Love ~ Relationships & Sunken Ships

The weather turnend

on

the night we ended

a memory lost beneath the sea

forgotten and insignificant

until

remembered by historians of love

asking why

always why

we never ask the questions

while we make love

only when it’s over

as the archeologists excavate our bed

looking for clues to why we left

our harbor

into the November storm that broke us

made us two from one

as the chilling rains fell

while the sleet froze on our naked bodies

as we felt the waves of dereliction

while the lights went out

on

love

relationships

and

sunken ships

 

Pain

I am in love

With a beautiful

Faithful woman

Her name is Pain

And she is mine

 

Chapter 2

fleeting moments of happiness

in a sea of meaning

never really all the way out of the melancholy

finding some comfort together

while swimming in it

confidence in the story

in another chapter

he will kiss her

and she will kiss him back

Confessions

 

He was drinking wine in his apartment with her. Music playing in the background as the last of the October light was fading, as was the wine in the bottle. Each of them in their separate chairs, just as their lives up to now had been. They were sitting in silence without awkwardness and talking without pretense. Time flowed as it does when two people are comfortable with each other and content with themselves. He wondered what she thought about him. His life, his oddities, his predilections, how he spoke, what he wrote about, how he looked, and if his poetry moved her soul. He thought she must know how much he liked her, how he craved her company.

Since he was a child he had difficulty expressing in spoken words how he felt. So much he kept inside of himself, in his head. The feelings unable to find a way out of his mouth. Is this why his marriage crumbled, why he saw women he liked disappear with other men? He felt deeply and truly about so much but could not say it when the he needed to. Maybe, that is why he started writing - it would be the salvation of his inner world. The way to tell those he cared about what he feels.

He turned his stare towards where she was curled up in the Papasan chair holding a half empty glass of Chianti. He imagined she was dreaming of visiting Italy with him someday and how she would smile - how her eyes would be excited with the ancient ruins of Rome and the beauty of the sights and smells of the Mediterranean. He wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to reach out across the space between them and hold her hand. He wanted to touch her and look into her eyes as he gently moved his face to hers and softly kiss her lips.

He desired all this but was afraid. Afraid he would scare her off and loose the friend he had. But he wanted her. His mind spiraled off again into the infernal questioning of himself: would he regret never touching his lips to hers? What is life without risking for the sake of making it beautiful? He thought if she knew what he was thinking she would say, "just kiss me you idiot, I will kiss you back."

Part of him really believed she would kiss him back. Part of him wanted to believe that and trust that and still all he really wanted was not the kiss but to trust someone again with his whole being. Really trust with all that he is. That is why he initially had turned to her. He wanted to ask her, "how do you trust someone, how do you really know what you give to someone is safe?" The words of a a Springsteen song floated into his mind, he knew if he quoted them to her he would receive a disparaging look with a smile and if she was feeling generous a snarky comment as she so loved Springsteen. But the lyrics were true and the song played on a cassette tape in his mind,

"On his right hand Billy’d tattooed the word love and on his left hand was the word fear ~ And in which hand he held his fate was never clear..."

He didn't quote the lyrics to her. He didn't ask her how do you trust someone. He didn't reach for her hand. He didn't kiss her. He blamed the final ray of sunshine dancing on her hair which distracted him. Or was it her beauty and kindness which overtook his senses and will to speak and act. He just looked at her, all of her and loved that she was sharing the same space with him, the same seconds of life.

So they sat in their separate chairs and drank the wine while the music played and the sun sank in the west. And, the being together was enough and made him feel whole.

 

Canvas

Depth of penetration

Light into darkness

Creating inside a body

An ache longing for liberation

Behind the eyes of imagination

Passions delicately seep

Dripping like morning dew

To the blank page from infinitude

Recapitulation of time and meaning

Layered interpretation without context

Fragments of truth and reality in an aesthetic captured betwixt being and non being

Life writ large on the canvas of the artists mind

Anticipating humanity stepping into the experience

She dances with color and exposes our nakedness

Incredulity at her brushstrokes

Fragility in finitude

Exposed breathless beauty in darkened skin

Lips touch lips

Life’s first kiss

Breath and eyes open to see love

She is all in all and her brush is set down

Resting to let her creation be

Light flickering as the image dances

The first shadows of reflection fall

Art is life

Creativity is being

She is becoming

Love Goes On

Life touches death

Beauty smiles on the disfigured

Art lives beyond the sacred or profane

Eyes weep with eyes

We embrace in triumph and defeat

Love goes on

 

The Remembrance of the Lost

"I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan."

~ Keats, from La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Tonight I sit

Tonight I moan

Tonight I wish

you were on the phone

Remembering the cost of concupiscence

Not as we recollect

But how we wish it was

in love

with the idea of you

the scent of affection

what could be and once was

The remembrance of the lost

Conspires against and with my heart

 

 

 

Questions In Paradise

"'How are you? You old love-house of always.'

'I'm the same.'

'Really the same?'

'The same as one always is. I'm yours in this town.'

'Until the plane leaves.'

'Exactly,' she said and changed her position for the better in the car. 'Look,' she said. 'We've left the shining part and it's dirty and smoky. When didn't we do that?'

'Sometimes.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Sometimes.'

Then they looked at the dirty and the smoky and her quick eyes and lovely intellengence saw everything instantly that had taken him so many years to see.

'Now it gets better,' she said. She had never told him a lie in his life and he had tried to never lie to her. But he had been quite unsuccessful.

'Do you still love me?' She asked. 'Tell me true without adornments.'

'Yes. You ought to know.'

'I know,' she said, holding him to prove it if it could prove it.

'Who is the man now?'

'Let's not talk about him. You wouldn't care for him.'

'Maybe not,' he said and held her so close that it was as though something must break if both were truly serious. It was their old game and she broke and the break was clean."

~ Ernest Heminingway, Islands In The Stream

 

One Question

I have one question to ask you. One question searching for an answer before the morning light. The question is for the only one I whispered these words to so many lost years ago, "I think I'm falling in love with you."

Are you happy?

Three Poems For A Sunday Morning

"Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive."

~ Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Touch my body

exorcise the demons

I am bleeding without a wound

hold me and be my tourniquet

~~~~~~~

Intuition is a clever bitch

Whispering truth above the decibels of lies

So pretend all you are not

She will grab my hand

And walk me to the light

 

~~~~~~~

We exchange each other

In the most meaningless of ways

Forgetting we are human

 

(Not lifeless pieces on a chess board)

 

Without hearts

Without history

Without eyes

I Want To

I want to touch you

I want to be touched by you

I want to melt the ice around your heart

I want to light a candle inside the darkness of your soul

I want us to wake up from the loneliness together

Wrapped in each other's arms

Sunshine dancing on our bodies

While the spring breeze moves through the room

Coffee and conversation

Without pretense or hesitation in our silences

 

Spaces

Tearing at the fabric of our being

We slip into the ambiguity of dispair

Space between us

Spaces

(always)

Spaces

 

You and I

Everything about us was true. All we went through was real and honest. Our time together is what life is - the full spectrum of emotions and experiences. No other people in relationships had it better or easier, no others were more or less in love.

Any one who says that or pretends that are liars - to themselves and to each other. No relationship is ideal or without difficulties because two people are mysteries to each other and themselves - it is in the discovery of oneself and each other that we become who we can be together.

We faltered and got lost and were not able to find our way back to each other. In the fog of resentments and disappointments and the passing of time we changed as does everyone. I am sorry for my disorientation, my inability to communicate, my failure at loving in ways you needed to be loved. I miss and love you still. I don't believe that will ever go away.

Pieces

 

We exchange one another

In the most meaningless of ways

Forgetting we are human beings

Not lifeless pieces on a chess board

Without hearts

Without history

 

Rivers

I wanted to grow old with you

Watching our children

Then our grandchildren play

I wanted to drink coffee with you

Sitting together on the steps while the day was still new

We could have walked along the Thames

Looked at art in the National Gallery

Drank and laughed on the streets of Soho

We could have walked along the Swan

Spent a morning in Freo sipping flat whites on Cappuccino Alley

Then a lazy afternoon on the beach while "The Doctor" caressed our skin and the ocean filled our senses

We could have walked along the Seine

The Louvre with its masterpieces could have been ours for an afternoon

Red wine and cheese on a crowded Parisian street while the day turned to night

We could have walked along the Liffey

Strolled through Stevens Green hand in hand on a rainy afternoon

Than a pint together in an ancient warm Pub

(We could have...faith in me wained ~ desires in a different direction ~ choices broke my heart ~ killing a part of my soul)

So agonizing the loss

I reeled and faltered

Was lost and alone

Vertigo and confusion tossed and whirled me about

Then...

I walked along the Thames

Looked at art in the National Gallery

Drank and laughed on the streets of Soho

I walked along the Swan

Spent a morning in Freo sipping flat whites on Cappuccino Alley

Then a lazy afternoon on the beach while "The Doctor" caressed my body and the ocean filled my senses

I walked along the Seine

The Louvre filled with its masterpieces was mine for an afternoon

Red wine and cheese on a crowded Parisian street while the day turned to night

I walked along the Liffey

Strolled through Stevens Green on a rainy afternoon

Drank a pint in an ancient warm Pub

I walked along the Tiber

I was renewed with all that is Rome

Tuscany breathed newness life into me

Wine and freshness

Warm Mediterranean breezes

Walking with a new lover and friend

As a wild rose bloomed by the river

The Ache

"He had discovered that grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being."

~ Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The ache of a loss does not go away entirely. It merely diminishes, fades in and out of perceptibility. At times it is triggered by something; a memory, a scent, a song, a photograph. Then emotions and feelings and the gravitas of experiences rise to be known again bringing with them all you thought you had forgotten somewhere in the past. Sometimes, if you are stronger in a given moment you let the ache wash over you and move on with little damage to your soul. While at other times when you are weak, you let the ache weigh you down. In the weak hours you reach for a bottle or pills or a lover to distract and assuage the pain - to help you make it through the night. To know these things, to be these things, is to be human. And so it is human to live again, to dare again, to risk again, to love again.

Lonliness

Loneliness

Resides

In the doldrums

In the darkness

In the falling rain

In the empty house

(In the hollowness of my heart)

Resides

Loneliness

 

Without Rocks

I went for a walk

Searching for rocks to collect

Instead I found you

Between the rain drops

A voice in the wind

A memory moving with the clouds

A reflection in the ripples of the water

I returned home without rocks

With words in my pockets

I found along the way

 

 

Moleskin

Moleskin notebook

Capturing the spilling of emotion

Every feeling and movement

Written on blank pages with dull ink

And flamboyant rhythms

Till the night gives way to morning

 

 

Our Language

Poetry is our language

A drop of rain on a blade of grass

An empty glass on a marble bar

Absinthe eyes looking away

Red wine and broken bottles

Burnt out candles

Wax hardened on used books

A lingering scent

Of words not spoken

On empty pages of time

Black brush stokes

Rain soaked pain

Cold coffee in dirty mugs

Sweat soaked insomniac sheets

Chasing your mirage in dreams

Our language is poetry

 

 

 

Depression

"She woke up torpid each morning, slowed by sadness, frightened by the endless stretch of day that lay ahead. Everything had thickened. She was swallowed, lost in a viscous haze, shrouded in a soup of nothingness. Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care. Sometimes she woke flailing and helpless, and she saw, in front of her and behind her and all around her, an utter hopelessness. She knew there was no point in being here, in being alive, but she had no energy to think concretely of how she could kill herself. She lay in bed and read books and thought of nothing. Sometimes she forgot to eat and other times she waited until midnight, her roommates in their rooms, before heating up her food, and she left the dirty plates under her bed, until greenish mold fluffed up, around the oily remnants of rice and beans. Often, in the middle of eating or reading, she would feel a crushing urge to cry and the tears would come, the sobs hurting her throat. She had turned off the ringer of her phone. She no longer went to class. Her days were stilted by silence and snow."

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Three Stones

Can you taste the uncertainty in my kiss

Feel the doubt on my skin

I was broken

I fell to the ground

I am frightened (now) to surrender my soul

To relinquish my secrets

I waiver in my desires

I question all the motives

I hide

Taking shelter from the emotional rain

Can you hear my heart trembling

Feel the defeat in my touch

The waterfall of love is hidden

In the desert of sunken gardens

A compass on my body

Is the answer to the riddle of the three stones

Can you reach my hand in the dark

Feel the tenderness still inside of me

 

Leonard Cohen ~ Beneath My Hands

"Beneath my hands

your small breasts

are the upturned bellies

of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move

I hear the sounds of closing wings

of falling wings.

I am speechless

because you have fallen beside me

because your eyelashes

are the spines of tiny fragile animals."

~ Leonard Cohen, Beneath my Hands

Can You

Can you taste the uncertainty in my kiss

Feel the doubt on my skin

I was broken

And I fell to the ground

I am frightened to surrender my soul

To relinquish my secrets

I waiver in my desires

I questions all the motives

Fleeing into myself I hide

Taking shelter from the risks

Can you feel my heart trembling

Feel the fear in my touch

To Be Naked

To be naked is to be known. To be naked not in the physicality of seeing skin or to be gazed upon but rather naked inwardly, a disrobing of the soul. A soul, a human, a person without fig leaves or loin clothes to hide behind in judgment and shame. To be naked is to be vulnerable and to be vulnerable is to accept worthiness, accept love, accept acceptance. To be, rather than not be; vulnerable, loved and accepted is our birthright because we are alive.

These three gifts are are always present, patiently waiting to be believed in. True nakedness is subversive. It reveals the folly of a puritanical obsession with the prohibition of physical nudity. It is easier to cover or legislate the covering of skin than to do the psychological and spiritual work of uncovering true naked authenticity. With the manifestation of authentic nakedness - physical nakedness would loose its taboo. Even in a strip club where ample skin is available to be gazed upon, "... nudity is a costume. Some of the quest for authenticity that the customers were on was a result of this — they wanted to see that final costume drop away" (Virginia Vitzthum, G-strings and Ph.D.s, http://www.salon.com/2003/06/12/frank_7/%0A).

Is that not what we all want from our friends, lovers, family? All the costumes to drop away so our true selfs can breathe.

 

Darkness

I opened all the windows

While

You were closing all the doors

And

The sun sank in the east

While

The darkness swallowed our love

Your Eyes

Lift me to your eyes

With the softness of your fingertips

Till our mouths meet

And I am lost with you

Mark Strand ~ From Not Dying

"The years change nothing.

On windless summer nights

I feel those kisses

slide from her dark

lips far away,

and in winter they float

over the frozen pines

and arrive covered with snow.

They keep me young."

~ Mark Strand, from Not Dying

Octavio Paz ~ From Sunstone

"To love is to struggle, to battle,

if two kiss, the world changes,

desires take on flesh, thoughts

take on flesh, wings sprout

on the backs of slaves.

If two kiss, if we kiss,

the world becomes real,

we cease to be ghosts,

we look at each other

and we see… we see."

~ Octavio Paz, from Sunstone

Into Tomorrow

I want to follow you

Into tomorrow

(with)

The light

From yesterday

I Remember A Kiss

I remember a kiss

Long ago

"Racing in the street..."

Down kingsway

Time for goodbye

Time for hello

In the car

In the night

Goodbye

Goodbye

Again

And

Again

Over

And

Over

A kiss in the morning

A phone call the next day

A letter

Then silence

Goodbye can last so long

As

Kisses fade into the night

 

 

Something As

Something as simple

As...

Not letting a screen door slam

Lighting candles

Playing soft music

Fresh sheets

Wind softly ringing chimes

Quiet shade

Poetry served on tarnished silver platters

Empty benches under willow trees

Incense burning at twilight

Chianti from Tuscany

Grass beneath tired feet

Swimming naked in mountain streams

A fire at midnight

A full moon

Falling asleep in lovers arms

Coffee at dawn

Together in bed

Something as simple

As...

Lost Love

I feel deeply

Fidelity fueled passion

Each lost love

A dagger thrust into my heart

Help me in the night

Hold me close

When the memories come

And the daggers twist

Sleep impoverishes my soul

Deja vu terrors wake me

Faces and fingertips

Forgotten words

Hold me

Till I am sleeping again

My love

My muse

Dance Me

"Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin

Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in

Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone

Dance me to the end of love..."

~ Leonard Cohen, Dance Me To The End of Love

 

 

Till Daylight

Sincere touch...

A hug like no other.

Arms wrapped around exclaiming, "you are special to me."

"I miss you" spoken in a kiss.

A grasp on a arm to say, "you are loved."

A touch of a hand.

Fingers caressing while whispering, "let the pain go."

Seemingly small gestures during a dark night.

Saving a life.

Till daylight comes.

“...slow hands of the living damnation.”

And in reading George Steiner, I experienced the shock of recognition. "One of the things I cannot grasp, though I have often written about them, trying to get them into some kind of bearable perspective,” Steiner writes, “is the time relation.” Steiner has just quoted descriptions of the brutal deaths of two Jews at the Treblinka extermination camp. “Precisely at the same hour in which Mehring and Langner were being done to death, the overwhelming plurality of human beings, two miles away on the Polish farms, five thousand miles away in New York, were sleeping or eating or going to a film or making love or worrying about the dentist. This is where my imagination balks. The two orders of simultaneous experience are so different, so irreconcilable to any common norm of human values, their coexistence is so hideous a paradox—Treblinka is both because some men have built it and almost all other men let it be—that I puzzle over time. Are there, as science fiction and Gnostic speculation imply, different species of time in the same world, ‘good time’ and enveloping folds of inhuman time, in which men fall into the slow hands of the living damnation?” Until I read this passage I had rather simple-mindedly thought that only I had entertained such speculation, that only I had become obsessed about the time relation—to the extent, for example, that I had attempted more or less successfully to pinpoint my own activities on the first day of April, 1943, the day when Sophie, entering Auschwitz, fell into the “slow hands of the living damnation.” At some point late in 1947—only a relatively brief number of years removed from the beginning of Sophie’s ordeal—I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943—April Fools’ Day—had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father’s letters to me, which handily corroborated my movements, I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas."
~ William Styron, Sophie's Choice

Parking Spot

Skin on skin

Ink on skin

A name, memory and place

All the time

Separating then and now

The space between the letters etched on my body

In-between which the mysteries are felt

The little spaces of sharing

In the attempting to understand

A parking spot

To rest

To make love

To be

To talk

To sleep

Till the dawn of answers

Ascends with the attempt to know another

Skin on skin

Ink on skin

Things I Like To Do ~ August 1989

 

 

 

 

A Conversation...

 

 

A conversation I once had:

"I love you."

"I know." She replied. "I can tell by the way you look at me."

"What would you do if I kissed you?"

"Kiss you back." She answered.

And then the moment slipped away into the afternoon light as we sat across from each other at the cafe content in knowing the truth. We loved and we confessed it and we knew more in those moments than many feel in a lifetime.

 

 

Won't Ever Go Away

"You can never replace anyone because everyone is made of such beautiful specific details."

~ Celine, Before Sunrise

"I guess when you're young you just believe there will be many people with whom you connect with. Later in life you realize it will only happens a few times."

~ Celine, Before Sunset

 

 

 

Everything about us was true. All we went through was real and honest. Our time together is what life is - the full spectrum of emotions and experiences. No other people in relationships had it better or easier, no others were more or less in love. Any one who says that or pretends that are liars - to themselves and to each other. No relationship is ideal or without difficulties because two people are mysteries to each other and themselves - it is in the discovery of oneself and each other that we become who we can be together. We faltered and we got lost and were not able to find our way back to each other. In the fog of resentments and disappointments and the passing of time we changed as does everyone. I am sorry for my disorientation, my inability to communicate, my failure at loving in ways you needed to be loved. I miss and love you still. I don't believe that will ever go away.

 

The First Rainy Night

From the first rainy night in Killarney

(You have been)

A faithful friend

And sometimes lover

A presence in my life

Whenever I feel invisible

You have made me visible

(From the first rainy night)

More than on my skin

You are etched into my heart

 

If I...

 

If I...

Told the truth

Who would care

Who wipes the tears

In the night

Without sleep

 

 

I Want To Run...

 

Touch

I needed to be touched

When I found her waiting in the lobby of loneliness

After a long absence of feeling

My skin had forgotten

The sensation of fingertips

Her nakedness comforted my soul

While she told me stories with her eyes

As we danced in the shadows of time