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Poems List

Tell Me, Is The Rose Naked?

Tell Me, Is The Rose Naked?

Tell me, is the rose naked
Or is that her only dress?


Why do trees conceal
The splendor of their roots?


Who hears the regrets
Of the thieving automobile?


Is there anything in the world sadder
Than a train standing in the rain?
👁️ 457

Sonnet XXXIV

Sonnet XXXIV

You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.


Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.


Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.


And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can restvegetables,
seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.


Translated by Stephen Tapscott
👁️ 620

Sonnet XXV

Sonnet XXV

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.


I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.


Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all


Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.
👁️ 563

Sonnet XVII

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
👁️ 754

Sonnet XIII:The light that rises from your feet to your hair

Sonnet XIII:The light that rises from your feet to your hair

The light that rises from your feet to your hair,
the strength enfolding your delicate form,
are not mother of pearl, not chilly silver:
you are made of bread, a bread the fire adores.


The grain grew high in its harvest of you,
in good time the flour swelled;
as the dough rose, doubling your breasts,
my love was the coal waiting ready in the earth.


Oh, bread your forehead, your legs, your mouth,
bread I devour, born with the morning light,
my love, beacon-flag of the bakeries:


fire taugh you a lesson of the blood;
you learned your holiness from flour,
from bread your language and aroma.
👁️ 475

Sonnet XCV:Who ever desired each other as we do

Sonnet XCV:Who ever desired each other as we do

Who ever desired each other as we do? Let us look
for the ancient ashes of hearts that burned,
and let our kisses touch there, one by one,
till the flower, disembodied, rises again.


Let us love that Desire that consumed its own fruit
and went down, aspect and power, into the earth:
We are its continuing light,
its indestructible, fragile seed
👁️ 404

Sonnet VIII

Sonnet VIII

If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full [here, interrupted by the baby waking -- continued about 26
hours later ]
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,


not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,


oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is -sand,
time, the tree of the rain,


everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.
👁️ 529

Sonnet LXXXI

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.


No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.


Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move


after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
👁️ 569

Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.


I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.


Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.


In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.
👁️ 753

Sonnet IX: There where the waves shatter

Sonnet IX: There where the waves shatter

There where the waves shatter on the restless rocks
the clear light bursts and enacts its rose,
and the sea-circle shrinks to a cluster of buds,
to one drop of blue salt, falling.


O bright magnolia bursting in the foam,
magnetic transient whose death blooms
and vanishes--being, nothingness--forever:
broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea.


You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,
while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,
collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:


because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,
galloping water, incessant sand,
we make the only permanent tenderness.
👁️ 485

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