Valentine

Valentine

By Elinor Wylie


Too high, too high to pluck

My heart shall swing.

A fruit no bee shall suck,

No wasp shall sting.

If on some night of cold

It falls to ground

In apple-leaves of gold

I’ll wrap it round.



And I shall seal it up

With spice and salt,

In a carven silver cup,

In a deep vault.




Before my eyes are blind

And my lips mute,

I must eat core and rind

Of that same fruit.




Before my heart is dust

At the end of all,

Eat it I must, I must

Were it bitter gall.

But I shall keep it sweet

By some strange art;

Wild honey I shall eat

When I eat my heart.




O honey cool and chaste

As clover’s breath!

Sweet Heaven I shall taste

Before my death.

For Love

For Love

By Robert Creeley

for Bobbie



Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above

the others to me

important because all



that I know derives

from what it teaches me.

Today, what is it that

is finally so helpless,



different, despairs of its own

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.



If the moon did not ...

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but

what would I not

do, what prevention, what

thing so quickly stopped.

That is love yesterday

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.


Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and

whimsical if pompous



self-regard. But that image

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me

because it is my own.



Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,

what have I made you into,



companion, good company,

crossed legs with skirt, or

soft body under

the bones of the bed.



Nothing says anything

but that which it wishes

would come true, fears

what else might happen in



some other place, some

other time not this one.

A voice in my place, an

echo of that only in yours.



Let me stumble into

not the confession but

the obsession I begin with

now. For you



also (also)

some time beyond place, or

place beyond time, no

mind left to



say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love

it all returns.

Beautiful Wreckage

Beautiful Wreckage



By W.D. Ehrhart



What if I didn’t shoot the old lady

running away from our patrol,

or the old man in the back of the head,

or the boy in the marketplace?



Or what if the boy—but he didn’t

have a grenade, and the woman in Hue

didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit

with seven Marines just for food,



Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee,

Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski

didn’t die in a medevac chopper

between Con Thien and Da Nang.



In Vietnamese, Con Thien means

place of angels. What if it really was

instead of the place of rotting sandbags,

incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud.



What if the angels were Ames and Ski,

or the lady, the man, and the boy,

and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud

and healed his shattered knee?



What if none of it happened the way I said?

Would it all be a lie?

Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful?

Would the dead rise up and walk?

A Dream Within A Dream

A Dream Within a Dream

By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?