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Entry April 28
Because hate is legislated written into the primer and the testament shot into
our blood and brain like vaccine or vitamins because our day is of time, of
hours and the clock-hand turns, closes the circle upon us and black timeless
night sucks us in like quicksand, receives us totally without a raincheck or
a parachute, a key to heaven or the last long look
I need love more than ever now...I need your love.
I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink.
Because slow negative death withers the world - and only yes can turn the tide,
because love has your face and body...and your hands are tender and your
mouth is sweet - and God has made no other eyes like yours.
Entry May 4
You rise out of sleep like a growing thing rises out of the garden soil.
Two leaves part to be your mouth, two tender seedleaves, and your eyes
are wonderfully starlike, your eyes are luminous and soft as the
velvet of pansies. Darling, good morning.
Our arms are empty of each other for a moment only. How beautifully you
turn, your mouth tilts to let my kisses in. Lie still we shall be longer.
We need so little room, we two...thus on a single pillow -as we move nearer,
nearer heaven - until I burst inside you like a screaming rocket.
Then we are quietly apart...returning to this earth.
Entry May 11
Some see you in similies: Helen's rich curves, colors autumn has.
You please them as an opium dream pleases, or you smile like
the sun is rising - or you walk proudly like a woman courted.
But I see you best unrelated...with not a metaphor to your name: your hair
not like the silk of corn or spiders but like your hair, your mouth
resembling nothing so wonderfully much as your mouth.
Why should I say you are like a slender water bird or wing? This is but
a side of you, a fraction. Or that your thighs are lilies, lilies
are cold, lilies are neither quick nor scented, they do not stain
the night with velvet musk, they cannot fire love or quench it.
I mean...compliments become you as tinsel becomes a tall snow covered
cedar in a mountain cedar wood.
Entry May 18
Your words are born not spoken. Dimensional soft-vowelled words palpable to the eye
or to the fingertip. Exquisitely curved as the young that flowers conceive.
Often I have watched your lips shape words... and your tongue nudge them out
like small birds not wholly certain of their wings. Your sweetest words are those
shaped ovally like plums or wild birds' eggs. And the long bright ribbons you
laugh, the multitudes of hyacinth and bluebells.
When I see words like soft grey catkins I know they are of love, whatever else my
ears register. And because your mouth is like the flesh of ripe fig, often I
take your words unsaid...as the brown honey-bear slips his red tongue into
the nest of sleeping bees to take out honey. And the sweet, natural taste,
the pussy-willow feel of your words is lovelier than their shape or music
Entry May 25
All right, sulk. But as you sit so...knees high, the wild spiral feathers
accentuating the meeting of your thighs, like dark grass grown in too rich
a soil, you are beautifully eloquent. Or when your gown loosens, falls off
the fierce faces of your breasts, as the cowl falls off the face of a
hunter's falcon...I attend, nerve naked.
I memorize you walking as if to music. Your dress lies against the cheeks
and hollow of your thighs like running water. Your breasts nod yes each step,
your slow involute hips cradle the eternal synonym for God.
The dress censors not a syllable of you. Articulate eyes wink from your breasts
and belly, signal from your throat-beckon from your knees, your waist...
your mobile shoulders.
Yes, your body makes eyes at me from every salient, promises warm, lavish
promises curved, colored, finished in warm velvet, like baby rabbits.
Entry June 3
Your eyes never opened after the last kiss. We had loved hard, its all
over your throat and hair, it lies on your mouth like a wild red
flower, it's on your cheeks and forehead in waning radiance.
The wonderful strength of your thighs is back to gentle beauty. Your nipples
contract, gather in like blossoms for the night. Your hand half-sleeping finds
me,your touch is very dear.
Now you are all sleep, alone with yourself, and a tall blue fence around you, not a
tendon taut, not a secret secret, you are all sleep and alone in a warm and velvet
world. Many an idle dream is looking for a home of sleep like yours to happen in.
Entry June 11
Why am I looking at you like this? only because I want to remember this, all this, the
musty glasses and the checkered tablecloth, cigarette butts, burnt matches, spilled
beer and crumpled napkins. The juke box, and the sailor with his hand inside the girl's
dress. The strong urine smell, and the whores and the fairies watching like spiders.
And the way the fingered piano eggs the dancers on to exaggerate
their coupling gestures. The recorded orgasm of the saxophone.
Hey, bartender...isn't it time we had one on the house?
Darling oh, I want to remember you always, everywhere in a tavern or in church, asleep
or taking bath...I must not ever forget the look in your eyes when you had drunk and
wanted to hurry home and be loved to sleep.
Entry June 12
Sleep late, nobody cares what time it is. Sunday morning, coffee in bed...then love
with coffee flavored kisses. And your tongue dripping honey like a ripe fig.
I have been hours awake looking at you lithely at rest in the free natural way
rivers bed and clouds shape. Your bedgown gathers up your full round thighs, rolls
over your hips. Your breasts are snub like children's faces...and your navel deep
as a god's eye.
Yes, your lips match your teats beautifully, rose and rose. The hair of your arm's
hollow and where your thighs meet agree completely, being brown and soft to look at like
a nest of field mice. Praise be the walls that shelter you from eyes that are not mine!
Love, not prayers shall be our offering this day. We shall praise God with absolute embraces
...our bodies shall sing Him in His own incomparable tongue. Prayer is humbleness, I
cannot be humble with the wealth of you beside me.
Entry June 17
Somewhere cities crouch...cower (Move nearer me) The velvet sky parasols us, and from
the incadescent noon the sun pours into the moist, open earth. The woods are sweet
and bedwarm as your breasts in the morning.
Somewhere a clock is timing us - hurry with the grass still under us and the sun
kissing us pink with lover's lips, not scavenger's teeth...come, love me.
You smile yes...and your lips part, fill out like leeches. Yes is a darting humingbird
your inside your throat - and in your armpits yes is sweeter than the ground mint
staining warm, naked thighs. Your breasts are wonderfully alive under my kisses.
Tremble against me-if we must spill blood, let it flow quickly like yellow honey
on a tongue, let it meet as in a flower...and the petals close upon it - yes, let it
live...timecapsuled in a new generation of you and me.
Entry June 22
Were I Pygmalion or God I would make you exactly as you are...in all dimensions. From
your warm hair to your intimate toes would you be wholly in your own image. I would
change nothing, add or take away. The same full red flower would model for your mouth
and from the same seashore would I bring the small translucent earshapes of your ears.
O the lovely throat that I could duplicate! The tender arms! I would shape your breasts
the shape of the hungry little faces they are now...and tip them with the same quick mouths.
I could not make your eyes deeper than they are - nor softer to look into...nor could I turn
your hips, your thighs, your belly in a sweeter curve: nor into the hollows of your loins more
tenderly - or store more honey there or fire.
How would I name you...need you ask? You know. By scarlet and the blue you where when love is
upon you, by the yellow tongues - by the warm white frangrance...by the slender leaves.
Entry June 24
Last night we entered our bed through opposite doors. Hours we lay awake, entrenched...before
the trapdoor gave and we were hurtling down in jerky sleep. When we suddenly awoke, our bodies
were together in the warm bed lap - and I was taking deep swollen kisses out of your brimming
mouth. Your lips cushioned the inherent murder in your teeth. My body grew to fit your body
and the opened blossoms of you were flaming, full...and making honey.
There in the jungle twilight, stark naked god slipped in between us and the lightning struck
and in the light I saw you, you were lovelier by many years than yesterday.
Today...your mind moved back into your face, willing away your last night's beauty.
And the hard mask of resolution lies dull upon you like a bad make-up.
Entry June 27
I stood long where you left me. Night was all around me and the stars pecked at it with fierce
acetylene silver beaks. A little thin moon scarred the sky. Then I walked...my arm around the
emptiness of you beside me. And because you were total in my eyes like sudden blindness, I saw
only you. You were my purpose and my way, you were the bright articulate lights and the dark
lonely streets, you were each door and window...and every passing face.
And because you were indelible in my blood and brain in infinite copies-without drink or delirium
my mind conceived you...my senses registered you dimensionally. And it was beautiful...O then it
was beautiful in a high beautiful city...in a tall lighted beautiful world- the moon was young and
the stars winked like fireflies in tall grass, night was a jeweled tent around us and we were
wonderfully alone and sleepy as we always are just after love.
Entry July 26
The thin, skeletal moon reminded me... and the sharp electric stars, when I walked to meet you.
And meeting you, your face-grim and implacable-reminded me. And the studied way you controlled
pleasure, even when we had drunk- danced, heard swing music, even when you read my new poem to
you. All these reminded me. A month had passed- a month, by the gaunt red moon like the mark of
an incandescent thumbnail.
Your mind's cosmetic lay frightfully upon you; muddied your eyes and settled on your mouth. It
entered your skin like acid. How will you be when you have fully torn the rainbows off my eyes? Ah,
will we be poor then, you and I-sorry and wrong, alone and poor- for all our righteousness and love
we may have found in others. Yes, I will be poor, what else not having you can mean to me?
And as for you-all the things you cannot ever be, you are only because my love is like the magic
touch of stars. You wear my love, and all who see you say, how beautifully his love becomes her!
ENTRY August 9
Each season of each year I will be forgetting you all over. Each season, every year. I will need
to forget you each summer, spring...autumn and winter. Each summer I will be forgetting you forever
naked, you brown with the sun's fire, you moving in massive adagio like a seal turning in water.
You lying in the sun-or looking darling in a cotton dress. You and the kites. Connecticut...and you.
Autumn, I will be forgetting meeting you, and the first long kiss on the green bedlam hill, under
the rash of stars- I could not leave your mouth...remember? And the garret rooms we lived in.
The bittersweet we gathered and the rich red sumac in the high hectic woods where the air was ripe
apples and the colors of chrysanthemum.
Each winter there will be long evenings together to forget, reading or talking-having friends.
Greenup on the Ohio, The sweetness of you in bed...and growing sleepy in each other's arms.
And you returning to me each morning "for one minute only" nakedly, for warmth-your mouth full
of cool mint toothpaste kisses.
Spring will be the hardest to forget, with lovers everywhere-O spring will be hard...
forgetting the early violets along the Hocking, hitching to Marietta-and the lamb that broke
the fold to follow us. Love we made beside the river, lying on the grass...how beautiful you
were-pale-green where you showed naked to the moon, your eyes were tearbright, your eyes were
full of moonlight and of stars and you were wonderfully warm and trembling when you let me in.
I will be forgetting you each day and every hour. Each night and day, each hour something
wonderful and dear of you will ring my heart and knock upon my mind. Each time
I hear Gilbert and Sullivan-Strauss, see gingo trees, read Lewis Carrol, see flowering
dogwood or smell locust, acacia, sweet honeysuckle, lily of the valley, or wild roses.
I shall be forever forgetting the quick happy kisses, like samples-when my own lips could
never fully capture yours. And the deep ravenous kisses when I awoke wanting you at night.
Sunday will be the hardest to forget, late Sunday mornings, with your sleep-rich body and your
hardly open eyes terribly tender. The articulate wordlessness of your lips and tongue- and the
natural way you raised your gown and fitted yourself to me.
O I drew love like honey-steeped wine from every mouth of you-and when we had loved our fill,
we laughed, and we were very hungry. Then we ate fruit with cream and sugar, bacon-sausages and
cakes with rich brown maple syrup...and drank strong, fragrant coffee.
Each time I know beauty, it shall be through you. When joy lifts me high...or sorrow breaks
me when I love again, my senses conditioned to you will be forgetting you anew. Each kiss that
fills my mouth shall fill it with your lips yes, each time my eyelids crumble and close under
blood's fired impact, when love strikes home-yours will be the mouth and yours the disengaging
arms-your heart it will be leaping in your throat and beating in your thighs.
Your relieved breasts. Your simmering loins. Your soft happy eyes.
I will be forgetting you in silence and in song...in silence will I dream dreams of you too
wonderful to dare aloud-and of words I shall not use for anyone but you I shall make poems.
When a star falls, I shall wish for you. When the moon is new,I shall wish for you.
When a bird looks into my window, when a leaf falls before me, when I find a fern in flower
I shall wish for you.
And when autumn lays out her lavish colors...her warm brown, ripe yellow, her exciting red
all over the hills and fields, like a lovely woman undressing-I shall look for you.
ENTRY August 22
As the world gathers momentum toward anihilation on all fronts-we walk apart, each to his own
lonely end...not hand in hand as lovers walk. Yet I would enter time's infinite pages more
happily with you than in the company of Christs and Dantes-comets and constellations!
Darling...before the distance widens beyond reach and sight-look this way, give me your hand
that the stars may say of us, The last we saw of them was when they kissed, then beautifully naked
walked as if into a sea of bright blue water-leaving their bodies like old clothes upon the shore.
ENTRY August 27
The white full moon like a great beautiful whore solicits over the city, eggs the lovers on the halves
walking in twos to their beds and to their mating. I walk alone. Slowly. No hurry. Nobody's waiting.
My love who loved me (she said) is gone. My love is gone.
And I walk alone. It's goodnight time...the haves are everywhere, in parked cars and passing taxis,
the still abstracted figures pressed against walls and niched in dark doorways...each two arm-hooped
into one body rigid with joy.
A lighted window holds me like high voltage. I see...cupped in the bed's white palm, the haves.
O she is beautiful, her breasts are white dogwood and her thighs barked poplars growing out
of the dark-matted jungle of her crotch. He is kissing her, interminately her mouth...and
one by one each breast is carried to the lips with tender violence.
Now she lays his hand to her secret body. Her frantic thighs invite invasion.
He covers her, enters...turns god-and my eyelids fall.
ENTRY August 29
It was like something done in fever, when nothing fits, mind into mind nor body into body...
when nothing meets or equals-when dimensions lie and perceptions go haywire. With what an
alien must sense my fingers curved about her breasts and seasrched the tangled dark where
love lay hiding! I closed my eyes to better imagine you-but the rehearsed body would not
ratify the mind's deception. The kisses of her mouth, the rhythm natural to love-and the
exciting musk with which love haloes itself...these thwarted my imagination.
Her love, too, was centered and intent, it did not reach her eyes and forehead, or light her
throat as your love did. It did not fill the room...or spread all over the ceiling of the sky.
It did not span the years and miles and hold hands with beast and God. Nor did her thighs rise
with that splendid grade I stroked from memory. Her body met me unlike your body and I entered
the heaven of her uneasily...and could not stay, for my heart being yours released no blood to
make ready for love.
ENTRY September 6
I saw autumn today...incipiently, on the sunset and the leaf, in the spontaneous whitecaps
shingling the bay and the window-displayed chrysanthemums and asters. I saw its night's
water color leavings on the cottonwood and the maple-and heard its voice in the locust's
high powered chatter in the camouflaged somewhere.
Ah! Fierce exhilation flows through me like dry current. Soon we shall walk on the sunny
side of the street...hold hands, mingle in bed for warmth.
Autumn is our season-yours and mine.
See, I have lain naked and long in the sun to match your body. We shall look beautiful lying
side by side. The stain of the season is rich upon you, only your breasts are white as the
winter grouse...you have not shown them to the sun-nor the low of your belly where you are
white, soft and dark-feathered.
ENTRY September 12
When all the poems on the theme have been written and all the night and day dreams dreamt,
without prophecy or fulfilment. When hope sustains us no longer-nor being drunk or busy or
therapeutically in love keeps us from remembering. When our new interests, our richer lives
require quotes to qualify their meanings, and however hard we try, we can exploit our
grievances no further to fortify our resolutions-what will we do to keep madness sulking
in the brain?
When we have forgotten even why we parted, if we ever knew at all, remembering, however,
when we could sleep naked and be warm together, kiss, though with a cold, when even baby-talk
became you...yes, and everything I said was sweet or funny and everything you did was beautiful.
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