Poems in Love & Romance

The market closes. Heat leans on the stones,
and via dei Coronari empties out
like a lung. I carry paper bags
that smell of figs and warm wax paper,
the fruit so ripe it bruises at a touch,
and I am thinking of your hands,
how they would lift one gently, thumb
against the split skin, patient as a man
who knows the sweetest thing is always
the one about to fall apart.

We met in a courtyard where the laundry
hung between two windows like a truce,
white sheets breathing in the afternoon.
You said the light in Rome is vulgar,
too much gold, too much insistence,
and I loved you then for being difficult,
for wanting shade. Some nights I still
hear the bicycle chains below, the squeak
and click, the small machinery of people
going home to someone, or to no one.

What I mean is: love is not a cathedral.
It is a kitchen at eleven, cold tiles
under bare feet, the kettle's private
argument with steam, a plum stone
left on the sill. It is the way you fold
my sweater wrong and I say nothing.
It is the fig, split open in my palm.
Eat it before it spoils, you tell me,
and so I do. The juice runs down my wrist,
sweet and mortal, and the evening
turns its slow coin over in the sky.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.