Pixel's Favorite Poems

Occasional havering

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He would not stay for me, and who can wonder

A. E. Housman

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?  He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,  And went with half my life about my ways.

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A Love Song

William Carlos Williams

What have I to say to you When we shall meet? Yet— I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love Is upon the world. Yellow, yellow, yellow, It eats into the leaves, Smears with saffron The horned branches that lean Heavily Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light— Only a honey-thick stain That drips from leaf to leaf And limb to limb Spoiling the colours Of the whole world.

I am alone. The weight of love Has buoyed me up Till my head Knocks against the sky.

See me! My hair is dripping with nectar— Starlings carry it On their black wings. See, at last My arms and my hands Are lying idle.

How can I tell If I shall ever love you again As I do now?

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I Am Not Yours

Sara Teasdale

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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The Evening After

Claire Trévien After James Merrill One evening, tired of games and each other, we spent watching our reflections on a screen — four in a two-seater, angling like sardines. For a dog’s hair I’d milked the wine, uttered words like, “that’s the cure!” swiveled the puckering glass like a mock-dandy, blood slushing at my temples, until the spill, a fatal expression on the white and navy, ruined the smoothness past salvation. A cough of salt, the patting of the fabric, perhaps enough.

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The Girl Grew and Grew, Her Mother Couldn’t Stop It

Daisy Fried (via Poetry Foundation, vol CCVI)

The girl grew and grew, her mother couldn’t stop it; it terrorized.    What would the finger-dance do? Kindergarten art a buffet of 
markers, gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer’s pools drying clear.    A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper    into paper-bag dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers. And silver rain.    And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored in reverse rainbow. Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles. A bird.    Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane, and knowledge: that the sky’s full of black-struck Ms and Ws, drifting    clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn’t reach down to meet the earth; mother shrinks to the size of a penis.

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Umbrella

James Harms (from Barrow Street)

I woke one morning and she wasn't there which wasn't new; she needed those night with her friends, her time to feel herself as herself, not as someone married to an umbrella life of sunny days, Mr. Shadow- maker, Mr. Good Guy. Our son was awake early as usual, and I’d just set him up with a glass of juice and Sponge Bob when I heard her trip on the landing. I looked up and saw her face rising with each stair, the smeared mascara, the sliding smile. She said, I’ll take care of him, go back to bed, and she put the phone on the nightstand and stumbled over a stack of folded laundry as she lurched back to our boy watching TV in the next room.  “Just fucked” we used to call it, that look at the end of a long night of long beers and longer bourbons, the long want of self-pity disguised as love. Sweet Narcissus, Here’s your face in a puddle of moonlight, the poem rising like bile in the back of my throat, the new aubade in a time of plenty. I dropped back into bed. As if to sleep again the breath of first light might dissolve a simple look, her look at the top of the stairs. So I took her phone in hand and thought No, it isn’t right, but then it was. And I read the record of a long night, her texts and his from evening into early morning, mostly sexts, dull or dumb or simply drunk, and then  a lie to me followed by one to her best friend, until it ended at his apartment: “Open your door,” she typed in the last text, 4:05 AM. And the silence between that moment and when I sat there shaking, her phone in my hand, my wife still drunk and just fucked in the next room holding my young son as she fell into sleep, Sponge Bob complaining to Patrick About crabby patties and jelly- fish, the weight of water in a world without air . . . I sat in that silence, that space, and struggled for breath and wondered what next: how to breath again at the bottom on this new sea

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somewhere i have never travelled

e e cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience,your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose or if your wish be to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending; nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility:whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

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Body of a Woman

Pablo Neruda (JB Donne translation)

White thighs, hillocks of whiteness, oh woman’s body, you resemble the world in your attitude of surrender My peasant’s body savagely excavates you and makes the child leap from the earth’s depth

I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me, and into me entered the night’s heavy invasion. To out live me I framed you like an arm at the forge, like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.

But falls the hour of vengeance and I love you. Body of flesh and moss and firm covetous milk. Oh the cups of your chest, oh the eyes of your absence! Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh slow sad voice!

Oh body of my woman, I shall persist in your gracefulness. My thirst, my desire unlimited, my uncertain road. Dark watercourse where eternal thirst follows, and weariness follows, and infinite sorrow.

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Sonnet

Tom Clark

The orgasm completely Takes the woman out of her Self in a wave of ecstasy That spreads through all of her body. Her nervous, vascular and muscular Systems participate in the act. The muscles of the pelvis contract And discharge a plug of mucus from the cervix While the muscular sucking motions of the cervix Facilitate the incoming of the semen. At the same time the constrictions of the pelvic Muscles prevent the loss of semen. The discharge Makes the acid vaginal lubricant Alkaline, so as not to destroy the spermatozoa.

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Valentine

John Fuller 

The things about you I appreciate may seem indelicate: I’d like to find you in the shower And chase the soap for half an hour. I’d like to have you in my power and see you eyes dilate. I’d like to have your back to scour And other parts to lubricate. Sometimes I feel it is my fate To chase you screaming up a tower or make you cower By asking you to differentiate Nietzsche from Schopenhauer. I’d like to successfully guess your weight and win you at a féte. I’d like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders, Falling like water over boulders. I like the shoulders, too: they are essential. Your collar-bones have great potential (I’d like all your particulars in folders marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose, I like the way your lips disclose The neat arrangement of your teeth (Half above and half beneath) in rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes. The way they focus on me gives me twinges. Your upper arms drive me berserk. I like the way your elbows work, on hinges.

I like your wrists, I like your glands, I like the fingers on your hands. I’d like to teach them how to count, And certain things we might exchange, Something familiar for something strange. I’d like to give you just the right amount and get some change.

I like it when you tilt your cheek up. I like the way you nod and hold a teacup. I like your legs when you unwind them. Even in trousers I don’t mind them. I like each softly-moulded kneecap. I like the little crease behind them. I’d always know, without a recap, where to find them.

I like the sculpture of your ears. I like the way your profile disappears Whenever you decide to turn and face me. I’d like to cross two hemispheres and have you chase me. I’d like to smuggle you across frontiers Or sail with you at night into Tangiers. I’d like you to embrace me.

I’d like to see you ironing your skirt and cancelling other dates. I’d like to button up your shirt. I like the way your chest inflates. I’d like to soothe you when you’re hurt Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.

I’d like you even if you were malign And had a yen for sudden homicide. I’d let you put insecticide into my wine. I’d even like you if you were the Bride of Frankenstein Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian’s Jekyll and Hyde. I’d even like you as my Julian of Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan How melodramatic If you were something muttering in attics Like Mrs Rochester or a student of boolean mathematics.

You are the end of self-abuse. You are the eternal feminine. I’d like to find a good excuse To call on you and find you in. I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin. And see you grin. I’d like to taste your Charlotte Russe, I’d like to feel my lips upon your skin, I’d like to make you reproduce.

I’d like you in my confidence. I’d like to be your second look. I’d like to let you try the French Defence and mate you with my rook. I’d like to be your preference and hence I’d like to be around when you unhook. I’d like to be your only audience, The final name in your appointment book, your future tense.

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I Wanna Be Yours

John Cooper Clarke 

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner breathing in your dust I wanna be your Ford Cortina I will never rust If you like your coffee hot let me be your coffee pot You call the shots I wanna be yours

I wanna be your raincoat for those frequent rainy days I wanna be your dreamboat when you want to sail away Let me be your teddy bear take me with you anywhere I don’t care I wanna be yours

I wanna be your electric meter I will not run out I wanna be the electric heater you’ll get cold without I wanna be your setting lotion hold your hair in deep devotion Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean that’s how deep is my devotion

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There Is No Word

Tony Hoagland There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

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High Windows

Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-- Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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Love of you is mixed deep in my vitals

Ancient Egyptian

Love of you is mixed deep in my vitals, like water stirred into flour for bread, Like simples compound in a sweet-tasting drug, like pastry and honey mixed to perfection. Oh, hurry to look at your love! Be like horses charging in battle, Like a gardener up with the sun burning to watch his prize bud open. High heaven causes a girl's lovelonging. It is like being too far from the light, Far from the hearth of familiar arms. It is this being so tangled in you.

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Because I liked you better

A.E. Housman

Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us We parted stiff and dry; 'Good-bye,' said you, 'forget me.' 'I will, no fear', said I.

If here, where clover whitens The dead man's knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming The heart no longer stirred, And say the lad that loved you Was one that kept his word.

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You Are Tired

e.e. cummings

You are tired, (I think) Of the always puzzle of living and doing; And so am I.

Come with me, then, And we'll leave it far and far away— (Only you and I, understand!)

You have played, (I think) And broke the toys you were fondest of, And are a little tired now; Tired of things that break, and— Just tired. So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight, And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart— Open to me! For I will show you the places Nobody knows, And, if you like, The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me! I'll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon, That floats forever and a day; I'll sing you the jacinth song Of the probable stars; I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream, Until I find the Only Flower, Which shall keep (I think) your little heart While the moon comes out of the sea.

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House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves.. moments before the wind.