Save the Darlings

Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow roses pressing from a clear bowl. All day we lay on the huge bed, my hand stroking the deep gold of your thighs and your back. We slept and woke entering the golden room together, lay down in it breathing quickly, then slowly again, caressing and dozing, your hand sleepily touching my hair now. We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole. -- Donald Hall

All night the sound had come back again, and again falls this quiet, persistent rain. What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon, so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent- am I to be locked in this final uneasiness. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness. - Robert Creeley

- Debbie Millman

The way the world is not Astonished at you It doesn't blink a leaf When we step from the house Leads me to think That beauty is natural, unremarkable And not to be spoken of Except in the course of things The course of singing and worksharing The course of squeezes and neighbors The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out And the course of course of me Astonished at you The way the world is not - Bill Knott

- Jack Kerouac

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flappers and Philosophers

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

If you place a fern under a stone the next day it will be nearly invisible as if the stone has swallowed it. If you tuck the name of a loved one under your tongue too long without speaking it it becomes blood sigh the little sucked-in breath of air hiding everywhere beneath your words. No one sees the fuel that feeds you. - Naomi Shihab Nye

It is only three o'clock & already I'm alone Listening to the lovers next door Like Patsy Cline & her Man Throwing barebacked wooden furniture Like the real life bicker of true love. I love that hands-on, Die-while-you're-dark-haired-still & young, fists curled to desire, Take Me kind of love. They'll make love without apology & I'll be left to the afternoon & the autoerotic sounds of my American voice Getting it all down. - Lucie Brock-Broido

In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, "Is it good, friend?" "It is bitter-- bitter," he answered; "But I like it "Because it is bitter, "And because it is my heart." - Stephen Crane

You were spring, And I the edge of a cliff, And a shining waterfall rushed over me. - Witter Bynner, poem excerpt