AMARYLLIS - after Rilke

Amaryllis

You've seen a cat consume a hummingbird, 

scoop its beating body from the pyracantha bush 

and break its wings with tufted paws 

before marshaling it, whole, into its bone-tough throat; 

seen a boy, heart racing with cocaine, climb 

from a car window in a tumble on the ground, 

his search for pleasure ending in skinned palms; 

heard a woman's shouts as she is pushed into the police cruiser, 

large hand pressing her head into the door, 

red lights spinning their tornado in the street.

But of all that will fade; on the table is the amaryllis,

pushing its monstrous body in the air,

requiring no soil to do so, having wound

two seasons' rot into a white and papered bulb,

exacting nutrition from the winter light,

culling from complex chemistry the tints

and fragments that tissue and pause and build

again the pigment and filament.

The flower crescendos toward the light,

though better to say despite it,

gores through gorse and pebble

to form a throat, so breakable, open

with its tender pistils, damp with rosin,

simple in its simple sex, to burn and siphon

itself in air. Tongue of fire, tongue

of earth, the amaryllis is the rudiment

of form itself, forming its meretricious petals

to trumpet and exclaim.

How you admire it. It vibrates

in the draft, a complex wheel

bitten with cogs, swelling and sexual,

though nothing will touch it. You forced it

to spread itself, to cleave and grasp,

remorseless, open to your assignments—

this is availability, this is tenderness,

this red plane is given to the world.

Sometimes the heart breaks. Sometimes

it is not held hostage. The red world

where cells prepare for the unexpected

splays open at the window's ledge.

Be not human you inhuman thing.

No anxious, no foible, no hesitating hand.

Pry with fiber your course through sand,

point your whole body toward the unknown,

away from the dead.

Be water and light and land,

no contrivance, no gasp, no dream

where there is no head.

Mark Wunderlich

1968

PRIVILEGE OF BEING

Many are making love.  Up above, the angels

in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing

are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond

and the texture of cold rivers.  They glance

down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—

it must look to them like featherless birds

splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—

and then one woman, she is about to come,

peels back the man’s shut eyelids and says,

look at me, and he does.  Or is it the man

tugging the curtain rope in the dark theater?

Anyway, they do, they look at each other;

two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,

startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet

lubricious glue, stare at each other,

and the angels are desolate.  They hate it.  They shudder pathetically

like lithographs of Victorian beggars

with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags

in the lewd alleys of the novel.

All of creation is offended by this distress.

It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,

rising.  The lovers especially cannot bear it,

it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that

they close their eyes again and hold each other, each

feeling the mortal singularity of the body

they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,

and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,

I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realised

that you could not, as much as I love you,

dear heart, cure my loneliness,

wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him

that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.

And the man is not hurt exactly,

he understands that his life has limits, that people

die young, fail at love,

fail of their ambitions.  He runs beside her, he thinks

of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of

coming, clutching each other with old, invented

forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready

to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely

companionable like the couples on the summer beach

reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes

to themselves, and to each other,

and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels. 

Robert Hass

1941

THE HUG

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed;
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.



Thom Gunn
1929-2004

HE SITS DOWN ON THE FLOOR OF A SCHOOL FOR THE RETARDED

I sit down on the floor of a school for the retarded,
a writer of magazine articles accompanying a band
that was met at the door by a man in a child's body
who asked them, 'Are you the surprise they promised us?'

It's Ryan's Fancy, Dermot on guitar,
Fergus on banjo, Denis on penny-whstle.
In the eyes of this audience, they're everybody
who has ever appeared on TV. I've been telling lies
to a boy who cried because his favourite detective
hadn't come with us; I said he had sent his love
and, no, I didn't think he'd mind if I signed his name
to a scrap of paper; when the boy took it, he said,
'Nobody will ever get this away from me,'
in the voice, more hopeless than defiant,
of one accustomed to finding that his hiding places
have been discovered, used to having objects snatched
out of his hands. Weeks from now I'll send him
another autograph, this one genuine
in the sense of having been signed by somebody
on the same payroll as the star.
Then I'll feel less ashamed. Now everybody is singing,
'Old MacDonald had a farm,' and I don't know what to do

about the young woman (I call her a woman
because she's twenty-five at least, but think of her
as a little girl, she plays that part so well,
having known no other), about the young woman who
sits down beside me and, as if it were the most natural
thing in the world, rests her head on my shoulder.

It's nine o'clock in the morning, not an hour for music.
And, at the best of times, I'm uncomfortable
in situations where I'm ignorant
of the accepted etiquette; it's one thing
to jump a fence, quite another to blunder
into one in the dark. I look around me
for a teacher to whom to smile out my distress.
They're all busy elsewhere. 'Hold me,' she whispers, 'hold me.'

I put my arm round her. 'Hold me tighter.'
I do, and she snuggles closer. I half-expect
someone in authority to grab her
or me; I can imagined this being remembered
for ever as the time the sex-crazed writer
publicly fondled the poor retarded girl.
'Hold me,' she says again. What does it matter
what anybody thinks? I put my other arm around her,
rest my chin in her hair, thinking of children
real children, and of how they say it, 'Hold me,'
and of a patient in a geriatric ward
I once heard crying out to his mother, dead
for half a century, 'I'm frightened! Hold me!'
and of a boy-soldier screaming it on the beach
at Dieppe, of Nelson in Hardy's arms,
of Frieda gripping Lawrence's ankle
until he sailed off in his Ship of Death.

It's what we all want, in the end,
to be held, merely to be held,
to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips,
for every touching is a kind of kiss).

She hugs me now, this retarded woman, and I hug her.
We are brother and sister, father and daughter,
mother and son, husband and wife.
We are lovers. We are two human beings
huddled together for a little while by the fire
in the Ice Age, two hundred thousand  years ago.


Alden Nowlan
1933-1983

THE HUG

A woman is reading a poem on the street 

and another woman stops to listen. We stop too. 

with our arms around each other. The poem 

is being read and listened to out here 

in the open. Behind us 

no one is entering or leaving the houses. 

Suddenly a hug comes over me and I’m 

giving it to you, like a variable star shooting light 

off to make itself comfortable, then 

subsiding. I finish but keep on holding 

you. A man walks up to us and we know he hasn’t 

come out of nowhere, but if he could, he 

would have. He looks homeless because of how 

he needs. “Can I have one of those?” he asks you, 

and I feel you nod. I’m surprised, 

surprised you don’t tell him how 

it is – that I’m yours, only 

yours, etc., exclusive as a nose to 

its face. Love – that’s what we’re talking about, love 

that nabs you with “for me 

only” and holds on. 

So I walk over to him and put my 

arms around him and try to 

hug him like I mean it. He’s got an overcoat on 

so thick I can’t feel 

him past it. I’m starting the hug 

and thinking, “How big a hug is this supposed to be? 

How long shall I hold this hug?” Already 

we could be eternal, his arms falling over my 

shoulders, my hands not 

meeting behind his back, he is so big! 

I put my head into his chest and snuggle 

in. I lean into him. I lean my blood and my wishes 

into him. He stands for it. This is his 

and he’s starting to give it back so well I know he’s 

getting it. This hug. So truly, so tenderly 

we stop having arms and I don’t know if 

my lover has walked away or what, or 

if the woman is still reading the poem, or the houses – 

what about them? – the houses. 

Clearly, a little permission is a dangerous thing. 

But when you hug someone you want it 

to be a masterpiece of connection, the way the button 

on his coat will leave the imprint of 

a planet in my cheek 

when I walk away. When I try to find some place 

to go back to. 

Tess Galagher

1943

SONG OF CHILDHOOD

When the child was a child 

It walked with its arms swinging, 

wanted the brook to be a river, 

the river to be a torrent, 

and this puddle to be the sea.

When the child was a child, 

it didn’t know that it was a child, 

everything was soulful, 

and all souls were one.

When the child was a child, 

it had no opinion about anything, 

had no habits, 

it often sat cross-legged, 

took off running, 

had a cowlick in its hair, 

and made no faces when photographed.

When the child was a child, 

It was the time for these questions: 

Why am I me, and why not you? 

Why am I here, and why not there? 

When did time begin, and where does space end? 

Is life under the sun not just a dream? 

Is what I see and hear and smell 

not just an illusion of a world before the world? 

Given the facts of evil and people. 

does evil really exist? 

How can it be that I, who I am, 

didn’t exist before I came to be, 

and that, someday, I, who I am, 

will no longer be who I am?

When the child was a child, 

It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding, 

and on steamed cauliflower, 

and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.

When the child was a child, 

it awoke once in a strange bed, 

and now does so again and again. 

Many people, then, seemed beautiful, 

and now only a few do, by sheer luck.

It had visualized a clear image of Paradise, 

and now can at most guess, 

could not conceive of nothingness, 

and shudders today at the thought.

When the child was a child, 

It played with enthusiasm, 

and, now, has just as much excitement as then, 

but only when it concerns its work.

When the child was a child, 

It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread, 

And so it is even now.

When the child was a child, 

Berries filled its hand as only berries do, 

and do even now, 

Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw, 

and do even now, 

it had, on every mountaintop, 

the longing for a higher mountain yet, 

and in every city, 

the longing for an even greater city, 

and that is still so, 

It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees 

with an elation it still has today, 

has a shyness in front of strangers, 

and has that even now. 

It awaited the first snow, 

And waits that way even now.

When the child was a child, 

It threw a stick like a lance against a tree, 

And it quivers there still today.

Peter Handke

1942

From Wings of Desire, 1987

Dir. Wim Wenders

MAY

The blessed stretch and ease of it -

heart's ease. The hills blue. All the flowering weeds

bursting open. Balm in the air. The birdsong

bouncing back out of the sky. The cattle

lain down in the meadow, forgetting to feed.

The horses swishing their tails.

The yellow flare of furze on the near hill.

And the first cream splatters of blossom

high on the thorns where the day rests longest.

All hardship, hunger, treachery of winter

forgotten.

This unfounded conviction: forgiveness, hope.

Kerry Hardie

1951