However

[binahboy.livejournal.com]

however we say it
we’re always wrong
When we say we can say it
right

When a daughter, a friend’s
daughter falls in her bathroom
and dies, the body found
two days later

however we say it
We’re always wrong
when we congratulate
a new acquaintance
on his recent wedding

and hear soon after
his wife’s madness
flared up like a secret
basement fire
the day of the honeymoon

~ A K Ramanujan

Stephen Dunn

[spiritualorchid.livejournal.com]

One day it will vanish,
how you felt when you were overwhelmed
by her, soaping each other in the shower,
or when you heard the news
of his death, there in the T-Bone diner
on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts
of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.
One day one thing and then a dear other
will blur and though they won't be lost
they won't mean as much,
that motorcycle ride on the dirt road
to the deserted beach near Cadiz,
the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,
his machine gun in your belly—
already history now, merely your history,
which means everything to you.
( You strain to bring back )

Stephen Dunn, "The Vanishings"

Cor Cordium - Algernon Charles Swinburne

[wanton-wonton.livejournal.com]

Cor Cordium

 Algernon Charles Swinburne

O heart of hearts, the chalice of love's fire,

       Hid round with flowers and all the bounty of bloom;

       O wonderful and perfect heart, for whom

The lyrist liberty made life a lyre;

O heavenly heart, at whose most dear desire

       Dead love, living and singing, cleft his tomb,

       And with him risen and regent in death's room

All day thy choral pulses rang full choir;

O heart whose beating blood was running song,

       O sole thing sweeter than thine own songs were,

               Help us for thy free love's sake to be free,

True for thy truth's sake, for thy strength's sake strong,

       Till very liberty make clean and fair

               The nursing earth as the sepulchral sea.