I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York
see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
Standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like and old ladies hair
It’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
It’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater
you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone.
Nell’s circular poem
Chistopher Logue
she came to me in the middle of winter
two-thirds my age and wearing a furry hat.
When she is happy her smile resembles
that of the flowergirl who tiptoes up
and down the lawn and somewhat to the right
of Botticelli’s Graces in ‘The Spring’.
And when she thinks her upper lip gets thin
and somewhere in between her nose and chin
a delicate obsession floats.
She blinks a lot. Is punctual. And I love her.
Now it is ten years later to the day.
I answer less. My pubic hair is grey.
And differently I love her more than when
Variations on the Word Love
Margaret Atwood
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.
Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.
