Last Faun.
For love is flesh, it is a flower flooded with blood. Did you think it was just a little chat across a table?
Either love is a shrine or a scar
A love loss poem by Japanese poet Kikuo Takano with the deadly earnestness of a farewell note appended to a mirror
(Tr. Fitzsimmons)
Like two mirrors
facing
we gave each
the other
identically.
A Leonard Cohen for the lovers
You Do Not Have to Love Me
I wrote all these songs for you
I burned red and black candles
...
I prayed for you
I prayed that you would love me
and that you would not love me
Rilke on stillborn loves, in the excellent translation of Stephen Mitchell (bless his soul)
You who never arrived
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
My top 24 best poems read in 2023.
#7
Rilke on stillborn loves, in the excellent translation of Stephen Mitchell
You who never arrived
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
One of my dearest poems by Julio Cortázar, who wrote poetry with that tenderness of feather and lilies he is known for.
For his cumpleaños!
After the Party
And when everyone had gone
and just the two of us were left
how beautiful it was to know that you were there like an oasis
Looking for courage with this beautiful Louise Glück
Matins
You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I am looking for courage.
Stunned by this T. S. Eliot.
Because I do not hope to turn again
Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Crushed, completely crushed by this poem by Miguel Archete, on friends lost.
I know that you are here in the lamplight,
in the ash of this cigarette, and in this glass;
you listen and watch me travel into the past
toward other days, as I sit here and write.
Nichita Stănescu's poem most quoted by lovers in Romania.
For bae 🖤 🫦
A Poem
Tell me. If I ever caught you
and kissed the arch of your foot,
wouldn't you limp a little after that
for fear of crushing my kiss? ...
Pulitzer poet James Wright, just being a fucken legend
The Jewel
There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind
My bones turn to dark emeralds.
I love bad breakup poetry!
Illiterate
Shadab Vadji
I know a man
who reads all inscriptions on ancient stones
and who knows
the grammars of all languages, dead or alive,
but who cannot read
the eyes of a woman
whom he thinks he loves.
Looking tonight for that word hummingbird.
Raymond Carver
Suppose I say summer,
write the word "hummingbird,"
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box.
The thing I remember the most about Pulitzer poet Franz Wright are not some of his most stunning vulnerable poetry, but the fact that he would leave love notes scattered daily around the house for his wife and that after he passed, she kept finding his notes
Needed a good cry this morning.
This love poem by Richard Siken did the trick.
Scheherazade
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon,
That means we are inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
Lost count of how many times Mark Strand broke me down today
The Good Life
The good life gives no warning.
It weathers the climates of despair
and appears, on foot, unrecognised, offering nothing,
and you are there.
W. S. Merwin on one of my obsessions, Odysseus search for home.
Odysseus
Therefore he went. And what wonder
If sometimes he could not remember
Which was the one who wished on his departure,
And which improbable, remote and true,
Was the one he kept sailing home to?
Ada Limón's heartbreaking poem written during the pandemic
The End of Poetry
enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough
I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate,
enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,
I am asking you to touch me.
Reading Leonard Cohen on my commute.
You Know Who I Am
If you should ever track me down
I will surrender there
And I'll leave with you one broken man
Whom I will teach you to repair
If you need a poem to tear up over tonight, this is the one.
The Catalogues of Memory
Gwendolyn MacEwen
love we have learned nothing
we have learned
nothing
not on the gold island
not on the washed beaches
we were two ships of burning glass
we were two ships of burning glass
This beautiful Rilke. To try to conjure some beauty to her night.
Do you still remember: falling stars
and our heart felt like a single thing
beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance -
and was whole, as if it would survive them!
This poem by Rilke of farewell to summer in the translation of Stephen Mitchell is perfect.
Autumn Day
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Linda Pastan, on the gaps between things.
Consider the Space Between Stars
Consider the white space
between words on a page, not just
the margins around them.
Consider the space
between lovers after a quarrel,
the white sheet, a cold metaphor
between them.
Denis Johnson
Heart burning rubber
Loving you is every bit as fine
as coming over a hill into the sun
at ninety miles an hour darling when
it's dawn and you can hear the stars unlocking themselves from the designs of God beneath
the disintegration orchestra of my black Chevrolet
Anne Carson, writing on one of my favourite paintings, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.
Nighthawks
I wanted to run away with you tonight
but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you -
Past and future circle round us
now we know more now less
in the institute of shadows.
My top 24 best poems read in 2023.
#18
This Richard Siken from his Crush is so so good.
Scheherazade
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon,
That means we are inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
My Top 24 best poems read in 2023.
Tied at
#23
with Paz
Hating Love
Roque Dalton
I don't believe in angels
but the moon is now dead for me.
The last glass of wine is gone
before the thirst I'm suffering from.
Without your hands my heart
is the enemy in my chest
Tr. H. Martin
I find the melancholy of this late Borges, timidly letting us in as he looks back at his life, the things he didn't become, beautiful.
Things that might have been
I think about things that might have been and never were
History without Helen's face
The love we never shared.
The heart-wrenching poem Paul Celan wrote to his firstborn son, who died at birth (tr. M. Hamburger)
Epitaph for François
The two doors of the world
stand open:
opened by you
in the twinight
Aside Anna Akhmatova, Lars Gustafsson also wrote a stunning poem on Lot's Wife.
For some it's hard not to
look back with a cold eye
And stay forever at home in a town,
which, for that reason, doesn't exist
What a stunning poem by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Fady Joudah.
Things that don't happen
If a rose could protect the story
I would let myself be plucked for it
anxiously
and patiently
Unboxing my books. This shelf is something like my pride and joy. Most of my Japanese literature.
You got a lot of Mishima, Kobo Abe, some Tanizaki, Soseki, some Haiku... oh, there was my Murakami phase...
This Leonard Cohen.
Just because.
Well, just because
@kisses4proust
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will
Cosmology
Linda Pastan
Someone has spilled the moon
all over the trees;
Why am I afraid of the dark
but more afraid of what the light reveals:
this moonlight lies everywhere
like a beautiful torn shroud;
My top 24 best poems read in 2023.
#16
This slick Jazzy Dionisio D. Martinez love poem
Charlie Parker: Almost Like Being in Love
These are the shadows of water when water
is thick and no longer transparent.
They are everywhere - on the walls,
across the ceiling.
This Dionisio Martinez love poem is perfect:
Jazz, Charlie Parker and the eros of water and shadows.
Charlie Parker: Almost Like Being in Love
These are the shadows of water when water
is thick and no longer transparent.
They are everywhere - on the walls,
across the ceiling.
Such melancholy from this poem by old Borges...
Remorse
I have committed the worst sin of all
That a man can commit. I have not been Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion
Drag me ...
My parents bred and bore me for a higher faith in the human game of nights and days.
What a fucking amazing love poem by Canadian P. K. Page.
Find Me
and when I see my figure through his eyes
I weep as though I'd seen the ghost of all
young girls, long dead,
who never should have died.
Yesterday I bumped into two rare poems by Clarice Lispector collected by her biographer Benjamin Moser.
The one that stuck with me was published in Diario de São Paulo, in 1947:
Flee, my terror, there's still time
Double the efforts of your measure
Plunge your wing in the air
Rilke lamenting the stars he sees are likely all gone, yet the poet knows which is still alive
Lament
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky
stands like a white city.
This poem by Louise Glück...
Oof
The Letters
Tomorrow it will be autumn.
We will sit together on the balcony
watching the dry leaves drift over the village
like the letters we will burn.
A behemoth of a poem by Brazilian modernist Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Your Shoulders Hold Up the World
A time comes when death doesn't help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, with no escapes.
Oh, nothing to see here. Just young Sylvia Plath being bloody brilliant.
Metaphors
I am a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
What a stunning love poem by Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan
@GhassanZaqtan
in the translation of Fady Joudah.
The Lover's Song
You have no clue
I visit you every night
to tell you my latest dream
This poem by Patrizia Cavalli, on the fear of starting again. Sometimes, not always, poems find you.
In other words: you must begin again.
Oh savage fear.
So build the little house again
and gather yourself up into it
hot-blooded swollen torn.
I love how this poem Frank O'Hara wrote to his poet friend John Ashbery reads like a whimsical friendship note you would pass around in class to tell your friend how much you like them
This poem by Vasko Popa translated by Simic just blew my mind in a thousand pieces.
Orphan Absence
Built like an empty gorge
You smell of absence
Alone you gave birth to yourself
My top 24 best poems read in 2023.
#6
This Gwendolyn MacEwen,
because of her absence.
Absences
You have never looked so fine
as now, when you are not here.
- So shot with light,
so sharply defined -
I cut my eyes on the keen edges of your absences
My God, how powerful this poem by late Adélia Prado
At this exact moment on the 20th of July,
nineteen hundred and seventy-six,
the sky is thick, it's cold, I am ugly,
I just got a kiss in the mail
Forty years old: I don't want a knife
or even cheese -
I want hunger.
I love, love songs of breakup that talk of books being love spoils.
In this one FBC wants his Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal back and bemoans she took his books even though she only reads on Kindle.
Has anyone ever understood Mayakovsky like in this Denis Johnson?
It's after one. You're probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my God, my President, my darling
Fuck me. This Raymond Carver... oof.
This Word Love
For S.
But that word love -
this word grows dark, grows
heavy and shakes itself, begins
to eat, to shudder, and convulse,
its way through the paper
until we too have dimmed in
its transparent throat
Catherine Wing, a recently discovered poet for me, being the troubadour of lost love.
Darker Sooner
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
The stubborness of longing.
I Still Have Everything You Gave Me
Naomi Shihab Nye
It is dusty on the edges.
Slightly rotten.
I guard it without thinking.
...
I do not ache
I would not trade.
Just Canadian poet Gwendolyn MacEwen being freaking brilliant
Poem
It is not lost, it's moving forward always
...
Do not light matches on the dark of its shore.
It will breathe you out, it will recede from you.
What is here, what is with you now, is yours.
God I love this miniature gem by Salvatore Quasimodo, here translated by Allen Mandelbaum.
And Suddenly It's Evening
Each alone on the heart of the earth,
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it's evening.
A criminally good poem by Vicente Huidobro, translated of course by Merwin.
Poetry is self-transubstantiation
Poetry is a Heavenly Crime
I am absent but deep in this absence
There is the waiting for myself
And this waiting is another form of presence
The waiting for my return
Such an exquisite and sensual poem by Vicente Aleixandre.
Rain
The waist is not a rose.
Not a bird. Not feathers.
The waist is the rain,
fragility, a moan
giving itself to you.
Some Osip Mandelstam translated by Robert Chandler.
Life has tired me to death;
Life has no more to offer.
But I love my poor earth
Since I know no other
What we had, we have.
Jean Valentine's reading of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Orpheus: You. You running across the field.
A hissing second, not a word,
and there it was, our underworld:
behind your face another, and another, and I
away.
I feel so seen by this Leonard Cohen
@kisses4proust
agrees
I am too loud when you are gone
I am John the Baptist, cheated by mere water
and merciful love, wild but over known