Alma Feminina

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    1

    Anne Bradstreet

    To My Dear And Loving Husband

    If ever two were one, then surely we.

    If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.

    If ever wife was happy in a man,

    Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

    I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold

    Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

    My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,

    Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.

    Thy love is such I can no way repay.

    The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

    Then while we live, in love let's so persever

    That when we live no more, we may live ever.

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    2

    Elizabeth Siddall

    Dead Love

    Oh never weep for love that's dead

    Since love is seldom true

    But changes his fashion from blue to red,

    From brightest red to blue,

    And love was born to an early death

    And is so seldom true.

    Then harbour no smile on your bonny face

    To win the deepest sigh.

    The fairest words on truest lips

    Pass on and surely die,

    And you will stand alone, my dear,

    When wintry winds draw nigh.

    Sweet, never weep for what cannot be,

    For this God has not given.

    If the merest dream of love were true

    Then, sweet, we should be in heaven,

    And this is only earth, my dear,

    Where true love is not given.

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    Worn Out

    Thy strong arms are around me, love

    My head is on thy breast;

    Low words of comfort come from thee

    Yet my soul has no rest.

    For I am but a startled thing

    Nor can I ever be

    Aught save a bird whose broken wing

    Must fly away from thee.

    I cannot give to thee the love

    I gave so long ago,

    The love that turned and struck me down

    Amid the blinding snow.

    I can but give a failing heart

    And weary eyes of pain,

    A faded mouth that cannot smile

    And may not laugh again.

    Yet keep thine arms around me, love,

    Until I fall to sleep;

    Then leave me, saying no goodbye

    Lest I might wake, and weep.

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    4

    Elizabeth Browning

    XIV

    If thou must love me, let it be for nought

    Except for love's sake only. Do not say

    'I love her for her smileher lookher way

    Of speaking gently,for a trick of thought

    That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

    A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'

    For these things in themselves, Beloved, may

    Be changed, or change for thee,and love, so wrought,

    May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

    Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,

    A creature might forget to weep, who bore

    Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

    But love me for love's sake, that evermore

    Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity.

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    XXXI

    Thou comest! all is said without a word.

    I sit beneath thy looks, as children do

    In the noon-sun, with souls that tremble through

    Their happy eyelids from an unaverred

    Yet prodigal inward joy. Behold, I erred

    In that last doubt! and yet I cannot rue

    The sin most, but the occasionthat we two

    Should for a moment stand unministered

    By a mutual presence. Ah, keep near and close,

    Thou dovelike help! and, when my fears would rise,

    With thy broad heart serenely interpose:

    Brood down with thy divine sufficiencies

    These thoughts which tremble when bereft of those,

    Like callow birds left desert to the skies.

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    XXXVIII

    First time he kissed me, he but only kissed

    The fingers of this hand wherewith I write;

    And ever since, it grew more clean and white,

    Slow to world-greetings, quick with its 'Oh, list,'

    When the angels speak. A ring of amethyst

    I could not wear here, plainer to my sight,

    Than that first kiss. The second passed in height

    The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,

    Half falling on the hair. O beyond meed!

    That was the chrism of love, which love's own crown,

    With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.

    The third upon my lips was folded down

    In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,

    I have been proud and said, 'My love, my own.'

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    XLIII

    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

    I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

    My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

    For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

    I love thee to the level of everyday's

    Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

    I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

    I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

    I love thee with the passion put to use

    In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

    I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

    With my lost saints,I love thee with the breath,

    Smiles, tears, of all my life!and, if God choose,

    I shall but love thee better after death.

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    8

    Christina Rossetti

    Twice

    I took my heart in my hand

    (O my love, O my love),

    I said: Let me fall or stand,

    Let me live or die,

    But this once hear me speak-

    (O my love, O my love)-

    Yet a woman's words are weak;

    You should speak, not I.

    You took my heart in your hand

    With a friendly smile,

    With a critical eye you scanned,

    Then set it down,

    And said: It is still unripe,

    Better wait a while;

    Wait while the skylarks pipe,

    Till the corn grows brown

    As you set it down it broke-

    Broke, but I did not wince;

    I smiled at the speech you spoke,

    At your judgment that I heard:

    But I have not often smiled

    Since then, nor questioned since,

    Nor cared for corn-flowers wild,

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    Nor sung with the singing bird.

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    I take my heart in my hand,

    O my God, O my God,

    My broken heart in my hand:

    Thou hast seen, judge Thou

    My hope was written on sand,

    O my God, O my God:

    Now let Thy judgment stand-

    Yea, judge me now

    This contemned of a man,

    This marred one heedless day,

    This heart take Thou to scan

    Both within and without:

    Refine with fire its gold,

    Purge Thou its dross away-

    Yea, hold it in Thy hold,

    Whence none can pluck it out.

    I take my heart in my hand-

    I shall not die, but live-

    Before Thy face I stand;

    I, for Thou callest such:

    All that I have I bring,

    All that I am I give,

    Smile Thou and I shall sing,

    But shall not question much.

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    After Death

    The curtains were half drawn; the floor was swept

    And strewn with rushes; rosemary and may

    Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,

    Where, through the lattice, ivy-shadows crept.

    He leaned above me, thinking that I slept

    And could not hear him; but I heard him say,

    "Poor child, poor child"; and as he turned away

    Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.

    He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold

    That hid my face, or take my hand in his,

    Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.

    He did not love me living; but once dead

    He pitied me; and very sweet it is

    To know he still is warm though I am cold.

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    Song ["When I am dead"]

    When I am dead, my dearest,

    Sing no sad songs for me;

    Plant thou no roses at my head,

    Nor shady cypress tree.

    Be the green grass above me

    With showers and dewdrops wet;

    And if thou wilt, remember,

    And if thou wilt, forget.

    I shall not see the shadows,

    I shall not feel the rain;

    I shall not hear the nightingale

    Sing on as if in pain.

    And dreaming through the twilight

    That doth not rise nor set,

    Haply I may remember,

    And haply may forget.

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    Adelaide Crapsey

    Dirge

    NEVER the nightingale,

    Oh, my dear,

    Never again the lark

    Thou wilt hear;

    Though dusk and the morning still

    Tap at thy window-sill,Though ever love call and call

    Thou wilt not hear at all,

    My dear, my dear.

    November Night

    LISTEN . . .

    With faint dry sound,

    Like steps of passing ghosts,

    The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

    And fall.

    Moon Shadows

    STILL as

    On windless nights

    The moon-cast shadows are,

    So still will be my heart when I

    Am dead.

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    The Guarded Wound

    IF it

    Were lighter touch

    Than petal of flower resting

    On grass, oh still too heavy it were,

    Too heavy!

    Amaze

    I KNOW

    Not these my hands

    And yet I think there was

    A woman like me once had hands

    Like these.

    Adventure

    SUN and wind and beat of sea,

    Great lands stretching endlessly . . .

    Where be bonds to bind the free?

    All the world was made for me!

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    Cinquains

    Fate Defied

    As it

    Were tissue of silver

    I'll wear, O fate, thy grey,

    And go mistily radiant, clad

    Like the moon.

    Night Winds

    The old

    Old winds that blew

    When chaos was, what do

    They tell the clattered trees that I

    Should weep?

    The Warning

    Just now,

    Out of the strange

    Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .

    A white moth flew . . . Why am I grown

    So cold?

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    Incantation.

    O mia Luna! Porta mi fortuna!

    (You must say it nine times, curtseying, and then wish.)

    In rose-pale, fading blue of twilight sky,

    See, the new moon's thin crescent shining clear;

    Nine times I'll curtsey murmuring mystic words, -

    And wish good fortune to our love, my dear.

    Old Love

    More dim than wining moon

    Thy face, mort faint

    Than is the falling wind

    Thy voice, yet do

    Thine eyes most strangely glow,

    Thou host . . thou ghost.

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    Mad Song

    (by Adelaide Crapsey)

    Grey gaolers are my griefs

    That will not let me free;

    The bitterness of tears

    Is warder unto me.

    I may not leap or run;

    I may not laugh nor sing.

    "Thy cell is small," they say,

    "Be still thou captived thing."

    But in the dusk of the night,

    Too sudden-swift to see,

    Closing and ivory gates

    Are refuge unto me.

    My griefs, my tears must watch,

    And cold the watch they keep;

    They whisper, whisper there --

    I hear them in my sleep.

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    They know that I must come,

    And patient watch they keep,

    Whispering, shivering there,

    Till I come back from sleep.

    But in the dark of a night,

    Too dark for them to see,

    The refuge of black gates

    Will open unto me.

    Whisper up there in the dark. .

    Shiver by bleak winds stung. .

    My dead lips laugh to hear

    How long you wait . . . how long!

    Grey gaolers are my griefs

    That will not let me free;

    The bitterness of tears

    Is warder unto me.

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    Rapunzel

    All day, all day I brush

    My golden strands of hair;

    All day I wait and wait..

    Ah, who is there?

    Who calls? Who calls? The gold

    Ladder of my long hair

    I loose and wait..and wait..

    Ah, who is there?

    She left at dawn..I am blind

    In the tangle of my long hair..

    Is it she? the witch? the witch?

    Ah, who is there?

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    Tears.

    The immemorial grief of all years

    Burdes my heart sorely, and the years

    Of slow eternal crying stain my cheeks.

    Forever and forever my soul speaks

    Saying: I am thy self: Look on me --

    And weep. Never and never shalt thou be

    As I. Weep; for weeping and hard pain

    Of loss measure joy of last visioned gain.

    You Nor I Nor Nobody Knows

    You nor I nor nobody knows

    Where our daily-taken breath

    Vanisheth and vanisheth:

    Where our lost breath's flying goes

    You nor I nor nobody knows.

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    To the Dead in the Grave-Yard Under My Window

    (Written in a Moment of Exasperation)

    HOW can you lie so still? All day I watch

    And never a blade of all the green sod moves

    To show where restlessly you toss and turn,

    And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees

    Stiffened and aching from their long disuse;

    I watch all night and not one ghost comes forthTo take its freedom of the midnight hour.

    Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones?

    The very worms must scorn you where you lie,

    A pallid mouldering acquiescent folk,

    Meek habitants of unresented graves.

    Why are you there in your straight row on rowWhere I must ever see you from my bed

    That in your mere dumb presence iterate

    The text so weary in my ears: "Lie still

    And rest; be patient and lie still and rest."

    I'll not be patient! I will not lie still!

    There is a brown road runs between the pines,

    And further on the purple woodlands lie,

    And still beyond blue mountains lift and loom;

    And I would walk the road and I would be

    Deep in the wooded shade and I would reach

    The windy mountain tops that touch the clouds.

    My eyes may follow but my feet are held.

    Recumbent as you others must I too

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    Submit? Be mimic of your movelessness

    With pillow and counterpane for stone and sod?

    And if the many sayings of the wise

    Teach of submission I will not submit

    But with a spirit all unreconciled

    Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.

    Better it is to walk, to run, to dance,

    Better it is to laugh and leap and sing,

    To know the open skies of dawn and night,

    To move untrammel'd down the flaming noon,

    And I will clamour it through weary days

    Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp,

    Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips

    Of resignation, sister to defeat.

    I'll not be patient. I will not lie still.

    And in ironic quietude who is

    The despot of our days and lord of dust

    Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop

    Grim casual comment on rebellion's end:

    "Yes; yes . . . Wilful and petulant but now

    As dead and quiet as the other are."

    And this each body and ghost of you hath heard

    That in your graves do therefore lie so still.

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    24

    AmyLowell

    Interlude

    When I have baked white cakes

    And grated green almonds to spread on them;

    When I have picked the green crowns from the strawberries

    And piled them, cone-pointed, in a blue and yellow platter;

    When I have smoothed the seam of the linen I have been working;What then?

    To-morrow it will be the same:

    Cakes and strawberries,

    And needles in and out of cloth

    If the sun is beautiful on bricks and pewter,

    How much more beautiful is the moon,Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree;

    The moon

    Wavering across a bed of tulips;

    The moon,

    Still,

    Upon your face.

    You shine, Beloved,

    You and the moon.

    But which is the reflection?

    The clock is striking eleven.

    I think, when we have shut and barred the door,

    The night will be dark

    Outside.

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    26

    LILACS

    Lilacs,

    False blue,White

    Purple,

    Colour of lilac,

    Your great puffs of flowers

    Are everywhere in this my New England.

    Among your heart-shaped leavesOrange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing

    Their little weak soft songs;

    In the crooks of your branches

    The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs

    Peer restlessly through the light and shadow

    Of all Springs.Lilacs in dooryards

    Holding quiet conversations with an early moon;

    Lilacs watching a deserted house

    Settling sideways into the grass of an old road;

    Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom

    Above a cellar dug into a hill.

    You are everywhere.

    You were everywhere.

    You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon,

    And ran along the road beside the boy going to school.

    You stood by pasture-bars to give the cows good milking,

    You persuaded the housewife that her dish pan was of silver.

    And her husband an image of pure gold.

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    You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms

    Through the wide doors of Custom Houses--

    You, and sandal-wood, and tea,

    Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks

    When a ship was in from China.

    You called to them: "Goose-quill men, goose-quill men,

    May is a month for flitting."

    Until they writhed on their high stools

    And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up

    ledgers.

    Paradoxical New England clerks,

    Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the "Song of Solomon" at night,

    So many verses before bed-time,

    Because it was the Bible.

    The dead fed you

    Amid the slant stones of graveyards.

    Pale ghosts who planted you

    Came in the night-time

    And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems.

    You are of the green sea,

    And of the stone hills which reach a long distance.

    You are of the elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell

    kites and marbles,

    You are of great parks where everyone walks and nobody is at home.

    You cover the blind sides of greenhouses

    And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass

    To your friends, the grapes, inside.

    Lilacs,

    False blue,

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    White

    Purple,

    Colour of lilac,

    You have forgotten your Eastern origin,

    The veiled women with eyes like panthers,

    The swollen, aggressive turbans of jewelled Pashas.

    Now you are a very decent flower,

    A reticent flower,

    A curiously clear-cut, candid flower,

    Standing beside clean doorways,

    Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles,

    Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight

    And a hundred or two sharp blossoms.

    Maine knows you,

    Has for years and years;

    New Hampshire knows you,

    And Massachusetts

    And Vermont.

    Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island;

    Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea.

    You are brighter than apples,

    Sweeter than tulips,

    You are the great flood of our souls

    Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts,

    You are the smell of all Summers,

    The love of wives and children,

    The recollection of the gardens of little children,

    You are the State Houses and Charters

    And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows.

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    May is lilac here in New England,

    May is a thrush singing "Sun up!" on a tip-top ash-tree,

    May is white clouds behind pine-trees

    Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky.

    May is a green as no other,

    May is much sun through small leaves,

    May is soft earth,

    And apple-blossoms,

    And windows open to a South wind.

    May is full light wind of lilac

    From Canada to Narragansett Bay.

    Lilacs,

    False blue,

    White

    Purple,

    Colour of lilac.

    Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,

    Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,

    Lilacs in me because I am New England,

    Because my roots are in it,

    Because my leaves are of it,

    Because my flowers are for it,

    Because it is my country

    And I speak to it of itself

    And sing of it with my own voice

    Since certainly it is mine.

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    A GIFT

    See! I give myself to you, Beloved!

    My words are little jars

    For you to take and put upon a shelf.

    Their shapes are quaint and beautiful,

    And they have many pleasant colours and lustres

    To recommend them.

    Also the scent from them fills the room

    With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.

    When I shall have given you the last one,

    You will have the whole of me,

    But I shall be dead.

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    Emily Dickinson

    You love me -- you are sure

    You love me -- you are sure --

    I shall not fear mistake --

    I shall not cheated wake --

    Some grinning morn --

    To find the Sunrise left --

    And Orchards -- unbereft --

    And Dollie -- gone!

    I need not start -- you're sure --

    That night will never be --

    When frightened -- home to Thee I run --

    To find the windows dark --

    And no more Dollie -- mark --

    Quite none?

    Be sure you're sure -- you know --

    I'll bear it better now --

    If you'll just tell me so --

    Than when -- a little dull Balm grown --

    Over this pain of mine --

    You sting -- again!

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    Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower,

    Perhaps you'd like to buy a flower,

    But I could never sell --

    If you would like to borrow,

    Until the Daffodil

    Unties her yellow Bonnet

    Beneath the village door,

    Until the Bees, from Clover rows

    Their Hock, and Sherry, draw,

    Why, I will lend until just then,

    But not an hour more!

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    A Bird came down the Walk

    A Bird came down the Walk

    He did not know I saw

    He bit an angle-worm in halves

    And ate the fellow, raw,

    And then he drank a Dew

    From a convenient Grass,

    And then hopped sidewise to the Wall

    To let a Beetle pass

    He glanced with rapid eyes

    That hurried all abroa

    They looked like frightened Beads, I thought

    He stirred his velvet head

    Like one in danger, Cautious,

    I offered him a Crumb,

    And he unrolled his feathers

    And rowed him softer home

    Than Oars divide the Ocean,

    Too silver for a seam

    Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,

    Leap, plashless as they swim.

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    34

    Sylvia Plath

    Mirror

    I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

    Whatever I see I swallow immediately

    Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

    I am not cruel, only truthful --

    The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

    Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

    It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

    I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

    Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

    Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

    Searching my reaches for what she really is.

    Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

    I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

    She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

    I am important to her. She comes and goes.

    Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

    In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

    Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

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    Mad Girl's Love Song

    "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

    I lift my lids and all is born again.

    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

    And arbitrary blackness gallops in:

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

    I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed

    And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.

    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:

    Exit seraphim and Satan's men:

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

    I fancied you'd return the way you said,

    But I grow old and I forget your name.

    (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    I should have loved a thunderbird instead;

    At least when spring comes they roar back again.

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

    (I think I made you up inside my head.)"

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    Mystic

    The air is a mill of hooks --

    Questions without answer,

    Glittering and drunk as flies

    Whose kiss stings unbearably

    In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

    I remember

    The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,

    The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.

    Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

    Once one has been seized up

    Without a part left over,

    Not a toe, not a finger, and used,

    Used utterly, in the sun's conflagration, the stains

    That lengthen from ancient cathedrals

    What is the remedy?

    The pill of the Communion tablet,

    The walking beside still water? Memory?

    Or picking up the bright pieces

    Of Christ in the faces of rodents,

    The tame flower-nibblers, the ones

    Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable --

    The humpback in his small, washed cottage

    Under the spokes of the clematis.

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    Is there no great love, only tenderness?

    Does the sea

    Remember the walker upon it?

    Meaning leaks from the molecules.

    The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,

    The children leap in their cots.

    The sun blooms, it is a geranium.

    The heart has not stopped.

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    You're

    Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

    Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

    Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

    Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.

    Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,

    Trawling your dark, as owls do.

    Mute as a turnip from the Fourth

    Of July to All Fools' Day,

    O high-riser, my little loaf.

    Vague as fog and looked for like mail.

    Farther off than Australia.

    Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.

    Snug as a bud and at home

    Like a sprat in a pickle jug.

    A creel of eels, all ripples.

    Jumpy as a Mexican bean.

    Right, like a well-done sum.

    A clean slate, with your own face on.

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    Anne Sexton

    Cinderella

    You always read about it:

    the plumber with the twelve children

    who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.

    From toilets to riches.

    That story.

    Or the nursemaid,

    some luscious sweet from Denmark

    who captures the oldest son's heart.

    from diapers to Dior.

    That story.

    Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,

    eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,

    the white truck like an ambulance

    who goes into real estate

    and makes a pile.

    From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

    Or the charwoman

    who is on the bus when it cracks up

    and collects enough from the insurance.

    From mops to Bonwit Teller.

    That story.

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    Once

    the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed

    and she said to her daughter Cinderella:

    Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile

    down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.

    The man took another wife who had

    two daughters, pretty enough

    but with hearts like blackjacks.

    Cinderella was their maid.

    She slept on the sooty hearth each night

    and walked around looking like Al Jolson.

    Her father brought presents home from town,

    jewels and gowns for the other women

    but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.

    She planted that twig on her mother's grave

    and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.

    Whenever she wished for anything the dove

    would drop it like an egg upon the ground.

    The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

    Next came the ball, as you all know.

    It was a marriage market.

    The prince was looking for a wife.

    All but Cinderella were preparing

    and gussying up for the event.

    Cinderella begged to go too.

    Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils

    into the cinders and said: Pick them

    up in an hour and you shall go.

    The white dove brought all his friends;

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    all the warm wings of the fatherland came,

    and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.

    No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,

    you have no clothes and cannot dance.

    That's the way with stepmothers.

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    Cinderella went to the tree at the grave

    and cried forth like a gospel singer:

    Mama! Mama! My turtledove,

    send me to the prince's ball!

    The bird dropped down a golden dress

    and delicate little slippers.

    Rather a large package for a simple bird.

    So she went. Which is no surprise.

    Her stepmother and sisters didn't

    recognize her without her cinder face

    and the prince took her hand on the spot

    and danced with no other the whole day.

    As nightfall came she thought she'd better

    get home. The prince walked her home

    and she disappeared into the pigeon house

    and although the prince took an axe and broke

    it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.

    These events repeated themselves for three days.

    However on the third day the prince

    covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax

    and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.

    Now he would find whom the shoe fit

    and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.

    He went to their house and the two sisters

    were delighted because they had lovely feet.

    The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on

    but her big toe got in the way so she simply

    sliced it off and put on the slipper.

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    The prince rode away with her until the white dove

    told him to look at the blood pouring forth.

    That is the way with amputations.

    They just don't heal up like a wish.

    The other sister cut off her heel

    but the blood told as blood will.

    The prince was getting tired.

    He began to feel like a shoe salesman.

    But he gave it one last try.

    This time Cinderella fit into the shoe

    like a love letter into its envelope.

    At the wedding ceremony

    the two sisters came to curry favor

    and the white dove pecked their eyes out.

    Two hollow spots were left

    like soup spoons.

    Cinderella and the prince

    lived, they say, happily ever after,

    like two dolls in a museum case

    never bothered by diapers or dust,

    never arguing over the timing of an egg,

    never telling the same story twice,

    never getting a middle-aged spread,

    their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

    Regular Bobbsey Twins.

    That story.

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    The Starry Night

    That does not keep me from having a terrible need of -- shall I say

    the word -- religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

    --Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

    The town does not exist

    except where one black-haired tree slips

    up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

    The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.

    Oh starry starry night! This is how

    I want to die.

    It moves. They are all alive.

    Even the moon bulges in its orange irons

    to push children, like a god, from its eye.

    The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.

    Oh starry starry night! This is how

    I want to die:

    into that rushing beast of the night,

    sucked up by that great dragon, to split

    from my life with no flag,

    no belly,

    no cry.

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    Housewife

    Some women marry houses.

    It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,

    a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

    The walls are permanent and pink.

    See how she sits on her knees all day,

    faithfully washing herself down.

    Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

    into their fleshy mothers.

    A woman is her mother.

    That's the main thing.

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    Music Swims Back To Me

    Wait Mister. Which way is home?

    They turned the light out

    and the dark is moving in the corner.

    There are no sign posts in this room,

    four ladies, over eighty,

    in diapers every one of them.

    La la la, Oh music swims back to me

    and I can feel the tune they played

    the night they left me

    in this private institution on a hill.

    Imagine it. A radio playing

    and everyone here was crazy.

    I liked it and danced in a circle.

    Music pours over the sense

    and in a funny way

    music sees more than I.

    I mean it remembers better;

    remembers the first night here.

    It was the strangled cold of November;

    even the stars were strapped in the sky

    and that moon too bright

    forking through the bars to stick me

    with a singing in the head.

    I have forgotten all the rest.

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    They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.

    and there are no signs to tell the way,

    just the radio beating to itself

    and the song that remembers

    more than I. Oh, la la la,

    this music swims back to me.

    The night I came I danced a circle

    and was not afraid.

    Mister?

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    The Kiss

    My mouth blooms like a cut.

    I've been wronged all year, tedious

    nights, nothing but rough elbows in them

    and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby

    crybaby , you fool!

    Before today my body was useless.

    Now it's tearing at its square corners.

    It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot

    and see -- Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.

    Zing! A resurrection!

    Once it was a boat, quite wooden

    and with no business, no salt water under it

    and in need of some paint. It was no more

    than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her.

    She's been elected.

    My nerves are turned on. I hear them like

    musical instruments. Where there was silence

    the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.

    Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped

    into fire.

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    Just Once

    Just once I knew what life was for.

    In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;

    walked there along the Charles River,watched the lights copying themselves,

    all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening

    their mouths as wide as opera singers;

    counted the stars, my little campaigners,

    my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love

    on the night green side of it and criedmy heart to the eastbound cars and cried

    my heart to the westbound cars and took

    my truth across a small humped bridge

    and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home

    and hoarded these constants into morning

    only to find them gone.

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    Lucia Hemans

    The last song of Sappho.

    SOUND on, thou dark unslumbering sea!

    My dirge is in thy moan;

    My spirit finds response in thee,

    To its own ceaseless cry'Alone, alone !'

    Yet send me back one other word,

    Ye tones that never cease !

    Oh ! let your secret caves be stirr'd,

    And say, dark waters! will ye give mepeace?

    Away! my weary soul hath sought

    In vain one echoing sigh,

    One answer to consuming thought

    In human heartsand will the wavereply ?

    Sound on, thou dark, unslumbering sea!

    Sound in thy scorn and pride !

    I ask not, alien world, from thee,

    What my own kindred earth hath still denied.

    And yet I loved that earth so well,

    With all its lovely things!

    Was it for this the death-wind fell

    On my rich lyre, and quench'd its living strings?

    Let them lie silent at my feet !

    Since broken even as they,

    The heart whose music made them sweet,

    Hath pour'd on desert-sands its wealth away.

    Yet glory's light hath touch'd my name,

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    The laurel-wreath is mine

    With a lone heart, a weary frame

    O restless deep ! I come to make them thine !

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    Give to that crown, that burning crown,

    Place in thy darkest hold!

    Bury my anguish, my renown,

    With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold.

    Thou sea-bird on the billow's crest,

    Thouhast thy love, thy home;

    They wait thee in the quiet nest,

    And I, the unsought, unwatch'd-forI too come!

    I, with this winged nature fraught,

    These visions wildly free,

    This boundless love, this fiery thought

    AloneI comeoh ! give me peace, dark sea!

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    Flight of the Spirit

    Whither, oh! whither wilt thou wing thy way?

    What solemn region first upon thy sight

    Shall break, unveiled for terror or delight?

    What hosts, magificent in dread array,

    My spirit! when thy prison-house of clay

    After long strife is rent? Fond, fruitless quest!

    The unfledged bird, within his narrow nest,

    Sees but a few green branches oer him play,

    And through their parting leaves, by fits revealed,

    A glimpse of summer sky; nor knows the field

    Wherein his dormant powers must yet be tried.

    Thou art that bird!--of what beyond thee lies

    Far in the untracked immeasurable skies

    Knowing but this--that thou shalt find thy guide!

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    Sara Teasdale

    Alone

    I am alone, in spite of love,

    In spite of all I take and give

    In spite of all your tenderness,

    Sometimes I am not glad to live.

    I am alone, as though I stood

    On the highest peak of the tired gray world,

    About me only swirling snow,

    Above me, endless space unfurled;

    With earth hidden and heaven hidden,

    And only my own spirit's pride

    To keep me from the peace of those

    Who are not lonely, having died.

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    Did You Never Know?

    Did you never know, long ago, how much you loved me

    That your love would never lessen and never go?

    You were young then, proud and fresh-hearted,

    You were too young to know.

    Fate is a wind, and red leaves fly before it

    Far apart, far away in the gusty time of year

    Seldom we meet now, but when I hear you speaking,

    I know your secret, my dear, my dear.

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    Gray Eyes

    It was April when you came

    The first time to me,

    And my first look in your eyes

    Was like my first look at the sea.

    We have been together

    Four Aprils now

    Watching for the green

    On the swaying willow bough;

    Yet whenever I turn

    To your gray eyes over me,

    It is as though I looked

    For the first time at the sea

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    Houses Of Dreams

    You took my empty dreams

    And filled them every one

    With tenderness and nobleness,

    April and the sun.

    The old empty dreams

    Where my thoughts would throng

    Are far too full of happiness

    To even hold a song.

    Oh, the empty dreams were dim

    And the empty dreams were wide,

    They were sweet and shadowy houses

    Where my thoughts could hide.

    But you took my dreams away

    And you made them all come true --

    My thoughts have no place now to play,

    And nothing now to do.

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    I Am Not Yours

    I am not yours, not lost in you,

    Not lost, although I long to be

    Lost as a candle lit at noon,

    Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

    You love me, and I find you still

    A spirit beautiful and bright,

    Yet I am I, who long to be

    Lost as a light is lost in light.

    Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out

    My senses, leave me deaf and blind,

    Swept by the tempest of your love,

    A taper in a rushing wind.

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    Maya Angelou

    Phenomenal Woman

    Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

    I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size

    But when I start to tell them,

    They think I'm telling lies.

    I say,

    It's in the reach of my arms

    The span of my hips,

    The stride of my step,

    The curl of my lips.

    I'm a woman

    Phenomenally.

    Phenomenal woman,

    That's me.

    I walk into a room

    Just as cool as you please,

    And to a man,

    The fellows stand or

    Fall down on their knees.

    Then they swarm around me,

    A hive of honey bees.

    I say,

    It's the fire in my eyes,

    And the flash of my teeth,

    The swing in my waist,

    And the joy in my feet.

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    I'm a woman

    Phenomenally.

    Phenomenal woman,

    That's me.

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    Men themselves have wondered

    What they see in me.

    They try so much

    But they can't touch

    My inner mystery.

    When I try to show them

    They say they still can't see.

    I say,

    It's in the arch of my back,

    The sun of my smile,

    The ride of my breasts,

    The grace of my style.

    I'm a woman

    Phenomenally.

    Phenomenal woman,

    That's me.

    Now you understand

    Just why my head's not bowed.

    I don't shout or jump about

    Or have to talk real loud.

    When you see me passing

    It ought to make you proud.

    I say,

    It's in the click of my heels,

    The bend of my hair,

    the palm of my hand,

    The need of my care,

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    'Cause I'm a woman

    Phenomenally.

    Phenomenal woman,

    That's me.

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    Men

    When I was young, I used to

    Watch behind the curtains

    As men walked up and down the street. Wino men, old men.

    Young men sharp as mustard.

    See them. Men are always

    Going somewhere.

    They knew I was there. Fifteen

    Years old and starving for them.

    Under my window, they would pause,

    Their shoulders high like the

    Breasts of a young girl,

    Jacket tails slapping over

    Those behinds,

    Men.

    One day they hold you in the

    Palms of their hands, gentle, as if you

    Were the last raw egg in the world. Then

    They tighten up. Just a little. The

    First squeeze is nice. A quick hug.

    Soft into your defenselessness. A little

    More. The hurt begins. Wrench out a

    Smile that slides around the fear. When the

    Air disappears,

    Your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly,

    Like the head of a kitchen match. Shattered.

    It is your juice

    That runs down their legs. Staining their shoes.

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    When the earth rights itself again,

    And taste tries to return to the tongue,

    Your body has slammed shut. Forever.

    No keys exist.

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    Then the window draws full upon

    Your mind. There, just beyond

    The sway of curtains, men walk.

    Knowing something.

    Going someplace.

    But this time, I will simply

    Stand and watch.

    Maybe.

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    Touched by An Angel

    We, unaccustomed to courage

    exiles from delight

    live coiled in shells of loneliness

    until love leaves its high holy temple

    and comes into our sight

    to liberate us into life.

    Love arrives

    and in its train come ecstasies

    old memories of pleasure

    ancient histories of pain.

    Yet if we are bold,

    love strikes away the chains of fear

    from our souls.

    We are weaned from our timidity

    In the flush of love's light

    we dare be brave

    And suddenly we see

    that love costs all we are

    and will ever be.

    Yet it is only love

    which sets us free.

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    Edna Millay

    Song Of A Second April

    April this year, not otherwise

    Than April of a year ago,

    Is full of whispers, full of sighs,

    Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;

    Hepaticas that pleased you so

    Are here again, and butterflies.

    There rings a hammering all day,

    And shingles lie about the doors;

    In orchards near and far away

    The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;

    The men are merry at their chores,

    And children earnest at their play.

    The larger streams run still and deep,

    Noisy and swift the small brooks run

    Among the mullein stalks the sheep

    Go up the hillside in the sun,

    Pensively,only you are gone,

    You that alone I cared to keep.

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    Sonnets 04: Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended

    Only until this cigarette is ended,

    A little moment at the end of all,

    While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,

    And in the firelight to a lance extended,

    Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,

    The broken shadow dances on the wall,

    I will permit my memory to recall

    The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.

    And then adieu,farewell!the dream is done.

    Yours is a face of which I can forget

    The color and the features, every one,

    The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;

    But in your day this moment is the sun

    Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

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    Sweet Love, Sweet Thorn, When Lightly To My Heart

    Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart

    I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain,

    And lie disheveled in the grass apart,

    A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain,

    While rainy evening drips to misty night,

    And misty night to cloudy morning clears,

    And clouds disperse across the gathering light,

    And birds grow noisy, and the sun appears

    Had I bethought me then, sweet love, sweet thorn,

    How sharp an anguish even at the best,

    When all's requited and the future sworn,

    The happy Hour can leave within the breast,

    I had not so come running at the call

    Of one whoe loves me little, if at

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    And do you think that love itself

    And do you think that love itself,

    Living in such an ugly house,

    Can prosper long?

    We meet and part;

    Our talk is all of heres and nows,

    Our conduct likewise; in no act

    Is any future, any past;

    Under our sly, unspoken pact,

    I KNOW with whom I saw you last,

    But I say nothing; and you know

    At six-fifteen to whom I go

    Can even love be treated so?

    I KNOW, but I do not insist,

    Having stealth and tact, thought not enough,

    What hour your eye is on your wrist.

    No wild appeal, no mild rebuff

    Deflates the hour, leaves the wine flat

    Yet if YOU drop the picked-up book

    To intercept my clockward look

    Tell me, can love go on like that?

    Even the bored, insulted heart,

    That signed so long and tight a lease,

    Can BREAK it CONTRACT, slump in peace.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    To Be In Love

    To be in love

    Is to touch with a lighter hand.

    In yourself you stretch, you are well.

    You look at things

    Through his eyes.

    A cardinal is red.

    A sky is blue.

    Suddenly you know he knows too.

    He is not there but

    You know you are tasting together

    The winter, or a light spring weather.

    His hand to take your hand is overmuch.

    Too much to bear.

    You cannot look in his eyes

    Because your pulse must not say

    What must not be said.

    When he

    Shuts a door-

    Is not there_

    Your arms are water.

    And you are free

    With a ghastly freedom.

    You are the beautiful half

    Of a golden hurt.

    You remember and covet his mouth

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    To touch, to whisper on.

    Oh when to declare

    Is certain Death!

    Oh when to apprize

    Is to mesmerize,

    To see fall down, the Column of Gold,

    Into the commonest ash.

    Hilda Doolittle

    Song

    You are as gold

    as the half-ripe grain

    that merges to gold again,

    as white as the white rain

    that beats through

    the half-opened flowers

    of the great flower tufts

    thick on the black limbs

    of an Illyrian apple bough.

    Can honey distill such fragrance

    As your bright hair

    For your face is as fair as rain,

    yet as rain that lies clear

    on white honey-comb,

    lends radiance to the white wax,

    so your hair on your brow

    casts light for a shadow.

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    Never More Will The Wind

    Never more will the wind

    cherish you again,

    never more will the rain.

    Never more

    shall we find you bright

    in the snow and wind.

    The snow is melted,

    the snow is gone,

    and you are flown:

    Like a bird out of our hand,

    like a light out of our heart,

    you are gone.

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    Louise Bogan

    Women

    Women have no wilderness in them,

    They are provident instead,

    Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts

    To eat dusty bread.

    They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,

    They do not hear

    Snow water going down under culverts

    Shallow and clear.

    They wait, when they should turn to journeys,

    They stiffen, when they should bend.

    They use against themselves that benevolence

    To which no man is friend.

    They cannot think of so many crops to a field

    Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.

    Their love is an eager meaninglessness

    Too tense or too lax.

    They hear in any whisper that speaks to them

    A shout and a cry.

    As like as not, when they take life over their door-sill

    They should let it go by.

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    76

    Sonnet

    Since you would claim the sources of my thought

    Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,

    The reedy traps which other hands have times

    To close upon it. Conjure up the hot

    Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow

    Devised to strike it down. It will be free.

    Whatever nets draw in to prison me

    At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.

    My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,

    My body hear no echo save its own,

    Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,

    Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell

    That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown

    Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud

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    May Swenson

    Blue

    Blue, but you are Rose, too,

    and buttermilk, but with blood

    dots showing through.

    A little salty your white

    nape boy-wide. Glinting hairs

    shoot back of your ears' Rose

    that tongues like to feel

    the maze of, slip into the funnel,

    tell a thunder-whisper to.

    When I kiss, your eyes' straight

    lashes down crisp go like doll's

    blond straws. Glazed iris Roses,

    your lids unclose to Blue-ringed

    targets, their dark sheen-spokes

    almost green. I sink in Blue-

    black Rose-heart holes until you

    blink. Pink lips, the serrate

    folds taste smooth, and Rosehip-

    round, the center bud I suck.

    I milknip your two Blue-skeined

    blown Rose beauties, too, to sniff

    their berries' blood, up stiff

    pink tips. You're white in

    patches, only mostly Rose,

    buckskin and saltly, speckled

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    like a sky. I love your spots,

    your white neck, Rose, your hair's

    wild straw splash, silk spools

    for your ears. But where white

    spouts out, spills on your brow

    to clear eyepools, wheel shafts

    of light, Rose, you are Blue.

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    Adrienne Rich

    Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

    Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,

    Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

    They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

    They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

    Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool

    Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

    The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band

    Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

    When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

    Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

    The tigers in the panel that she made

    Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

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    Living In Sin

    She had thought the studio would keep itself;

    no dust upon the furniture of love.

    Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

    the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,

    a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

    stalking the picturesque amusing mouse

    had risen at his urging.

    Not that at five each separate stair would writhe

    under the milkman's tramp; that morning light

    so coldly would delineate the scraps

    of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

    that on the kitchen shelf amoong the saucers

    a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--

    envoy from some village in the moldings...

    Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,

    sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

    declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,

    rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;

    while she, jeered by the minor demons,

    pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

    a towel to dust the table-top,

    and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.

    By evening she was back in love again,

    though not so wholly but throughout the night

    she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

    like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

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    My Mouth Hovers Across Your Breasts

    My mouth hovers across your breasts

    in the short grey winter afternoon

    in this bed we are delicate

    and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves

    tough and delicate we play rings

    around each other our daytime candle burns

    with its peculiar light and if the snow

    begins to fall outside filling the branches

    and if the night falls without announcement

    there are the pleasures of winter

    sudden, wild and delicate your fingers

    exact my tongue exact at the same moment

    stopping to laugh at a joke

    my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter

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    Sharon Olds

    The End

    We decided to have the abortion, became

    killers together. The period that came

    changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple

    who had been for life.

    As we talked of it in bed, the crash

    was not a surprise. We went to the window,

    looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming

    curved shears of glass as if we had

    done it. Cops pulled the bodies out

    Bloody as births from the small, smoking

    aperture of the door, laid them

    on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked

    through. Blood

    began to pour

    down my legs into my slippers. I stood

    where I was until they shot the bound

    form into the black hole

    of the ambulance and stood the other one

    up, a bandage covering its head,

    stained where the eyes had been.

    The next morning I had to kneel

    an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,

    rubbing with wet cloths at those glittering

    translucent spots, as one has to soak

    a long time to deglaze the pan

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    when the feast is over.

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    Sex Without Love

    How do they do it, the ones who make love

    without love? Beautiful as dancers,

    gliding over each other like ice-skaters

    over the ice, fingers hooked

    inside each other's bodies, faces

    red as steak, wine, wet as the

    children at birth whose mothers are going to

    give them away. How do they come to the

    come to the come to the God come to the

    still waters, and not love

    the one who came there with them, light

    rising slowly as steam off their joined

    skin? These are the true religious,

    the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

    accept a false Messiah, love the

    priest instead of the God. They do not

    mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

    they are like great runners: they know they are alone

    with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

    the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-

    vascular health--just factors, like the partner

    in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

    single body alone in the universe

    against its own best time.

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    Primitive

    I have heard about the civilized,

    the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I

    are

    savages. You come in with a bag,

    hold it out to me in silence.

    I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it

    and understand the message: I have

    pleased you greatly last night. We sit

    quietly, side by side, to eat,

    the long pancakes dangling and spilling,

    fragrant sauce dripping out,

    and glance at each other askance, wordless,

    the corners of our eyes clear as spear points

    laid along the sill to show

    a friend sits with a friend here.

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    The Clasp

    She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,

    we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,

    I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his

    face, again, and when I had her wrist

    in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple

    of seconds, to make an impression on her,

    to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost

    savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,

    the expression, into her, of my anger,

    "Never, never, again," the righteous

    chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very

    fast-grab, crush, crush,

    crush, release-and at the first extra

    force, she swung her head, as if checking

    who this was, and looked at me,

    and saw me-yes, this was her mom,

    her mom was doing this. Her dark,

    deeply open eyes took me

    in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment

    she learned me. This was her mother, one of the

    two whom she most loved, the two

    who loved her most, near the source of love

    was this.

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    The Borders

    To say that she came into me,

    from another world, is not true.

    Nothing comes into the universe

    and nothing leaves it.

    My motherI mean my daughter did not

    enter me. She began to exist

    inside meshe appeared within me.

    And my mother did not enter me.

    When she lay down, to pray, on me,

    she was always ferociously courteous,

    fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,

    but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of my

    body fell, the barrier of my spirit.

    She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wanted

    ardently to please her, I would say to her

    what she wanted to hear, as if I were hers.

    I served her willingly, and then

    became very much like her, fiercely

    out for myself.

    When my daughter was in me, I felt I had

    a soul in me. But it was born with her.

    But when she cried, one night, such pure crying,

    I said I will take care of you, I will

    put you first. I will not ever

    have a daughter the way she had me,

    I will not ever swim in you

    the way my mother swam in me and I

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    felt myself swum in. I will never know anyone

    again the way I knew my mother,

    the gates of the human fallen.

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    Louise Gluck

    Love Poem

    There is always something to be made of pain.

    Your mother knits.

    She turns out scarves in every shade of red.

    They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm

    while she married over and over, taking you

    along. How could it work,

    when all those years she stored her widowed heart

    as though the dead come back.

    No wonder you are the way you are,

    afraid of blood, your women

    like one brick wall after another.

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    First Memory

    Long ago, I was wounded. I lived

    to revenge myself

    against my father, not

    for what he was--

    for what I was: from the beginning of time,

    in childhood, I thought

    that pain meant

    I was not loved.

    It meant I loved.

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    Lullaby

    My mother's an expert in one thing:

    sending people she loves into the other world.

    The little ones, the babies--these

    she rocks, whispering or singing quietly. I can't say

    what she did for my father;

    whatever it was, I'm sure it was right.

    It's the same thing, really, preparing a person

    for sleep, for death. The lullabies--they all say

    don't be afraid, that's how they paraphrase

    the heartbeat of the mother.

    So the living grow slowly calm; it's only

    the dying who can't, who refuse.

    The dying are like tops, like gyroscopes--

    they spin so rapidly they seem to be still.

    Then they fly apart: in my mother's arms,

    my sister was a cloud of atoms, of particles--that's the difference.

    When a child's asleep, it's still whole.

    My mother's seen death; she doesn't talk about the soul's integrity.

    She's held an infant, an old man, as by comparison the dark grew

    solid around them, finally changing to earth.

    The soul's like all matter:

    why would it stay intact, stay faithful to its one form,

    when it could be free?

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    Parable Of Faith

    Now, in twilight, on the palace steps

    the king asks forgiveness of his lady.

    He is not

    duplicitous; he has tried to be

    true to the moment; is there another way of being

    true to the self?

    The lady

    hides her face, somewhat

    assisted by the shadows. She weeps

    for her past; when one has a secret life,

    one's tears are never explained.

    Yet gladly would the king bear

    the grief of his lady: his

    is the generous heart,

    in pain as in joy.

    Do you know

    what forgiveness mean? it mean

    the world has sinned, the world

    must be pardoned--

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    Happiness

    A man and a woman lie on a white bed.

    It is morning. I think

    Soon they will waken.

    On the bedside table is a vase

    of lilies; sunlight

    pools in their throats.

    I watch him turn to her

    as though to speak her name

    but silently, deep in her mouth--

    At the window ledge,

    once, twice,

    a bird calls.

    And then she stirs; her body

    fills with his breath.

    I open my eyes; you are watching me.

    Almost over this room

    the sun is gliding.

    Look at your face, you say,

    holding your own close to me

    to make a mirror.

    How calm you are. And the burning wheel

    passes gently over us.

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    The Red Poppy

    The great thing

    is not having

    a mind. Feelings:

    oh, I have those; they

    govern me. I have

    a lord in heaven

    called the sun, and open

    for him, showing him

    the fire of my own heart, fire

    like his presence.

    What could such glory be

    if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,

    were you like me once, long ago,

    before you were human? Did you

    permit yourselves

    to open once, who would never

    open again? Because in truth

    I am speaking now

    the way you do. I speak

    because I am shattered.

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    Ai

    Conversation

    We smile at each other

    and I lean back against the wicker couch.

    How does it feel to be dead? I say.

    You touch my knees with your blue fingers.

    And when you open your mouth,

    a ball of yellow light falls to the floor

    and burns a hole through it.

    Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.

    Did you ever, you start,

    wear a certain kind of dress

    and just by accident,

    so inconsequential you barely notice it,

    your fingers graze that dress

    and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,

    you see it too

    and you realize how that image

    is simply the extension of another image,

    that your own life

    is a chain of words

    that one day will snap.

    Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,

    and beginning to rise heavenward

    in their confirmation dresses,

    like white helium balloons,

    the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,

    and above all that,

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    that's where I'm floating,

    and that's what it's like

    only ten times clearer,

    ten times more horrible.

    Could anyone alive survive it?

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    Carolyn Forch

    Elegy

    The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour

    the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.

    To what and to whom does one say yes?

    If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?

    Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb.

    This is the city you most loved, an empty stairwell

    where the next rain lifts invisibly from the Seine.

    With solitude, your coat open, you walk

    steadily as if the railings were there and your hands weren't passing

    through them.

    "When things were ready, they poured on fuel and touched off the fire.

    They waited for a high wind. It was very fine, that powdered bone.

    It was put into sacks, and when there was enough we went to a

    bridge

    on the Narew River."

    And even less explicit phrases survived:

    "To make charcoal.

    For laundry irons."

    And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking.

    The page is a charred field where the dead would have written

    We went on. And it was like living through something again one

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    could not live through again.

    The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house

    with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings

    where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field,

    And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell.

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    Denise Duhamel

    Ai

    There is a chimp named Ai who can count to five.

    There's a poet named Ai whose selected poems Vice

    just won the National Book Award.

    The name "Ai" is pronounced "I"

    so that whenever I talk about the poet Ai

    such as I'm teaching Ai's poems again this semester

    it sounds like I'm teaching my own poems

    or when I say I love Ai's work

    it sounds as if I'm saying I love my own poems

    but have poor grammar. I haven't had a chance

    to talk much yet about this Japanese chimp

    who can arrange pictures in order of the number of objects

    contained in those pictures. I just read about her

    for the first time yesterday, the fifth of January in the year 00

    which I imagine would be a hard concept

    for Ai the chimp. It feels weird writing 00 -

    I had to do it when I wrote my first check

    of the year 2000. I think we should proclaim

    this year as the year of Olive Oyl, who

    is also an 00, but with letters instead of numbers.

    I was in the Koko fan club for a while since I love gorillas,

    but then I moved around so much, the newsletters

    and requests for money stopped coming.

    I wonder if Ai the poet is happy she shares a name

    with a gifted chimp. To me, the most amazing thing

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    about Ai the poet is she hardly ever

    writes an "I" poem about herself.

    She crawls into the hearts

    of the cruelest men and writes about what

    it is like to be them, while I mostly

    curl in the bellies of the shattered women.

    There's no evidence that one approach

    is better than the other. There's no evidence

    that chimpanzees use numbers in the wild.

    One expert said that perhaps chimpanzees

    count the number of predators they see.

    I read on the web that John Wayne actually said,

    "I don't feel we did wrong in taking

    this great country away from them. There were great numbers

    of people who needed new land,

    and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."

    So maybe chimps do count their enemies, to see if they

    have the advantage, but I'm a romantic -

    I like to think that Ai the poet and I mostly count our stanzas.

    I like to think Ai the chimp mostly counts her bananas.

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    Sex With A Famous Poet

    I had sex with a famous poet last night

    and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

    because I was married to someone else,

    because I wasn't supposed to have been drinking,

    because I was in fancy hotel room

    I didn't recognize. I would have told you

    right off this was a dream, but recently

    a friend told me,write about a dream,

    lose a readerand I didn't want to lose you

    right away. I wanted you to hear

    that I didn't even like the poet in the dream, that he has

    four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him

    rather unattractive, that I only met him once,

    that is, in real life, and that was in a large group

    in which I barely spoke up. He disgusted me

    with his disparaging remarks about women.

    He even used the word "Jap"

    which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

    When we were first dating, I told him

    "You were talking in your sleep last night

    and I listened, just to make sure you didn't

    call out anyone else's name." My future-husband said

    that he couldn't be held responsible for his subconscious,

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    who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--

    which my husband and I perceive as enormous,

    but how much fame can an American poet

    really have, let's say, compared to a rock star

    or film director of equal talent? Not that much,

    and the famous poet knows it, knows that he's not

    truly given his due. Knows that many

    of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

    are only pretending to have read all his books.

    But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

    I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

    For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

    Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

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    Yes

    According to Culture Shock:

    A Guide to Customs and Etiquette

    of Filipinos,when my husband says yes,

    he could also mean one of the following:

    a.) I don't know.

    b.) If you say so.

    c.) If it will please you.

    d.) I hope I have said yes unenthusiastically enough

    for you to realize I mean no.

    You can imagine the confusion

    surrounding our movie dates, the laundry,

    who will take out the garbage

    and when. I remind him

    I'm an American, that all has yeses sound alike to me.

    I tell him here in America we have shrinks

    who can help him to be less of a people-pleaser.

    We have two-year-olds who love to scream "No!"

    when they don't get their way. I tell him,

    in America we have a popular book,

    When I Say No I Feel Guilty.

    "Should I get you a copy?" I ask.

    He says yes, but I think he means

    "If it will please you," i.e. "I won't read it."

    "I'm trying," I tell him, "but you have to try too."

    "Yes," he says, then makes tampo,

    a sulking that the book Culture Shockdescribes as

    "subliminal hostility . . . withdrawal of customary cheerfulness

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    Delmore Schwartz

    O Love, Sweet Animal

    O Love, dark animal,

    With your strangeness go

    Like any freak or clown:

    Appease tee child in her

    Because she is alone

    Many years ago

    Terrified by a look

    Which was not meant for her.

    Brush your heavy fur

    Against her, long and slow

    Stare at her like a book,

    Her interests being such

    No one can look too much.

    Tell her how you know

    Nothing can be taken

    Which has not been given:

    For you time is forgiven:

    Informed by hell and heaven

    You are not mistaken

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    Delmore Schwartz

    Poem (Faithful to your commands, o consciousness)

    Poem Faithful to your commands, o consciousness, o

    Beating wings, I studied

    the roses and the muses of reality,

    the deceptions and the deceptive elation of the redness of the growing

    morning,

    and all the greened and thomed variety of the vines of error, which

    begin by promising

    Everything and more than everything, and then suddenly,

    At the height of noon seem to rise to the peak or dune-like moon of no

    return

    So that everything is or seems to have become nothing, or of no

    genuine importance:

    And it is not that the departure of hope or its sleep has made it

    inconceivable

    That anything should be or should have been important:

    It is the belief that hope itself was not, from the beginning,

    before believing, the most important of all beliefs.

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    What Curious Dresses All Men Wear

    What curious dresses all men wear!

    The walker you met in a brown study,

    The President smug in rotogravure,

    The mannequin, the bathing beauty.

    The bubble-dancer, the deep-sea diver,

    The bureaucrat, the adulterer,

    Hide private parts which I disclose

    To those who know what a poem knows

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    Pamela Alexander

    In the Room Next to Yours

    Plaster drops from the long thin boards

    into my shoes at night.

    I like seeing bare laths, the truth

    of how a house hangs on. What did I think

    walls were? I saw only

    the costume, paper wrappers over

    the stuff of them.

    Nothing could disguise the catastrophe

    of your bed. It clanked, it rattled,

    it shrieked: it must have had

    moving parts, like a heart.

    If we had slid underneath and looked up

    -- what mysteries! All the machinery

    of a pre-Copernican universe, whirs and wheels,

    clicks and clutches, pulleys and bearings and

    brakes. I know there were brakes.

    The underparts of the bed must have been

    as intricate as the rituals you had

    in the morning, the ones you had at night,

    to keep away fires, and lightning, and hurt.

    They didn't work.

    I was afraid of your fears and left you, trailing

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    loose clockworks. What did I think

    a love was? Through the wall

    I hear a new one moving.

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    The Catacombs Again

    As you were.

    What are you looking at now.

    I'd imagined you too long, made a hieroglyph

    of your bright hair.

    You came and were gone.

    A scenario: the grey birds and the white birds

    adjoin each other like words.

    Adjacent.

    The roots of thousands of plants press against the walls;

    inside on the walls all my friends are dancing together.

    If one is gathering facts

    these are merely adjectives.

    Regardless.

    The failure of not having seen is nothing like

    the failure of not having looked.

    The verb "to come."

    How did you know about caves?

    You knew where I would come and gave me a prophetic

    look.

    The book about caves is filled with pictures,

    words and pictures, the moving cat

    in several positions.

    The leaves of a vine or a sentence.

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    Debra Bruce

    Divorced Men

    She was the best one

    on the beach, but what a bitch

    she was later. Summer after summer

    she tossed, she twisted the sheets

    on her side, she burnt the edges

    of everything to spite you. Thc small

    kitchen sweated grease, babies stuck

    to her hip until they finally slipped

    away from her and dropped, one

    by one, into your arms in the backyard.

    Like other fathers you knew, you

    played ball with your boys

    on a homemade diamond. You played

    until your trick kne gave, until she

    called through the screen for you

    to bring them in. But it was just dusk,

    you slapped your catcher's mitt

    and shouted. You could still see the perfect

    arc of your son's pitch, you thought

    you could see everything.

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    For the Boy Reading Playboy

    On a page smooth as skin,

    just as you flip her over

    with your fingertip, I push

    through the heavy door. Humid air

    breathes into the bookstore, makes

    you look up, blows her back

    on her back again, and she looks

    up at you.

    Caught

    by a woman, with another woman

    in your hands,

    you slip the August issue

    under your arm, and wait

    for me to leave. Excuse me.

    You must hold her perfectly

    flat against you while I wedge by

    so close I can smell your neck.

    Buttery hips could smear

    all over you, even lips sweat.

    But she is cool, covered

    by darkness. Her body listens

    for the slap of your belt

    slipped off, the heavy buckle dropped.

    I've taken boys like you

    to bed before, and know how

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    the night cuts

    shapes of women, pinned up

    or pinned down. In the shadows,

    drunk uncles would come back

    from weddings to laugh and la, la, la

    at us. And we would have to listen

    all night to our parents, far away

    in the stars, screaming

    about something.

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    Fear of Love

    At the edges of my body

    stand the women you've loved:

    One, her throat rinsed with snow,

    says you left her that winter

    in a country of marble.

    Another, black-eyed,

    says the olive groves still blaze toward Florence

    at dawn. In that valley of blue slopes

    she remembers how you explained

    Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

    In her quilted robe, your mother

    is inviting you home for Thanksgiving.

    In the doorway of a house

    I've never seen, she waits

    to fold you back into her.

    If I could say

    I can't imagine life with you

    if I could grieve

    as the planets clog nightly

    in the birch tree,

    but I can't

    and already

    the white lawns of our deaths

    stretch out, where our children

    keep putting on their hoods.

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    Athenian Wife Waiting For Her Husband

    5th century B.C.

    Damp cheese crumbles on my fingers.

    I lick it slowly, let myself linger

    here alone. I've had them cook the fish

    the way I know he likes it, the best bite,

    that muscle of cheek still moist and tight

    for him. For him. But where is he now

    at dusk? Cupping his wine cup, sipping

    with his men, smiling at them, nipping

    a bit of leek, a puckered olive tucked

    beneath his tongue? How I would love to hear

    his words as he puts his lips to the ear

    of another man. Or is it some boy again,

    a shapely mouth, a blond head that blinds

    him with love each month or so? Do I mind?

    I try not to think. I rub a red root

    in circles on my cheeks and wait for his thighs,

    those runner's thighs to bring him back. I sigh

    and hold my own hands. They're cool and closed.

    I want him to come here and open them,

    lift up my beaded, belted robes, and then

    forget that boy he kissed an hour ago,

    who made the honeyed hills of Athens hum,

    who held my husband's body so hard the sun

    rushed into his head

    and burned me away -- woman,

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    wife, bed.

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    Sonnet MVI

    Since you love her, I know you'll understand

    that when I met her, you-know-whose hot dart

    hit me and hurt. Although I'm not a man.

    Love's not determined by who has what part.

    If it were, then how could I have felt this?

    The steamy mirror, her robe on the floor . . .

    She soaped slow circles over her pelvis

    as I watched her through the blurry shower door.

    If I loved her, I'd only verify

    what you know well. The thought heats up my hips.

    I'm jealous of your cheek on her thigh

    as she holds your hair, rides against your lips.

    If she loved me, she'd understand what you

    love so much about her. What I love too.

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    Mary Fell

    This is a Love Poem

    My blood

    suddenly

    knows you are gone

    It is shouting your name

    It runs

    down to the ends of my fingers

    looking for you

    It wants to be

    a piece of red wool

    unraveling

    all the way to Central America

    It wants to be a boat

    coming into the harbor at Managua

    carrying fruit

    Through all the rooms of my body

    it is running

    opening doors

    A child in a tantrum stamps

    red shoes

    demanding to know where you are

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    Daniela Gioseffi

    Your Body

    has a strength

    destined to know me.

    Wherever my lips touch you

    they find a kiss

    as if my hands

    had made you of clay

    exactly

    as I would have wished.

    Your hands, your arms,

    your chest, thighs,

    your special parts

    are missing parts of me,

    vessel into which you fit,

    one river of two streams

    flowing into one ocean.

    Before we met,

    I was on the verge

    of automation.

    As metal I'd have rusted,

    atrophied.

    As flesh,

    I'll stay alive unto death

    feeling your hands kneading me

    to breath.

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    Wheat

    I hadn't watched maggots

    closely before.

    The way they squirm and burrow

    their way in.

    What curious things!

    How characteristic of sperm.

    Somehow,

    how like wheat!

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    Matrimonial Bed

    He thinks of her, a furry animal -- her center

    soft, warm with worry --

    but wet, inviting wonder,

    a place he can fill with himself.

    She feels his need pressed between her thighs,

    waiting to be opened by his touch, his fingers will the thrill

    of her desire -- light explodes

    a sunburst in her dark mind --

    her face like a winter when she worries

    about all the murdered flowers tom flesh tortured shrieks --

    her skin like a spring blooming petals, pitying

    pink, yellow, purple veined

    buds of beneficent being, his red heart bums him

    with life she forces like an indigestible summer of merciless

    heat.

    She thinks how mean and hard he seems at times

    and pulls herself in and closes

    wanting him to open her with his need

    and then he rubs her back and neck

    and she hears his sweet murmur

    as she longs to be strong enough to mother him

    and his seed always waiting to spill into her

    and make her bloom like a round melon of light

    that talks and sees roses which must die to be

    beautiful like the sea from which she smells

    her own body throbbing and rolling

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    as he thrusts need into her need to be kneaded

    necessary as bread to earth planted in spring so that grass

    grows