Words to my Friend
Understand me: I am a mediocre being,
Not good, not very bad, peaceful, a bit of a dag...
but I love the dying day which grows dim by degrees,
our fire, the cloistered intimacy of our home..
Where the lamps, veiling their amber transperancies,
Set a golden hue, bring a comfort and a sureity
And there by the fire, our pooches lay in comfort,
eyes raised as we go about our routines
And settle as we do, in the warmth that we share
anon
Walt Whitman
Primeval my love for the women I love,
O bride! O wife! more resistless, more enduring than I can tell, the thought of you!
Then separate, as disembodied, the purest born,
The ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation,
I ascend - I float in the regions of your love, Oman,
O sharer of my roving life
Six Years for Nancy - Alice Bloch
A friend calls us an old married couple
I flinch, you don't mind
On the way home you ask why I got upset
We are something like what she said you say
I say No
We are'nt married no one has blessed this union no one gave us kitchen gadgets
We bought our own blender
We built our own common life in the space between the laws
Six years
What drew us together a cartographer a magnetic force our bodies our speech the wind a hunger
Listeners both we talked
I wanted: your lean wired energy control decisivness honesty your past as an athlete
You wanted: my 'culture' gentleness warmth
Of course that was doomed
You brought out my anger I resist your control your energy exhausts me my hands are too hot for you
You gained the weight I lost
My gentleness is dishonest your honesty is cruel you hate my reading I hate your motorcycle
Yet something has changed
You have become gentler
I more decisive We walk easilyaround our house into each other's language
There is nothing we cannot say together
Solid ground under our feet we knew the landscape We have no choice of destination only the route is a mystery every day a new map of the same terrain
Alice Bloch (born 1947)
Gertrude Stein
from Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Faded
I love my love with a v
Because it is like that
I love my love with a b
Because I am beside that
A king.
I love my love with an a
because she is a queen
I love my love and a a is the best of them
Think well and be a king,
Think more and think again
I love you with a dress and a hat
I love you and not with this or with that
I love my love with an a y because she is my bride
I love her with a d because she is my love beside
Thank you for being here
Because you are not there.
And with and without me which is and without she she can be late and then and how and all around we think and found that it is time to cry she and I.
Gertrude Stein 1874-1946
W.J.Cory
Heraclitis
They told me, Heraclitis, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remebered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dearold carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.