FIVE LOVE POEMS FOR THANKSGIVING 2018

by V. B. Price

HONESTY IS THE WILDNESS OF THE SEA

Plagues of anger choke the streets
inflaming and distending everyone.
Hector’s dead. Andromache’s collapsed.
Safety is a hoax. Corpses aren’t secure.

Only you for me, the warmth of your mind,
the breezes your courage attracts,
only you and I together
relieve the fever from the streets of hate,
stretched out in our bodies
like myths sunbathing in the glades.
Only we, together, know each other all alone.
We speak to each other as if we were the sea.
Anything can be said to the ocean
without the slightest fear;
and the ocean hears. Imagine
being comprehended by the sea. Imagine!
It is this we know between us.

Anger through the midnight streets of Troy:
it loses its way to our house,
dazed in the labyrinth of secrecy and truth
we have built around
the holy and the listening sea.

 

Shakespeare III: Sonnet 60

NO OPPOSITE
“Praising thy worth…”

Unlike the dolphin, light, or space,
love itself is cause but not effect,
not the sum of history as grace.

Time does not transfix it; it is and it is not,
and how it ends is not for circumstance
but shadows, sand, slow rocks to say.

Love is as time is, without a time that is beginning.
It comes about as if it always is,
and no amount of seeking, waiting, or deserving can make it be.

Love is not a property, it is a form, of all that is,
and can’t be stopped until it stops, despite “his cruel hand.”
Thus rending, freeing, and transforming, it is reality

that has no proof, no opposite, but must be faced
as evidence for now that praise of all is not misplaced.

 

LOS CHAVEZ MOON

The moons of summer
rising out of the soft black air,
up through the streaming breezes
—to watch such light with you,
the light of skin
released beneath the dark,
such bed safe light,
in the deep folding shadows of the trees,
to watch such light with you
is to feel inside
the slow rising of our tides,
our inseparable seas
rising together
through the bright, fearless body of the night.

 

NAUSICAA

Your body startles me
moving through the dark of the hall.
You feel to my eyes
like the breeze feels on my legs in the heat of the weeds,
cool as the brush of your hand
still warm from the warmth of my skin.
And I worship as I see
such forms that are
the perfection of things
that have no perfection
—ripples, fire, fields of green,
a knee,
the belly of a cat stretched out,
dogs sleep-dancing in perfect trust,
or you
walking down the hall through bedroom dusk,
your back just scratched,
Venus of all beauty,
Aphrodite dressed in shade,
leading me to rest
in roses, pond light,
sea wind, moss;
Venus of perfection,
philosophy disrobed,
reborn as pure anatomy
to which nothing is opposed.

 

HEAVEN
For Rini, before the second operation
February 1980

Itch dreams,
crazy lurk pains,
packed death settling —
everywhere we look
mad clues: bile
spilling from the car,
the threat of eyes unscrewing,
whispers scheming on the lawn —
everywhere but here:
this water dome, this perfect circle
in the center of the stone
with its groves of tomatoes and sunflower forests,
its cats with their perfect hair,
and the workings at night under lamps with our pens,
the backdoor breezes, Madeira m’dear
over ice in the moonlight late before bed,
this place where we are
more who we are than we are when alone,
where we are
the place in itself, where we’re known,
proven to be who we are to ourselves
through the trust we have earned
from each other — this
is heaven on earth,
our full blessing,
for nothing,
not even the worst,
makes it less.

 

(Photo by Jay Huang)