Room after room,
I hunt the house through
We inhabit together.
Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her-
Next time, herself!-not the trouble behind her
Left in the curtain, the couch’s perfume!
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather.

Yet as the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
( Read more... )

Time will say nothing but I told you so ( Read more... )

Can you contain my most intimate whisper,
settle it down after it has entered you,
make it a part of you and still cling
to my hand gently as your eyes hold me?

Something must protect our weakness,
our mortality, and I choose the petal
and the leaf for their own transience,
as life is emboldened by mortal fear.

In this light through this glass and wood,
I ( Read more... )

If my voice is not reaching you
add to it the echo-
echo of ancient epics

And to that-
a princess

And to the princess-your beauty

And to your beauty-
a lover's heart

And in the lover's heart
a dagger

-- Afzal Ahmed Syed

P.S.: I felt this piece as soon as I read it. I just had to share it with ( Read more... )

It is snowing heavily again.
I have been watching it for a long time
the way a blind man looks at the world
on the back of his eyelids.
Something I wanted in my hands
is not there, and I hear
the soft cry of the flakes approaching.
Trapped among branches,
it sounds as if I have lost someone
and have reached up to find
that same whiteness on my mouth,
plunging ( Read more... )

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half words whispered low:
As earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

-- Robert Graves

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and ( Read more... )

What if the heart does not pale as the body wanes,
but is like the sun that blazes hotter each day
on these immense, perishing fields? What then?
(Desire is not the problem. This far south,
we are careful not to mistake seizures for love.)
He sits there bewildered in a clamp of light.
In the stillness, the sun grinds him clean.

-- Jack Gilbert

1.
I fell through a hole in the sky from one end of the world
to the next. Burning off layers
like a comet
until I hit the surface of earth.
I awaken in a house on the edge of the Pacific
near a mango tree
with your sweet-smelling head
on my arm.

2.
The flower might appear vulnerable
as it bends with the tradewinds
drinks in the sun
the rain
but its roots extend ( Read more... )

“…except you ravish me.”

In the beginning I couldn’t speak to you.
Not because the words wouldn’t come;
it was because they might. Not words like love,
blooming where they fall; words like come here.
When once you turned to look straight at me
out of a crowd, I thought I must have let

the sounds inside my head come out, like “let
us all go home ( Read more... )