For first time visitors, I recommend beginning at the beginning with the Introduction. For all the rest of you lot, just move along.

La Figlia Che Piange

O quantum te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair-
Lean on a garden urn-
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair-
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise-
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.

	Anonymous

The Sinking Stone

High in the alpine snowfields when a

stone slips from a peak and rolls to

the glacier below the sun will heat

it in the burning days of spring and

it will melt itself a hole & disappear

in the snow    I like that stone burned

hot from loving you am sinking deep in-

to a cold vast no- where ice land of

your loving someone else instead of me!

    Anonymous  

Something I Know About Her

She touches when she talks--
must touch to smooth out syntax with her fingertips,
must lay on her hand to hear her echo,
to feel the words you don't speak
below the ones you do.

What she means by it is
if she touches you, listen:
to surprise her at it
    would be life waking a sleepwalker
    between two dreams--
would trap her in this tedious
world of mere
                    jive
                        words.

    Anonymous

Streets

Loves that ended long ago:

Sometimes you meet them in the street
sometimes you meet them in dreams.

When you meet them in the street, they resemble dreams
when you meet them in dreams, they resemble streets

streets where half the houses are empty
because you don't remember whose faces

appear in the darkness behind the windows.

	Anonymous

Lovers

They have been our mortal fools
Since we stood erect, cooked meat, made gods—
Perhaps winning our first laughter
With their windy breathing, their verses
Even now, wave after wave of the air we breathe
Is broadcast with the babble of their ballads,
Making us unwitting celebrants
Of their discovery that robins sing,
The moon shines, violets grow, spring
Arrives, summer endures, and trees and seas
And breezes whisper, all for them.  And all

Stop, fade, die, are mute, mocking, when love is gone,
Absent, late.  Theirs is no ignoble or trivial pain
That, little less than death,
Has such wide capacity and power
To turn bitter, curse man, beast and stone;
Makes desolation of vast seconds that pinch the brain
To despair, suicide, murder.  Yet sometimes in rare
Madness, or pure sanity more awesome,
One will force its shape and sound into an art
That chokes laughter when we recognize
The single human image of its transfigured wisdom.

    Anonymous

Love is so short,
forgetting is so long.