This is probably

my favorite love poem. Written by a scientist by vocation who does poetry on the side (!). I love the last four stanzas especially.

Love

Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
An eternity and a half of vigils
blanker than snow.

Tons of words
old as the tracks
of a platypus in the sand.

A hundred words we didn't write.
A hundred pyramids we didn't build.

Sweepings.
Dust.

Bitter
as the beginning of the world.

Believe me when I say
it was beautiful.

-Miroslav Holub

I love this.

It's sort of cloudy and makes me think of antiseptic.

Falling

You're pressing your fingers against the sky,
asking Jesus if he sees how close those trees are.
You don't believe in Jesus. A stewardess takes everything
sharp that could hurt you: plastic cups, prayer beads.
All of her omelets are gone. You're watching your window
like television--a show about the suburbs, those stubborn lives.
Whole families relax and look lovely at home.
You're folding your hands around the armrests,
feeling the vague sadness of the stewardess's voice.
There are no clouds today above the boxwoods.
You could live in a world so solidly blue.

-Lesley Dauer

So I've decided

that I'm going to start posting in here again, because keeping good poetry to myself feels selfish.

Worry

Say you want to sing right now,
over and over, the name of an old lover.
Aren't you afraid the neighbors will hear
your voice shaking a little, the way you shook
in that lover's arms, the night you started
losing one another? If you were me, you felt
a lessening no talking could lessen, a sense
the motel television made sense just then,
with its wash of poorly adjusted color
lighting the room. Between leaving
for more ice and forcing a toast
to the future, plastic glasses patting
and sloshing, you thought, "This
is what we're entitled to."

If, unlike me, you had pulled the curtains open,
overhead lights might have glinted
off the balcony railing for you
and exposed the courtyard, the shutdown
fountain. The two of you might have danced
down there, slowly and close. The two of you
might have rescued something beautiful.
If you were me, you wouldn't sing
that name either. You'd worry
about the neighbors. You'd worry like I do.

-Aaron Anstett

This is so beautiful it makes me want to cry.

Dear Marianela,

I hope you read this, because my phone is, as usual, out of service, and I want to say that those poems are wonderful. I'm posting "since feeling is first" here, so it'll be more easily accessible for me in the future. Thank you for showing them to me.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- e. e. cummings

Also for the

rapture.

I'm reposting this

poem for the rapture tomorrow.

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
            everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
            in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
            Through flames everywhere
            consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
    I would
            find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
            the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
            in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you'd hear mine and each of us
     would find
            the other's hand.
                         We know
            that it might not be so.
                          But for this quiet moment, if only for this
                             moment,
and against all reason,
            let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
            that somehow it would be so.
            I'd hear your cry, you mine--
                         And each of us would find a blinded hand.

-Tennessee Williams

I have a

really intimidatingly large amount of chemistry to do tonight, so I'm updating my blog instead. I really want a donut. I blame you, Carolyn. And ramen. Yesterday, I bought some balogna and salami, but I don't really feel like eating it anymore.

Again, the Body

When you spend many hours in a room alone
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself--
that is the problem of the body, not that it is moral
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe--
who would have thought cannibals would be so tender?
This could be any life: the vegetation is thick
and when there is an opening you follow
down its tunnel until one night you find yourself
walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved
friends are using their stone blades
to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,
though the chunk I ate was bland;
it was only when I chewed too far and bled
that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.
How difficult to be in a body,
how easy to be repelled by it,
eating one-sixth of the human heart.
Afterward, the hunters rested
their heads on each other's thighs
while the moon shone on the river
for the time it took to cross the wedge of sky
making its gash through the trees . . .

- Lucia Perillo

Incredible. ". . . that is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal / but that it is mortifying."