Contents
1.The More Loving One - W.H Auden
2.By Sappho...He is almost a god...
3.New Love And The Gentle Heart - Dante
4.Love Tells Us Who We Are - Donald.T.Sanders
5.That Only Which We Have Within...Ralph Waldo Emerson
6.Askleppiados 320 BC
7.Otomo no yakamoch 718 - 785
8.Yuan Chen
9.Anon - Japanese 10th Century
10.Topography - Sharon Olds
11.First Thanksgiving - Sharon Olds
12.Fire And Ice - Robert Frost
13.Breasts - Charles Simic
14.And Balls - Anne McNaughton
15.As Much As You Can - Constantine.P.Cavafy
16.When They Are Roused - Constantine.P.Cavafy
17.Understanding - Constantine.P.Cavafy
18.I Crave Your Mouth - Neruda
19.Delight In Disorder - Rober Herrick
20.He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven... - William Butler Yeats

THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care , I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were the stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them say,
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel it’s total dark sublime,
Though this might take a little time.
W.H Auden, American (b. Eng) 1907-1973

By Sappho 6th cent. BC

He is almost a god,a man beside you,
Enthralled by your talk, by your laughter.
Watching makes my heart beat fast
Because, seeing little, I imagine much.
You put fire in my cheeks
Speech won't come. My ears ring.
Blind to all others, I sweat and I stammer.
I am a trembling thing, like grass,
An inch from dying.

So poor I've nothing to lose, I must gamble...

NEW LOVE AND THE GENTLE HEART

New love and the gentle heart are the same thing,
Just as the wise man has set down in his poems,
And one without the other could no more exist
Than the thoughtful soul exist if thought did not.

Nature made them both one day when amorous,
New Love as Lord, and the heart as his great seat;
Inside that house New Love lies there sleeping,
Perhaps a month or two, perhaps for years-

Then it is beauty in a savvy woman that appears,
And beauty pleases his eyes so much that deep inside
A desire is born toward this desirable thing,

And sometimes the desire remains alive in him
So long that it makes the spirit of New Love wake up.
A generous man has the same effect upon a woman.
Dante

LOVE TELLS US WHO WE ARE

Love Tells Us Who
We Are
When I asked the
Answer “Who?”
No Love Answered
So I knew I
Had to Wait
For Love

For
We are No One
Before Love
A missing clue looking
For a person
A Star looking for
A sky
An “I am” waiting for
An I

Music Tells Us
What We Feel
But Cannot Say
Love Reveals
What We Know
But cannot see

Before You I was Nothing but
When You Gave me Your Hand
I took My Hand
For Love Tells Us Who
We Are So
When I asked the
Answer ‘Who?’
Love Answered
You

Donald T. Sanders
American b.1944

That only which we have within,
can we see without.
If we meet no Gods, it is because we harbor none.
If there is a grandeur in you,
you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Askleppiados 320 BC

Think how unspeakably sweet
The taste of snow at midsummer,
How sweet a kind spring breeze
After the gales of winter.

But as we all discover,
Nothing's quite as sweet
As one large cloak
Wrapped around two lovers.

Otomo no yakamoch 718-785

Late evening finally comes:
I unlatch the door
And quietly wait
The one
Who greets me in my dreams.

Yuan Chen

I cannot bare to put away
The bamboo sleeping-mat

That night I brought you home,
I watched you roll it out.

Anon Japanese 10th cent.
Early morning glows
In the faint shimmer
Of first light
Choked with sadness
I help you into your clothes

Topography
(from THE GOLD CELL, 1987)

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
intricately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
SHARON OLDS

First Thanksgiving
(from BLOOD, TIN, STRAW, 1999)

When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world — which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing — whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air — I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.
SHARON OLDS

FIRE AND ICE
Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate,
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
ROBERT FROST

BREASTS

I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.

They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.

Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher's stone
Worth bothering about.

They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.

Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.

They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.

I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach a jar of forbidden jam.

Gently with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer-mugs.

I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics,
Star-gazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth...

They give each finger
Its true shape, its joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.

And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg-yolk.

I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,

That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

O my sweet, my wistful bagpipes.
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.
Now, in the absolute immobility
Of time, drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,
I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.
CHARLES SIMIC

AND BALLS
Actually: it's the balls I look for, always.
Men in the street, offices, cars, restaurants.
it's the nuts I imagine-
firm, soft, in hairy sacks
the way they are
down there rigged between the thighs,
the funny way they are.
One in front, a little in front of the other,
slightly higher. The way they slip
between your fingers, the way they
slip around in their soft sack.
The way they swing when he walks,
hang down when he bends
over. You see them some times bright pink
out of a pair of shorts
when he sits wide and unaware,
the hair sparse and wiry
like that on a poland china pig.
You can see the skin right through- speckled,
with wrinkles like a prune, but loose,
slipping over those kernels
rocking the smooth, small huevos.
So delicate, the cock becomes a diversion,
a masthead overlarge, its flag distracting
from beautiful pebbles beneath.
ANNE MCNAUGHTON

AS MUCH AS YOU CAN
Even if you cannot shape your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can; do not debase it
in excessive contact with the world,
in the excessive movements and talk.

Do not debase it by taking it,
dragging it often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
until it becomes burdensome as an alien life.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1913)

WHEN THEY ARE ROUSED
Try to guard them, poet
However few they are that can be held.
The visions of your eroticism.
Set them, half hidden, in your phrases.
Try to hold them, poet,
when they are roused in your mind
at night, or in the noon glare.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1916)

UNDERSTANDING
The years of my youth, my sensual life --
how clearly I see their meaning now.
What needless repentances, how futile....
But I did not understand the meaning then.
In the dissolute life of my youth
the desires of my poetry were being formed,
the scope of my art was being plotted.
This is why my repentances were never stable.
And my resolutions to control myself, to change
lasted for two weeks at the very most.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1918)

I CRAVE YOUR MOUTH...
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Neruda

DELIGHT IN DISORDER
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthralls the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.
Robert Herrick

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven...
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

copyright 2005 Debra Dicembre
site design by innazone for www.gogoit.com.au