A request for poems about touch.

[marialuminous.livejournal.com]

Do any of you have favorite poems about touch? Specifically about longing to touch or to be held, and not necessarily in a sexual sort of way. Thanks.

This is one of my favorites, by Sonia Sanchez.

----------------------------

"Haiku"

There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch.

-Sonia Sanchez

In Me as the Swan, Leslie Williams

[moireach.livejournal.com]

In Me as the Swans
Leslie Williams

Not embittered
even while freezing
to the ice of their own lakes.
The night I was leaving for Madrid
into the noisy party a dazzling
friend-of-a-friend walked in: I want so much
(as a couple of kids on the dance floor want)
to slow the tempo, hold there longer,
to feel that seedly longing
to be pressed into the soil,
or that little lift the mothers get
when stocking larders, even now,
vestige of the primitive urge
to be provided for and to provide.

         I went alone to see that balcony
in Verona, after the Roman dramas and luxuries
above the Spanish Steps, when an elegant
footman brought a pack of Reds on a silver
tray and all but smoked them for you;
after your towels had warmed in London’s best
hotel, whose name I can’t remember and am kind of glad,
glad now for the rest of empty August and
the convent hostel’s eleven o’clock curfew,
glad now when I go to the distinguished dinners
that I have stood alone
wondering at illuminated books,
looking at Woolf’s spectacles under glass
or standing under Bourgeois’s giant spider
at the Tate—at times the best kept universe
was my own, no interceding docents
or guided tours, but a riverine serendipitous
wandering—waif, naïf.

                  I liked the light enormously so why
did I obey the bell that called me in?

Poem in the Matukituki Valley - James K. Baxter

[http://users.livejournal.com/_steelphoenix_/]

Because I recently rediscovered James K. Baxter's work, and I love this poem.

Some few yards from the hut the standing beeches
Let fall their dead limbs, overgrown
With feathered moss and filigree of bracken.
The rotted wood splits clean and hard
Close-grained to the driven axe; with sound of water
Sibilant falling and high nested birds.

In winter blind with snow; but in full summer
The forest blanket sheds its cloudy pollen
And cloaks a range in undevouring fire.
Remote the land's heart; though the wild scrub cattle
Acclimatized, may learn
Shreds of her purpose, or the taloned kea.

For those who come as I do, half-aware,
Wading the swollen
Matukituki waist-high in snow water,
And stumbling where the mountains throw their dice
Of boulders huge as houses, or the smoking
Cataract flings its arrows on our path - 

For us the land is matrix and destroyer,
Resentful, darkly known
By sunset omens, low words heard in branches;
Or where the red deer lift their innocent heads
Snuffing the wind for danger,
And from our footfall's menace bound in terror. 

Three emblems of the heart I carry folded
As charms against flood water, sliding shale:
Pale gentian, lily, and bush orchid.
The peaks too have names to suit their whiteness,
Stargazer and Moonraker,
A sailor's language and a mountaineer's.

And those who sleep in close bags fitfully
Besieged by wind in a snowline bivouac -
The carrion parrot with red underwing
Clangs on the roof by night, and daybreak brings
Raincloud on purple ranges, light reflected
Stainless from crumbling glacier, dazzling snow,

Do they not, clay in that unearthly furnace,
Endure the hermit's peace
And mindless ecstasy? Blue-lipped crevasse
And smooth rock chimney straddling - a communion
With what eludes our net - Leviathan
Stirring to ocean birth our inland waters?

Sky's purity; the altar cloth of snow
On deathly summits laid; or avalanche
That shakes the rough moraine with giant laughter;
Snowplume and whirlwind - what are these
But His flawed mirror who gave the mountain strength
And dwells in holy calm, undying freshness?

Therefore we turn, hiding our souls' dullness
From that too blinding glass: turn to the gentle
Dark of our human daydream, child and wife,
Patience of stone and soil, the lawful city
Where man may live, and no wild trespass
Of what's eternal shake his grave of time.