I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You

I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.

I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.

-- Pablo Neruda

My Heart Leaps Up

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

-- Wordsworth

Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly—

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

-- Sylvia Plath

At Evening

Let me now sleep, let me not think, let me
Not ache with inconsistent tenderness.
It was untenable delight; we are free--
Separate, equal--and if loverless,
Love consumes time which is more dear than love,
More unreplicable. With everything
Thus posited, the choice was clear enough
And daylight ratified our reckoning.
Now only movement marks the birds from the pines;
Now it's dark; the blinded stars appear;
I am alone, you cannot read these lines
Who are with me when no one else is here,
Who are with me and cannot hear my voice
And take my hand and abrogate the choice.

-- Vikram Seth

From a letter

Life has become very dear to me, and I am very glad that I love. My life and my love are one. "But you are faced with a 'no, never never'" is your reply. My answer to that is, "Old boy, for the present I look upon that 'no, never never' as a block of ice which I press to my heart to thaw.

~ Vincent Van Gogh, famous Dutch artist to Theo, his brother, describing his passion for his cousin, Kee. She never withdrew from her position of 'no, never never'

Refusal To Notice Beautiful Women

I don't know why I didn't think of this before.
It's so simple: I just won't notice.
Twenty years ago the hormones would have exploded this idea
but now I'm-now I have the wisdom of-anyway
I'll just be like "What? Oh, I didn't notice. Where?
Over there? Nope, didn't happen to see her."
Life is going to be a lot easier.
I'll read more books;
I won't keep looking up when someone comes into the cafe`
because who cares? I mean,

to hell with them!
They want to be so impossible?
They want to be so many versions of sublimity on two legs?
Let them go watch each other, whatever, let them go tantalize
lurching iron pumpers who wear backwards baseball caps.
Or let them go get engagement rings from suits that wear cologne,
vice presidents with tickets to Jamaica.
I'm very vague on all that
because I'm so devoted to other values.
Like,
art's endless campaign to represent the mysteries of the spirit's
passage through the realm of time and change. That's
what I'm all about-but I get distracted I mean till now I did
get distracted by BWs but that's over.
Finito.
Let them shimmer and slink in Jamaica,
let their bikinis be murderous-that's only flesh!
Flesh is nothing but-you know, it's only meat.
It's only physical substance. With whatever warmth and smoothness
ultimately it's-well, the seventeenth-century guys called it dust
and they had a point. Were they happy?
Well,that's not my problem.
I've got very large bookstores I can go to
where a thousand books are shiny and smooth-

I abjure Jamaica. I extract Jamaica from my heart
with the tweezers of mature sobriety. Not that I had any actual access
okay okay anyway I have this life now: I embrace it.
My jeans are wearing through at the knees. I embrace this.
My hair, to the extent that it remains, points northeast in a peculiar way
since my last haircut by Dawnette who is much less sexy than her name
and who calls to mind a vat of mashed potato-but I don't say that
because she' s human, plus I'm not thinking about how any woman looks.
Yesterday I spilled ginger ale all over the seat of my gray Mazda-
all right. It's my life. I accept it. The thought that a BW is unlikely
to ride in an old gray Mazda coated with ginger ale does not come up.
I read books. Oh,perhaps on occasion I recall that in 1967 Kathy Farley smiled at me
on Thayer Street but I know that has become fiction, she is fictive,
and I'm off now to a very large bookstore,
and once I've got a tall mocha and some slim volumes in the cafe`
even the Michelle Pfeiffer of 1983 couldn't make me look up.

-- Mark Halliday from Michigan Quarterly Review

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

--Maya Angelou

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


--ee cummings

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

--Raymond Carver

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings
,It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.