Thursday, December 9, 2010

Being in Love

BY CHUNGMI KIM
Awakened from a dream, I curl up
and turn. The roses on the dresser
smile and your words bloom.
The red roses for Valentine’s Day.

Like in a film
thoughts of you unfold
moment by moment.
 
I vaguely hear
the sound of your spoon scooping cereal
the water stream in the shower
the buzzing noise of your electric razor
like a singing of cicada.

Your footsteps in and out of the bedroom.
Your lips touching my cheek lightly.
And the sound of the door shutting.

In your light
I fall asleep again under the warm quilt
happily like a child.

Upon waking
on the kitchen counter I find a half
grapefruit carefully cut and sectioned.
Such a loving touch is a milestone
for my newly found happiness.

A Moment

BY MARY ELIZABETH COLERIDGE
The clouds had made a crimson crown
    Above the mountains high.
The stormy sun was going down
    In a stormy sky.

Why did you let your eyes so rest on me,
    And hold your breath between?
In all the ages this can never be
    As if it had not been.

Together

BY R. S. THOMAS
All my life
I was face to face
with her, at meal-times,
by the fire, even
in the ultimate intimacies
of the bed. You could have asked,
then, for information
about her? There was a room
apart she kept herself in,
teasing me by leading me
to its glass door, only
to confront me with
my reflection. I learned from her
even so. Walking her shore
I found things cast up
from her depths that spoke
to me of another order,
worshipper as I was
of untamed nature. She fetched
her treasures from art’s
storehouse: pieces of old
lace, delicate as frost;
china from a forgotten
period; a purse more valuable
than anything it could contain.
Coming in from the fields
with my offering of flowers
I found her garden
had forestalled me in providing
civilities for my desk.
‘Tell me about life,’
I would say, ‘you who were
its messenger in the delivery
of our child.’ Her eyes had a
fine shame, remembering her privacy
being invaded from further off than
she expected. ‘Do you think
death is the end?’ frivolously
I would ask her. I recall
now the swiftness of its arrival
wrenching her lip down, and how
the upper remained firm,
reticent as the bud that is
the precursor of the flower.

Romanticism

BY DAVID BAKER
It is to Emerson I have turned now,   
damp February, for he has written   
of the moral harmony of nature.   
The key to every man is his thought.   
But Emerson, half angel, suffers his   
dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled
that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her

head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life   
suffer from the warfare between the force   
& delicacy of her soul & the
weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th,   
1832, of an evening strange
with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited
Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.

—Emerson looking in, clutching his key.   
Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild   
fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing   
as if stunned by persistent cold wind   
or leaning over, as from rough breath.   
I have brought my little one, bundled and   
gloved, to the lonely place to let her run,

hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened   
along the ground hard from a winter drought.   
I have come out for the first time in weeks   
still full of fever, insomnia-fogged,
to track her flags of breath where she’s dying   
to vanish on the hillsides of bramble
and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal,

one or two sparrows, something with yellow—
scatter in small explosions of ice.
Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased   
by the physical crunch of the ground, damp   
from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot,   
that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath   
too rocky to cultivate, covered thick

with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze
not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled,
—that half of him for whom nature was thought.   
Kate has found things to deepen her horror   
for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled   
by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle   
of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick

bramble, or the bramble itself enough
to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood-
colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa.
What does she see when she looks at such things?   
I do not know what is so wrong with me
that my body has erupted, system
by system, sick unto itself. I do

not know what I have done, nor what she thinks   
when she turns toward her ill father. How did   
Emerson behold of his Ellen, un-
embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands?   
Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are   
to find out the secrets of our own natures.   
Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night

with his journal, the awful natural
fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been
deeper sacrifice than a sacrament.
Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down   
like light snow on the beautiful hills?   
Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . .
—His other half worried by the wording.

Choice

BY J. V. CUNNINGHAM
Allegiance is assigned   
Forever when the mind   
Chooses and stamps the will.   
Thus, I must love you still   
Through good and ill.

But though we cannot part   
We may retract the heart   
And build such privacies   
As self-regard agrees   
Conduce to ease.

So manners will repair   
The ravage of despair
Which generous love invites,   
Preferring quiet nights   
To vain delights.

Chance Meeting

BY SUSAN BROWNE
I know him, that man
walking- toward me up the crowded street
of the city, I have lived with him
seven years now, I know his fast stride,
his windy wheatfield hair, his hands thrust   
deep in his jacket pockets, hands
that have known my body, touched
its softest part, caused its quick shudders   
and slow releasings, I have seen his face   
above my face, his mouth smiling, moaning   
his eyes closed and opened, I have studied
his eyes, the brown turning gold at the centers,   
I have silently watched him lying beside me   
in the early morning, I know his loneliness,   
like mine, human and sad,
but different, too, his private pain
and pleasure I can never enter even as he comes   
closer, past trees and cars, trash and flowers,   
steam rising from the manhole covers,   
gutters running with rain, he lifts his head,   
he sees me, we are strangers again,   
and a rending music of desire and loss—
I don’t know him—courses through me,
and we kiss and say, It’s good to see you,
as if we haven’t seen each other in years   
when it was just a few hours ago,
and we are shy, then, not knowing   
what to say next.

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs

BY A.E. STALLINGS
Sleep, she will not linger:
She turns her moon-cold shoulder.
With no ring on her finger,
You cannot hope to hold her.

She turns her moon-cold shoulder
And tosses off the cover.
You cannot hope to hold her:
She has another lover.

She tosses off the cover
And lays the darkness bare.
She has another lover.
Her heart is otherwhere.

She lays the darkness bare.
You slowly realize
Her heart is otherwhere.
There's distance in her eyes.

You slowly realize
That she will never linger,
With distance in her eyes
And no ring on her finger.