love poems

Bewilderment

A man knows himself unworthy, her love unmerited,

a mystery like a healing after a wing's light touch.

And he no longer tries to hide his failings,

humbled and as helpless for wounds

as if he were already old and almost blind

and forgets his way in a well known city.

Shaking, he takes out a worn, often folded paper,

and asks strangers to read a name, an address.

the first of all thoughts

photograph by erin

A Woman Photographing Turtle Eggs

She loves the clutch of shells, broken,
emptied, left. She lifts them
one by one on her palm

to weigh their weightlessness
against her breath, their touch
against her skin. She thinks

of the eggs inside the warm mother,
how each slid free at the right time
and shielded a life as it nudged

into being and particular shape,
tiled carapace and plastron
and claws and hooked mouth

perfect in their solidity, fact
knitted from the egg's liquid.
The young curled in each private

chamber of the sun-wombed nest
breathed slowly through shell and dirt,
and perhaps, near hatching,

they sometimes heard footsteps,
faint news from the unguessed,
far air of light and menace and food,

though they were earth-held secrets
who had not yet suffered
the first of all thoughts: emerge.

a story about longing

A Story about Longing

Once --- so long ago that only the most ancient of the turtles would remember his name and then only if turtles cared about names, which they do not --- a man fell in love with a tiger lily.

It ended, as these things do. I won't say well or badly.

Between a man and a tiger lily, what beautiful thing could happen, except the ending?

some warmth

A Morning

A worm thin as an i or a snipped thread,
of a synthetic green you would never know
was natural, the knot of its strange blood
a little gemstone ticking in its head,
risks death on the rim of my sleeve to knead
and softly knead its half-inch of earth.
This perfect being flung itself unfelt, unhurt
as a breath, from a birch leaf. It liked my heat
and curled up to wait through all the turns
of the dark, there where I hung my naked shirt,
because it believed without words
and without knowing it lacked the words
that every day that wakes some warmth returns.

Everything Transforms (Lucian Mănăilescu)

Everything Transforms

It's all a game of quanta and atoms ---
we know but can never really explain,
because the waters, flowing, change to clouds,
and mountains, waiting, weather to a plain.

Butterflies perish in heaps of colors,
the stars decay to a dust of starlight,
people burst into flames of snowfall,
blanketing an unreal world in white.

But the very dream that fashions empires,
the very thought that struck the tongue dumb,
how we felt and what we were --- no one knows,
nor can imagine what change will come.


Lucian Mănăilescu
(my translation -- original in the comments)

the real makes a boundary within abstract order

My poem "Neither Speech nor Silence" is online at Heron Tree.