Explosion - Delmira Agustini

(Note: READ the poem FIRST, before this commentary.) Delmira Agustini (1887 - 1914)... She was a rising poet in Uruguay, known for original imagery while exhibiting a strong command of traditional Spanish meters and forms, when she died at the age of 27.  The circumstances of her death increased her popularity.  Married but a few weeks, she had separated from her husband but agreed to see him one last time. She was found dead with him the next morning in a short-time hotel in Montevideo, the victim of a murder-suicide.  It gives this selection poignancy to contrast the exuberance and happiness at finding Love with its outcome.  And a commentary on the dark side of the passion.  (Check out this poem from an earlier posting, which has some marvelous lines about that flip side - loss - of love.  But without a murderous rage directed at the love object.)  

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Explosion

                               transl. from Spanish by Perry Higman

If life is love , blessed be it!

I want more life to love!  Today I feel

a thousand years of ideas are worth nothing

next to one azure minute of feeling.

My heart was dying, sad and slow….

Now it blooms in light like a flower of Phoebus:

Life bursts like a violent sea

where the hand of love strikes its blow!

Today my melancholy, with broken wings

went out into the night, sad, cold;

like an old mark of sorrow

it dissolves in distant shadows….

My whole life laughs, kisses, sings!

My whole life is a mouth in bloom!

                                             Delmira Augustinin - Uruguay

" 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

Untitled

Sulpicia, a Roman poetess from the 1st century BCE, is only known by her name and a handful of poems included with Tibullus’.  I am including this one for two reasons: the mid-line sentence that starts “Let my joy...”. And the last sentence, which amuses because, thanks to the word chosen by the translator, it connects with a famous line from a Seinfeld episode, thus making a connection across two thousand years, where how “worthiness” in a lover is measured a certain way.  (It’s also interesting because sponges WERE used for contraception in the ancient world!)  The reader will have to know American TV from a certain period to get the reference.


Untitled
                                 
                   transl. By Aliki and Willis Barnstone
                         
At last love has come.  I would be more ashamed
  to hide it in cloth than leave it naked.
I prayed to the Muse and won.  Venus dropped him
  in my arms, doing for me what she
Had promised.  Let my joy be told, let those
  who have none tell it in a story.
Personally, I would never send off words
  in sealed tablets for none to read.
I delight in sinning and hate to compose a mask
  for gossip.  We met.  We are both worthy.

                                                                     Sulpicia - 1st. Cent. BCE

Nameless Journey

An Israeli poet who immigrated to Palestine in 1935 when she was in her early twenties, Goldberg had a distinguished academic career at Hebrew University in Jerusalem until her death in 1970.  She wrote children’s books and translated European authors.  I don’t know much about her, finding this in an anthology of women poets.   I chose this image from ones available, as the years were not kind to her youthful beauty.

This poem has a long “runway” leading to the last two lines, which, at least for me, were a surprise at first reading.  The gender in the last line could be either.  In subsequent readings, it’s clearer that the trail to it was marked..  (Don’t cheat and skip to the end!).  This appealed to the same part of me that likes jokes with an unexpected punch line.  The “runway” also made for - like a good wine - a longer (emotional) finish. And the effect of more readings, like more sips of that wine, uncovers more of its depth.  (A Grand Crus St. Emilion like Château Le Dome would be right: like this poem, it’s better than its classification.) 

———————————————————-
 From Nameless Journey 

                               Transl. by Raman Commanday
                                             
II

My room is so small
that the days sneak in, humiliated.
I, too, live that way,
in the smell of smoke and apples.
At night the neighbors turn on lights
on the other side of the yard.
They shine quietly
through the branches of the tall birch,
through the windows facing me.
At night sometimes it is difficult to remember
that once
somewhere
there was my own window.

III

These have been weeks when no one
calls me by name, and this is very simple:
the parrot in the kitchen of my house
has not yet learned it.
People the breadth of the city
don’t know it.
It has no voice, no sound or note.
Days, I go without a name
in the street whose name I know.
I sit for hours without a name
before the tree whose name I know.
Sometimes I think without a name
of him whose name I don’t know.

                                                    Leah Goldberg
                                           https://www.thewinecellarinsider.com/bordeaux-wine-producer-profiles/bordeaux/st-emilion/le-dome/

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

Sonnet XIV - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Another poet that needs little introduction, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861), became one of the most popular English poets of the Victorian Era, to the point of being considered for the Poet Laureate post (which went to Tennyson...).  Self-schooled in the classics and from a family that fell from wealth into genteel middle-class after financial set-backs, she also had a medical afflictions that made her an invalid and recluse for a time.  Death by drowning of a beloved brother did not help her emotional state.  Almost 40 when she met Robert Browning, he was the love of her life and the inspiration for "Sonnets from the Portuguese", which cemented her fame and popularity.  Her poems on the themes of social injustice and women's roles were also well-received, though her popularity declined after her death.  Her reputation is now mostly based on the love sonnets.  Compare and contrast this one to the one from Shakespeare (yesterday's post).  His is on "eternal love"; hers on what makes it eternal.  To me, it's the best answer for those who keep asking "Why do you love me?" Or "What do you love about me?".  It's always a mystery that defies dissection, a dissection that shouldn't be attempted in the first place!
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Sonnet XIV

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile – her look- her way
Of speaking gently, - for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day” –
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee, - and love so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry, -
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.

                                                                                   Elizabeth Barrett Browning - English

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

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

The Glass - Carolyn Kizer

Born in 1925, Kizer won the Pulitzer in 1984.  She's been very active in poetry circles, including starting a journal in the Northwest, and been the recipient of numerous awards.  I haven't read much by her - she has 8 books of poetry.  I like this one for its brevity and density, but particularly for its last line, which signifies so much in so few words and could be a poem all by itself.
--------------------------------
The Glass

Your body tolls the hour,
The hands spin round and round.
Your face, the focus of light,
Will burn me to the ground.

Losing ourselves in Love
Beneath this counterpane,
Unwinding from its womb
To the all-consuming now,

All day today I die,
I die eternally,
Losing myself in joy.       
By one touch you put out time.

                                                                     Carolyn Kizer - American

The Museum - Sandra Hochman

Sandra Hochman (1936 -  ) is of the same first-generation of feminist poets as Plath and Sexton, though the youngest of the three by a few years.  Unlike them, the pressures, expectations, and angst didn't lead to suicide but to a career that has included numerous awards (though not the most prestigious ones) and creative output in the form of novels, essays, journalistic pieces, and one amazing documentary film that may finally be distributed after sitting on the shelf for 30 years.  (Click here to read more about it and her.)  She hasn't published poetry since the early 80s, focusing instead on the other outlets.  This poem comes from the 1960s.  Who of us has not walked through a museum with a love interest?  There's something heady and electric being surrounded by all that beauty on display, something that heightens how we feel, think, and behave toward the person with us.  It's catnip to our senses: it makes us try to be wittier, more observant and reflective, to show our soul out loud, .as the museum acts like an aphrodisiac..... And Hochman captures that common experience.  
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The Museum

In the feathery museum –

Marriage bonds like silky ribbons snap. You’re on
Your own. Over the staircase,
Over the widening stairs,

Climbing and entering.
We walk around –
I hear my clicking on the floor. We
stare at the statues – Imperial Chinese Ladies
Stuffed in glass cases smile behind white porcelain frowns –
Walking down hallways – classic vases
Robust under glass – miles away from Greece –
And bronze statues dancing – here are the Degas nudes –
You say they look like me – all twirling around
And we are walking down toward the Rembrandt room.

We stare at those eyes. At the impossible mouths
Almost about to speak and tell me some secret:
You say, “They are all close to death” – no, closer to sleep,
All of the portraits just about to snooze.
I want to lie down with you,
Discovering your limbs softly with my hands
As though you were also
A trip through an unknown museum –
In a long sleep of teeth and lips
I would kiss you so many times
As you come to life in my arms.

                                                                                        Sandra Hochman - American

To Celebrate My Body - Diane Wakoski

I know it was the dedication on the front-cover of her book "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems" (see photo - click on it to enlarge to read) that attracted my attention to Diane Wakoski (1937- ) when I was in my 20s.  It was just so provocative and real.  The poems inside had the same kind of tone: strongly worded, fierce, "....the voice of a woman who is not afraid of depths..." (Anais Nin).  Frankly, they were a bit scary (back then), as I was yet unaccustomed to the range of voices, particularly female, that existed in poetry.  It was also the 1970s and the cultural impact of feminism, etc. was barely out of the boiling stage.  She was/is also someone with whom the critics had a hard time.  Some thought her poems were too focused on the self, while others appreciated her first-person voice and language.  I haven't kept up with her writing after that era, but I come back to that volume (and one other) whenever I want to be jolted.  The poem here is one of the shorter ones and a little "softer".  
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To Celebrate My Body

where
you had only
to touch me
other had
to present a history
a bibliography,
a justification

but

no question
remains,
that a gift
easily given
lightly received
is wasted

no one can
touch me
the way
you can/ I should say
did

but

no question
remains
your touch
was not lightly
taken

and
my body
has spent
a lot of years
awakening

too long
in fact
to stop
the process

your touch
is
somewhere
across the ocean. My imagination
has never
been poor; but
cannot extend
to a life
where touching
comes only
in a letter

Celebrate
the word.
we
are both
poets;
taking the world
ultimately
seriously

but the word
can only
give life
if it acknowledges
the lips
the mouth that made it

the body
that pumped the
sounding air

where
you had only
to touch me
others had
to present a history
a bibliography,
a justification

the touch
comes first
remains
is the last thing you
remember
after you
turn
out
the light
at night.
                                                                      Diane Wakoski - American

Untitled (You Did Say...) - Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker two days in a row (see previous)....  She is also someone with a masterful command of and ability to write poems fitting different forms, such as sonnets, villanelles, etc.  This one is in sonnet form.
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Untitled

You did say, need me less and I'll want you more.

I'm still shell-shocked at needing anyone,

used to being used to it on my own. 

It won't be me out on the tiles till four-

thirty, while you're in bed, willing the door 

open with your need. You wanted her then, 

more. Because you need to, I woke alone 

in what's not yet our room, strewn, though, with your 

guitar, shoes, notebook, socks, trousers enjambed 

with mine. Half the world was sleeping it off 

in every other bed under my roof. 

I wish I had a roof over my bed 

to pull down on my head when I feel damned 

by wanting you so much it looks like need. 

                                                                                        Marilyn Hacker - American

Somewhere In A Turret - Marilyn Hacker

 Marilyn Hacker (1942 -  ) is of the generation that reached their 20s in the 1960s, a perfect storm of both personal and societal turmoil.  For many women it was a liberating time so it's not surprising how many women writers/poets found their true voices (and sexual orientation) during this time.  (Before she "came out", she was married to Samuel R. Delany, an award-winning science-fiction writer now teaching at Temple Univ. (!).)  To write powerful poems beyond early adulthood (20s - early 30s) - when angst/anger/passion can carry a piece - takes real talent, dedication, and perseverance.   She has demonstrated hers through the last decades of productive work.  Her poems are often situation or place-specific, her language is sometimes raw(er), but all in the service of bringing a reader inside.  This selection comes from her second poetry book (Separations in 1976), which followed her debut volume (Presentation Pieces in 1974) that won the National Book Award in that year. 

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Somewhere In A Turret

Somewhere in a turret in time,

castled and catacombed in but

still on a tan street that

ends with a blue-and-white gingerbread house,

those rooms are still filled

with our pictures and books.  On the sill

our black-and-white cat hums after a fly.

It is getting light.  When we come in,

no one will ask you to leave, no one will send me away.

Nobody lives in the present, time

has textures past and future that

tongues taste at, fingers feel for.

The present happens in rooms

I am not in; past rooms

are only momentarily

empty, if I knew how

to turn around, I would cross the threshold smiling.

No one would ask me to leave, no one would send me

    away.

Don’t think I’m trying to ignore the time

I piled my things into a cab and left

a note for you and one for the dinner guests.

Those rooms have new tenants.  You and I

may never share a closet or a towel-rack

again.  We contrived it. I am still

surprised waking up without you every morning.

But I can’t camp out in your house or you in mine.

Peoplse would ask me to leave.  People woulod send you

    away.

Still, I am an optimist.  Sometime

we may be sitting, maybe near the ocean

on a cliff, and under the blown spray

get tangled in each other’s fingers and hair;

and in that arbitrary future, our mouth

and the sea will taste of each other.

It is so easy to make things happen

like a freeze shot ending a movie

so you don’t leave, and I don’t go away.

But you know about words.  You have had time

to figure out that hardly anyone

came back to bed because of a poem.

Poems praise and protect us from

our lovers.  While I write this

I am not having heartburn

about your indifference.  We could walk

into any room.

You wouldn’t ask me to leave.  I wouldn’t send you

    away.

                                                                                          Marilyn Hacker - American

Contradictions: Tracking Poems - Adrienne Rich

My selection comes from Rich's work from the mid-1980s, when her reputation was more than solidified as a leading poet and a strong feminist (and lesbian) voice.  Born in 1929, she led a conventional life (husband, three kids) until the 1960s, when she found an adult voice ignited by the socio-political changes of that period.  (Crap, this is sounding like a college paper...)  I first encountered Rich in 1974 through her volume - Diving Into The Wreck - that won the National Book Award  that year.  She isn't known for her love poetry: her passion is for the "bigger" themes of her struggles to liberate herself (and women of her generation) from the restraints of male-dominated society, but such energy as is diverted to "Love" produced poems with heat.  (There is a volume called  Twenty One Love Poems that's worth the effort to find and read.)  I like this one for its compactness in painting a specific place and time, particularly the line "stopping to laugh at a joke", which says so much about the people and the relationship.
---------------------------------
3.

My mouth hovers across your breasts

in the short grey winter afternoon

in this bed        we are delicate

and tough        so hot with joy we amaze ourselves

tough        and delicate        we play rings

around each other        our daytime candle burns

with its peculiar light        and if the snow

beings to fall outside        filling the branches

and if the night falls        without announcement

these are the pleasures of winter

sudden, wild and delicate        your fingers

exact        my tongue exact at the same moment

stopping to laugh at a joke

my love         hot on your scent        on the cusp of winter     

                

                                                                                                   Adrienne Rich - American

Topography - Sharon Olds

You can't get more "contemporary" than Sharon Olds (1942-  ) or writing that is more personal and touching on some of her favorite themes: sex, the body, family.  She is somewhat controversial, but definitely popular, partly because her poems are so accessible and not "intellectual", as she will be the first to acknowledge.  (Writing in free verse also doesn't hurt accessibility.)  Regardless, it's been "good enough" with academics and critics to win her major awards and teaching posts, etc.  I chose this one because there is more playfulness in the eroticism vs. some of her others. 
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Topography

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states untied, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

                                                                                               Sharon Olds - American

Dawn - J. Ibarbourou

Juana de Ibarbourou (1895-1979) is little known here though famous, not just in her native Uruguay ( her photo is on the one thousand peso bill, as being photogenic didn't hurt!) but also throughout Latin America, particularly for the sensuality of her poems about love.  After her husband of thirty-seven years died in 1942, her subjects turned to contrasting the realities of aging and death with reminiscences about the past.  (A "medlar" - word in the poem- is a small, apple-like fruit that is edible only after it's over-ripe or beginning to decay.)

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Dawn (transl - Spanish)
                                                             translated by Perry Higman

I have spent a restless and sleepless night.
Day is dawning and I slip out of bed, bored.
Today I alone walk along this long street
of sealed doors and sleeping houses.

A dawn like smoke.
It seems the sun, ill-humored,
has lit a fire with green wood
to cook its breakfast.

The wind is moist like it just came from
a bath. In the pale sky,
the colorless stars
little by little are vanishing.

A milkman in a red beret goes by.
From atop an old wall,
I am tempted by a bent, plush branch
heavy with ripe medlars.

I walk, walk, walk,walk.
When I return and bend over him
With a kiss, to wake him,
He will think, with hungry joy,
That I too have just come from the bath.


                                                                                     Juana de Ibarbourou Uruguayan  (celebration)

Married Love - K. Tao-Sheng

The Yuan Dynasty poetess Kuan Tao-Sheng (1262-1319) was known as a calligrapher and painter of bamboos, orchids and plum blossoms. She was married to Chao Meng-Fu, the leading Yuan Dynasty calligrapher.  Tao-Sheng wrote the poem to her husband when she found out that he was intending to take a concubine. It is said that he was so moved by it that he did not.   

As a calligrapher and painter, she is overshadowed by him (who even has a crater on Mercury with his name!), but this poem has made her known far more broadly, as Chinese calligraphy is an acquired taste.  It is interesting (to me) how thousand-year old Chinese poetry - of which there will be more examples in this blog - is much more accessible to "regular" people than Chinese paintings of the same period with their often obscure references to Chinese history, etc.   

A few years ago, I was asked by my friend, Janet Chen, to speak at her wedding to Gary Mi.  I was very touched by this honor and chose this poem, around which I built some wedding remarks.
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Married Love 

You and I 
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold a figure again of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.

In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one bed.                                                                  

Kuan Tao-Sheng - Chinese

The First Day - C. Rossetti

 

Rossetti came from one of those families (like the Kennedys) where you could look like an under-achiever because you were "only" a Senator.  

Her brother was Dante Gabriel Rossetti (painter, poet) and her father Gabrieli Rossetti (poet).  Her poetry, reflective of her time (mid 1800's England), isn't usually my taste, but I've always liked this one, perhaps because it isn't as over-written as (I feel) many of her other ones.  (There are photos of her in later life, but they are not flattering in the least: she was not photogenic.... even this illustration is very kind to her looks.)
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The First Day

I wish I could remember the first day,
First hour, first moment of your meeting me;
If bright or dim the season it might be;
Summer or winter for aught I can say.
So, unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom, yet, for many a May.

If only I could recollect it! Such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow.
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much!
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand! - Did one but know!

                                                                                          

Christina Rossetti - English