When You Go

When you go,

if you go,

And I should want to die,

there's nothing I'd be saved by

more than the time

you fell asleep in my arms

in a trust so gentle

I let the darkening room

drink up the evening, till

rest, or the new rain

lightly roused you awake.

I asked if you heard the rain in your dream

and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.

-Edwin Morgan (RIP)

One Cigarette

No smoke without you, my fire

After you left,

your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray

and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey

I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal

of so much love. One cigarette

in the non-smoker's tray.

As the last spire

trembles up, a sudden draught

blows it winding into my face.

Is it smell, is it taste?

You are here again, and I am drunk on you tobacco lips.

Out with the light.

Let the smoke lie back in the dark.

Till I hear the very ash

sigh down among the flowers of brass

I'll breathe, and long past midnight, you last kiss.

-Edwin Morgan (RIP)

Old Song

I'm feeling ok still in some small way

I've come too far to just go away

I wish I could stay here some way.

So that what now comes wouldn't only be more

of what's to be lost. What's left would still leave more

to come if one didn't rush to get there.

What's still to say? Your eyes, your hair, your smile,

your body sweet as fresh air, your voice in the clear morning

after another night, another night, we lay together, sleeping?

If that has to go, it was never here.

If I know still you're here, then I'm here too

and love you, and love you.

-Robert Creeley

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side

Shoudst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at a lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honor turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

-Andrew Marvell

The Descent

The descent beckons

as the ascent beckoned

Memory is a kind

of accomplishment

a sort of renewal

even

an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new

places

inhabited by hordes

heretofore unrealized,

of new kinds-

since their movements

are towards new objectives

(even though formerly they were abandoned)

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat-since

the world it opens is always a place

formerly

unsuspected. A

world lost,

a world unsuspected

beckons to new places

and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory

of whiteness .

With evening, love wakens

though its shadows

which are alive by reason

of the sun shining

grow sleepy now and drop away

from desire .

Love without shadows stirs now

beginning to waken

as night

advances.

The descent

made up of despairs

and without accomplishment

realizes a new awakening :

which is a reversal

of despair.

For what we cannot accomplish, what

is denied to love,

what we have lost in the anticipation-

a descent follows,

endless and indestructible.

-William Carlos Williams