"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.