Homage To Sextus Propertius - Ezra Pound

Another by Ezra Pound (see other for bio info) and possibly my favorite of all of his poems, perhaps because of its accessibility and stylistic departure from his best known.  Sextus Propertius was a Roman poet generally regarded for his elegies, of which close to one hundred survive.  They chronicle a love affair with an older woman who captured - and held - his heart early on and, it seems, until her death. 


I read this during my college years and the verse beginning with "Fool who would set a term to love's madness..." has always set the standard for expressing the absolute absurdity - and folly - of trying to control the object, arc, and/or duration of a love affair.  "The heart has its reasons, of which Reason knows nothing about", wrote Pascal, and we seem to forget that all the time.  Or how artificial barriers are just plain foolhardy and counter-productive to what our hearts want most: to connect.
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Homage to Sextus Propertius

                                            

While our fates twine together,

sate we our eyes with love;

For long night comes upon you

and a day when no day returns.

Let the gods lay chains upon us

so that no day shall unbind them.

Fool who would set a term to love's madness

For the sun shall drive with black horses,

earth shall bring wheat from barley,

The flood shall move toward the fountain

Ere love know moderations,

The fish shall swim in dry streams.

No, now while it may be, let not the fruit of life cease.

Dry wreaths drop their petals,

their stalks are woven in baskets,

To-day we take the great breath of lovers,

to-morrow fate shuts us in.

Though you give all your kisses

you give but few.

Nor can I shift my pains to other,

Hers will I be dead,

If she confer such nights upon me,

long is my life, long in years,

If she give me many,

God am I for the time.

                                         

                                                      Ezra Pound - American

Sonnet 4 - Ah when you drift hover - Berryman

As mentioned in earlier post, John Berryman's (1914 - 1972) 115 sonnets were an accounting of the course of a love affair with a married woman.  By this one's number, it's at the beginning. 

It's not an "easy" poem after the first four lines.... but what first four lines they are!  They alone are worth it.  Who hasn't felt so enraptured, connected and complete that nothing else that moment matters - not life, not wondering "...the point of life..."!  Those lines are the gold-standard for describing the drug-like "high" of kissing a lover.  (There.  Now I've made you, dear reader - AND myself! - entirely self-conscious about the next time we kiss.   Yes, even each other!)  

The rest of the sonnet requires a bit more "work" for full appreciation, particularly with the classical references.  (I wrestled with whether to post this poem at all because of that.)  

However, as quick help, "swine-enchanted lover" is a reference to the Odyssey and Circe, the enchantress who turned Odysseus' crew into animals, notably pigs.  (Hmm.... is this where it comes from that women call men "pigs"?)  "Melpomene" was one of  the 9 Muses, the goddesses of dance, music, and song, in Greek mythology.  Each "covered" one area in the arts, and Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy.  "Erato", on the other hand, was the Muse of erotic poetry....so we know where Berryman was headed (if not already there).  He was a lustful, lively - and tormented - man who, like his father, eventually committed suicide (click on his name above for a link to a brief bio).  It's good to have in this poem - and many others - a record of his joy.
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Sonnet 4 – Ah when you drift hover

Ah when you drift hover before you kiss

More your mouth yours now, lips grow more to mine

Teeth click, suddenly your tongue like a mulled wine

Slides fire, -- I wonder what the point of life is.

Do, down this night when I adore you, Lise,

So I forsake the blest assistant shine

Of deep-laid maps I made for summits, swine-

enchanted lover, loafing in the abyss?

Loaf hardly, while my nerves dance, while the gale

Moans like your hair down here.  But I lie still.

Strengthless and smiling under a maenad rule.

Whose limbs worked once, whose imagination’s grail

Many or some would nourish, must now I fill

My strength with desire, my cup with your tongue,

          no more Melpomene’s but Erato’s fool?...

                                                      John Berryman

Little Children’s Prayer - Galway Kinnell

It’s always a delight when a poet of Galway Kinnell’s (1927-2014) stature addresses romantic love, particularly when better known for tying together big societal themes with how they crash and connect with the daily lives of people at every level.   A New Englander, Ivy Leaguer (Princeton), a civil rights and anti-war activist AND a veteran (Navy), he brought all those experiences together in poems that are accessible but also require a little “stretching” (at least for me) and are both thoughtful and feeling.  Some of those poems are quite unsparing in spot-lighting the ugly.  He won both a Pulitzer and a share of the National Book Award for poetry in the same year (1980) for his Selected Poems.

This one is a recent “discovery” for me and has grown with each reading.  Its note of hope is an elixir we can appreciate and contrast with Rod McKuen’s “To Benson Green On His 27th Birthday”, but it’s a hope that doesn’t ignore all that might be around the bend of the river of Experience.  I have hung a signed, limited edition broadside of it that I pass several times a day.


Little Chidren’s Prayer


We huddle together, like the hands
of someone who prays, studying the book
of the great world, the wind
blowing the pages over, desolate odd, desolate even, and
              otherwise.

When we come to
our own story, and read of its happy beginning
and of its ending happy enough for such as we will have been
and of all that’s needed to give clarity to the days and
                nights between,
may we find the love-flower,
that gives good faithfulness in love, pressed perfectly
long ago between some pages
of the slow going where only those who adore the story
                ever read.

And when we set out on our way
toward our loves, wearing our flower.
may we walk hand in hand a little while longer together
stretching the laughter of childhood
as far as we can into the days to come,
and may we hear,
from the other direction, another laughter
echoing back
from the graves where our next bodies will have lain down
             already and be laughing,
gently, at everything that once seemed so serious,
blessing with light heart our days and nights, even their sorrows.

                                               
                                                                           Galway Kinnell - American

The Surly One - Theodore Roethke

If this is the only Roethke poem you will read here, you'll be doing yourself a disservice.  Pleeease "click" on his name on the left and check out the others!  He has written some of the most dazzling love poems that I know: joyous, playful, with imagery that will surprise by their freshness.  This one is short and, thus, might look simple and not worth a second read.... but take your time!  Boil some water, and while the tea steeps let the lines loose among your emotional memories.  You will be surprised at what they can stir up, if you let them.  I like #1, perhaps because of my fondness for single malt whiskeys, as they evoke my chosen connection to Scotland.  (However, unlike Roethke, I SIP, not slug them down to drown memories.)  In #2, it's how he condenses so much truth in the last two lines. 
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 The Surly One

1

When true love broke my heart in half ,

I took the whisky from the shelf,

And told my neighbors when to laugh.

I keep a dog, and bark myself.

2

Ghost cries out to ghost –

But who’s afraid of that?

I fear those shadows most

That start from my own feet.

                                                                Theodore Roethke

Sonnet 36 – (Keep your eyes open when you kiss) - John Berryman

 Another selection from John Berryman's sonnets has been long overdue.  For some background, the 115 poems, written in the 1940s and in one volume, were a lineal account of a love affair and not published until the mid-1960s.  To me, they are on a par with Neruda's, sharing a richness and passion of expression that is dizzying.  Both are to be read aloud and large, be it in front of the loved one as declarations or alone, as lamentations.  Either way, they are bold and cathartic, with wine or whiskey, day or night.  Sometimes, the syntax in Berryman can sound "Yoda-ish" by its placement of nouns and verbs, and it takes a little bit of effort to "get" all he is doing with language.  But the prize.... the prize when you do is so satisfying that you'll be ashamed of having complained.  Here, in this early one in the arc of the relationship, he turns the traditional "close your eyes when kissing" on its head and riffs on it.... while sticking to the sonnet structure. Wow!

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 Sonnet  36 – (Keep your eyes open when you kiss) – John Berryman

Keep your eyes open when you kiss: do: when

You kiss.  All silly time else, close them to;

Unsleeping, I implore you (dear) pursue

In darkness me, as I do you again

Instantly we part . . only me both then

And when your fingers fall, let there be two

Only, “in that dream-kingdom”: I would have you

Me alone recognize your citizen.

Before who wanted eyes, making love, so?

I do now.  However we are driven and hide,

What state we keep all other states condemn,

We see ourselves, we watch the solemn glow

Of empty courts we kiss in . . Open wide

You do, you do, and I look into them.

                                                      John Berryman

" It Is Marvellous..." - Elizabeth Bishop

 I know that I am supposed to like Elizabeth Bishop (1911 - 1979) and I certainly respect her work - but she has never been appealing personally except for her translations of Brazilian poets.  As the biographical synopsis tells (click on her name above), she had a tragic personal life one wouldn't wish on an enemy.  Her father died when she was one year old, her mother placed permanently in a mental institution when Elizabeth was five years old, and later, her long-term lover in Brazil committed suicide.  Wealthy grandparents provided an education (Vassar) and financial freedom which led to travel abroad and, eventually, fourteen years in Brazil until returning to the USA in 1970 to teach at Harvard.  Work published work in her lifetime - only 101 poems - was good enough to win both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for Poetry.  Her reputation has grown in stature since her death.  

This poem IS marvellous for how it paints scene, setting, and atmosphere to perfection.  The details build unrushed to the final result the way a cook adds each ingredient, in the right amount and at the right time, to make an edible perfection.  (I was making a smoked salmon corn chowder yesterday.)   Enjoy!

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“It Is Marvellous…”

It is marvellous to wake up together

At the same minute; marvellous to hear

The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,

To feel the air suddenly clear

As if electricity had passed through it

From a black mesh of wires in the sky.

All over the roof the rain hisses,

And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;

It is the prickling air that wakes us up.

If lightning struck the house now, it would run

From the four blue china balls on top

Down the roof and down the rods all around us,

And we imagine dreamily

How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning

Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view

Of night and lying flat on one's back

All things might change equally easily,

Since always to warn us there must be these black

Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise

The world might change to something quite different,

As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,

Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.

                                             Elizabeth Bishop

Sonnets - Actualities - I - e.e. cummings

 The fifth selection from cummings.  I have a concern that it may be harder to understand by someone whose first language isn't English, but I believe in "stretching" when it comes to reading.  It's not a BIG poem, but one that captures well that state of anticipation waiting for the appearance of the loved one.  Check out the John Berryman Sonnet 23: it's another take on that "in waiting" state, which sometimes is more exciting than what happens after the arrival.  Everything is perfect when waiting, yet we have all had the experience of the actual time together be the total opposite.....   This one also made it here because it has lines describing the physical effect on the heartbeat created by the  presence of one's love.   Just like  the Inuit language is supposed to have 20 or more words for snow,   I am intrigued by how many different ways poets describe a heart beat in love. There should be one more than there are for describing a heart in pain....
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Sonnets – Actualities

                        I

when my love comes to see me it’s

just a little like music,  a

little more like curving colour (say

orange)

                 against silence, or darkness……….

the coming of my love emits

a wonderful smell in my mind,

you should see when I turn to find

her how my least heart-beat becomes less.

And then all her beauty is a vise

whose stilling lips murder suddenly me,

but of my corpse the tool her smile makes something

suddenly luminous and precise
-- and then we are I and She ………

what is that the hurdy-gurdy’s playing

                                                                     e.e. cummings - American

A Decade - Amy Lowell

 Amy Lowell (1874-1925) came from a privileged and wealthy background, a true-blue "Boston Brahmin" who became an influential figure in championing and publicizing the Imagist movement exemplified by Ezra Pound.   While her dedication and energy to furthering poetry made T.S. Eliot call her "the demon saleswoman of poetry", Pound, after he and Lowell had a falling out, called her "hippopoetess", a reference to her large size.   Educated by tutors, private schools and self-guided reading, Amy wrote from an early age and was published in numerous journals besides being an editor, critic and lecturer.  She won a Pulitzer in 1925 for her collection of poems, What's A Clock.  Somewhat forgotten after her death, interest in her revived with the interest in women/lesbian writers during the emergence of the women's movement in mid-late 20th century.  While she did live with a woman for the last decade or so of her life AND her poetry could be erotic (as the one below), there is no "smoking gun" about her sexual orientation since her lov... er, companion burned all the personal papers.  Regardless, "A Decade" is a jewel, for a man or a woman.  I particularly like how it speaks to both the immediate experience and how it transforms as it repeats over time into something sustaining as well for "a decade"...
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A Decade

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

                                                                                              Amy Lowell

Eight Sonnets - III - Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950) didn't live long enough to see the feminist movement of the 60s, but conducted her life with the integrity of being her own person in a time when most women could not and did not, thus serving as a great role model for those that followed.  Born in Maine, "Vincent" (as she was called by friends) parlayed an early poem, with encouragement from her mother, into a scholarship to Vassar.  It was off-to-the-races then to a literary life as a poet and playwright in New York City, to Greenwich Village where she lived on the brink of poverty but with great zest.  Her fourth volume of poetry garnered a Pulitzer in 1923.  She continued writing poetry (and plays) for the rest of her career and was widely known through the many public readings she gave.  Though openly bisexual, "Vincent", was in an open marriage until her husband of twenty-six years died a year before her own.  This sonnet, the third in a group of eight, has always intrigued me by how it is set up.
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Eight Sonnets

III

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

                                                                                        Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wild Oats

This is the fifth poem by Larkin in this anthology and it’s one that straddles my self-imposed/copied categories.  One could call it an  “Intimations” poem as much as a “Separations” or “Desolations” one.  It really doesn’t fit neatly in any, but it belongs in this anthology precisely because it mirrors real life: sometimes it’s just impossible to categorize a relationship (or its place) in the “love relationship pantheon”.  I’ve “liked” it because of how compresses the whole arc of a seven year into just a few lines, but the sparseness of details does not deter one from absolutely “getting” what it was to the writer.  There is a sadness in how desultory it was or meaningful (or not) to him.  He isn’t quite a cad but certainly not a noble soul.  And he doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the years it took of his (and her) life, even while “reflecting” through this account of the relationship.  It leaves me both sad for him and wondering how many of us have had his kind of experience. 

BY PHILIP LARKIN

About twenty years ago

Two girls came in where I worked—

A bosomy English rose

And her friend in specs I could talk to.   

Faces in those days sparked

The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt   

If ever one had like hers:

But it was the friend I took out,

And in seven years after that   

Wrote over four hundred letters,   

Gave a ten-guinea ring

I got back in the end, and met   

At numerous cathedral cities   

Unknown to the clergy. I believe

I met beautiful twice. She was trying   

Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.

Parting, after about five

Rehearsals, was an agreement   

That I was too selfish, withdrawn,   

And easily bored to love.

Well, useful to get that learnt.   

In my wallet are still two snaps

Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.   

Unlucky charms, perhaps.

Words for the Wind

This is the sixth of Roethke’s poems included here and one of his great love poems—lush, sensual, and mystical.  I wrestled with its inclusion because of thelength, but it’s worth taking the time to read.  And reread because the imagery is so rich and - sometimes - so rewiring of common words together for something fresh, that it takes some time and effort to fully appreciate what he has done. It’s a sustained lyric meditation on the subject.  The ending has always struck me as quintessential Roethke. Love is not simply admiration or desire; it’s a way of discovering oneself in another consciousness.

So, get a glass of your favorite beverage for reading poetry, get comfortable, and enjoy!  

 WORDS FOR THE WIND

                                          Theodore Roethke 

1

Love, love, a lily's my care,
She's sweeter than a tree.
Loving, I use the air
Most lovingly: I breathe;
Mad in the wind I wear
Myself as I should be,
All's even with the odd,
My brother the vine is glad.

Are flower and seed the same?
What do the great dead say?
Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme:
She sways whenever I sway.
"O love me while I am,
You green thing in my way!"
I cried, and the birds came down
And made my song their own.

Motion can keep me still:
She kissed me out of thought
As a lovely substance will;
She wandered; I did not:
I stayed, and light fell
Across her pulsing throat;
I stared, and a garden stone
Slowly became the moon.

The shallow stream runs slack;
The wind creaks slowly by;
Out of a nestling's beak
Comes a tremulous cry
I cannot answer back;
A shape from deep in the eye 
That woman I saw in a stone 
Keeps pace when I walk alone.

2

The sun declares the earth;
The stones leap in the stream;
On a wide plain, beyond
The far stretch of a dream,
A field breaks like the sea;
The wind's white with her name,
And I walk with the wind.

The dove's my will today.
She sways, half in the sun:
Rose, easy on a stem,
One with the sighing vine,
One to be merry with,
And pleased to meet the moon.
She likes wherever I am.

Passion's enough to give
Shape to a random joy:
I cry delight: I know
The root, the core of a cry.
Swan-heart, arbutus-calm,
She moves when time is shy:
Love has a thing to do.

A fair thing grows more fair;
The green, the springing green
Makes an intenser day
Under the rising moon;
I smile, no mineral man;
I bear, but not alone,
The burden of this joy.

3

Under a southern wind,
The birds and fishes move
North, in a single stream;
The sharp stars swing around;
I get a step beyond
The wind, and there I am,
I'm odd and full of love.

Wisdom, where is it found? 
Those who embrace, believe.
Whatever was, still is,
Says a song tied to a tree.
Below, on the ferny ground,
In rivery air, at ease,
I walk with my true love.

What time's my heart? I care.
I cherish what I have
Had of the temporal:
I am no longer young
But the winds and waters are;
What falls away will fall;
All things bring me to love.

4

The breath of a long root,
The shy perimeter
Of the unfolding rose,
The green, the altered leaf,
The oyster's weeping foot,
And the incipient star 
Are part of what she is.
She wakes the ends of life.

Being myself, I sing
The soul's immediate joy.
Light, light, where's my repose?
A wind wreathes round a tree.
A thing is done: a thing
Body and spirit know
When I do what she does:
Creaturely creature, she! 

I kiss her moving mouth,
Her swart hilarious skin;
She breaks my breath in half;
She frolicks like a beast;
And I dance round and round,
A fond and foolish man,
And see and suffer myself
In another being, at last.

1958

Level - John Koethe

John Koethe (1945 - ), educated at Princeton and Harvard, teaches currently in the Midwest, I think at U of Winsconsin.)  While we are almost contemporaries - he's just a bit older - I am not familiar with his writing, though he is not an unknown and has been recognized with fellowships and prizes.  His bio (click on his name) is a little sparse, but at least he has one on the Poetry Foundation website.  (Aside: one of my pet peeves about poetry - and visual arts - is how critics often interfere with a reader/viewer's experience by either interpreting too much and/or making it about HIS / HER experience and biases through what they write.  A case in point is the bio on Koethe in the "Innisfree Poetry Journal" from which come this quote:  "In language that is often discursive, often plangent, always mesmeric in its lyricism...".  Now, I think I have a pretty good vocabulary, but I had to look up "plangent"!  Oh, wait.  It means ".. lamenting, often melancholy" and used chiefly in poetry/literature.  Hmm....  Next time academics and critics bemoan the state of poetry in this society, they might consider NOT USING WORDS THAT FURTHER SEPARATE THEM FROM A LARGER AUDIENCE!!! 
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Level

                                 A promise of so much to that is to come
                                 Extracted, accepted gladly
                                 But within its narrow limits
                                                               John Ashberry

Eventually, I’d hoped, I would please you.
I would call you the right names,
Bend with your gestures, remember your actions,
Extracting them gladly, but within real limits.

I see I was wrong. Shall I find you different?
Easy, supple, and without pain?
Or is energy part of the music?
I try. I am trying to ask you –

O the noises that cannot be touched!
The faces have passed me like a brown dream

For how can they change?
Always unbearably tender, and constant,
Like a house that is tender and constant.

You are like other people. There is
I suppose, no reason to want you
Unless desire itself is a reason, drawing us
Out of our kindness, leaving us terrified

Peace. Beauty, we know,
Is the center of fear, hammering,
Holding in a loose ring your purposeful
Dream – and you see them

Looking painfully into your face, though you know
They will never come back in the same way.

John Koethe

Waking - Jill Hoffman

Don't know much about Jill Hoffman, except for what's on Wikipedia.... I like this one for the last line.
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Waking

Exquisitely trampled in a goat-footed dance
my eyes shift left to right to left, openly
watching your narrow eyes watching me.
Unless our dreams get mixed into mine
flaunting their alien flesh, like mine,
I like the silence after napping best.

                                                                         Jill Hoffman - American

A Deposition - Leonard E. Nathan

 Leonard Nathan (1924 - 2007) taught at Berkeley for most of his career and authored 17 books of poetry.  His obit notes that he was ".... a fixture for 50 years in literary circles both on and off the UC Berkeley campus....".  I confess to being glaringly unfamiliar with his poetry, but I liked this one.  It reminds me of how Ann Landers always answered when people wrote for advice about their marriage: "Are you better off with or without him/her?"

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A Deposition

They never should have married, but they did
And got for their trouble someone to accuse,
To be accused by, someone to whom they could,
With telling pleasure, break the day’s bad news…
Yet they outlasted their friends who foretold just how
And on what day they’d part, and at what place –
But never did; wherever they chose to go,
They went together, bitter and full of grace,
As if some secret (Two alone could share)
Bound them by a higher law, though wrong,
Than love’s. Like royalty deposed, they were
Impossible, and in that region strong.

                                                                                Leonard E. Nathan - American

Nota Bene - Jean Garrigue

Another one by Jean Garrigue (see yesterday's selection, below).  I like its compactness and truths: short and truthful.....but not sweet.  A good description of love's emotional daisy-chain wherein we play all roles, sometimes simultaneously.
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Nota Bene

I’ll break your heart, A. said to me
You’ll break my heart, I said to B.
Both did, and still, is my ticker all that smashed?
We get over old wounds by acquiring new ones,
Said C. And thus I sustained all three.

                                                                     Jean Garrigue - American

Again, Again - Jean Garrigue

Jean Garrigue (1914 - 1972) is not a household name when citing woman poets of the American mid-century.  Yet, one of her books was nominated for a National Book, and she had a successful academic career teaching at Smith and Bard Colleges, and was generally well-regarded by critics.  She was from Indiana, spent several periods of her life in Europe, and eventually settled in New England.  The critic Stanley Kunitz called her "... a wildly gifted poet…whose art took the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom".   Two themes to which she often returned were travel and love.  From my limited reading of her, I liked this one for its observations about the cyclical nature of love relationships. (It reminds me of a long, lovely, lyrical poem by Conrad Aiken on the same subject.)
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Again, Again

Always that old language for the new:
How many eyes are black or brown or blue.
How many have come naked into bed
The curtains drawn; late morning that lets in
Just so much light to gild the rose-gold head.
That amorini look – intent and bent
To fast desire on nothing else but it
A century long.
How many times. How many arms
How many kisses that the gamblers gave
Or pitched all on to win
Or gaining win to lose again.
How many times. And now you come.
Have cigarettes, cigars, guitars and rum!
How many times. Yet none but this –

                                                                                   Jean Garrigue - American

Question In Red Ink - Kenneth Koch

 As contrast to the other Kenneth (Rexroth) of yesterday's poem, here is Kenneth Koch (1925 - 2002), one generation younger and from the East Coast.  He's not quite the kind of "Eastern Establishment" that Rexroth was against - in fact, Koch's own rejection of the Confessionals' (think Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) style in favor of more avant-garde/modern is somewhat akin to Rexroth's.  Koch became part of the New York poetry scene (like Rexroth was part of San Francisco's) collaborated with painters, wrote the kind of plays that had limited audiences (and appeal), but also volumes of poetry that eventually garnered him a Bolligen Prize.  You can probably tell I am not a big fan of his, but his poetry had humor, energy, and imagery that makes one smile and go "cool!".   It's what I like about this one: memorable images that feel barely connected to each other as a tight narrative/story-line, yet, when it's over,  one does feel an unity that makes sense.  At least to me.
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Question In Red Ink

I come to you out of an old darkness,

Smelling familiarly of sleep –

I approach you smiling keenly,

My lips typewriting noise,

But love softens me until

I move like a child in a graveyard.

     Now we are clever as history-books and discover

Beautiful talk, the laying on of hands –

I move without whistling,

Bitten by moonlight,

But when you spread your cards on the table

A wealthy darkness settles…

      Crazy with loss, I skin the idiom

And leave us naked and ashamed,

Huddling like whipped songs….

     Bettye, who set our motors so

That like Coney Island pleasure-cars

We swerve, consummating

Contact on a focal point of love

To streak away like electrons,

Careless and obscene as a broken nerve?

                                                                         Kenneth Koch - American

Two Poems (the second one) - Kenneth Rexroth

Sometimes called the father of the Beat poets of the 1950s, Kenneth Rexroth (1905 - 1982) was far more.  From a peripatetic youth and early years working odd jobs, hitchhiking here and in Europe, he became an early and active member of the San Francisco poetry scene and instrumental in introducing/mentoring poets that included,  Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  Denise Levertov, and LeRoi Jones.
Rexroth also had an early interest in poetry from other cultures and eras, and his compilations of Chinese and Japanese poetry helped popularize those and their influence on American poetry.  As a poet, he never garnered the major writing awards, but his devotion to poetry and its place in society was recognized by a lifetime achievement award from The Academy of American Poets.  I chose this one because its representative of one of his themes (erotic poetry), part of a broader "anti-establishment" thread in his outlook and writings.
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Two Poems  (second one)

I like to think of you naked.

I put your naked body

Between myself alone and death.

If I go into my brain

And set fire to your sweet nipples,

To the tendons beneath your knees

I can see far before me.

It is empty there where I look,

But at least it is lighted.

I know how your shoulders glisten,

How your face sinks into trance,

And your eyes like a sleepwalker’s,

And your lips of a woman

Cruel to herself.

                                I like to

Think of you clothed, your body

Shut to the world and self contained,

Its wonderful arrogance

That makes all women envy you.

I can remember every dress,

Each more proud that a naked nun.

When I go to sleep my eyes

Close in a mesh of memory.

Its cloud of intimate odor

Dreams instead of myself.

                                                       Kenneth Rexroth - American