Le Petit Prince

"If some one loves a flower, of which just one single blossom grows in all the millions and millions of stars, it is enough to make him happy just to look at the stars."

Antoine de Saint Exupery

Anna Akhmatova

I pressed my hands together under cover
Of my veil. "Why are you so pale today?"
-- Because I intoxicated my lover
With numbing anguish, and drove him away.

How could I forget? He went out, reeling.
His mouth dreadful -- twisted, grim...
I ran down the stairs, not touching the railing,
At the gate I caught up with him.

I shouted hoarsely -- "It was just a joke.
You mustn't leave me -- I'd rather be dead."
He smiled calmly, terribly, then spoke:
"Don't stand out here in the wind," he said.

translated by Lyn Coffin

"No party is any fun unless seasoned with folly."

Desiderius Erasmus

L'amour fou

"Longing on a large scale is what makes history"

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Even long after my death

Even long after my death
long after your death
I want to torture you.
I want the thought of me
to coil around your body like a serpent of fire
without burning you.

I want to see you lost, asphyxiated, wander
in the murky haze
woven by my desires.

For you, I want long sleepless nights
filled by the roaring tom-tom of storms
Far away, invisible, unknown.
Then, I want the nostalgia of my presence
to paralyse you.


by Maria, from Surrealist Love Poems

What We Have in Common

After the great Diaspora of the citizens of the land of barren longing,
none remain but Earth, and Sky, and their Madness.

Earth wrapped pear-shaped in whale-bone corset,
inching closer to hourglass extinction,
rose crèmes and wine for wheat and water.

Sky dimming, diaphanous on down pillows,
refusing form or flight, tempestuous
bird cries breaking free like bourbon over ice.

Madness hovering gently over them like a canopy,
whirling thick, full of forfeited knowingness,
clenched heart barking damning decrees:


Join the moonlight blood-hunt!

Accept the bow of lost consequence!

Devour with pearly teeth lupine love!

Where is your sense of whimsy?

"Dahlias, now. A raw yardful of dahlias -- we are making our way through them toward the street. A morning. After the first night I slept at his house, which, as you know and he does not, is the first night I slept at any man's house. Through the wet grass, walking behind him. All of a sudden he stops and bends aside. Snaps off a single dark red dahlia, my eyes going out of me like a cry. Lover, I thought. Now he keeps going and reaches his car and jumps in, placing the dahlia on the seat beside him, drives off. With a wave. My car is parked farther down the street."

from Plainwater by Anne Carson

The metallic taste of those memories brings me back, bone-cold.

What a mess I’ve made.

Surfacing, time tarnished, he was
slender hipped, still as a moored ship,
saltwater skin on box-spring seabed,
always a lover of loosened knots, trespass,
the after-quiet, silence.

347 leagues is a long way to pray
when you find yourself facedown in the sand,
full of fire, slowly turning to glass,
unable to escape that sliver of God, displaced
beneath whirlpools, those oblique Black Sea eyes.

He could not be wrecked alone on that filthy island.

Inland, longing and bereft,
I am quietly ruined by the beauty
in believing

in nothing

Carthage

I am Carthage, snatched off the map.
Once warmed by the crazed African sun,
my fingers now extend under the seabed of the Mediterranean.
I wait until time becomes a circle and the past is transformed;
until the past has not passed and my walls fall up from the sand,
walls of gold and ivory envied by Ra and his pharaohs.
Dido will walk backwards out of the underworld,
will be reborn on the funeral pyre of her mad desolation.
I will be reformed through looking glass magic,
sandy streets ever strewn with his fresh footprints.
I will thrive on the stolen rouge kisses of Venus.
Rome will never be born.

I've Been Let Down...

"You cannot will intoxication, vertigo, a ravening or wild love"

Lucie Brock-Broido