love poetry – Page 9 – don't confuse the narrator

clearing away the clouds

First kiss

It’s there in the air between them.

As hands sketch fragmented curves,
fingertips graze its surface.

They worry it with words,
map points along the borders.

Their tongues taste the edges
of possibility until they find its shape

in the space where their lips meet.

I came across an earlier draft of the above in a stack of papers I was about to throw away, but I can’t find any trace of it on my computer. I don’t think I’d deliberately discarded it, but it definitely needed work.

There’s still a way to go, but it’s given me something to think – and write – about.
Continue reading “clearing away the clouds”

valentine

I know that you’re
a thousand miles away,
yet each grey car I glimpse
demands I look again

losing the thread

Amor, Amor
(after Garcilaso de la Vega)

Love offered me a cloth so fine and rich,
 with folds so ample, I could not refuse 
but sewed myself a habit, stitch by stitch.
 I find the garment shrinks with daily use:
 its generous measures pucker and draw tight,
 I suffocate where once I’d room to spare;
I stretch and strain to free myself, I fight, 
yet still the precious fabric will not tear.
Come, show me one who wants to cut these ties –
 these homespun tapes we fashion for our lives
 to bind ourselves to husbands or to wives –
 and I will show you one who’s spinning lies.
 Each wears the cloth he wove, though I confess 
I wonder if mine’s shroud or wedding dress.

Continue reading “losing the thread”

kisses

As Valentine’s day approaches, the conversation turns to love poetry; revisiting an old poem, I found this fragment:

So many kisses left
on the station steps: kisses
scattered en la boca
del metro.

If the metro station in question were the one in the photo, I can only assume there was a tango playing in the background.

On a lingustic tangent, I really wish bus stops were underground so they also had a “boca”: then I could have called the post “besos & buses” and pondered the association between the Spanish besar and the English “buss”.

Boxing Day

on a foreign shore: icing-tipped waves
toss tinsel into the clear air. We play
at Wenceslas in the sand, taking it in turns
to be the page. We look for sea holly and sing
carols under the curious gaze
of a parrot in a palm tree.

(Like the last couple of posts it’s not new. It’s also a repost, but I think the blog has different readers now. Incidentally, don’t waste time trying to find the parrot in the photo: it wasn’t actually that palm tree!)