Night Watch

Outside the walls of black flint,
Eyeless.
How pale in sleep you lie.
Love: my love is just a breath
blown on the pane and dissolved.

The web of the spider is ripped with rain,
The geese fly on into the black cloud.

What can I do for you?
What can I do for you?
Can the touch of a finger mend
what a finger's touch has broken?

Blue-eyed now, yellow haired,
I stand in my old nightmare
beside the track, while you,
and over and over and always you,
plot into the death cars.
Sometimes you smile at me,
and I, I smile back at you.
How sweet the nature of the station master's roses!
How pure, how poster-like, the colors of this dream.

- Adrienne Rich

Song of Three Smiles

Let me call a ghost,

Love, so it be little:

In December we took

No thought for the weather.

Whom now shall I thank

For this wealth of water?

Your heart loves harbors

Where I am a stranger.

Where was it we lay

Needing no other

Twelve days and twelve nights

In each other’s eyes?

Or was it at Babel

And the days too small

We spoke our own tongue

Needing no other?

If a seed grow green

Set a stone upon it

That it learn thereby

Holy charity.

If you must smile

Always on that other,

Cut me from ear to ear

And we all smile together.

- W. S. Merwin

Air and Angels

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

- John Donne

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo... STAND on the highest pavement of the stair— Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair— Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise— Fling them to the ground and turn With a fugitive resentment in your eyes: But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. So I would have had him leave, So I would have had her stand and grieve, So he would have left As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, As the mind deserts the body it has used. I should find Some way incomparably light and deft, Some way we both should understand, Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. She turned away, but with the autumn weather Compelled my imagination many days, Many days and many hours: Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers. And I wonder how they should have been together! I should have lost a gesture and a pose. Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose. - T.S. Eliot

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

- William Butler Yeats