She Walks in Beauty Read online

  Of uncontested summer all things raise

  Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

  Then your love looked as simple and entire

  As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face

  As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,

  Which promise always wine, by mottled fire

  More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

  And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall

  Into my hands, through all that naïve light,

  It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight

  As must have been the first great gift of all.

  Protocols

  VIKRAM SETH

  What can I say to you? How can I now retract

  All that that fool, my voice, has spoken—

  Now that the facts are plain, the placid surface cracked,

  The protocols of friendship broken?

  I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn

  Past the still house where you lie sleeping.

  May the sun burn away these footprints on the lawn

  And hold you in its warmth and keeping.

  Jamesian

  THOM GUNN

  Their relationship consisted

  In discussing if it existed.

  From Proverbs and Song Verse

  ANTONIO MACHADO

  The language of love

  was never the worse

  for some overstatement.

  Sonnet XLIII: How Do I Love Thee?

  ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

  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 every day’s

  Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

  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.

  XLIV: You must know that I do not love and that I love you

  PABLO NERUDA

  You must know that I do not love and that I love you,

  because everything alive has its two sides;

  a word is one wing of the silence,

  fire has its cold half.

  I love you in order to begin to love you,

  to start infinity again

  and never to stop loving you:

  that’s why I do not love you yet.

  I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held

  keys in my hand: to a future of joy—

  a wretched, muddled fate—

  My love has two lives, in order to love you:

  that’s why I love you when I do not love you,

  and also why I love you when I do.

  Code Poem for the French Resistance

  LEO MARKS

  The life that I have is all that I have,

  And the life that I have is yours.

  The love that I have of the life that I have

  Is yours and yours and yours.

  A sleep I shall have

  A rest I shall have,

  Yet death will be but a pause,

  For the peace of my years in the long green grass

  Will be yours and yours and yours.

  The Smaller Orchid

  AMY CLAMPITT

  Love is a climate

  small things find safe

  to grow in—not

  (though I once supposed so)

  the demanding cattleya

  du côté de chez Swann,

  glamor among the faubourgs,

  hothouse overpowerings, blisses

  and cruelties at teatime, but this

  next-to-unidentifiable wildling,

  hardly more than a

  sprout, I’ve found

  flourishing in the hollows

  of a granite seashore—

  a cheerful tousle, little,

  white, down-to-earth orchid

  declaring its authenticity,

  if you hug the ground

  close enough, in a powerful

  outdoorsy-domestic

  whiff of vanilla.

  Sonnet 116

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove:

  Oh no, it is an ever fixèd mark

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wandering bark,

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

  Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error and upon me proved,

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

  RUMI

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

  there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

  When the soul lies down in that grass,

  the world is too full to talk about.

  Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

  doesn’t make any sense.

  The Emperor

  MATTHEW ROHRER

  She sends me a text

  she’s coming home

  the train emerges

  from underground

  I light the fire under

  the pot, I pour her

  a glass of wine

  I fold a napkin under

  a little fork

  the wind blows the rain

  into the windows

  the emperor himself

  is not this happy

  Late Fragment

  RAYMOND CARVER

  And did you get what

  you wanted from this life, even so?

  I did.

  And what did you want?

  To call myself beloved, to feel myself

  beloved on the earth.

  From The First Morning of the Second World

  DELMORE SCHWARTZ

  . . . Quickly then and certainly it was the river of summer, blue as the

  infinite curving blueness above us,

  Little boats at anchor lolled or were lapped, and a yacht slowly

  glided.

  It was wholly holiday, holiday absolute, a silk and saraband day,

  warm and gay and

  Blue and white and vibrant as the pennants buoyant on the stadium

  near us,

  White, a milk whiteness, and also all the colors flaring, melting, or

  flowing.

  There hope was, and the hopes, and the years past,

  The beings I had known and forgotten and half-remembered or

  remembered too often,

  Some in rowboats sunned, as on a picnic, or waiting, as before

  a play,

  the picnic and the play of eternity as summer, siesta, and summit

  —How could I have known that the years and the hopes were

  human beings hated or loved,

  Or known that I knew less and more than I supposed I supposed?

  (So I questioned myself, in a voice familiar and strange.)

  There they were, all of them, and I was with them,

  They were with me, and they were me, I was them, forever united

  As we all moved forward in a consonance silent and moving

  Seated and gazing,

  Upon the beauti
ful river forever.

  2

  So we were as children on the painted wooden horses, rising and

  falling, of the carnival’s carousel

  Singing or smiling, at times, as the lyric of a small music tinkled

  above us

  Saying: “The task is the round, the round is the task, the task and

  the round are a dance, and

  There is nothing to think but drink of love and knowledge, and

  love’s knowledge

  When after and before are no more, and no more masks or un-

  masking,

  but only basking

  (As the shining sea basks under the shining sun

  In a radiance of swords and chandeliers dancing)

  In the last love of knowledge, the first, when thought’s abdication quickens thought’s exaltation,

  In the last blessing and sunlight of love’s knowledge.”

  I hardly knew when my lips parted. Started to move slowly

  As in the rehearsal of half-remembered memorized

  anthem, prayer, or spell

  of heartwelling gratitude and recognition.

  My lips trembled, fumbled, and in the depths and death of thought

  A murmur rose like the hidden humming of summer, when June

  sleeps

  In the radiant entrancings of warm light and green security.

  Fumbling, feeling for what I had long supposed I had grasped and

  cast aside as worthless,

  the sparks or glitters of pleasure, trivial and transient.

  —The phrases like faces came, lucid and vivid, separate, united,

  sincere as pain

  With the unity of meaning and emotion long lost, disbelieved or

  denied,

  As I sought with the words I had known a candid translation.

  So I said then, in a language intimate and half-understood:

  “I did not know . . . and I knew . . . surely I once knew . . .

  I must have known . . .

  Surely sometimes guessed at or suspected,

  Knew and did not know what love is,

  The measure of pleasure, heart of joy, the light and the heart of

  the light

  Which makes all pleasure, joy and love come to be

  As light alone gives all colors being, the measure and the treasure

  Of the light which unites and distinguishes the bondage and

  freedom in unity and distinction

  Which is love . . . Love? . . . Is love? What is love?”

  Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and

  treasure of pleasure is being as being with, belonging

  Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.

  Withness is ripeness,

  Ripeness is withness,

  To be is to be in love,

  Love is the fullness of being.

  . . .

  1 Corinthians 13:1–13

  If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

  If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

  Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.

  It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

  Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

  For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

  Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

  And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

  WORK

  I GREW UP IN A TIME when mothers, including my own, went back to work after they had raised their children. My mother had a job before she was married, but not a career. That was for my generation. In the past thirty years, women have become defined by what we do, as well as by whom we love. Now, for the first time, women constitute half the American workforce. At the higher end of the socioeconomic scale, the debate tends to focus on choices and the hidden truth that women without children can advance farther and more easily in the professional world, while for families in the lower half of the income ladder, women are the primary breadwinners in a majority of households and often struggle to support a family alone. For all of us, the challenge is how to balance work and family and do a decent job at both. It’s not easy in our society, which gives little support to mothers, still pays women 25 percent less than men for the same job, only grudgingly acknowledges that women still do the majority of housework, parenting, and caregiving, and does a woefully inadequate job of educating our children.

  In traditional societies, women were responsible for farming, cooking, weaving, and sewing. Later they became domestic servants, teachers, nurses, and waitresses. In modern times, women are also scientists, lawyers, professors, and poets. So it makes sense that the world of work has become a subject for women’s poetry.

  Women poets are often crusaders for social justice and equality. Tillie Olsen went to jail for trying to organize workers in the meat-packing house where she was employed. In the poem “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” she writes about the terrible conditions of Texas garment workers. In “PS Education,” Ellen Hagan, who teaches poetry in some of New York City’s most challenging schools, writes with moral indignation about the ways in which today’s educational system is failing our children.

  Some kinds of work connect women of many generations. In “Lineage,” Margaret Walker writes about her grandmothers who struggled to survive in the harsh and unforgiving world of subsistence farming, but whose strength and joy inspired their granddaughter. Poems about the modern professional workplace are surprisingly hard to find. We can only hope that more poets will shine a light on its benefits and shortcomings, and help us to integrate work more easily into other parts of our lives.

  weaponed woman

  GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  Well, life has been a baffled vehicle

  And baffling. But she fights, and

  Has fought, according to her lights and

  The lenience of her whirling-place.

  She fights with semi-folded arms,

  Her strong bag, and the stiff

  Frost of her face (that challenges “When” and “If.”)

  And altogether she does Rather Well.

  Night Waitress

  LYNDA HULL

  Reflected in the plate glass, the pies

  look like clouds drifting off my shoulder.

  I’m telling myself my face has character,

  not beauty. It’s my mother’s Slavic face.

  She washed the floor on hands and knees

  below the Black Madonna, praying

  to her god of sorrows and visions

  who’s not here tonight when I lay out the plates,

  small planets, the cups and moons of saucers.

  At this hour the men all look

  as if they’d never had mothers.

  They do not see me. I bring the cups.

  I bring the silver. There’s the man

  who leans over the jukebox nightly

  pressing the combinations

  of numbers. I would not stop him

  if he touched me, but it’s onl
y songs

  of risky love he leans into. The cook sings

  with the jukebox, a moan and sizzle

  into the grill. On his forehead

  a tattooed cross furrows,

  diminished when he frowns. He sings words

  dragged up from the bottom of his lungs.

  I want a song that rolls

  through the night like a big Cadillac

  past factories to the refineries

  squatting on the bay, round and shiny

  as the coffee urn warming my palm.

  Sometimes when coffee cruises my mind

  visiting the most remote way stations,

  I think of my room as a calm arrival

  each book and lamp in its place. The calendar

  on my wall predicts no disaster

  only another white square waiting

  to be filled like the desire that fills

  jail cells, the old arrest

  that makes me stare out the window or want

  to try every bar down the street.

  When I walk out of here in the morning

  my mouth is bitter with sleeplessness.

  Men surge to the factories and I’m too tired

  to look. Fingers grip lunch box handles,

  belt buckles gleam, wind riffles my uniform

  and it’s not romantic when the sun unlids

  the end of the avenue. I’m fading

  in the morning’s insinuations

  collecting in the crevices of buildings,

  in wrinkles, in every fault

  of this frail machinery.

  In an Iridescent Time

  RUTH STONE

  My mother, when young, scrubbed laundry in a tub,

  She and her sisters on an old brick walk

  Under the apple trees, sweet rub-a-dub.