their love

The world is full of love poems. And many are too awkward and personal to even read. Sappy and relentlessly hopeful? Abstract and untrue? These are but a few reasons some of us shrink from love poems. But here is a sampling of love poems with what I consider a low-awkward factor. I guess it’s relative, but… there you go.

Mario Benedetti was an Uruguayan poet and turned out to be a cute little old man, though it took 70-80 years to make that a reality. Although he is well known in the Spanish-speaking world, I can’t seem to find a whole lot of his works translated into English. For part of the 1970s and 1980s, Benedetti lived in exile (because of Uruguayan dictatorship) in Argentina, Peru, Cuba and Spain. In addition to his poetry, he wrote novels and short stories.

Ustedes y Nosotros

Ustedes cuando aman
exigen bienestar
una cama de cedro
y un colchón especial

nosotros cuando amamos
es fácil de arreglar
con sábanas qué bueno
sin sábanas da igual

ustedes cuando aman
calculan interés
y cuando se desaman
calculan otra vez

nosotros cuando amamos
es como renacer
y si nos desamamos
no la pasamos bien

ustedes cuando aman
son de otra magnitud
hay fotos chismes prensa
y el amor es un boom

nosotros cuando amamos
es un amor común
tan simple y tan sabroso
como tener salud

ustedes cuando aman
consultan el reloj
porque el tiempo que pierden
vale medio millón

nosotros cuando amamos
sin prisa y con fervor
gozamos y nos sale
barata la función

ustedes cuando aman
al analista van
él es quien dictamina
si lo hacen bien o mal

nosotros cuando amamos
sin tanta cortedad
el subconsciente piola
se pone a disfrutar

ustedes cuando aman
exigen bienestar
una cama de cedro
y un colchón especial

nosotros cuando amamos
es fácil de arreglar
con sábanas qué bueno
sin sábanas da igual.

see an english translation.

Lisel Mueller was born in Germany (Hamburg) in 1924 and moved to the States with her family when she was 15. She taught at Goddard College, University of Chicago, Elmhurst College.

Romantics
Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann

The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

John Paul Davis writes poems, designs websites and does other things like keep a blog. A resident writer with Vox Ferus, he resides in Chicago. His poem, The Zombie, Rejected By His Human Lover, Responds was recently published by the Cordite Poetry Review. It can be found here. Given the shiny new date of publication and out of respect for the review, I haven’t included the text here, but it’s worth the click.

Theodore Wratislaw (1871-1933) was an English poet and solicitor. I know little else of this man, so I’ll leave it at this.

Sonnet Macabre

I love you for the grief that lurks within
Your languid spirit, and because you wear
Corruption with a vague and childish air,
And with your beauty know the depths of sin;

Because shame cuts and holds you like a gin,
And virtue dies in you slain by despair,
Since evil has you tangled in its snare
And triumphs on the soul good cannot win.

I love you since you know remorse and tears,
And in your troubled loveliness appears
The spot of ancient crimes that writhe and hiss:

I love you for your hands that calm and bless,
The perfume of your sad and slow caress,
The avid poison of your subtle kiss.

poets and written things

“birds sing sweeter than books tell how,” says e.e. cummings. And though he may be right, there is little will stop the poet from trying to write it down anyway.

Pablo Neruda, poeta y diplomático chileno. Su poesía abarcó el ámbito político y formó parte del “ataque literario” contra Hitler, por lo que le fue otorgado el Premio Stalin de la Paz.

Deber del poeta

A quien no escucha el mar en este viernes
por la mañana, a quien adentro de algo
casa, oficina, fábrica o mujer,
o calle o mina o seco calabozo:
a éste yo acudo y sin hablar ni ver
llego y abro la puerta del encierro
y un sin fin se oye vago en la insistencia,
un largo trueno roto se encadena
al peso del planeta y de la espuma,
surgen los ríos roncos del océano,
vibra veloz en su rosal la estrella
y el mar palpita, muere y continúa

Así por el destino conducido
debo sin tregua oír y conservar
el lamento marino en mi conciencia,
debo sentir el golpe de agua dura
y recogerlo en una taza eterna
para que donde esté el encarcelado,
donde sufra el castigo del otoño
yo esté presente con una ola errante,
yo cirucule a través de las ventanas
y al oírme levante la mirada
diciendo: cómo me acercaré al océano?
Y yo trasmitiré sin decir nada
los ecos estrellados de la ola,
un quebranto de espuma y arenales,
un susurro de sal que se retira,
el grito gris del ave de la costa.

Y así, por mí, la libertad y el mar
responderán al corazón oscuro.

..read it in english..

Bukowski (prolific drinker, writer, womanizer) wrote this poet, a far less beautiful account on poetry:

this poet he’
d been drink
ing 2 or 3 da
ys and he wa
lked out on t
he stage and
looked at th
at audience
and he just k
new he was
going to do i
t. there was
a grand pian
o on stage a
nd he walke
d over and li
fted the lid a
nd vomited i
nside the pia
no. then he c
losed the lid
and gave his
reading.

they had to r
emove the st
rings from t
he piano and
wash out the
insides and r
estring it.

I can unders
tand why th
ey never invi
ted him bac
k. but to pas
s the word o
n to other un
iversities tha
t he was a
poet who lik
ed to vomit i
nto grand pi
anos was un
fair.

they never c
onsidered th
e quality of
his reading.
I know this
poet: he’s ju
st like the re
st of us: he’l
l vomit anyw
here for mon
ey.

that little thing is the gift a “slam-ish” piece answering the question of “why write?” mayda del valle performs poetry with passion and grace. and to my knowledge… no hurling in pianos, so go ahead and book this poetess.

The Trouble With Poetry by Billy Collins, who will not be blessed with a bio in this post because he already got one here.

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night –
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky –

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti –
to be perfectly honest for a moment –

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Ok. And that’s all for now!