Love Poetry Out Loud (12 page)

Paul Verlaine

V
oici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches

Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous.

Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches

Et qu'à vos yeux si beaux l'humble présent soit doux.

[About us here are fruit and flower, bract and bough
,

And here too is my heart, which beats only for you
.

Nor let those pale white hands tear that to pieces now

Which makes so poor a gift for your fair eyes to view.]

J'arrive tout couvert encore de rosée

Que le vent du matin vient glacer à mon front.

Souffrez que ma fatigue à vos pieds reposée

Rêve des chers instants qui la délasseront.

[All dewy am I come to be complete
,

With morning's light airs icy on my brow
.

Permit me so to lay this languor at your feet
,

Refreshed for those rare moments only dreams allow.]

Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête

Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers;

Laissez-la s'apaiser de la bonne tempête.

Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.

[On your sweet breast then might I place my head
,

Which swirls from your last kisses, long and deep
;

And, since our own ecstatic tempest's quieted
,

As you do rest a little, I perhaps may sleep.]

 

TOUCH

These two poems are about touch — one of absence, one of presence. For the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, the imagery is of sea and sun. For the American poet Jean Toomer, the imagery is of a city night, early in the last century
,

 

Salty Like the Sea

In the islands and along the coast, one can find souvenir shops selling shells and coral. The pieces of coral we find in such shops are skeletons left behind by once living creatures. Only in their absence can we grasp them. The poet stops in to look and finds himself transported by touch, reminded of love by its absence
.

Derek Walcott

T
his coral's shape echoes the hand

It hollowed. Its

Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,

As your breast in my cupped palm.

Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand,

Its pores, like yours, shone with salt sweat.

Bodies in absence displace their weight,

And your smooth body, like none other,

Creates an exact absence like this stone

Set on a table with a whitening rack

Of souvenirs. It dares my hand

To claim what lovers' hands have never known:

The nature of the body of another.

Jean Toomer

W
hisper of yellow globes

gleaming on lamp-posts that sway

like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me

like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house

that the main wires are insulate

(her words play softly up and down

dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape

and press your lips to mine

till they are incandescent

 

City Lights

Washington, D.C., after World War I, during Prohibition, was a city at a threshold, linking north and south. Toomer was at a threshold too. In this poem he evokes that electric time and place. Try reading it as a woman speaking to a man, with the male narrator speaking in the title and in parentheses
.

Insulate =
Covered with insulation
.

 

WITH LOVE IN MIND

It's said that your brain is your most important sex organ. In its ability to attach meaning and beauty to attraction, to rationalize impulses, to imagine what could be, and to deny what is, the brain makes the whole business possible. Here are two good examples of the brain at work, one by a young poet, and another by an aging one
.

 

In labour =
Waiting in pain
.

Tired with standing =
Sexually excited
.

Harmonious chime =
Perhaps a chiming watch, fashionable at the time
.

Busk =
Corset
.

Still =
Erect
.

Hairy diadem =
Her crown of hair
.

John Donne

C
ome, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,

Until I labour, I in labour lie.

The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,

Is tired with standing though they never fight.

Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering,

But a far fairer world encompassing.

Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,

That th' eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.

Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime

Tells me from you, that now 'tis your bed time.

Off with that happy busk, which I envy,

That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.

Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals,

As when from flowery meads th' hill's shadow steals.

Off with that wiry coronet and show

The hairy diadem which on you doth grow;

Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread

In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.

In such white robes heaven's angels used to be

Received by men; thou angel bring'st with thee

A heaven like Mahomet's paradise; and though

Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know

By this these angels from an evil sprite,

Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O my America, my new found land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,

My mine of precious stones, my empery,

How blessed am I in this discovering thee!

To enter in these bonds, is to be free;

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.

As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,

To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use

Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,

That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,

His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.

Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made

For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;

Themselves are mystic books, which only we

Whom their imputed grace will dignify

Must see revealed. Then since I may know,

As liberally, as to a midwife, show

Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,

Here is no penance, much less innocence.

To teach thee, I am naked first, why then

What needst thou have more covering than a man.

 

Undressing

We normally think of elegies as somber poems, but an elegy can be any kind of extended meditative reflection. In this case, it's a playful meditation on erotic love, and a request to get busy. Often titled “To His Mistress Going to Bed,” it's young John Donne at his wittiest, most rakish, and most unabashedly punny. Indeed, it was too risque for his literary executors to include in the edition of his poems published after his death, at which time he was an old and well-respected clergyman
.

Mahomet's paradise =
The heaven of sensual delights that awaited men, according to Islamic teaching
.

Manned =
Inhabited
.

Atlanta's balls = I
n Greek mythology, the swift-footed Atlanta was beaten in a race, and thus won in marriage, when she was tricked into stopping for some golden apples; here, the roles are reversed
.

Laymen =
The uninitiated; a groan is an appropriate response to the double entendre
.

Than a man =
Also a groaner
.

J. V. Cunningham

T
here are, perhaps, whom passion gives a grace,

Who fuse and part as dancers on the stage,

But that is not for me, not at my age,

Not with my bony shoulders and fat face.

Yet in my clumsiness I found a place

And use for passion: with it I ignore

My gaucheries and yours, and feel no more

The awkwardness of the absurd embrace.

It is a pact men make, and seal in flesh,

To be so busy with their own desires

Their loves may be as busy with their own,

And not in union. Though the two enmesh

Like gears in motion, each with each conspires

To be at once together and alone.

 

Senior Activities

J. V. Cunningham was a fan of Donne's poetry, and it shows in his techniques of versification and in some of the imagery. But instead of Donne's rhetorical pyrotechnics, Cunningham's modern meditation is gently self-mocking and ironic
.

KANE
.
You always said you wanted to live in a palace
.

SUSAN
.
Oh, a person could go crazy in this dump. Nobody to talk to, nobody to have any fun with
.

KANE
.
Susan
.

SUSAN
.
Forty-nine thousand acres of nothing but scenery and statues. I'm lonesome
.

—Herman J. Mankiewiez and Orson Welles,
Citizen Kane

LOVE LETTERS

Instant messaging, Internet chat, voice mail, real-time video, mobile phones … who has time to write a letter anymore? More's the pity — love letters have an ancient pedigree, and even now nothing quite says “I miss you” as well. Two lonely voices can he heard in this letter and the one that follows
.

Ezra Pound

W
hile my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.

And we went on living in the village of Ch
ō
kan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,

You went into far Ku-t
ō
-en, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me. I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

As far as Ch
ō
-f
Å«
-Sa.

 

Out of Character

Ezra Pound could not read Chinese, nor could the scholar whose research turned up the ideograms of the eighth-century poet Li Po, and whose work with native-speaking translators Pound inherited. In finding a modern voice for a lonely girl from a thousand years earlier, Pound makes the poem his own
.

 

Little Boy Lost

Some men never really grow up (and, arguably, a lot of those who become poets fit into that category). Some women find that quality endearing. Others … well … Stephen Dunn hopes that the woman he's writing to belongs with the first group
.

Stephen Dunn

(For L.)

L
ast night during a thunderstorm,

awakened and half-awake,

I wanted to climb into bed

on my mother's side, be told

everything's all right —

the mother-lie which gives us power

to make it true.

Then I realized she was dead,

that you're the one I sleep with

and rely on, and I wanted you.

The thunder brought what thunder brings.

I lay there, trembling,

thinking what perfect sense we make

of each other when we're afraid