hold like so

When I say …

When I say “I will be true to you” I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities.

- Jeanette Winterson

I don’t own …

I don’t own my emotions unless I can think about them. I am not afraid of feeling but I am afraid of feeling unthinkingly. I don’t want to drown. My head is my heart’s lifebelt.

- Jeanette Winterson

oh…

whenever i dream of asking for forever, this is basically how the conversation goes in my head.

from Wait for Me

It will be the same
as it has always been
and you are right to pack

your heart in ice
if you believe this.

- James Tate

After Love

Afterward, the compromise.
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.”

- Maxine Kumin

from When You Are Old And Gray

…How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face…

- W.B. Yeats

bat eyes

 

poetry makes everything make sense.

The Man

I like the parts of you
that are not the parts of me,
the furry paws of your knees
and the angular metal of your upper arm.
So often I turn to touch softness
and find taut rope and hard glass.

My body stretches elastic
to meet and hold forum
with the hollow of your back.
I crawl under your thrown face
and find moist refuge.

In such moments
I forget your bones and fingernails.
I surrender to the mud that moves with us,
sinking and rising
in the steam that is our common element.

- Lisa C. Taylor

Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother’s hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

- Li-Young Lee