All that has tamed me I have learned to love
and lost that wildness that was once beloved.
All that was loved I’ ve learned to tame
and lost the beloved that once was wild.
All that is wild is tamed by love —
and the beloved (wildness) that once was loved.
I. Of Choice
Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,
Don’ t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,
More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
I.
There's nothing more
erotic than
onered
Chilean plum
slumbered in
the brown palm
of the curved
hand of the right
man.
It needn’ t be tinder, this juncture of the year,
a cigarette second guessed from car to brush.
The woods’ parchment is given
to cracking asunder the first puff of wind.
Yesterday a big sycamore came across First
and Hawthorne and is there yet.
Things happen when you drink too much mescal.
One night, with not enough food in my belly,
he kept on buying. I’ m a girl who’ ll fall
damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he
was hot and generous and so the least
that I could do was let him kiss me, hard
and soft and any way you want it, beast
and beauty, lime and salt — sweet Bacchus’ pards —
and when his friend showed up I felt so warm
and generous I let him kiss me too.
His buddy asked me if it was the worm
When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’ t know your fear
is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,
who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,
or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?
This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind
that doesn’ t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,
the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
Cloud covers and lifts,
I’ ll fly off to a fjord in Norway,
post “Oh the pain” above my doorway
if you insist on going your way,
for this is not a duck.
That is what cowards say, and realists
who run away, shun the appeal its
rare white fur holds, although they feel it’ s
a rabbit full of pluck.
Let’ s multiply, let’ s twitch our noses,
let’ s walk among the night’ s dark roses,
though where the oldest story goes is
a place where tongues might cluck.
Beloved beauty who inspires
love in me from afar, your face obscured
except when your celestial image
stirs my heart in sleep, or in the fields
where light and nature's laughter shine more lovely —
was it maybe you who blessed
the innocent age called golden,
and do you now, blithe spirit,
fly among men? Or does that miser fate
who hides you from us save you for the future?
