LOVE POEMS for Valentine

LOVE POEMS for Valentine’s Day and Beyond

DID YOU LOVE WELL WHAT VERY SOON YOU LEFT?

By Marilyn Hacker

Did you love well what very soon you left?

Come home and take me in your arms and take

away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

Never so full, I never was bereft

so utterly. The winter evenings drift

dark to the window. Not one word will make

you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake

from your night toward me. The only gift

I got to keep or give is what I’ve cried,

floodgates let down to mourning for the dead

chances, for the end of being young,

for everyone I loved who really died.

I drank our one year out in brine instead

of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

FALL ON ME

By Cynie Cory

There are no plum trees reaching for us tonight.

No moon caught in the fence.

Your lips are swollen like dark rose petals pulsing outward,

flames giving light to the shadows of plums.

How gracefully we step over them; it is our art.

Girl, I beg you to leave your country.

The moon here is practical, innocuous. I have seen it

slice open the throat of a grieving woman while she wept in the street.

�

I dream of you repeatedly. I am a field and you are (in me)

looking for home.

But you don’t see, your eyes flutter like two moths against the light.

Lie down in these pastures, I can afford to wear your bones.

I push into you without teory, without speaking.

I kiss the entire mouth of you like a moon I swallow in the hurry.

Your wrist slips over my eye where I see beyond the flesh of you:

the lonely childhood, the poems half-written.

�

I am with you like a blistered angel caught in the light.

(It was a Cuban moon, it was smoke that came my way.)

How could you take cover? Turn from the orchards that have bathed

you for centuries

in rubble. I uncover a wooden nail, clench it in my fist while I travel

under a moon that swears it will.

By Anne Sexton

I was wrapped in black

fur and white fur and

you undid me and then

you placed me in gold light

and then you crowned me,

while snow fell outside

the door in diagonal darts.

While a ten-inch snow

came down like stars

in small calcium fragments,

we were in our own bodies

(that room that will bury us)

and you were in my body

(that room will outlive us)

and at first I rubbed your

feet dry with a towel

because I was your slave

and then you called me princess.

Princess!

Oh then

I stood up in my gold skin

and I beat down the psalms

and I beat down the clothes

and you undid the bridle

and you undid the reins

and I undid the buttons,

the bones, the confusions,

the New England postcards,

the January ten o’clock night,

and we rose up like wheat,

acre after acre of gold,

and we harvested,

we harvested.

MR. MINE

By Anne Sexton

Notice how he has numbered the blue veins

in my breast. Moreover there are ten freckles.

Now he goes left. Now he goes right.

He is building a city, a city of flesh.

He’s an industrialist. He is starved in cellars

and, ladies and gentlemen, he’s been broken by iron,

by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant

iron of his mother’s death. But he begins again.

Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city.

From the glory of boards he has built me up.

From the wonder of concrete he has molded me.

He has given me six hundred street signs.

The time I was dancing he built a museum.

He built ten blocks when I moved on the bed.

He constructed an overpass when I left.

I gave him flowers and he built an airport.

For traffic lights he handed out red and green

lollipops. Yet in my heart I am go children slow.

FOR MY LOVER, RETURNING TO HIS WIFE by Anne Sexton

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.

She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.

Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.

She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,

has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,

done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.

She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.

I give you back your heart.
I give you permission—

for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound—
for the burying of her small red wound alive—

for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stockings,
for the garter belt, for the call—

the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.

She is so naked and singular.
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.

As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.

DECEMBER 11^TH

By Anne Sexton

Then I think of you in bed,

your tongue half chocolate, half ocean,

of the houses that you swing into,

of the steel wool hair on your head,

of your persistent hands and then

how we gnaw at the barrier because we are two.

How you come and take my blood cup

and link me together and take my brine.

We are bare. We are stripped to the bone

and we swim in tandem and go up and up

the river, the identical river called Mine

and we enter together. No one’s alone.

ECLECTIC

By Amy Mathias

I want to collect you.

I want to store you

in the smooth

folds

of my petal pink

silk

sheets.

I want to

drop

you in my

throat

hollow

behind my knees

and in my belly-button.

I want to tie

you in black

satin bows

and wear you out

to dinner.

I want to slide

you on

under

wear.

I want to share your skin

and slip

into your pocket

with the Laundromat quarters.

SONNET 29

By William Shakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yes in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee—and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

STRUGNELL’S BARGAIN

By Wendy Cope

My true love hath my heart and I have hers:

We swapped last Tuesday and we felt elated

But now, whenever one of us refers

To “my heart,” things get rather complicated.

Just now, when she complained, “My heart is racing,”

“You mean my heart is racing,” I replied.

“That’s what I said.” “You mean the heart replacing

Your heart my love.” “Oh piss off, Jake!” she cried.

I ask you, do you think Sir Philip Sidney

Got spoken to like that? And I suspect

If I threw in my liver and a kidney

She’d still address me with as scant respect.

Therefore do I revoke my opening line:

My love can keep her heart and I’ll have mine.

POSSIBLY

By Lesleá Newman

to wake and find you sitting up in bed

with your black hair and gold skin

leaning against the white wall

a perfect slant of sunlight slashed

across your chest as if God

were Rembrandt or maybe Ingmar Bergman

but luckily it’s too early to go to the movies

and all the museums are closed on Tuesday

anyway I’d rather be here with you

than in New York or possibly Amsterdam

with our eyes and lips and legs and bellies

and the sun as big as a house in the sky

and five minutes left before the world begins

By e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere

i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear

no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want

no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

PANTIES AND THE BUDDHA

By Molly Peacock

Frantic to finish, frantic not to forget

details for a thousand deadlines,

“Clean underpants!” I think in the shower,

get out, drage a plastic tub, and string a line

under the tropic showerhead, grabbing clothespins,

hauling soap and dirty silk panties back

behind the curtain with me, still wed

to ALL THINGS NOW! (Poor Buddha, there’s an ax

in your back.) Make of yourself a lightness,

Buddha says. Loofahs, gels, rinses and shampoos:

timing the hair rinse to rinsing the pants

--clip each by its crotch, lace dripping.

I won’t know I have a body until you,

darling, imagine this lingerie on me as I

excuse myself to the ladies’ room stall

of this restaurant in a foreign city

to lean my forehead on the marble, all

items on my lists crossed out, and the ax

I put in the Buddha’s back starts slipping out

as I hike up a silk jungle print on my ass,

glad to remember I have one, as you

always remind me how glad you are to feel

this silk beneath the plain wool of my slacks.

UNTITLED

By Rochelle Smith

You like it better

than I do.

I look at your sweet amazed face

smell your neck as you come

muscular and helpless as an oyster

I gasp in rhythm with you

and hate you.

Wait that’s not

the right word

Hate’s not the right word.

Afterwards we kiss in silly ways.

You bring me glasses of clear yellow juice

from the dark kitchen

I sing babybaby songs

the parts I remember

while you braid my hair

Then I lie against your chest

expecting to hear echoes

and my mouth has a smoky taste in it, rich

and think, like envy.

This body next to you

that I keep lending you

is as varied in its uses

as baking soda.

It can make things rise

it can neutralize

it absorbs your scent and holds it tight.

Do I feel like a cool powder beneath you?

Because inside

all this nakedness

I can’t

make it wet

not a

part of me

is wet.

CARIBBEAN I

By Rochelle Smith

There was a taxi

and it drove past my grandmother

and wouldn’t stop it

was midday, and hot and

I was five

on our way from the market

with new school shoes and

still-alive blue crabs and

I knew I had the power

to stop the car

contort

that oily man

and his braying radio

into goodness

to make him treat her

like what she was

but I didn’t I

stood

being five

and there is a

twist

still when I think of it

though it wasn’t a long walk home.

CARIBBEAN II

By Rochelle Smith

lying in a house

that is padded, muffled, armored

tight as a virgin against the cold

only knowing it is raining

how I miss the lascivious houses

of home, spread wide, low and naked

only a thin, corrugated skin

between your quivering

and the punishing August rain.

So delicious

to lie in a dark porous house

clothed only in a twist of sheet

and as the roof throbs with water

to hear the drumming even in your navel,

even in your ankles,

to sleep, breathing.

PETITE SYRAH

By Ian Dickinson

One more long draw

from my half empty wine glass

and the stained new carpet

assumes the role of the ocean

the constant clink-clank

of the dryer relaxes

into a soothing rhythm

as water fights for position

against the shifting rim.

You will play the role

of you

and I’ll be there as well

lying strewn across the caramel sands

as the water turns Zinfandel red

the Atlantic drowns the blush sun through

charcoal green depths

your wide ice eyes

melt, your lips,

and your lips, fluent

as Cabernet from Bordeaux.

Petty fear disappears

for the instant

we didn’t share

wont linger.

The fog clouding sobriety

burns away, inevitably

the sour dream disappears

as fast as the last

gulp of sweet Syrah

I fall asleep on the couch

my dirty clothes still on.

BLACK WOMAN

By Naomi Long Madgett

My hair is springy like the forest grasses

That cushion the feet of squirrels—

Crinkled and blown in a south breeze

Like the small leaves of native bushes.

My black eyes are coals burning

Like a low, full, jungle moon

Through the darkness of being.

In a clear pool I see my face,

Know my knowing.

My hands move pianissimo

Over the music of the night:

Gentle birds fluttering through leaves and grasses

They have not always loved,

Nesting, finding home.

CONJURE

By Robert Wrigley

There is nothing of her body he can’t

conjure—texture, heft, taste, or smell.

This is heaven, and this is also hell.

He can dream the way moonlight comes slant

through the window, illuminating breast

and breast, her navel a shadowy pool

he drinks the darkness from, her skin grown cool,

and her lips and her lips and all the rest.

If she were here, he thinks, and he thinks too

much, he thinks. He thinks too much when she’s here,

and when she’s gone. And the window’s a mirror

he’s all alone in. If he could say he knew

every night would be made of her, a thigh

in the true air, her long, elegant spine

blossoming forth from the clothes on the line,

he would have asked, he would have asked her why

the sigh of the evening breeze is her tongue

and the rose of her cast off shirt his hand

unfillable and trying. He can stand

and go and find her still-damp towel among

the morning’s last mementos, and the shape

of her ear, a whorl on the pillow’s white.

He can feel the whole weight of her at night

and the weight of her absence, and her hip.

He would say when she’s gone he loves too much.

He’s immoderate or reckless. He cries

and laughs at his crying, his dreams are lies

he cannot live without, a drunk, a lush,

inebriate of skin and tongue and hair.

But reason has no mouth to kiss, no eyes

he dives in. His head aches. he is not wise,

but strokes the round, blue corporeal air

and conjures her painfully into place.

Most chaste of lovers he is, a shadow

man enamored of another shadow,

and the dark he is kissing is her face.

ANGELS

By Robert Wrigley

Cigarettes pilfered two at a time

from her mother’s purse, slender black candles

flickering all around us, dripping

a translucent, silver wax. her father’s

favorite records, Brubeck and Baker,

sailing out the French doors,

over the patio and the pool;

her father’s gold razor

sliding over my toes, to the arch of each

foot, to the ankle, to the knee and beyond.

The skin of my legs tingled.

Over the fine bone china bowl,

filled now with hair and foamy water,

angels presided, a chain of them

tangled wing to wing

around the rim—in the too pale light,

in the artist’s rendering—neither male

nor female but beautiful still.

We’d grunted the old cheval mirror

across the room to the bed,

and I could see her from both sides,

breasts and buttocks as she knelt

to kiss from my legs little ruby after ruby

of blood. A wedding portrait

hung above us, and two slabbed, mug-shot smiles

peered from the nightstands—mother here,

father there, his glasses by the clock,

her night-mask in the drawer.

We didn’t speak, we didn’t need to:

the negotiations of young flesh,

this for that, mine for yours—one more coin

in the bank of beautiful sins.

I could have had anything

I wanted, and I wanted it all,

whoever I was, that peeled boy

so naked there was no skin

between me and the girl, there was nothing,

so that what I remember most

is the hour just after we stopped,

when she eased back down my legs to kneel

at my feet and hold my heels in her palm,

until nail by nail she was finished,

her lips kissing the air, her breath

coming cool to dry the polish,

an icy burn blown upward through my bones.

She rolled me over and lay down on me

until we slept. I woke

in the dark, to burnt wicks smoking

all around and a dream falling away

as I stretched, the weight on my back

only wings.

THREE BY DORIANNE LAUX

2 AM
When I came with you that first time
on the floor of your office, the dirty carpet
under my back, the heel of one foot
propped on your shoulder, I went ahead
and screamed, full-throated, as loud
and as long as my body demanded,
because somewhere, in the back of my mind,
packed in the smallest neurons still capable
of thought, I remembered
we were in a warehouse district
and that no sentient being resided for miles.
Afterwards, when I would unclench
my hands and open my eyes, I looked up.
You were on your knees, your arms
stranded at your sides, so still —
the light from the crooknecked lamp
sculpting each lift and delicate twist,
the lax muscles, the smallest veins
on the backs of your hands. I saw
the ridge of each rib, the blue hollow
pulsing at your throat, all the colors
in your long blunt cut hair which hung
over your face like a raffia curtain
in some south sea island hut.
And as each bright synapse unfurled
and followed its path, I recalled
a story I’d read that explained why women
cry out when they come — that it’s
the call of the conqueror, a siren howl
of possession. So I looked again
and it felt true, your whole body
seemed defeated, owned, having taken on
the aspect of a slave in shackles, the wrists
loosely bound with invisible rope.
And when you finally spoke you didn’t
lift your head but simply moaned the word god
on an exhalation of breath — I knew then
I must be merciful, benevolent,
impossibly kind.

This Close – Dorianne Laux

In the room where we lie,
light stains the drawn shades yellow.
We sweat and pull at each other, climb
with our fingers the slippery ladders of rib.
Wherever our bodies touch, the flesh
comes alive. Head and need, like invisible
animals, gnaw at my breast, the soft
insides of your thighs. What I want
I simply reach out and take, no delicacy now,
the dark human bread I eat handful
by greedy handful. Eyes, fingers, mouths,
sweet leeches of desire. Crazy woman,
her brain full of bees, see how her palms curl
into fists and beat the pillow senseless.
And when my body finally gives in to it
then pulls itself away, salt-laced
and arched with its final ache, I am
so grateful I would give you anything, anything.
If I loved you, being this close would kill me.

The Lovers - Dorianne Laux

She is about to come. This time,
they are sitting up, joined below the belly,
feet cupped like sleek hands praying
at the base of each other’s spines.
And when something lifts within her
toward a light she’s sure, once again,
she can’t bear, she opens her eyes
and sees his face is turned away,
one arm behind him, hands splayed
palm down on the mattress, to brace himself
so he can lever his hips, touch
with the bright tip the innermost spot.
And she finds she can’t bear it—
not his beautiful neck, stretched and corded,
not his hair fallen to one side like beach grass,
not the curved wing of his ear, washed thin
with daylight, deep pink of the inner body—
what she can’t bear is that she can’t see his face,
not that she thinks this exactly—she is rocking
and breathing—it’s more her body’s though,
opening, as it is, into its own sheer truth.
So that when her hand lifts of its own violation
and slaps him, twice on the chest,
on that pad of muscled flesh just above the nipple,
slaps him twice, fast, like a nursing child
trying to get a mother’s attention,
she’s startled by the sound,
though when he turns his face to hers—
which is what her body wants, his eyes
pulled open, as if she had bitten—
she does reach out and bite him, on the shoulder,
not hard, but with the power infants have
over those who have borne them, tied as they are
to the body, and so, tied to the pleasure,
the exquisite pain of this world.
And when she lifts her face he sees
where she’s gone, knows she can’t speak,
is traveling toward something essential,
toward the core of her need, so he simply
watches, steadily, with an animal calm
as she arches and screams, watches the face that,
if she could see it, she would never let him see.

The Best Slow Dancer

by David WAGONER (from traveling light)

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper

By the second string of teachers and wallflowers

In the school gym across the key through the glitter

Of mirrored light three-second rule forever

Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer

Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there

In your arms like music she knew just how to answer

The question mark of your spine your hand in hers

The other touching that place between her shoulders

Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure

To move as they wished wherever you might stagger

Without her she turned in time she knew where you were

In time she turned her body into yours

As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never

Where you would be for all time never closer

Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under

Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her

You weren’t the worst one not the boy whose mother

Had taught him to count to murmur over and over

One slide two slide three slide now no longer

The one in the hallway after class the scuffler

The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather

With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her

But see her dancing off with someone or other

Older more clever smoother dreamier

Not waving a sister somebody else’s partner

Lover while you went floating home through the air

To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer

Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

HATE POEM

By Julie Sheehan

I hate you truly. Truly I do.

Everything about me hates everything about you.

The flick of my wrist hates you.

The way I hold my pencil hates you.

The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.

Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The little blue-green speck of sock lint I’m trying to dig from under my third toenail, left foot hates you.

The history of this keychain hates you.

My sigh in the background as you pick out the cashews hates you.

The goldfish of my genius hates you.

My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.

My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.

My pleasant “good morning”: hate.

You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate.

The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it.

My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you.

Layers of hate, a parfait.

Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,

I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure.

My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you,

Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

VALENTINE

By Carol Ann Duffy

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I gave you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love.

Here.

It will blind you with tears

like a lover.

It will make your reflection

a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,

possessive and faithful

as we are,

for as long as we are.

Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,

if you like.

Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers,

cling to your knife.