archetype

Archetypes (c. k. williams) Often before have our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced, often I’ve been comforted through a dream by that gently sensitive pressure, but this morning, when I woke your hand lay across mine in an awkward, unfamiliar position so that it seemed strangely external to me, removed, an object whose precise weight, volume and form I’d never remarked: its taut, resistant skin, dense muscle-pads, the subtle, complex structure, with delicately elegant chords of bone aligned like columns in a temple. Your fingers begin to move then, in brief, irregular tensions and releasings; it felt like your hand was trying to hold some feathery, fleeting creature, then you suddenly, fiercely, jerked it away, rose to your hands and knees, and stayed there, palms flat on the bed, hair tangled down over your face, until with a coarse sigh almost like a snarl you abruptly let yourself fall and lay still, your hands drawn tightly to your chest, your head turned away, forbidden to me, I thought, by whatever had raised you to that defiant crouch. I waited, hoping you’d wake, turn, embrace me, but you stayed in yourself, And I felt again how separate we all are from one another, how even our passions, Which seem to embody unities outside of time, heal only the most benign divisions, That for our more abiding, ancient terrors we each have to find our own valor. You breathed more softly now, though; I took heart, touched against you, and, as though nothing had happened, you opened your eyes, smiled at me, and murmured—how almost startling to hear you in your real voice—“Sleep, love.”

Modest is Hottest, boys edition

young bucks come to town

Little Monster

 

Emerson Vernon Rose

We are so happy.

Atti with the Claus Family, my love and...my sauerkraut fermenting! Merry Christmas to me.

Adrienne Rich, or When it's cold all I want are Adrienne Rich and Theodore Roethke poems. I don't know why.

from Twenty-One Love Poems

I

Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseperable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.