[thompson]

I want to show my students some good love poems written in the last 10 years or so. I'd appreciate some recommendations.

Thanks,

Bill

[Susan McLean]

Here's one of my recent favorites, from the book Meadowlands.


Ithaca
by Louise Gluck

The beloved doesn't
need to live. The beloved
lives in the head. The loom
is for the suitors, strung up
like a harp with white shroud-thread.

He was two people.
He was the body and voice, the easy
magnetism of a living man, and then
the unfolding dream or image
shaped by the woman working the loom
sitting there in a hall filled
with literal-minded men.

As you pity
the deceived sea that tried
to take him away forever
and took only the first,
the actual husband, you must
pity these men: they don't know
what they're looking at;
they don't know that when one loves this way
the shroud becomes a wedding dress.

[J.A. Crider]

Two Erotic Love Poems

Bill,

I don’t know if these can be played in a classroom, but here are two erotic love poems, by Galway Kinnell and Timothy Steele, the former of which answers the question “Is there life after a long marriage?” I found Steele’s poem in the “new formalist” anthology Rebel Angels (1996), but it may be earlier; Kinnell’s free verse poem is from Imperfect Thirst (1994). I was going to post these on Clay Stockton’s thread on Paired Poems on General Talk, so since I’m transcribing I’ll just drop them here too. Both poems share incredibly similar subject matter, yet are substantially different in style and approach. I’ve wondered if one was written in response to the other. I first thought both poems dealt with married couples, but rereading Steele’s piece again I’m not certain—which would be a nice irony, free verse for a marriage, formal verse for a something possibly less formal.

“An Aubade” (Timothy Steele)

As she is showering, I wake to see
A shine of earrings on the bedside stand,
A single yellow sheet which, over me,
Has folds as intricate as drapery
In paintings from some fine old master’s hand.

The pillow which, in dozing, I embraced
Retains the salty sweetness of her skin:
I sense her smooth back, buttocks, belly, waist,
The leggy warmth which spread and gently laced
Around my legs and loins, and drew me in.

I stretch and curl about a bit and hear her
Singing among the water’s hiss and race.
Gradually the early light makes clearer
The perfume bottles by the dresser’s mirror,
The silver flashlight, standing on its face,

Which shares the corner of the dresser with
An ivy spilling tendrils from a cup.
And so content am I, I can forgive
Pleasure for being brief and fugitive.
I’ll stretch some more, but postpone getting up

Until she finishes her shower and dries
(Now this and now that foot placed on a chair)
Her fineboned ankles, and her calves and thighs,
The pink full nipples of her breasts, and ties
Her towel up, turban-style, about her face.


*

“Rapture” (G. Kinnell)

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven A.M.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
Thinking, or possibly dreaming,
of how she might look if, at breakfast,
I spoke about the hidden place in her
which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,
and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,
if such things are possible, she came.
I imagine her hair would fall about her face
and she would become apparently downcast,
as she does at a concert when she is moved.
The hynopompic play passes, and I open my eyes
and there she is, next to the bed,
bending to a low drawer, picking over
various small smooth black, white,
and pink items of underwear. She bends
so low her back runs parallel to the earth,
but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.
The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,
lift toward the east—what can I say?
Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.
Her breasts fall full; the nipples
are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars
of the gate under the earth where those who could not love
press, wanting to be born again.
I reach out and take her wrist
and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.
Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,
rummaging in the same low drawer.
The clock shows eight. Hmmm.
With huge, silent effort of great,
mounded muscles the earth has been turning.
She takes a piece of silken cloth
from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls
of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,
as if she will be, all day among strangers,
looking down inside herself at our rapture.




[This message has been edited by J.A. Crider (edited February 05, 2005).]

[epigone]

Two of my favorites:

A Monorhyme for the Shower

Lifting her arms to soap her hair
Her pretty breasts respond – and there
The movement of that buoyant pair
Is like a spell to make me swear
Twenty odd years have turned to air;
Now she’s the girl I didn’t dare
Approach, ask out, much less declare
My love to, mired in young despair.

Childbearing, rows, domestic care –
All the prosaic wear and tear
That constitute the life we share –
Slip from her beautiful and bare
Bright body as, made half aware
Of my quick, surreptitious stare,
She wrings the water from her hair
And turning smiles to see me there.

Dick Davis

The Orange

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange --
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dae --
They got quarters and I had a half.

And thatorange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This peace and contentment. It's new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I'm glad I exist

Wendy Cope

[Katy Evans-Bush]

The Present


For the present there is just one moon,
though every level pond gives back another.

But the bright disc shining in the black lagoon,
perceived by astrophysicist and lover,

is milliseconds old. And even that light's
seven minutes older than its source.

And the stars we think we see on moonless nights
are long extinguished. And, of course,

this very moment, as you read this line,
is literally gone before you know it.

Forget the here-and-now. We have no time
but this device of wantonness and wit.

Make me this present then: your hand in mine,
and we'll live out our lives in it.


Michael Donaghy

[J.D. Hughes]

one by c.k. williams, "archetypes", which i couldn't find on-line except by going to amazon and previewing his book "Repair." it's also in the best american poetry 1999 edited by robert bly.

and one below by the late william matthews

Misgivings
William Matthews

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

[Chris Childers]

Wilbur's "For C." It's been posted on this site before.

Edit: Tim just posted it on DE, so I'll copy it here.

For C.

After the clash of elevator gates
And the long sinking, she emerges where,
A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,
She looks up toward the window where he waits,
Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest
Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say goodbye-
Even this other pair whose high romance
Had only the duration of a dance,
And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,
See each in each a whole new life foregone.
For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these
Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief
And baggage, yet with something like relief,
It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas
To cancel out their crossing and unmake
The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness;
Still there's a certain scope in that long love
Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,
Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,
A passion joined to courtesy and art
Which has the quality of something made,
Like a good fiddle, like the rose's scent,
Like a rose window or the firmament.



[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited February 20, 2005).]