a couple of years ago i was in the poetry section at our local borders books. usually i'm the only one standing in the poetry section, but this time a goodlooking man of about 35 is looking at the shelves then turns to me and tells me he's about to meet his girlfriend. he wants to bring her a book of love poetry. do i know anything about poetry, and could i make a recommendation.
fuck. i was caught off-guard and couldn't think of a thing. looking at the titles i suggested pablo neruda, a great sensualist if there ever was one. other than that i came up with nada, zilch, zero.
at least i could find next to nothing from what was on offer at borders that night.
we all have favorite love songs and love movies. i'm guessing here, unless, in the phrase of thom gunn yr all too sour or realistic. what about favorite love poems. there are two for me, tomas transtromer's 'at funchal' and rene char's 'the basket-weaver's love'.
and yrs?
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Fuck, I'm caught off-guard too, but here are the first two that come to mind:
First Love by Samuel Beckett
and these lines from A Thousand Plateaus' eigth plateau 'Trois nouvelles, ou "qu'est-ce qui s'est passé"', p.238 in the french edition (my translation):
it might be better to conceive things as a matter of perception: one walks into a room, and one sees some thing as already there, as having just arrived, even if it hasn't happened yet. And we know that what is happening, is already doing so for the last time, that it's over. One hears a "I love you", which one knows is being said for the last time. Perceptive semiotic. My god, what could possibly have happened, whilst all is and stays imperceptible, and so that all be and stays imperceptible for ever?
my first thot was almost anything by Frank O'Hara. in "To the Harbormaster" there's: "To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will." but everywhere in his work is love: "I kiss your cup / which will not be used again / till you come back." big poems & little it's all abt love.
He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
--Yeats
Creeley's Valentine for Pen & almost everything David Shapiro has written.
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