Poetry request

[resonant]

Tapping into all the Poetry Month enthusiasm with a request: I'm looking for poems about long love. Not new love, not yearning for love that's about to happen, and not bad old bitter marriage-that-used-to-be-love, but established, mature love.

I've been surprised (and rather depressed) at how difficult this is to find.

One poem that I like quite well is The Country of Marriage by Wendell Berry. Parts of it don't quite ring true to me -- they sound more like a man talking to his deity than a man talking to his wife -- but I love this:

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are --
that puts us in the dark.

Comments

[merrily]

Aha! I have one for you, kind of. It's a newish-love-looking-forward-to-long-old-love poem. I found it in the Garrison Keillor-edited collection, Good Poems.

Prayer For A Marriage
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 neighbours.

[resonant]

Aww! That made me smile, especially "not fighting/gravity so much as embodying/its sweet force."

[anatsuno]

I immediately thought of this song from Brel I love so much - Chanson des vieux amants, song of tow old lovers - and I found people who've attempted to do good translations of it (instead of just singable transpositions). Check this out (and read the comments, there are more translations in there). I love it so.

http://bktkn.blogspot.com/2008/11/la-chanson-des-vieux-amants-jacques.html

[resonant]

Pretty! Wish I spoke French -- translations of songs/poetry never quite work.

[anatsuno]

This translator doesn't believe this is actually true. :)
(though I'm not claiming the translations I linked you to ar of the highest order, at all).

[anatsuno]

though for the video, if you want to watch/listen, I'd prefer this one to the one embedded in the post...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1DpjXQUDsI

[reginagiraffe]

Not really a poem and not *exactly* about mature love but I really like it so... here.

[resonant]

Only in Australia does "skier" rhyme with "beer"!

[china_shop]

Also in New Zealand. *g*

[reginagiraffe]

*g*

I just really like the idea of love being the accumulation of shared experience and growing together to make a unique entity. Which doesn't make it any less real and special. Just not mystical.

[libitina]

That's awesome. I don't think I'd ever heard of him before.

[china_shop]

It's a song rather than poetry, but have you heard Tim Minchin's If I didn't have you? :-)

[resonant]

OK, what are the odds? (points at previous comment, placed five minutes earlier)

[china_shop]

Heeeeeee! \o/

(And fairly good odds, because the song is just that good. *g*)

[reginagiraffe]

*highfives*

[china_shop]

*highfives back*

[reginagiraffe]

Storm is another one of my favorite. (*adores*)

[china_shop]

Yes! And Not Perfect. I think Not Perfect was the first one I saw. *looooves* I had to go out and buy his DVD. :-)

[fox]

I believe it's Sonnet 130. Can't swear I've got that right without looking it up, and I'm not going to bother looking it up, so I can't swear I've got the punctuation exactly right either. But, you know.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath which from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, walks on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied by false compare.

[libitina]

It has a bit of death, but not in a bad way. How about

Ask No Return
Horace Gregory

Ask no return for love that's given
embracing mistress, wife or friend,
. ask no return:
on this deep earth or in pale heaven,
awake and spend
hands, lips and eyes in love,
in darkness burn,
the limbs entwined until the soul ascend.

Ask no return of seasons gone:
the fire of autumn and the first hour of spring,
the short bough blossoming
through city windows when night's done,
when fears adjourn
backward in memory where all loves end.
in self again, again the inward tree
growing against the heart
and no heart free.

From love that sleeps behind each eye
in double symmetry
ask no return,
even in enmity, look! I shall take your hand;
nor can our limbs disjoin in separate ways again,
walking, even at night on foreign land
through houses open to the wind, through cold and rain,
waking alive, meet, kiss and understand.

[libitina]

Okay, so I bring you more death. But I'm paging through my old beloved poetry anthology to see what fits the request. And, oddly enough, I think that Frost might do. In an unlikely poem: The Death of the Hired Man.

[tevere]

I immediately thought of Elaine Feinstein's 'Talking to the Dead'. She wrote it after her husband's death-- and even though they clearly didn't have a fairytale perfect marriage, her love for him shines through just so much. The whole book makes me cry and cry. I could quote the whole thing, but here are a couple:

Skin

There was a time before we met as well
as this inexorable after. If I had not

found you, who would I have been?
A woman who could dance a stylish tango

fretted with too much wanting -- sex, success --
spoilt, self-seeking, and a little shallow

distrusting what I could not understand. There were
so many men I cannot list them all.

Some I abandoned, some abandoned me.
One I loved well gave me a diamond --

I often wondered what happened to him --
Then you became the skin of all I am.

Winter

The clock's gone back. The shop lights spill
over the wet street, these broken streaks
of traffic signals and white headlights fill
the afternoon. My thoughts are bleak.

I drive imagining you still at my side,
wanting to share the film I saw last night,
-- of wartime separations, and the end
when an old married couple reunite --

You never did learn to talk and find the way
at the same time your voice teases me.
Well, you're right, I've missed my turning,
and smile a moment at the memory,

always knowing you lie peaceful and curled
like an embryo under the squelchy ground,
without a birth to wait for, whirled
into that darkness where nothing is found.

A Visit

I still remember love like another country
with an almost forgotten landcape
of salty skin and a dry mouth. I think
there was always a temptation to escape
from the violence of that sun, the sudden
insignificance of ambition,
the prowl of jealousy like a witch's cat.

Last night I was sailing in my sleep
like an old seafarer, with scurvy
colouring my thoughts, there was moonlight
and ice on green waters.
Hallucinations. Dangerous nostalgia.
And early this morning you whispered
as if you were lying softly at my side:

Are you still angry with me? And spoke my
name with so much tenderness, I cried.
I never reproached you much
that I remember, not even when I should;
to me, you were the boy in Ravel's garden
who always longed to be good,
as the forest creatures knew, and so do I.

[hellpenguin]

As soon as I find my favorite Poetry book, I will hook you up.

[nestra]

Checked the poems I have posted in my journal, and found this one.

[schemingreader]

I couldn't find the Sharon Olds poem I wanted--there's this one, called "True Love". But then I found the one I wanted:

"Primitive"

I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand the message: I have
pleased you greatly last night. We sit
quietly, side by side, to eat,
the long pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant sauce dripping out,
and glance at each other askance, wordless,
the corners of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along the sill to show
a friend sits with a friend here.

[kass]

I like:

Reshaping each other

We are differently shaped
with everyone we love,
sticking out here, receding
there, interlocking couples.

We grow roles as trees
extrude bark; perhaps
the real life is under
neath in the thin green sap.

I am the finder of things
in drawers; I make lists
and menus; I read maps.
You lift and haul and open.

I select; you reject.
You brood and I fuss.
You dream and I arrange.
You regret and I flee.

If we are yin and yang
it is in a crazy quilt
of push, pull and merge.
Strange as sphinxes,

common as goldfish, neither
alike nor different finally
but ratcheted together
in the gears of marriage.

-- Marge Piercy, from What Are Big Girls Made Of?

[pollyanna]

Well, this one by Robert Burns immediately came to mind:

John Anderson, My Jo

John Anderson, my jo, John,
When we were first acquent;
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snaw;
But blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill the gither;
And mony a cantie day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we'll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.


And I think of Atlas by U.A. Fanthorpe as a poem about a long-standing relationship.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

This one sprung to mind, and I'm sure I can think of others. I know Donald Hall has written a lot about his long marriage to Jane Kenyon, but much of it is while talking about her death, and I'm not sure that's what you're going for.

Man and Wife
Robert Lowell

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days’ white.
All night I’ve held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive… .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God’s creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in our twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

[moireach.livejournal.com]

I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone
Stephen Dunn

The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we’d just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we’re all saying
each other’s names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I’ve come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they’re all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
Everytime the kids turn their backs
I touch my wife’s breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin—
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.