Memoir of a Marriage, Part III – Disappointed Love

Tags

disappointment, Love, Lovers, Marriage, memoir, poems, poetry, Relationships, Romance, Soul Mates

When I first fell in love, it was a hot thing—urgent, possessive, almost feverish at times. I truly saw love as being two souls in one body. We were opposites that complemented each other. He was my missing half, and I his.

But I wasn’t content with that. In some fervent way I wanted to be him, become him, live inside him, feel my heart beating in his body and his in mine. I wanted to meld with him.

Not surprisingly, I discovered this just wasn’t happening. There were times when our love felt like that, when we seemed so close, but then it would slacken and drift away. And when that happened, he seemed almost like a stranger to me, someone I barely knew, and did not understand at all.

That’s when I wrote the following poem.

 Love’s Duplicity

I look at you and see
Incredibly
A face at once slighted by closeness, yet
Dimmed by the distance I hold you;
A face overlooked and over known, yet
Laced by fingers, fearful to possess you.
And you look from eyes
Half-halting
Wary that you know me.

I look at you and see
Incredibly,
How the lines forming you
Flow not into my own
But lie separately, falling
On planes apart.
Reasoning makes no clearer,
No nearer
That we lie two, not one.

I look at you and see
Incredibly,
How the brown hollow of your eyes
Will ever haunt mine, and
I cry for me, for all whose heart’s desire
Is held ever at half embrace:
Half wanting, half waiting,
Half knowing
What we’ll never know.

I look at you and see
Incredibly,
How these feelings we are one
Or we should be,
How we are strangers
Never touching,
Lie at odds in me.
Is it odd I reap of love
the bittersweet?

Eventually I realized we weren’t soul mates and probably never would be. And while I still yearned for us to become closer, he was content with the way things were.

While I wanted to know everything about him, there were parts of me—important parts—that he simply had no interest in. Like my passion for the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, writing. He knew I wanted to be a writer—that I wrote poetry and short stories and kept a journal—and he liked that about me. But he had no interest in what I was writing, never asked to read anything. Never seemed interested when I offered to share what I wrote. He wasn’t curious at all.

Finally, I let go trying to become closer, and we drifted away from each other. Our marriage became almost sterile, perfunctory. We shared a house, children, a bed. That was all. I realized that I no longer loved him. At times I barely liked him.

A veil of sadness descended over me, a yearning for something I feared I would never have. I felt my soul mate was still out there somewhere, waiting for me. But I realized I may never find him.

The following poem expresses that feeling of waiting for something that may never happen. It was originally published in a college journal.

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

I watch them every summer, the hot hills

Crouched like a lion beside the road,

Tawny skin pulled taut across

Long, lean ribs.

I would take my hand and trace

Round ripples of male muscle,

Feel the hot rise and cool dip

of his body.

I see the arrogance—rocky head held

High against a blazing sky, the patient

Power unmindful of the heat

that holds me.

One day he will rise, stretch his sensuous

Body against the sky with one, low moan.

On silent paws he will pursue me.

And so I wait.

by Deborah J. Brasket

We’d been married ten years by then, but I felt I could no longer live like this. It was time for me to leave.

(To be continued) In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago, an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.

Memoir of a Marriage, Part II – Erotic Love

Tags

erotic love, intimacy, Love, Lovers, making love, Marriage, poems, poetry, Relationships, Romance

photo here

In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago, an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.

Part II – The Geometry and Geography of Love

I wrote these poems while still quite young, and very much in love, and loving the way our bodies “meet and mingle” when making love.  I loved the “lean lines” and “anxious angles,” the patterns we made spread across the bed.

I was fascinated by how the masculine and feminine forms complemented each other. It inspired the following drawing, something I was playing around with at the time, enjoying the lean look of pen on paper.

A Pleasing Design

I find satisfaction in form,
In bare geometric patterns,
In line upon line bisecting line,
In spacious planes spread out and open.

I like this silky stretch of skin,
Simple curves and supple cones,
I like the firm feel of your flesh,
Swollen contours, anxious angles.

Mostly I like the intricate pattern
We create, stripped bare and essential
The piling planes and lacing lines,
The way we meet and mingle,

When one fine ray of you cuts
Clean through me, and within that
intersecting interlude we come
To a common and satisfying point.

By Deborah J. Brasket

Several love poems I wrote at the time involves the “topography” or “geography” of love, exploring each other’s bodies as if exploring an intimate landscape, with all its hills and streams, forests and caves, and vast flowing deserts.

Even then, so long ago, I was fascinated by how the human and natural worlds interconnect, and seem to complement each other.

In Exploration

I like the lay of your land.

You stretch before me
in large and rugged proportions.

The sheer volume of your mass
with its vast and varied landscape
is an irresistible invitation
to explore you.

You are shaped of firm and fertile earth
pressed lovingly round solid granite.

I lay my face close to smell
the sweet and salty scent of you
And there I hear
low, deep rumblings
of subterranean waters.

I trace you with my finger to find
Sudden softness, deep impenetrable forests,
and parts of you so finely chiseled
I must stop and marvel.

When I touch you my hand spans continents,
for there’s no lusher garden,
no sweeter field,
no depth more resounding,
nor peak more pure
than what I find in touching you.

I rise and hover over you like a cloud
then slowly, gently, cover you with my body.
I feel the touch of skin on skin,
your warmth rising through me
and press so near I hear
Your heartbeat in my body.

I am spilling with the rich fill of you,
Knowing all my sweet and wild secrets lie
Ever open to the finger of exploration.

Then I find within the far-off orb of your eye
a space so vast and distant,
and long to explore
the intangible reaches of your mind.

By Deborah J. Brasket

Memoir of a Marriage in Poetry, Part I – Innocent Love

Tags

Love, Lovers, Marriage, memoir, National Poetry Month, poems, poetry, Romance, wedding anniversary

In celebration of April as National Poetry Month and our 50th wedding anniversary (yes, I was a child bride), I’ll be reposting a series I published here years ago, an anatomy of love as it evolves over time, exploring married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts.

Part I, Some Silly Little Love Poems, Loosed at Last

He was a young handsome marine, fresh from his tour of duty in Vietnam. I was senior in high school, a flower-child who wrote poetry and read Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. We were the opposites that attract. I dropped out of school to marry him because he had to move away for work and I couldn’t live without him. But as an Ironworker building bridges and topping off sky-scrapers, his work kept taking him away from me. And as a freshman in college with a baby on the way, I could not follow, so we were constantly being parted. I wrote these poems to mourn his absence and celebrate love’s sweetness. The last one shows too the fear I felt of losing him forever, for his work on the high iron was so dangerous. These poems lay in a drawer for decades till published here.

Now, While

Now
While the love-light of your eyes
Shines upon my face,
And your bare-bodied shadow
Presses close to mine,

Now
With the moonlight and trees
Spreading patterns across our bed,
And the corners of the room
lie dark and drowsy,

Now
Let us kiss and love.

Then
While our bodies still hungrily cling
Let us sleep,

Closely breathing,
Closely dreaming,
Close in love.

Gone

You’re gone!
And though I know
You’ll be back Monday
The word gets caught between
The empty of my arms

Just Asking

We loved
We came to be like
Mirrors, reflecting like

I saw myself
An image in your eye.

When you’re gone
I find myself
And empty likeness

I question, are you gone
Or am I?

Would That Love

Would that love move me once
That it move me far enough
Would that love move me now
In all I do.

For the way is far too strong
That would push against the throng,
Cut me loose to lose myself
In loving you.

Since the day will surely show
When I’ll have to let you go
What a waste to love you then
With clutching arms.

So let me meet your every wish
Make myself a selfless gift
That I fill to overflowing
Loving you.

And when we part, if part we must,
I’ll unclasp in loving trust,
For Love spent us to the full
In every way.

PART II – Erotic Love

PART III – Disappointed Love

PART IV – Love Lost and Love Renewed

PART V – Lasting Love

To Live Content With Small Things

Tags

inspiration, meditation, poems, poetry, quotations, spiritual

A few pebbles for the pond . . . . 

To live content with small things;
To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;
To be worthy, not respectable;
To listen to stars and birds, and to babes with an open heart;
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never –
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common.  — William Henry Channing

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
— e.e.cummings

We sit together,
the mountain & I
. . .  until only the
mountain remains.
— Li Po

Letters From Beyond the Grave on Memorial Day

Tags

David Whyte, death, inspiration, Memorial Day, poems, poetry, renewal, Rilke, spirituality

While neither of these poems have anything in particular to do with remembering those who have given their lives to defend our freedoms, they are reminders that death is not an ending but another beginning. So my heartfelt prayer for them is that they fell into the arms of that great Mothering and are being nurtured and renewed there.

Farewell Letter to My Son

She wrote me a letter
after her death
and I remember
a kind of happy light
falling on the envelope
as I sat by the rose tree
on her old bench
at the back door,
so surprised by its arrival
wondering what she would say,
looking up before I could open it
and laughing to myself
in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time
for me to leave you.
I am afraid that the words
you are used to hearing
are no longer mine to give,
they are gone and mingled
back in the world
where it is no longer
in my power
to be their first
original author
not their last loving bearer.
You can hear
motherly
words of affection now
only from your own mouth
and only
when you speak them
to those
who stand
motherless
before you.

As for me I must forsake
adulthood
and be bound gladly
to a new childhood.
You must understand
this apprenticeship
demands of me
an elemental innocence
from everything
I ever held in my hands.
I know your generous soul
is well able to let me go
you will in the end
be happy to know
my God was true
and I find myself
after loving you all so long,
in the wide,
infinite mercy
of being mothered myself.

P.S. All your intuitions are true.

By David Whyte

To Leave One’s Own Name Behind

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising Things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once, floating away
in every direction. And being dead is hard work
and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel
a trace of eternity. – Though the living are wrong to believe
in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living
they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent
whirls all ages along in it, through both realms
forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar

By Rainer Maria Rilke
from Duino Elegies, The first Elegy
translation by Stephen Mitchell

I found both of these poems and the photo by Edward Steichen on Beauty We Love, a wonderful source of inspiration I turn to often.

Perfect Pairings – Klee and cummings

Tags

abstract art, art, creativity, e.e. cummings, inspiration, painting, Paul Klee, poems, poetry

I’ve long been a huge fan of Paul Klee’s paintings and e.e. cummings’ poetry, and for similar reasons: their playfulness and sense of excitement, as if “bursting with something very important and precise to say.,” as one critic writes of cummings’ work.

They dared to take their art in new and often jarring directions, playing with syntax and form, with color and composition. The reader/viewer is forced to see things in a new way. To question old ways of looking at the world.

Beneath the playfulness, something deeper is going on. Each bends toward the light.

“Everything passes, and what remains of former times, what remains of life, is the spiritual. In everything we do, the claim of the Absolute is unchanging.” – Paul Klee

“Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.” – e.e. cummings

A few favorites of each follows.

[in Just-]

BY E. E. CUMMINGS

in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it’s
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s
spring
and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

By E. E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

Boats & Blessings, Poems by Clifton and Collins

Tags

blessings, boats, poems, poetry, Thanksgiving

May you and your loved ones, near and far, have a Blessed Thanksgiving.

blessing the boats

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
(at St. Mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

— From Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000.

The Dead

BY BILLY COLLINS

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
— From Sailing Alone Around the Room. (Random House September 17th 2002)

Art by Odilon Redon, “Final Journey, Soul Guardians”