Here are some poems I love. Enjoy…
b
To the rhythm of our blood
To the rhythm of our blood
Drumming, drumming
to the rhythm of our blood.
Rain beating on my back,
water running round your thigh
to the rhythm
to the rhythm of our blood.
Climbing, falling
through the drumming of the rain
to the echoes of our blood.
-Nick Bantock, from The Venetian’s Wife
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To Lou Andreas-Salomé
I.
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives’ roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself: looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly,
endlessly, into your sheltered heart.
II.
As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in breath –
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw
you turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, somehow had
wildest childhood over my heart.
III.
Memory won’t suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being’s floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don’t think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don’t invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you’ve gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino, late autumn 1911
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Love Song
How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
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Once I took your face into
my hands. Moonlight fell on it.
Most incomprehensible object
under overflowing tears.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
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These hills contain me as a field, a stone
Yet I contain them also: when I fare
Beyond their borders and am all alone
I need but think of them to see them there,
Each hill, each hallow, each familiar place
As clearly imaged as a loved one’s face.
- Byron Herbert Reece
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Night. Oh you face against my face
dissolved in deepness.
You, my awestruck gaze’s vast
preponderance.
Night, in my eyesight shuddering,
but in yourself so firm;
inexhaustible creation, continuing on
over the earth’s remains;
full of young starfields that hurl
fire from the black at their edges
into the soundless adventure
of the space-between;
by your very being, transcender,
you make me seem small –;
yet, at one with the dark earth,
I dare exist in you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
1924
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Come when you should. All this will have been
passing through me for you to breathe.
I have gazed at it for so long, for your sake,
namelessly, with the gaze of poverty,
and have loved it, as if already you drank it in.
And yet: when I recall that all this –
myself, stars, flowers, and the sharp flight
of a bird out of gesturing brushwood,
the cloud’s haughtiness and what the wind
could do to me at night, whisking me
out of one being into a next, — that all this,
in endless succession (for I am all this,
am what the potion’s roar left behind
in my ear, am that exquisite taste which once
a ripe fruit expended on my lips), –
that all this, when once you’re really here,
all, even back to the boy’s low gaze
into the chalices of high-grown flower fields,
even back to one of my mother’s smiles
which I perhaps, thronged with your being,
shall think of as something stolen –, that all this
I then shall have to inexhaustibly outgive,
night and day, so much unsparingly
assimilated nature –, never knowing if what
begins to glow in you is mine: perhaps
you’ll grow more beautiful entirely from your own beauty,
from the profusion of restedness in your limbs,
from what is sweetest in your blood, — for all I know,
because there is awareness even in your hand,
because your hair flatters your shoulders,
because something in the dark breeze
is one with you, because you forget me totally,
because you don’t strain to hear, because you are a woman:
when I recall how I’ve dipped tenderness
into blood, into that never startled
soundless heartblood of things so loved
Rainer Maria Rilke
1912
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Lovesong
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment’s brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon’s gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other’s face
Ted Hughes
