It Is Marvelous by Elizabeth Bishop

It is marvelous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvelous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a birdcage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening.

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

Quietly by Kenneth Rexroth

Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet—
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and the penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

I Want by Kim Konopka

to shove my clothes
to one side of the closet,
give you the bigger half.
Quietly I’ll hide most of my shoes,
so you won’t know I have this many.

I will
rearrange furniture to add more,
find space on my shelves
for your many books,
nail up the placard that says
poets do it, and redo it, and do it again.

I want
to share a laundry basket,
get our clothes mixed up,
wait for the yelling
when my reds run wild
into your whites
turning them a luscious pink,
your favorite color of me.

I will
move my pillow
to the other side of the bed,
lay yours next to mine,
your scent on the fabric
always near me,
even on nights you’re away.

I will
buy a new bureau to hold your
thousand and one black socks,
find a place for all those work boots,
the ones I refer to as big and ugly.

I want
more pots and pans to wash,
piles of them leaning high
from late night meals
cooked naked and drunk,
red wine pouring into
a sauce of simmering
tomatoes, garlic, and olive oil,
kisses bitten between bites,
and platefuls of our late hours,
stacking up into dawn.

I want
to stock cupboards, closets, and pantry,
fill the house with us.
I want to gain weight with you
because our love,
our love makes me fat.

Variations on the Word Love by Margaret Atwood

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It’s the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it, too. How do we know
it isn’t what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard. As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there’s the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the star
that press us on with their deafness.
It’s not love we don’t wish
to fall into, but that fear.
This word is not enough but it will
have to do. It’s a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.

[Love is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink] by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Strawberries by Edwin Morgan

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open French window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates on our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air
in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you
let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

The Orange by Wendy Cope

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange--
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave--
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad you exist.

Transfiguration by Jack Hirschman

I am peasant
next to your language
because I am not
a peasant, simple
next to your love
because I wound it,
dumb next to your voice
because you are my lips
and leave me speechless,
leave me also loneliness,
hurt me
with the inexpressible,
and because you
live the way you do
and I cannot,
I must go elsewhere
in this corner of
my shoulder and weep you,
who love me inexhaustibly
more than I can ever hope
to silence with a poem,
because it is the silence
I hope for, because
it is the very pure
silence hope itself is,
and so I bend, to
my pencil I say: you,
to the beautiful page, you,
I say Yes without speaking,
I say many things, and still
there is room, there is space,
your face is where I see forever.

Prayer for a Marriage by Steve Scafidi

When we are old one night and the moon
arcs over the house like an antique
China saucer and the teacup sun

follows somewhere far behind
I hope the stars deepen to a shine
so bright you could read by it

if you liked and the sadnesses
we will have known go away
for awhile--in this hour or two

before sleep--and that we kiss
standing in the kitchen not fighting
gravity so much as embodying

its sweet force, and I hope we kiss
like we do today knowing so much
good is said in this primitive tongue

from the wild first surprising ones
to the lower dizzy ten thousand
infinitely slower ones—and I hope

while we stand there in the kitchen
making tea and kissing, the whistle
of the teapot wakes the neighbors.

Every Day You Play by Pablo Neruda

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened,
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic buckets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Last Love by Mary Kerr

For years I chose the man to suit the instant,
from good guy to goat boy.
Not one could bridal me. In place of lace veil,
I peered from bandage gauze.
And if, in rage, some suitor tore that off, the red sun
was a scald, and I felt scalped
and rocket-shot onto the nearest flight. So everyone
I kissed left hurt. One man
broke the table I served him bread on.
Another claimed my heart
was arsenic at its core. When my last love came,
he slid a palm across
mine eyes, lent me his mouth (a bitten
plum), lay his head
in the middle of me, bent me
to that. Nights now,
my face rests on the meadow of his chest—
so I’m a loose-petalled poppy
blown open, a girl again, for the last time
hearing the earth’s heartbeat.

My Husband's Back by Susan Minot

Sunday evening.
Breakdown hour. Weeping into
a pot of burnt rice. Sun dimmed
like a light bulb gone out
behind a gray lawn of snow.
The baby flushed with the flu
asleep on a pillow.
The fire won’t catch.
The wet wood’s caked
with ice. Sitting
on the couch my spine
collides with all its bones
and I watch my husband
peer past the glass grate
and blow.
His back in a snug plaid shirt
gray and white
leaning into the woodstove
is firm and compact
like a young man’s back.

And the giant world which swirls
in my head
stopping most thought
suddenly ceases
to spin. It sits
right there, the back I love,
animal and gamine, leaning
on one arm.
I could crawl on it forever
the one point in the world
turns out
I have traveled everywhere
to get to.

Habitation by Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

The Ache of Marriage, by Denise Levertov

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.