Friends, we are having some difficulty at home. Actually, to be more accurate, the trouble has been going on for a while, but we’ve been doing our best to correct it. My cat Apollo has been pretty brutally attacking my other cat Anna. For those of you who know Anna, you know she’s a sweetheart. [...]
Tag Archives: love
Plato’s Phaedrus
Phaedrus addresses much of the subject matter contained in Gorgias, rhetoric and right living, and closes with a discussion of writing. Yet these discussions are products of the pair’s original topic: love.
Valediction
Lady with the frilled blouse And simple tartan skirt, Since you have left the house Its emptiness has hurt All thought. In your presence Time rode easy, anchored On a smile; but absence Rocked love’s balance, unmoored The days. They buck and bound Across the calendar Pitched from the quiet sound Of your flower-tender Voice. [...]
Sonnet 106
When in the chronicle of wasted timeI see descriptions of the fairest wights,And beauty making beautiful old rhymeIn praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,I see their antique pen would have expressedEven such a beauty as you master now.So [...]
Evening Song
Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,Lakes and moon and fires,Cloine tires,Holding her lips apart. Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon,Miracle made vesper-keeps,Cloine sleeps,And I’ll be sleeping soon. Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters where the moonwaves start,Radiant, resplendently she gleams,Cloine dreams,Lips pressed against my heart. —Jean Toomer
Chamber Music XIII
Go seek her out all courteously, And say I come,Wind of spices whose song is ever EpithalamionO, hurry over the dark lands And run upon the seaFor seas and land shall not divide us My love and me. Now, wind, of your good courtesy I pray you go,And come into her little garden And sing at her window;Singing: The bridal wind [...]
The Science of the Night
I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,My careless sprawler,And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,That have become the land of your self-strangeness.What long seduction of the bone has led youDown the imploring roads I cannot takeInto the arms of ghosts I never knew,Leaving my manhood on a rumpled fieldTo guard you where [...]
