For Friendship

For Friendship -Robert Creeley
For friendship
make a chain that holds,
to be bound to
others, two by two,

a walk, a garland,
handed by hands
that cannot move
unless they hold.

For Love -Creeley
Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all

that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.

If the moon did not . . .
No, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not

do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything

as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is me own,

Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask
what have I made you into,

companion. Good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in

some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place. An
echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you

also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to

say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns.

Henry Cuyler Bunner. 1855–1896
236. Candor
October—A Wood
"I KNOW what you 're going to say," she said,
And she stood up looking uncommonly tall;
"You are going to speak of the hectic Fall,
And say you 're sorry the summer 's dead.
And no other summer was like it, you know,          5
And can I imagine what made it so?
Now aren't you, honestly?" "Yes," I said.
"I know what you 're going to say," she said;
"You are going to ask if I forget
That day in June when the woods were wet,          10
And you carried me"—here she dropped her head—
"Over the creek; you are going to say,
Do I remember that horrid day.
Now aren't you, honestly?" "Yes," I said.
"I know what you 're going to say," she said;          15
"You are going to say that since that time
You have rather tended to run to rhyme,
And"—her clear glance fell and her cheek grew red—
"And have I noticed your tone was queer?—
Why, everybody has seen it here!—         20
Now aren't you, honestly?" "Yes," I said.
"I know what you 're going to say," I said;
"You 're going to say you've been much annoyed,
And I 'm short of tact—you will say devoid—
And I 'm clumsy and awkward, and call me Ted,          25
And I bear abuse like a dear old lamb,
And you'll have me, anyway, just as I am.
Now aren't you, honestly?"
"Ye-es," she said.

Coming to This - Mark Strand
We have done what we wanted. We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry of each other, and we welcomed grief and called ruin the impossible habit to break. And now we are here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake of its dish. The wine waits. Coming to this has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away. We have no heart of saving grace, no place to go, no reason to remain.

Nicholson & Lee, eds. The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse. 1917.
78. Ode to Beauty
By Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
WHO gave thee, O Beauty,
The keys of this breast,—
Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say, when in lapsed ages           5
Thee knew I of old?
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,          10
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all!
I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,          15
Thou latest and first!
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men;
New-born, we are melting
Into nature again.          20
Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err!
Guest of million painted forms,
Which in turn thy glory warms!
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,          25
The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc,
The swinging spider’s silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond,          30
In thy momentary play,
Would bankrupt nature to repay.

Ah, what avails it
To hide or to shun
Whom the Infinite One          35
Hath granted His throne?
The heaven high over
Is the deep’s lover;
The sun and sea,
Informed by thee,          40
Before me run,
And draw me on,
Yet fly me still,
As Fate refuses
To me the heart Fate for me chooses.          45
Is it that my opulent soul
Was mingled from the generous whole;
Sea-valleys and the deep of skies
Furnished several supplies;
And the sands whereof I’m made          50
Draw me to them, self-betrayed?
I turn the proud portfolios
Which hold the grand designs
Of Salvator, of Guercino,
And Piranesi’s lines.          55
I hear the lofty paeans
Of the masters of the shell,
Who heard the starry music
And recount the numbers well;
Olympian bards who sung          60
Divine Ideas below,
Which always find us young,
And always keep us so.
Oft, in streets or humblest places,
I detect far-wandered graces,          65
Which, from Eden wide astray,
In lonely homes have lost their way.

Thee gliding through the sea of form,
Like the lightning through the storm,
Somewhat not to be possessed,          70
Somewhat not to be caressed.
No feet so fleet could ever find,
No perfect form could ever bind.
Thou eternal fugitive,
Hovering over all that live,          75
Quick and skilful to inspire
Sweet, extravagant desire,
Starry space and lily-bell
Filling with thy roseate smell,
Wilt not give the lips to taste          80
Of the nectar which thou hast.

All that’s good and great with thee
Works in close conspiracy;
Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely
To report thy features only,          85
And the cold and purple morning
Itself with thoughts of thee adorning;
The leafy dell, the city mart,
Equal trophies of thine art;
E’en the flowing azure air          90
Thou hast touched for my despair;
And, if I languish into dreams,
Again I meet the ardent beams.
Queen of things! I dare not die
In Being’s deeps past ear and eye;          95
Lest there I find the same deceiver,
And be the sport of Fate for ever.
Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,
Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!

Epilogue -Lowell
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme - why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

The Evening of the Mind -Justice
Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood; Here is the shadow moving down the page Where you sit reading by the garden wall. Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises, Shudder and droop. You know their voices now, Faintly martyred peaches crying out Your name, the name nobody knows but you. Is it the aura and the coming on. It is the thing descending, circling, here. And now it puts a claw out and you take it. Thankfully in your lap you take it, so. You said you would not go away again, You did not want to go away - and yet, It is as if you stood out on the dock Watching a little boat drift out Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish . . . And you were in it, skimming past old snags, Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky As soundless as a gong before it’s struck- Suspended how? - and now they strike it, now The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats, And you must wake again to your own blood And empty spaces in the throat.

The Best Slow Dancer -Wagoner
Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper By the second string of teachers and wallflowers In the school gym across the key through the glitter Of mirrored light three-second rule forever Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there In your arms like music she knew just how to answer The question mark of your spine your hand in hers The other touching that place between her shoulders Trembling your countless feet light-footed sure To move as they wished wherever you might stagger Without her she turned in time she knew where you were In time she turned her body into yours As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never Where you would be for all time never closer Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her You weren’t the worst one not the boy whose mother Had taught him to count to murmur and over One slide two slide three slide now no longer The one in the hallway after class the scuffler The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her But see her dancing off with someone or other Older more clever smoother dreamier Not waving a sister somebody else’s partner Lover while you went floating home through the air To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

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