For The Same Book

With all its best of sense and wit
Each Album's earlier leaves are writ;
No page—but Love and Friendship on it
Shower dainty prose and perfumed sonnet;
While not one troubling thought comes nigh
Of future dearth and vacancy.

Yet blight, e'en now, is on the wing
To nip that vernal blossoming;
His tribute flowers Wit fails to yield,
Sense, worldly grown, seeks wider field;
E'en Love and Friendship cease to write,
And half the book is idle white.

Turn, Emblem-seeker, turn and look,


For love I, too, could die she said nor fear it

Such love as some of the dead queens have had
Whose sorrow matched their beauty. I could bear it,
And I think die too, to have been so glad.
With the sweet wonder in a great light lying
I would not e'en upbraid the deadly dart,
But gazing in the eyes of my Love, dying,
Passion my beauty in his aching heart.
Beyond the shadow of my own renewal
So to have set my beauty like a flame,
Quivering as Helen's — ah! that Trojan jewel,
Where all love's pride and sorrow has a name —
I, too, would take time's grandeur to the dust,


For Love

for Bobbie


Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all


that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.

If the moon did not ...
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not

do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.


For Jane With All the Love I Had, Which Was Not Enough

I pick up the skirt,
I pick up the sparkling beads
in black,
this thing that moved once
around flesh,
and I call God a liar,
I say anything that moved
like that
or knew
my name
could never die
in the common verity of dying,
and I pick
up her lovely
dress,
all her loveliness gone,
and I speak to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,


For Every Woman

This is for every woman
that cries herself to sleep
that lies alone in bed at night
that stays awake, unable to sleep

This is for every woman
that is scared of being hurt again
that has been left behind, heartbroken
that needs to be given something to believe in

This is for every woman
that needs to feel wanted
that wants to feel desirable
that feels like no one even cares

This is for every woman
that has loved another freely
that shows how much she cares


For Ever

When dusk appears here,
day starts at your place.
Night marches with snake's hood;
my heart and eyebrow tremble in fear.

When night approaches at your place,
our magpies whistle here;
your whole body sweats in fright
as if there were venom in the air.

Lorena, o my sweet bride,
we won't live more on two distant shores;
we will taste honey of same flowers,
we will cultivate love-crops in same fields.

We will see the same dawn with our four eyes


For a Present of Roses

Crimson and cream and white -
My room is a garden of roses!
Centre and left and right,
Three several splendid posies.

As the sender is, they are sweet,
These lovely gifts of your sending,
With the stifling summer heat
Their delicate fragrance blending.

What more can my heart desire?
Has it lost the power to be grateful?
Is it only a burnt-out fire,
Whose ashes are dull and hateful?

Yet still to itself it doth say,
`I should have loved far better
To have found, coming in to-day,


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