Grieving for a List of Qualities

Grieving for a List of Qualities

Eun Ji, why does love do harmful things
To us who mope in sweet humility?
Are we not the most harmless people
Love is a fire, sword, has it done you awful harm?

No! Only words, only words of lost love
The treasures that were too shabby anyhow
And pain, like well-known eyes of attachment
Taken, or lips, a name of a dear baby

The idea of who we were with such and such a person
The months that seemed to hover in ecstasy
But Ah to give ourselves over to a greater power
Or let nature do with us what she may

Such are the traps and doves and gold
Of the inner life, and the sharing pacts
We make with other souls, even if temporary
All to craft our heart in more particular a form

How much we give and for whom, perhaps
It’s all a selfish play in the end, we are always
One step away from beauty, one step
In love not with the person but the idea of a person.

Ineffable Name

Your ghostly handkerchief
Rubs me in disbelief
As moist as your province
Of erotic dreams

Your Jewish mind
Is too shrewd and logical
For an eternal love-story
I will never meet

One such as you again
In the gold palace of
Lesser conversations
I will go on my merry way

Stitching heaven wherever I roam
For love is intellectual
And my body is not
Pragmatic as a woman

I find miracles without quarrels
Far easier than one who has
Not to be picky, but to be kind
My Messiah is my present love.

Sea People

Our love was not other than this
It did not, not break on the shores
Like the waves of oceans
Across from which we came

You were native and I was immigrant
Or was I foreigner and you were
Oriental? A lowered eyelid of heart
Far in the distance, coming closer

Like a strange shell of our souls
Meeting, side by side, we tried
To explain it, but it was what it was
That higher instinct to flight

Love is a flight from reality
If we’d close our eyes
We might have missed it
The breath that mingles with years

And the solace that comes
From deep loyalty and ultimate
Belonging, it’s the shore alight
After a thousand empty voyages

Our love was not other than this
The body of a flower born to bloom
On a lonely branch, requiring timing
Nature did that to us, she let us go

Against the musical rhythm
Of our fate where we met
Changing our lives forever.

Love’s Mataphysicks

If yet I have not all thy love
For loving is never enough
I must do more than pray
Both increased by gratitude

And the desire to love more
If yet I have not all thy love
I thought, dream it, enjoy it
I cannot deny, I share it

Fiercely and without restraint
If yet I have not all they love
I who am so little wise, so humble
So simple, deare perhaps I

Shall never have thee all
My stature was made small by
Nature, my wit outbid by
More generous fates, my time

More short and partial to trials
If yet I have not all they love
Be it said that love’s riddles were
Unpublishable to me, triumphs

As if out of reach, treasures
Undeserved, comforts unmet
If yet I have not all they love
Do not bargain but say farewell

Deare, well I know, I shall never
Have all of thee, never know thy
Full heart, love doth every day admit
The worthy choice of my lost destiny.

Photo Courtesy:

1. http://bittersweetvenom.deviantart.com/art/another-one-inside-the-shell-440125761
2. http://bittersweetvenom.deviantart.com/art/don-t-let-me-go-439633033

Magnetic transience of our blooms

If your eyes were not the
color of lightning, of a day full
of loving hope, this world of
faces, work, play, politics

If you were not the chief grace
of my little years, amber weeks
golden months, clogged with
moments of clasping anticipation

I would have gone mad long ago –
If, my dearest, you had not come
into my life like sand, trees, rain
everything is so alive that is to

live with you, eat with you, move with you
if our arms, legs, noses did not touch
each night in our beloved sleep
your life and my life would not

be so good, so happy, and now
I can see everything that lives
and loves in you, so easily, held-in
as the water that shatters the

restless rock; the breeze that caresses
the most ancient fires, you were there
and we drop into the future in
blue salt, falling in sea-circles of
another world, of permanent tenderness.

Photo Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/War-of-roses-408847420

A Heart to Add Wholeness

Oh, there are eyes that can rejoice
And a heart to add to wholeness
That laughs as a lover only can
These bare breast that do pound
This skin that does cry
Oh, there are lips that rest here
How will hungry Time
Put by sunshine then?
Hour after hour uplifted so?
Oh I would live in you and me
Build myself lightly on a dream
And would my thoughts wrap
Your feelings bright, till we are
Lost in swimming stars
So should I lose myself
To love you my dear?

Photography Courtesy: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Sunset-in-Leiden-377296974