A little modern poetry for these modern times.
By Kristen Droesch — Written on Aug 15, 2013
There's no faster way to charm your honey than with a sonnet. Dive into these love poems, and maybe find the poet in yourself!
Pantoum by Randall Mann
If there is a word in the lexicon of love,
it will not declare itself.
The nature of words is to fail
men who fall in love with men.
It will not declare itself,
the perfect word. Boyfriend seems ridiculous:
men who fall in love with men
deserve something a bit more formal.
The perfect word? Boyfriend? Ridiculous.
But partner is . . . businesslike—
we deserve something a bit less formal,
much more in love with love.
But if partner is businesslike,
then lover suggests only sex,
is too much in love with love.
There is life outside of the bedroom,
and lover suggests only sex.
We are left with roommate, or friend.
There is life, but outside of the bedroom.
My friend and I rarely speak of one another.
To my left is my roommate, my friend.
If there is a word in the lexicon of love,
my friend and I rarely speak it of one another.
The nature of words is to fail.
Northampton Style by Marie Ponsot
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
Northampton-style, on the porch out back.
Its voice touches and parts the air of summer,
as if it swam to time us down a river
where we dive and leave a single track
as evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
that lets us wash our mix of dreams together.
Delicate, tacit, we engage in our act;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.
When we disentangle you are not with her
I am not with him. Redress calls for tact.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer
still. A small breeze rises and the leaves stir
as uneasy as we, while the woods go black;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer
and lets darkness enter us; our strings go slack
though the player keeps up his plangent attack.
Evening falls. Someone’s playing a dulcimer;
its voice touches and parts the air of summer.
The Courtship of the Lizard Lover by Kate Buckley
He crawls through the cracks
of my stone foundation,
sly and sleek as
I tempt him with food.
He stays out of habit; I cook
out of love for things that move.
We grow accustomed to each other’s
trails and smells, the skins we’ve shed
along the long, long road
of rubbing each other smooth.
Till all the skins we’ve shed lie sparkling
like so many stones in this desert land.
I scoop him up in my hand
and eat him.
True Solar Holiday by Douglas Crase
Out of the whim of data,
Out of binary contests driven and stored,
By the law of large numbers and subject to that law
Which in time will correct us like an event,
And from bounce and toss of things that aren’t even things,
I’ve determined the trend I call “you” and know you are real,
Your unwillingness to appear
In all but the least likely worlds, as in this world
Here. In spite of excursions, despite my expenditures
Ever more anxiously matrixed, ever baroque,
I can prove we have met and I’ve proved we can do it again
By each error I make where otherwise one couldn’t be
Because only an actual randomness
Never admits a mistake. It’s for your sake,
Then (though the stars get lost from the bottle,
Though the bottle unwind), if I linger around in the wrong
Ringing up details, pixel by high bit by bit,
In hopes of you not as integer but at least as the sum
Of all my near misses, divisible,
Once there is time, to an average that poses you perfectly
Like a surprise, unaccidentally credible
Perfectly like a surprise. Am I really too patient
When this is the only program from which you derive?
Not if you knew how beautiful you will be,
How important it is your discovery dawn on me,
How as long as I keep my attention trained
Then finally the days
Will bow every morning in your direction
As they do to the sun that hosannas upon that horizon
Of which I am witness and not the one farther on:
Set to let me elect you as if there were no other choice,
Choice made like temperature, trend I can actually feel
To a Grey Dress by Arthur Symons
There's a flutter of grey through the trees:
Ah, the exquisite curves of her dress as she passes
Fleet with her feet on the path where the grass is!
I see not her face, I but see
The swift re-appearance, the flitting persistence—
There!—of that flutter of grey in the distance.
It has flickered and fluttered away:
What a teasing regret she has left in my day-dream,
And what dreams of delight are the dreams that one may
dream!
It was only a flutter of grey;
But the vaguest of raiment's impossible chances
Has set my heart beating the way of old dances.
Litany by Carolyn Creedon
Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant?
I will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and I will eat it and call
it a carolyn sandwich. Then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayon¬naise and
that is how you shall love me in my restaurant
Tom, will you come to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed?
Yes, and I will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later,
it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby
Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen
and watch the people with me?
Yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. I will win and we will tangle up
on your comforter while the sweat rains from our stomachs and fore¬heads
Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s
jewelry box. Later can we walk to the duck pond?
Yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. I will push you on
the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. If you fall I might disappear
Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a
loved face and give you a squalling red daughter.
No, but I will come inside you and you will be my daughter
Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person?
No, but I will lie down on your sheets and taste you. There will be feathers
of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you
Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your
back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook
of your shoulder blade?
No, but later you can lie against me and almost touch me and when I go I will
leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed
up against the thought of me
Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday
you will need me?
No, but I will sit in silence while you rage, you can knock the chairs down
any mountain. I will always be the same and you will always wait
Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just
hanging there and I want it.
No, it will burn my fingers. No one can have the sun: it’s on loan from God.
But I will draw a picture of it and send it to you from Richmond and then you
can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun
Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from
Richmond and baptise me with sex and cool water?
I will come back from Richmond. I will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the
back of your neck and then I will lick the salt off it. Then I will leave
Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me?
I have left you. That is how you will know
Beaded Baby Moccasins by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
If love is like a doll’s shoe —
the color of nascent snow
that laces over the ankle
or the polychromatic beaded baby moccasins
we saw lying in the museum drawer
that belonged to an infant from a sea tribe of seal hunters.
Or the rutilant pink blossoms
of the locust tree that bloomed in the dark
while I slept dreaming of my arrival
on a red-eye wearing a long to the floor skirt —
not of a postulant, but of a flower vendor
or a woman covering disfigurement.
Freud believed that religious faith
is a wish-fulfilling illusion.
I can’t locate faith in a carved or uncarved pew.
I’m more focused on the altar boy’s shoes.
Under his white robe he’s wearing a man’s black loafers
vastly oversized for his small feet with
sufficient spare space for a coyote den in each toe.
I want to buy him a kite.
If love is a mezzanine floor we will not fall from,
a hand holding back my hair from my face
as I’m sick on the side of the bus.
The mouth so at home in the vicinity of pavement.
Pew also means to enclose, as in men who were
as willingly pewed in the parish church
as their sheep were in night folds.
Freud also believed civilized life imposes suffering,
yet he always wore a dinner jacket.
We delaminate layers of old paint
bleach sheets in the shade.
I take out the oily ham from the beans,
the unflattering photos from the folio,
the quotes about repressed homosexuality
being the reason Sigmund’s patient Little Hans
is afraid of horses.
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