I cry your mercy-pity-love!-aye, love ( Read more... )

I climbed the stairs
to your apartment and
met your old lover and
his friend on the way
out laughing.

I brought you a book
of poems that I love;
you have cooked
a simplified coq con vin.

The evening I decided to love you
you told me you loved me.

Passion declared.
Steak burned.

There is no future for us.
You have discovered the secret
that will bind me to you for ( Read more... )

If you will die for me,
I will die for you

and our graves will
be like two lovers washing
their clothes together
in a laundromat.

If you will bring the soap,
I will bring the bleach.

-- Richard Brautigan

Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.

In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.

And over the evening forest
the bronze moon climbs to its place.
Why has the music stopped?
Why is there such silence?

-- Osip Mandelstam

You stand as rocks stand
to which the sea reaches
in transparent waves of longing;
they are marred, finally;
everything fixed is marred.
And the sea triumphs,
like all that is false,
all that is fluent and womanly.
From behind, a lens
opens for your body. Why
should you turn? It doesn’t matter
who the witness is,
for whom you are suffering,
for whom you are ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Come to me in silence
out of the noise of noon.
Be the eye inside of me.
Help me drink the river up
and swallow it,
or let me take great mouthfuls
out of you,
stampeding you to bed
and then beyond,
beyond.

( ... )

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

( ... )

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of ( Read more... )

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

( ... )