Read Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy for Free Online

second glass when I sometimes
    weep and you start to get sleepy – I love
    to drink and cry with you, and end up
    sobbing to a sleeping man, your
    long body filling the couch and
    draped slightly over the ends, the
    untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.
    Yes, we know we will make love, but we’re
    not getting ready to make love,
    nor are we getting over making love,
    love is simply our element,
    it is the summer night, we are in it.
    SHARON OLDS

Snow Melting
    Snow melting when I left you, and I took
    This fragile bone we’d found in melting snow
    Before I left, exposed beside a brook
    Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know,
    Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day.
    Though at the time her wild human hand
    Had gestured inexplicably, I say
    Her meaning now is more than I can stand.
    We’ve reasons, we have reasons, so we say,
    For giving love, and for withholding it.
    I who would love must marvel at the way
    I know aloneness when I’m holding it,
    Know near and far as words for live and die,
    Know distance, as I’m trying to draw near,
    Growing immense, and know, but don’t know why,
    Things seen up close enlarge, then disappear.
    Tonight this small room seems too huge to cross.
    And my life is that looming kind of place.
    Here, left with this alone, and at a loss
    I hold an alien and vacant face
    Which shrinks away, and yet is magnified –
    More so than I seem able to explain.
    Tonight the giant galaxies outside
    Are tiny, tiny on my windowpane.
    GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG

Wild strawberries
    What I get I bring home to you:
    a dark handful, sweet-edged,
    dissolving in one mouthful.
    I bother to bring them for you
    though they’re so quickly over,
    pulpless, sliding to juice,
    a grainy rub on the tongue
    and the taste’s gone. If you remember
    we were in the woods at wild strawberry time
    and I was making a basket of dockleaves
    to hold what you’d picked,
    but the cold leaves unplaited themselves
    and slid apart, and again unplaited themselves
    until I gave up and ate wild strawberries
    out of your hands for sweetness.
    I lipped at your palm –
    the little salt edge there,
    the tang of money you’d handled.
    As we stayed in the wood, hidden,
    we heard the sound system below us
    calling the winners at Chepstow,
    faint as the breeze turned.
    The sun came out on us, the shade blotches
    went hazel: we heard names
    bubble like stock-doves over the woods
    as jockeys in stained silks gentled
    those sweat-dark, shuddering horses
    down to the walk.
    HELEN DUNMORE

Strawberries
    There were never strawberries
    like the ones we had
    that sultry afternoon
    sitting on the step
    of the open french window
    facing each other
    your knees held in mine
    the blue plates in our laps
    the strawberries glistening
    in the hot sunlight
    we dipped them in sugar
    looking at each other
    not hurrying the feast
    for one to come
    the empty plates
    laid on the stone together
    with the two forks crossed
    and I bent towards you
    sweet in that air
    in my arms
    abandoned like a child
    from your eager mouth
    the taste of strawberries
    in my memory
    lean back again
    let me love you
    let the sun beat
    on our forgetfulness
    one hour of all
    the heat intense
    and summer lightning
    on the Kilpatrick hills
    let the storm wash the plates
    EDWIN MORGAN

For Desire
    Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
    and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
    surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
    or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
    of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
    Give me the lover who yanks open the door
    of his house and presses me to the wall
    in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
    and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
    and begin their delicious diaspora
    through the cities and small towns of my body.
    To hell with the saints, with the martyrs
    of my childhood meant to instruct me
    in the power of endurance and faith,
    to hell with the next