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Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire

As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face

As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,

Which promise always wine, by mottled fire

More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall

Into my hands, through all that naïve light,

It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight

As must have been the first great gift of all.

Protocols

VIKRAM SETH

What can I say to you? How can I now retract

All that that fool, my voice, has spoken—

Now that the facts are plain, the placid surface cracked,

The protocols of friendship broken?

I cannot walk by day as now I walk at dawn

Past the still house where you lie sleeping.

May the sun burn away these footprints on the lawn

And hold you in its warmth and keeping.

Jamesian

THOM GUNN

Their relationship consisted

In discussing if it existed.

From Proverbs and Song Verse

ANTONIO MACHADO

The language of love

was never the worse

for some overstatement.

Sonnet XLIII: How Do I Love Thee?

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

XLIV: You must know that I do not love and that I love you

PABLO NERUDA

You must know that I do not love and that I love you,

because everything alive has its two sides;

a word is one wing of the silence,

fire has its cold half.

I love you in order to begin to love you,

to start infinity again

and never to stop loving you:

that’s why I do not love you yet.

I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held

keys in my hand: to a future of joy—

a wretched, muddled fate—

My love has two lives, in order to love you:

that’s why I love you when I do not love you,

and also why I love you when I do.

Code Poem for the French Resistance

LEO MARKS

The life that I have is all that I have,

And the life that I have is yours.

The love that I have of the life that I have

Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have,

Yet death will be but a pause,

For the peace of my years in the long green grass

Will be yours and yours and yours.

The Smaller Orchid

AMY CLAMPITT

Love is a climate

small things find safe

to grow in—not

(though I once supposed so)

the demanding cattleya

du côté de chez Swann,

glamor among the faubourgs,

hothouse overpowerings, blisses

and cruelties at teatime, but this

next-to-unidentifiable wildling,

hardly more than a

sprout, I’ve found

flourishing in the hollows

of a granite seashore—

a cheerful tousle, little,

white, down-to-earth orchid

declaring its authenticity,

if you hug the ground

close enough, in a powerful

outdoorsy-domestic

whiff of vanilla.

Sonnet 116

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh no, it is an ever fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

RUMI

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll