day, in their turn,

Boys and girls will find themselves become bad kings

or wicked stepmothers,aged woodcutters,

ancient shepherds, mad crones and wise-women,

to stand in shadows, see with cunning eyes:

The girl, still waiting calmly for her prince.

The boy, lost in the night, out on the moors.
~Neil Gaiman