Do Not Love Me Yet

Do not love me yet, for I
Am still a slender moon,
A scimitar about the heart
Too sharp to touch too soon.

Before I'm touched I need to grow
More full in golden light;
I need to smile upon my earth
And rule some patch of night.

I need to know what roads and fields
Lie in my domain
And dull my brand new ecstasies
With sophomoric pain.

I need the love of some blank boy
As cold and dark as me,
That we might grope in ignorance
And fear of what might be.

And then when I'm a silver bowl
And know what I can hold,
Then, then, perhaps, we could try love
If you are not too old.

By Turlough O'Carolan.
Copyright by
Nicholas Gordon

Bright World

And it came to pass, that meaning faltered; came detached
unexpectedly from the place I'd made for it, years ago,
fixing it there, thinking it safe to turn away, therefore,
to forget—hadn't that made sense? And now everything
did, but differently: the wanting literally for nothing
for no good reason; the inability to feel remorse at having
cast (now over some, now others), aegis-like, though it
rescued no one, the body I'd all but grown used to waking
inside of and recognizing, instantly, correctly, as mine,
my body, given forth, withheld, shameless, merciless—
for crying shame. Like miniature versions of a lesser
gospel deemed, over time, apocryphal, or redundant—both,
maybe—until at last let go, the magnolia flowers went on
spilling themselves, each breaking open around, and then
apart from, its stem along a branch of stems and, not of
course in response, but as if so, the starlings lifting, unlifting,
the black flash of them in the light reminding me of what I'd
been told about the glamour of evil, in the light they were
like that, in the shadow they became the other part, about
resisting evil, as if resistance itself all this time had been
but shadow, could be found that easily. . . What will you do?
Is this how you're going to live now? sang the voice in my
head: singing, then silent—not as in desertion, but as
when the victim suddenly knows his torturer's face from
before, somewhere, and in the knowing is for a moment
distracted, has stopped struggling—And the heart gives in.

BY: Carl Phillips

IN MY LIFE...

There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed.
Some forever, not for better.
And some have gone, and some remain.

All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can’t recall.
Some are dead and some are living.
In my life I love them all.

But of all these friends and lovers,
There is no one compares with you.
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new.

Though I know I’ll never ever lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them.
In my life I love you more.

Though I know I’ll never ever lose affection
For people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think of them.
But in my life I loved you more.
I love you more.
I love you more.

Romantic Quote

"Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence."

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt