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