Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,

every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you.

Love at Thirty-Two Degrees, Katherine Larson

It has already been one week, and I'm still so everlasting tired; I think this sleep will reach my bones one day and melt them straight out of my body. My brain and metaphorical heart are out of sync. And yet my feet keep moving, even when they should stay put. Even when they ache to be rested, but there's no rest for the weary, and there are many miles to go. Chin up, head up, walk tall, keep moving; all good advice in theory.

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

The Rain, Robert Creely

The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying “Hey! I've been

trying to wake you up for fifteen

minutes. Don’t be so rude, you are

only the second poet I’ve ever chosen

to speak to personally

so why

aren’t you more attentive? If I could

burn you through the window I would

to wake you up. I can't hang around

here all day.”

“Sorry, Sun, I stayed

up late last night talking to Hal.”

“When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt” the Sun said

petulantly. “Most people are up

already waiting to see if I’m going

to put in an appearance.”

Frank O'Hara
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island

last night my mother was a child, in my dream, surrounded by yellow roses and riding an enormous horse. this is as close as i can get to that feeling again.
next i may have to tackle the anxious dream i have about oceans and overpasses.

You say you want to feel
the words.

You just want to live in Boston
with the painter Martha McCollough.

Sure, I can imagine the thought
of an easel, the idea
of thick paint.

But I want you to explain it simply, clinically.

Because now that I've thought about it, what
doesn't begin with love and death and end
in lonliness?

the acrobat
solo, or even less than solo,
less, because he's crippled, missing,
missing wings,
missing them so much more
that he can't miss the chance
to soar on shamefully unfeathered
naked vigilance, alone.

How summer’s children turn

into fish and rain softens men

How the elements of summer

nights bid us to get down with each other

on the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful

whether or not

it will change the world one drop

c.d. wright Lake Echo, Dear

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

william carlos williams

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Returning Birds

This is not a dirge-- no, it's only indignation.
An angel made of earthbound protein,
a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,
singular in air, without number in the hand,
its tissues tied into a common knot
of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama
unfolding to the wings' applause,
falls down and lies beside a stone,
which in its own archaic, simpleminded way
sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

this one makes me think of you, colleen:

We were in the Safeway parking lot. I couldn’t find my cigarettes.
You said Hurry up! but I was worried there would be a holdup
and we would be stuck in a hostage situation, hiding behind
the frozen meats, with nothing to smoke for hours.
You said Don’t be silly,
so I followed you into the store.
We were thumping the melons when I heard somebody say Nobody move!
I leaned over and whispered in your ear I told you so.

it's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and everytime we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.

An article at Poetry Foundation .org, When Yellow Ribbons and Flag Waving Aren't Enough, is as nonpolitical as you can get when speaking of war these days, but it has a strength that makes politics sounds silly in the end. An ex soldier's take on recent war poetry, eloquent and worth the read.

I was standing
on a northern corner.

Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of wolves.

Proof
of Your existence? There is nothing
but.

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through a marriage into a marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
...
Love is not enough. We die and are put in the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wilderness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

little lonely nights

on the bright side, i may have a paying job soon- but no one hold their breath...

the numbers
...I want to close my eyes and find a quiet field in fog, a few sheep moving towards a
fence.
I want to count them, I want them to end. I don't want to wonder
how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down,
which of them will wander the sidewalks all night
while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark.

An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.
The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night
is thinking. It's thinking of love.
It's thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
That's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone.

I'm tired, I want to rest now.
I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple name
without a shadow. Let me go. How many prayers
are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?

the numbers
How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans,
with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish
finish
a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted
in not sleeping,how many in sleep-- I don't know
how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times
the world breaks apart, disintegrates to nothing and starts up again
in the course of an ordinary hour. I don't know how God can bear
seeing everything at once: the falling bodies, the monuments and the
burnings,
the lovers pacing the floors of how many locked hearts.
...

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but it does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.