More sweet than as these yellow petals soft
Could grace your cheek your hand did touch my face
That day we lay outstretched upon the sand
And heard the waves lap love’s short time away.
Now like this flower from its root removed
We languish each in lonely, distant place,
Our summers brief, our winters long demand
We hurry time whose rush then cannot stay.
Yet know by this you are more carefully loved,
That hungered for as food is your embrace,
That love is surer which must trials withstand,
Though for their quickest end I earnest pray.
For my love’s voice is lost and all joys pained,
Nor I rejoice but in your sight regained.
c. 1985
So young your eyes were yet to me so fair
As half a child’s and half a woman’s glance,
Where wisdom did joy’s comeliness enhance
And play brought wit to wisdom’s somber stare.
But late those lights are pits of deep despair.
Their lids in sleep are shrouds on much-tried hope.
In vain you look away so that their scope
You might the bones of young love’s body spare.
Yet if we now as climbing greens entwine,
Though neither strong enough can all walls scale,
On the other’s grasp if our own should fail.
So cling to me, who gave your life for mine,
Whose tender care I wearied into death.
Awake with me and share my regained breath.
c. 1985
Your love I seek as saints have sought God’s grace:
With single wish and heart did they transcend
All purposes profane, each time and place,
And found at start the joy that is love’s end.
So I in loving you have hopes each touch
At once all blossoms yet to be will taste,
For I in trust would pledge to you as much,
That you may be by all my days embraced.
So please confirm my love with your sweet smile
And render all, surrendering the source.
Confirm my joy and take me from my trial
Assured my only good’s my only course.
Except that hope against the dark of night
You are my center-sought and only light.
c 1985
Come mark with me the day we met, the years’
Increase, that happy fruit, four joyful hearts
Asleep, cradled in our love’s watchful care.
Though nights be dark and days wait shadow crossed
We’ll shield them a while from the world’s worst fears.
As if still capsuled in our inmost parts
Their hurts, their sorrows, burdens first we’ll bear.
We plant and weed to save that strength which lost
Never regrows on soil where children’s tears
Unstopped have washed away the fragile starts
Of trust and confidence, where hateful air
Or drought blows love-parched fields to angry dust.
As our love looks to theirs, soon strong and free,
So mine, ringed by yours, may ever yielding be.
c 1985
In what desert of self-solace do you dwell
Doubly fatigued by all my tiresome need?
To what spare fortress does your heart recede
Encumbered by each compliment I tell?
“Your breath so sweet,” fans boredom’s sighs.
To dare, “I would my hand upon your heart,”
Arcs your bones and makes our bodies part.
Each plan to capture snares its own demise.
But from your lonely, lofty tower spy
This madman’s ventures on your casual shell,
And pray your cool bastion won’t withstand.
For at love’s pained breaking point I’ll try
Every force, wit, artifice, and skill
To make you laugh, cry, love, and grant your hand.
c. 1985
In photographs I found your bandaged knee,
Impish grin, tomboy stance. Pages later,
Childhood passed, you stood a teenaged dater
At the dance in youth’s full-blossomed beauty.
Your face I’ve held in raptured ecstasy
And soothed its strain in labor’s deep intent.
Your smile in comfort, laughter, singing spent,
Makes new old joys recalled in memory.
Forgive me then if I in fancy paint
Your visage without blemish, line, or spot,
Or dream you never dance with step awry.
Not that you live always a flawless saint,
But good alone is etched, all else forgot,
Imagining with love’s transforming eye.
c 1985
We kissed and my hand softly stroked your hair.
We read each other rightly and undressed.
Your mirrored milky limbs my gaze caressed
When playfully you scolded, “Please don’t stare.”
Streams will sooner upland flow than my eyes
Look away. As spring’s petals ache to feast
On light of day on you they come to rest.
All other scenes dull views they will despise.
So let us with this argument be done:
The moon would never fault its loyal tide;
Nor would the North its faithful pointers chide.
Forgive the flower, blame the beaming sun.
Assured then, I had made my point, by chance
When I looked up, I caught your secret glance.
c 1985
No woman ever lived whom poets praised
But flickered on the pathways of their brains
Unreal as lovelies pictured on the page
Who neither breathe nor dance yet set to flame
Men’s raw desire. So words, if aptly phrased,
Can conjure sensate echoes, life’s remains,
To form a player placed upon a stage
Who acting leads the will, refines its aim.
Then neither scorn my work nor spurn my love
Thinking you are by one unfair compared
And by the other falsely known. That force
Is not their own by which these specters move
My heart to care. Their beauty, goodness shared
In earthly flesh is you, their font, their source.
c 1985
At night in Misquamicut’s still-warm sand
You stick-scratched our children’s names one by one
Knowing by the hour they would all be gone,
Erased by the Atlantic’s second hand.
Next morning, having the time of our life,
In a sunlit century bedroom we
Played eager whaling captain home from sea
At long last to his faithful waiting wife.
However brief, such evanescent signs
Must to some high eternal court convey
Our true devotion, powerfully sway
Their judgment. For relying on these lines,
They would conclude with wistful envied sigh
That no two ever loved but you and I.
c 1986
Of course they think our bond fell ready-forged
Complete from Tennessee’s clear heaven’s blue
That crisp, late October afternoon when
For all the world to witness we declared
To treasure first each other’s self and dared
All time to hobble our delight. From then
To now we’ve gaily danced, our vows kept true,
Prepared our hearts for music yet unscored.
How easily we paid the price and shed
Those lesser selves we early sought, discerned
How Love who loved us first had improvised
Far grander forms than any we’d devised,
Clad us like lilies, finer than we’d earned.
So courting daily newly are we wed.
c 1986
If all I ever wanted was your smile
Your easy laughter told I had the power
To enchant you ever after. I could
Have left within the hour but stayed the while.
Or if to sense your body’s inward fire
Was all my need, plucking your sweet flower,
I should have thought to close the door for good
But lingered, tempted to explore desire.
Since I aspire to be your only love,
Pledging you my heart all days to spend our
Lives together, let this be understood:
Profits accrue both ways. All tests would prove
A fair exchange our bargaining to be:
Your love, my life, for rapture, ecstasy.
c 1985
Once when I was young and slim and golden
Of an Indiana summer your head
Upon my shoulder gently lay. Moonlight
Softly filtered through late autumn’s yellowed
Leaves, made pearls of teardrops on your scarf. Then
Your words came into me, scholar long-dead,
Like spring’s mountain freshets bubbling crystal-white,
Enlivened all from winter’s icy hold.
So have we melted, time and time again,
With words, thoughts, and flesh we every hunger fed;
Defeated seasons in this angels’ flight,
Tapped eternal power and with its fire glowed.
For this then did we in history pair:
To grow by love and then to glory share.
c 1985.
When I with you in love’s sweet fire have lain
So like sailors charting an unknown sea
By familiar stars come at last to rest
In sunset’s glory on a newfound shore,
Or astronauts on thunder-studded flame
Rising, hurtling, curving through the starry
Trackless void, trust their final, fiery test
To counting at the atom’s ticking core,
Or saints for whom life’s every joy and pain
In death conjoin to lasting ecstasy
Perceive those paths and to those guides hold fast
Who mark the way to love’s unending store;
So then we know why hunger’s drive’s so deep
And all such pleasures meant for us to reap.
c 1986
This water like a lover’s kiss upon
Your lips, your breasts, hips, thighs, and feet as you
Slip silently by, buoys your silken frame
Yields to your stroke and waits your next embrace.
These textbooks, like a lover’s letters con-
Centrate your thoughts, feed your gaze, and bear to
Your heart those medical routines whose aim
Is to transform your hands for caring grace.
Again you grow in beauty and in truth
And gladly I will every help provide
Although the efforts truly yours alone.
Yet I recall how as a student youth
You claimed my heart and joined me as my bride
And since have shared all joys you’ve ever known.
c 1986
Do not rely alone upon my loy-
Al heart for ever-faithful love, pretend-
Ing these eyes blind to others’ glory, locked
But to your beauty’s key, or these ears deaf
To any other’s story, to your voice
Open only, or this flesh numb except-
Ing to your body’s quickened pulse. Did not
You storm this fortress first through the eye, then
Gain the ear with pleasant argument?
The heart succumbed and touch then sealed the vow.
Yet all these gates remain agape and must.
So rush again as to be first in fervent
Struggle at every portal every now
Until this stronghold fail and fall to dust.
c 1986
Although for ears this tongue may never frame
A portrait yielding half the eyes’ delight
On seeing you, yet I will try despite
My fears for words to find your beauty’s name.
If I so challenge them they might suggest
The eager succor of your love’s embrace
And so defy this line’s too meager space
And bear the soft warmth of your fragrant breast.
But almost all words fail, put to the test
Of your enduring love, except God’s grace,
From which it springs, survives and grows apace,
Forgiving all my flawed, mere human best.
So in these lines all words are compromise
But of your love they’re little less than lies.
c 1986
And if there is a woman it is she
Whose liquid voice revives my noise-worn ears
Whose beauty like a magnet snags my gaze
Whose unmistaking touch can trace my heart.
For her courageous loving sets me free
From shadows cast by all my childhood fears;
Her clearer sight, my aid in choice’s haze,
She loosed the bonds that tied my timid art.
Yet as I honor her, she honors me
In love’s exchange so dancing through the years.
To raise each other’s hopes, exceed the praise,
Sustain all trial, and choose the better part.
For love’s reflection gains no greater prize
Than find its mirror in its lover’s eyes.
c 1986
If ever fame should fall to me for praise
Of you, how oddly then, would erring chance
Decide to laud the dancer for the dance
As if none other could his steps retrace.
For Leibnitz sought, and Newton likewise found,
Though neither knew the other on the path
To calculus, that incremental math
Which placed all science on a firmer ground.
And as it is in science, so it is in art
That similar minds might well alike conceive
If objects comparable their sense behold.
So he must write, he who takes my part
Within your arms, if I earth’s arms receive,
And all your gracious loving be retold.
c 1986
When weary with this world’s unending woe
Or sundered by my sadly proven fault
My spirit flagging, laggard, lame, and halt
Lay victim to the day’s destructive flow,
Torn to answer here before I answer there
Assailed by friend and foe from every side
Whose eager taunts erode my crumbling pride
And send me stumbling headlong to despair,
Then by the sight of some unmixed good—birds’
Flight, a child’s smile—I grasp the root above,
Disown my curse, and free again grow bold;
For he who made my lips to speak these words,
Who filled my heart with words to tell my love
Leads me to you to treasure, trust, and hold.
c 1988
Lady, this love for life on flesh must feed
Though sight or sound or touch of you entice
Only to fail the need; that food suffice
Alone wherein your heart you freely cede.
As babes who long in darkness warmly wombed
Once brusquely born to brightness, chilling air
Find first fond calm in mothers’ clasping care
So turn we home until we are entombed.
Then let us from this common union take
That bread and wine for which our bodies burn
In pure devotion heaven’s blessings earn
And on earth each other’s heaven make.
In love’s surrender still are we increased
Though feeding all the other yet we feast.
c 1989
Perhaps in mornings’ quiet I might find
In nearby wood the sun’s first tangent beam
Break green translucent fire against the pale
Blue newborn sky. Or later watch those same
Transecting planes concede their verdant glow
To blue-black night. Thus days begin and end
As certainly as noon is known by shad-
Ows’ brevity. The eye’s blink, the camera’s
Click can no more catch the instant than one
Can stanch a river with a stick. So when
Last you said you loved me, and slipped from life
As water through my grasp, your body slack,
Your eyes that stared away, is every day
Relentlessly more distant, lost to me.
c 2001
How often in the moonlit fog we walked,
Held hands, our only warmth, yet knew just when
In the shadow of a bough, to turn our-
Selves together, our arms enwrap, and kiss.
How often in the beach’s waves we walked,
Held hands, each other’s anchor as we played,
Your tanless skin now safe in sunset’s shade,
As water washed our feet, we’d softly kiss.
How often in the falling snow we walked,
Held hands, our gentle link in darkening hours,
Each other guided up and through the wood,
‘Til on the crest we stood, and breathless kissed.
Now from that tender clasp so cruelly torn
By death, my kiss lay on my lips stillborn.
c 2002
No, none can say, I “love” you, with the word
As if the sound itself its sense conveyed.
Consider hymns we hold so fraught with praise
Which in a foreign ear no laud is heard.
Could grapefruit cut with care for thirty years
Contain a part? Or boots pulled gently on
Or off? Fetching drinks and snacks must surely
Count, as would walking babies in the night
Or waking quietly to let you sleep,
And sharing trials and tears. And racing back
To kiss you one more time—as if to say
That trains and planes and all the world can wait.
Unless I placed you first in all designed
My “love” was wasted breath and undefined.
. c 2002
This drear first Easter since your death finds me
Attired in gloom of grief, awash in tears.
Even all of Sunday’s alleluias
Failed to lift my leaden soul. Their echoes
Swelling still within recall that first spring
When you in yellow splendor stood beside
Me in the pew, your voice as angel-bright
And clear as ever near God’s throne would sing.
Then each year since you left my side and joined
The robed triumphant throng to celebrate
With voice and organ’s volume strained the Love
That made the world and makes the world again.
So apropos this Easter’s bleak cold rain,
To hold to hope in grief, to love in pain.
c 2002
Old, dear, Reverend Thomas, who did not
Know he, too, soon would die, came to pray with
Us in the hours of your death, when you were
Too weak even for tenderness. Softly
We spoke, unsure he’d remember, of heart-
Breaking children, progress to date, how but
For the pain there was no treatment. Defer-
Ring, he left a slim sacred volume that
Addressed every need. We couldn’t read it
And found tears are prayers, wordless and wet
Salt-life surrendered from the furthest cells
Welling inward to swell the stream—clumsy
Convulsion, fleshquake of sorrow—thought-
Lessly sobbing our unspeakable wish.
c 2005
