The Lover Remembereth Such as He Sometime Enjoyed and Showeth How He Would Like to Enjoy Her Again

I found this poem in the 1980s and neglected to write down who wrote it. Its title paraphrases that of a poem by the 16th-century writer Thomas Wyatt, though this poem turns out wistful rather than sardonic like Wyatt's. It's a sonnet of dive bars and lost love in contemporary language that's easy to understand. The next-to-last line hits me in the heart.

The Lover Remembereth ... 

Luck is something I do not understand:
There were a lot of things I almost did
Last night. I almost went to hear a band
Down at the Swinging Door. I, almost, hid

Out in my room all night and read a book,
The Sot-Weed Factor, that I'd read before.
Almost, I drank a pint of Sunny Brook
I'd bought at the Dickson Street Liquor Store.

Instead I went to the Restaurant-on-the-Corner
And tried to write, and did drink a beer or two.
Then coming back from getting rid of the beer
I suddenly found I was looking straight at  you.

Five months, my love, since I last touched your hand.
Luck is something I do not understand.

Cheers.

Posting one of my own. For my son when he was a baby.

Tucked In

Moon head,
you pearl the world.
You opalize,
you sheen with green
the now I tend.
You are my prize.
Jewel,
I would polish you,
engrave a plaque
and label you
my son,
my perpetuity,
my eon.

But you're not rock.
You're mouth,
you're breath
unfailing,
soft as footsteps on a rug.
And you are clear eye
wide as love
that guards me as I move
from door
to shelf,
from shelf
to drawer,
to you.

And you are
many-splendored lobe,
vellum nub I tug
between my teeth
and you are nape
and nose
and springy cheek,
warm enough to bite,
boy-sweet bun face.

Some distant night from now
the lack of you
will lope into this room.
And you'll be gone.
But I'll know how
I stroked the first white swirls
upon your head,
too fine for working hands,
so I touched them
with my lips
instead.

Skate

Another one of my own. For Spencer when he was little and long of limb.


Skate

Fling of elbow,
spree of wheee,
festivity
of nerve and knee,
love,
you jubilate,
you clop toward grace
but smack into,
collapse onto,
askew,
the curb.

My specimen,
my bony bird.
You’ve hit perdition
gravel gray.
You flap, you flay,
you feather, flop,
you loud squawk up
and scatter sky.
You beak, you bok,
you rage, I rock
you, spew, I coo to
you, the my

whose lashes clump.
Whose chin fits in my palm.
Whose tear slides
toward my fingertip.
Whose ruin I’ll wrap
in ever arm
until you chirp.
Until you fly.

2007?

Dear Eagles by Gabe Gudding

Gabe Gudding again. Here in letter form, a sort of riff on the eagle as a symbol of the U.S. The same craziness and fun and wild use of language. I don't share his sentiment here, but I love the way he writes. He could revive poetry, if people read poetry.

Dear Eagles

I am bored by beagles those happy dogs
so indelibly at gates. They’re unlike
the nation’s eagles who bang on gelid gusts
above our fields and shining logs. I am
not, thus, bored by yóu—all
your pleasures gentried, such epaulets
and fuss—and never over are the clawed towings
of fish with your angled feathers, no: Dó call me
an eagle lover, then. You are possibles.

Yet too you that once that were some symbols
of this nation that dealt some blows: you are not now
—nor are you ever always will be again—
ethicals,

your country’s over. And though you’re here still,
you will surely go.

For I have seen few snowmen outlast the snows.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Gudding


(First appeared in The Canary)


Speak.

The Book of Life by Laura Kasischke

This one starts out using internal and off rhyme well but largely drops that until the end, with the near rhyming "coat" and "hope," creating a nice finality. But the end confuses me. Is it the body that is skipping along? If so, how, given that it is a bedraggled thing? Anyway, a fun poem with a lightness.


The Book of Life

Pale and naked without their bodies, the souls
examine the book
in which they hope to find
their names inscribed.

Made of soap. Now. Made
of smoke. Now
made of dew
and hairlessness. And how

primitive, I realize, seeing them, it's been:
The body. Its

silly limbs transporting, through the world, our
windblownness. Our
cloud wherever it went.

Teeth, old-fashioned and enameled, so
easily chipped.
The nose, often
runny, sometimes broken.
Heavy eyelids. Ankle twisted. How

did we bear it as it bore us, all
stuttering and limping, clomping, hungry,
shaggy, horny, and diseased. All

that meat—grossly, morosely—weighted
around a soul:

A simple soul!
Exhausting coat!
Skipping along like hope.



Speak,soul.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London, by Dylan Thomas

Just three sentences here. The syntax of the first is hard to follow, but logical: "Never until ... shall I ... ." The poem has a primal feel, and I think it is Judaeo-Christian. The last line, to me, says that on some level this is about the fall of man. The tragedy of one is the tragedy of us all.


A Refusal to Mourn ...

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.


Unspeakable

And then a darkness

Posting one of my own for kicks. A voice from the heart, mostly iambic. da DA da DA da DA da DA. 


  
And then a darkness

I lost me in the restaurant. Yes.

I lost me in the spicy wings. But no,

before the wings, before the greasy dripping of the wings.

I lost me when you handed me the napkins.

The giving of the napkins made me love you.

The giving and the arching of the eyebrows that said laugh.

The giving and the arching of your eyebrows going gray

and saying laugh, and saying funny, glad, and it can happen, have me,

lean across the booth and kiss, right now,

the one whom love has zapped you with.

I also lost my scarf that night, the silky purple one

with deeper purple fringe I’d had for 20 years.

I lost you too, somehow, that night — no, not that night,

but later. How that mattered. 

I’m 52 and didn’t know that I could be

so deeply purple lost it’s almost black.

I’m 52 and didn’t know that I could die like this,

with a memory of your hand outstretched toward mine and then a darkness.

K.R. 4-2-14
Voices carry.
Leave a comment.