unask

 

love is one of many great fires

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.

Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.

Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.

Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Jack Gilbert

 

 

fire and light

In the sea
there are no orange trees
and in Seville
no love.

Dark lady, you are fire and light;
please lend me your sunshade.

My skin is green:
juice of the lemon
juice of the lime.

And in your words,
your sour sweet words
I float, like a trivial fish.

In the sea, no orange trees.
Ah, love!

But not in Seville.

Lorca (transl. Tom Davis)

 

 

In the Pavilion, watching the Spring

 

A gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by the world.

Three times the bell tolls; it echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside-down in the lake.

Love is a vast sea. It cannot be emptied.
And the springs of insight flow easily, everywhere.

Where is nirvana?
Why, here, of course.

 

Ho Xuan Huong, transl. Tom Davis

 

 

 

 

O glistening sunlight

O glistening sunlight,
O iridescence, O unique shining,
the wedding of the Godhead:
O burning jewel.

The clothes you wear are noble
They fall straight and clear;

Your friendship is with angels:
A citizen of the sacred.

Come, enter into the palace of the King.

 

Hildegard of Bingen transl. Tom Davis

 

 

Ariel

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

...

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

Wallace Steevens

 

 

 

a shout of joy

The human seed goes down in the ground
like a bucket into the well.

It will come up filled and over-filled
with unimaginable beauty.

Your mouth closes, here,
and immediately opens
with a shout of joy, there.

 

Rumi, On the day of my death, Ode 911.

 

 

 

the here and the now

I would like you to think I love you warmly
Like brown cat yawning among sheets in the linen-cupboard.

I would like you to think I love you resourcefully
Like rooftop starlings posting chuckles down the flue.

I would like you to think I love you extravagantly
Like black cat embracing the floor when you pick up the tin opener.

I would like you to think I love you accurately
Like Baskerville kern that fits its place to a T.

I would like you to think I love you chronically
Like second hand solemnly circumnavigating the clock.

And O I want to love you, not in the absent tense, but in the here and the now
Like a present-minded lover.

 

U.A. Fanthorpe