"Tigers" - Eliza Griswold and a request

[theprohibition.livejournal.com]

Poems about liking/loving someone who will never love you back?  I need something to help cope with or relate to right now.

Also, a poem in return:
"Tigers" - Eliza Griswold

What are we now but voices
who promise each other a life
neither one can deliver
not for lack of wanting
but wanting won't make it so.
We cling to a vine at the cliff's edge.
There are tigers above
and below.  Let us love
one another and let go.

Comments

I got these from the comm. They helped me.

[tophet-perish.livejournal.com]

After Years
Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.



Carol Ann Duffy:

All Days Lost Days


Living
in and out of the past,
inexplicably
so many things have died
in me.

In and out like a tide,
each tear
holds a tiny hologram.
Even this early
I am full of years.

Here are the little gravestones
where memory
stands in the wild grass,
watching the future
arrive in a line of big black cars.

All days
lost days, in and out of themselves
between dreaming
and dreaming again and half-

Xavier Villaurrutia
Death in Décimas (fragments)
I

There’s no proof of existence
that is greater than this fate:
living without seeing you
and dying in your presence!
This limpid recognition:
loving what’s never been seen
and waiting for the unseen;
this falling with no landing
is the anguish of thinking
given I die I exist.

II

If you are there everywhere,
on land and in the water,
in the air encasing me
and in voracious fire;
if you go there everywhere,
traveling with me in my thoughts,
in the heaving of my breath
and in my blood’s disarray,
are you not, Death, in my life,
water, fire, dust and wind?

IX

If I keep you imprisoned,
and caress you and hide you;
if I feed you in the depths
of my most intimate wound,
if my death gives you your life
and my frenzy such delights,
what will become of you, Death,
when, when I must leave this world,
untying this tangled knot,
you too will have to leave me?



Eric Gamalinda - Las Ruinas del Corazon
Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain
and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man

more beautiful than you, they said you pretty much lost control
of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away

annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams
of him being cut and blown apart, or spread on the rack,

or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin guardians
of the Alhambra, Saint Ursula and Saint Susana, to send him home

and make him stay forever. And they answered her prayers
and killed Philip the Handsome at twenty-eight.

Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and she wrapped
his body in oil and lavender, and laid him out in a casket of lead,

and built a marble effigy of the young monarch in sleep,
and beside it her own dead figure, so he would never think

he was alone. And she kept his body beside her, and every day
for the next twenty years, as pungent potions filled the rooms,

she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks into his pot,
and memories of his young body woke her adamant desire.

She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death
may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life

by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely
in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin,

then sliced a thick portion of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate
an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of his chest,

then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine.
Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles

and washed everything down with sweet jerez.
Then she decided she was ready to die.

But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments
in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,

and the marble to be selected from the most secret veins
of the earth and placed where no man could see it,

because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep

with their eyes open, because the angles tremble
from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits

of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,
and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.

[tophet-perish.livejournal.com]

Cascando
-- Samuel Beckett


1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

[fiercecupcake.livejournal.com]

That was beautiful.

[poppyromanov.livejournal.com]

One Season (Tony Hoagland)

That was the summer my best friend
called me a faggot on the telephone,
hung up, and vanished from the earth,

a normal occurance in this country
where we change our lives
with the swiftness of hysterical finality

of dividing cells. That month
the rain refused to fall,
and fire engines streaked back and forth crosstown

towards smoke-filled residential zones
where people stood around outside, drank beer
and watched their neighbors houses burn.

It was a bad time to be affected
by nearly anything,
especially anything as dangerous

as loving a man, if you happened to be
a man yourself, ashamed and unable to explain
how your feelings could be torn apart

by something ritual and understated
as friendship between males.
Probably I talked too loud that year

and thought an extra minute
before I crossed my legs; probably
I chose a girl I didn't care about

and took her everywhere,
knowing I would dump her in the fall
as part of evening the score,

part of practicing the scorn
it was clear I was going to need
to get across this planet

of violent emotional addition
and subtraction. Looking back, I can see
that I came through

in the spastic, furtive, half-alive manner
of accident survivors. Fuck anyone
who says I could have done it

differently. Though now I find myself
returning to the scene
as if the pain I fled

were the only place that I had left to go;
as if my love, whatever kind it was, or is,
were still trapped beneath the wreckage

of that year,
and I was one of those angry firemen
having to go back into the burning house;
climbing a ladder

through the heavy smoke and acrid smell
of my own feelings,
as if they were the only
goddamn thing worth living for.

[poppyromanov.livejournal.com]

The More Loving One (WH Auden)

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Two Housman poems

[catalania.livejournal.com]

Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;

I only vex you the more I try.

All's wrong that ever I've done or said,

And nought to help it in this dull head:

Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye.



But if you come to a road where danger

Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share,

Be good to the lad that loves you true

And the soul that was born to die for you,

And whistle and I'll be there.


A.E. Housman





Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;

I only vex you the more I try.

All's wrong that ever I've done or said,

And nought to help it in this dull head:

Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye.



But if you come to a road where danger

Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share,

Be good to the lad that loves you true

And the soul that was born to die for you,

And whistle and I'll be there.


A.E. Housman

[teithiwr.livejournal.com]

Oh my, that poem you posted is quite amazing.

[wind-hover.livejournal.com]

Just to say: this request was exactly what I needed... thank you to both the requester and those who have fulfilled it. :) And the poem in return is wonderful.

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

"Sometime with One I Love"
Walt Whitman

Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn'd love,
But now I think there is no unreturn'd love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return'd,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

“Hyacinth”
Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am in love with him
To whom a hyacinth is dearer
Than I shall ever be dear.

On nights when the field-mice
Are abroad, he cannot sleep.
He hears their narrow teeth
At the bulbs of his hyacinths.

But the gnawing at my heart
He does not hear.