Stag's Leap: Poems

I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.

I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.

it is forbidden to love where we are not loved

Some people think I should be over my ex by now — maybe I thought I might have been over him more by now. Maybe I’m half over who he was, but not who I thought he was, and not over the wound, sudden deathblow as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core of our life together.

each hour is a room of shame, and I am swimming, swimming, holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being naked with the clothed, or being a child, having to try to behave while hating the terms of your life.

let’s part equals, as we were in every bed, pure equals of the earth

He fell in love with her because I didn't suit him anymore - nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he saw it for me.

And you couldn’t say, could you, that the touch you had from me was other than the touch of one who could love for life—whether we were suited or not—for life, like a sentence. And now that I consider, the touch that I had from you became not the touch of the long view, but like the tolerant willingness of one who is passing through.

If I could choose, a place to die,” it would never have been in your arms, old darling

as if languagelessness was a step up, in evolution, from the chatter of consciousness.

There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All, Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small; A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent, And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.

I've said that he and I had been crazy for each other. But maybe my ex and I were not crazy for each other. Maybe we were sane for each other, as if our desire was almost not even personal - it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there seemed to be no other woman or man in the world.

I want to relearn the intervals, to journey with a man among the thirds and fifths, augumented, diminshed, with a light touch, sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual adores and dotes - and of course what I reaaly want is some low notes.

I guess that's how people go on, without knowing how.

And sometimes I feel as if, already, I am not here—

So much had become so connected to him that it seemed to belong to him, so that now, flying, for hours, above the Atlantic still felt like being over his realm.

and my job is to eat the whole car of my anger, part by part, some parts ground down to steel-dust.

but he does not want to talk about it, he wants a stillness at the end of it.

One of us maybe a little too much a hunter, the other a little too polar of affection, polar of summer mysteriousness, magnetic in reticent mourning.

And it entered my strictured heart, this morning, slightly, shyly as if warily, untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness and plenty of his ongoing life, unknown to me, unseen by me, unheard by me, untouched by me, but known by others, seen by others, heard, touched.

And no, he does not want to meet again, in a year—when we part, it is with a dry bow and Good-bye.

and for an instant he's alive toward me, a gem of sea of pond in his eye. Then that retreat into himself, which always moved me, as if there were a sideways gravity, in him, toward some vanishing point.

Now I see I've been hoping, each time we meet, that he would praise me for how well I took it, but it's not to be.

But if feels as if he's not here— though he's here, it feels as if, for me, there's no one there

We have always been going back, since birth, back toward not being alive.

I think he loved being loved

That moved me so much about you, the way you were a dumbstruck one and yet you seemed to know everything I did not know

And slowly he starts to seem more far away, he seems to waft, drift at a distance

and love seemed to rest, on us, in a place where, for that hour, it felt death could not reach, and someone was singing in my hearing, without words, that no one can live without reaching death, but I could have lived without having loved almost without reserve, and for a moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.