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Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: Romance

Within the White Hot Flow of Writing

31 Thursday May 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Fiction, Love, My Writing, The Writing Process, Writing

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

books, Deborah J. Brasket, fiction, Flow, Novel, revolution, Romance, This Sea Within, writing, writing process

Spirals, spirals, spirals

That’s where I am. Where I love to be.

I began a new novel almost as soon as I finished the last. An idea I had entertained years ago kept coming back to me. You may remember a blog post I wrote a while ago about wishing I could find a really good steamy novel that was also a novel of ideas, that had substance and depth. Some of you encouraged me to write one if I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and that stuck with me. You should write the novel you want to read. I’ve always believed this.

I also love long novels set in exotic places that reveal the political unrest of the times. And having spent so much time in the tropics when we were sailing, I’m drawn to that kind of locale.

It all fit perfectly with an idea I had played with some years ago about a young naive girl from California who travels to Central America to find her missing mother (I must get the bottom of all these stories I write about missing mothers!) and gets swept up in a political struggle and the revolutionaries fighting to free their country.

As I began preparing to write, I noticed how similar the process of writing this novel is to the one I wrote last time.

First there’s a germ of an idea, and then the need to anchor it in reality. The need to immerse myself in some aspect of the history, the setting, the geography, the larger ideas that underpin what I’m aiming to write: Research.

I went of a shopping spree and bought Salman Rushdie’s memoir of traveling in Nicaragua during the Contra wars, Smile of the Jaguar. I also bought Blood of Brothers, Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer, a journalist for the New York Times during and after the revolution; The County Under My Skin, A Memoir of Love and War by the poet, Gioconda Belli, who fought in the revolution; and The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. I already had Tom Hayden’s The Long Sixties, a signed copy I got at a fundraiser I organized years ago. Although my novel will be set in a mythical country along the isthmus, studying the war in Nicaragua would help me get a better understanding of what was going on in the region during those turbulent times.

Next in the process comes the need to discover the names and voices of my main characters. I cannot write a word without that.  This  almost happens simultaneously. The voices must have names to embody them, the names must have voices to bring the alive. The names evoke the voices, the voices evoke the names: Lena and Raoul.

Once I have these, there’s not stopping them. They take over my life. They start telling me their stories and I run and grab a pen. I keep on writing, pages after pages in my notebook and on my computer. I look up and morning has turned to nightfall. It doesn’t matter. They follow me to bed. I sleep with them. I dream them. I wake up writing love poems in their voices.

Then I need at least a vague sense of how the novel will open, how it will close. It may change along the way, but I need this parenthesis to contain my writing and to show me where it’s moving. They tell me.

When I have the beginning and the ending, keys scenes in between emerge. I write them down quickly before they disappear. They may change over time, but at least I have key points upon which to hang my novel.

By then my characters have become real to me. They have flesh and bone, names, voices, histories. They have deep, deep urges, conflicting desires, inner and outer struggles, a sense of transformation.

It’s like watching a miracle unfold. How they seem to come from nowhere, out of thin air, then suddenly they are breathing bodies, passionate, possessed.

This miracle of the white, hot flow of words.

Next comes the need, for me at least, to discover the title for this novel, something that embodies both of their stories and what happens to them.

I need a hook, like I did with From the Far Ends of the Earth. Whenever I felt I was becoming lost, a bit overwhelmed, unsure about where the story was going, how to proceed, if this fit or that should be cut, I went back to the title, which embodied my main theme. Then I knew.

The title was a thematic blueprint for what I wanted the book to be. The impact I was after. A book about gathering up and bringing home all the lost parts of ourselves and our families.

So I searched for something like that, some touchstone that would lead me back to that germ of an idea I began with. The point around which all else revolves. And I found it: This Sea Within.

Lena, a California girl, a surfer in love with the sea, restless, passionate, caught up in the turmoil of her times, the Sixties, travels to a mythical country in Central America where her mother was born, searching for the woman who abandoned her, but finding instead a people and culture and land that feels like home, like a part of her lost self. And there she meets Raoul, the leader of a band of revolutionaries whose base camp is on a remote stretch of the sea. And well, you can imagine the rest.

But this is also meant to be a story of ideas, of the tension between a life of contemplation and the life of an activist, the urge to save and savor the world at the same time. It’s about the tensions between a huge, powerful county and what it sees as its smaller vassal states below its border. It’s about the need to find purpose and place in one’s life, to serve a cause greater than one’s self. And it’s about how poetry and art can keep the spirit alive when the world we live in is bathed in blood, figuratively for some, and literally for others.

It’s also about the cycle of time, this never-ending (r)evolution that creates the ever-changing world we live in. It’s about the slow march of history, whose arc is indeed long, but hopefully, must, must, bend toward justice.

This Sea Within. The restless times from which great movements and revolutions are born, and two lovers caught up in that turmoil. That pretty much sums up what this book is meant to be. For now.

It’s all subject to revision.

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In the Mood for Love, in Music and Art

15 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Love, music

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

art, Love, Lovers, music, Pinterest, Romance, Visual Arts

Emil Nolde - Reddish-brown Couple (Embracing)

Emil Nolde – Lover’s Embracing

Some favorite pairings in music and art to start your weekend off. I fell in love with this hauntingly sad-sweet piece by Shigeru Umebayashi and paired it with some of my favorite romantic images on my “Mothers and Other Lovers” Pinterest page. Enjoy.

 

Antonio Canova - Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, 1793

Antonio Canova – Psyche Revived by Cupid’s kiss

 

Edvard Munch, Kiss by the Window, 1892, Oil on canvas    73 x 92 cm   See the best #Art installations in New York at www.artexperience...

Edvard Munch “Kiss by the Window”

 

Guinivere, Emma Florence Harrison.

A Knight’s Kiss b Anne Anderson

Autor:Rodin Obra: El beso Obra hiperrealista realizada en mármol. Tiene una textura la cual interpreta el artista sobre la obra totalmente de acuerdo con las características de un ser humano. La obra se encuentra en Paris

Auguste Rodin

Tristan and Isolde by Mac.Fisman

Tristan and Isolde by Mac Fisman

Lovers William_Powell_Frith_The_lovers

Lovers by William Powell Firth

 

 

Very classic Picasso style - love these!

By Erhard Loblein

 

One of Ireland's favourite paintings and also recently voted as the nations favourite as well -Frederic William Burton's 'The Meeting on the Turret Stairs'.

Meeting on the Turret Stairs by Frederick Burton

 

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

 

The Fisherman and the Siren - Frederic Leighton - WikiArt.org

The Fisherman and the Siren by Frederic Leighton

 

Paradise_Lost_16

Adam and Eve from Milton’s Paradise Lost

 

Extremely rare 1923 edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren...

Gustaf Tenggren illustration for Grimm’s Fairy Tale

 

 

by Emil Nolde 1867 - 1956.

By Emil Nolde

 

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Sexy, Smart, Sweet, & Soulful

12 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by deborahbrasket in Culture, Fiction, Love, Recommended Books

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

books, Diana Galbaldon, Erotica, Love, Romance, sexy, soulful, The Outlander, TV, TV series

outlander_612x380_0Finally! I found what I was looking for when I wrote the post Speaking of Erotica, a “steamy love story that has depth and substance.” I wrote:

I am seeking something that stimulates and satisfies in a deeper way than what I’ve found so far. A story that explores, perhaps, at least to some degree, both the sensual and spiritual nature of desire, arousal, and consummation. After all, sexual and spiritual pleasure, power and transformation are parallel journeys on the road to fulfillment. Both are precipitated by strong human desires for union with the Other. Both, arguably, are what shape us as human beings.

Each journey involves deep longing for something beyond the individual self. Each requires trust and receptivity, surrender and self-sacrifice, tenderness and devotion. Each gives way to passion and delight, awe and wonder, ecstasy and bliss, love and transcendence.

Each seeks the Beloved.

Strangely enough, I read the first three chapters of the book in question and put it away, thinking it wasn’t what I was looking for. And I might never have returned to the book if it hadn’t recently been made into a cable TV series that I watched on Netflix. The film took me beyond the pages I had read and showed me what I had missed. Now I’ve finished the first book in the cult-classic series and have begun the second.

Yes, you guessed it. The book is The Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, a time-traveling historical romance set in the 1940’s and 18th century Scotland.

The book isn’t as literary as I’d originally hoped and the prose sometimes dips toward purple, but it makes up for it by some truly beautiful writing and by turning the romance genre upside-down in so many interesting (and sometimes disturbing) ways. Our hearty hero, for instance, is younger than our heroine and he’s a virgin to boot. It is he who is lusted after by the villain rather than our heroine. And she, far from being an innocent is an experienced, strong, deeply intelligent woman with a fierce mind of her own, which, sadly, gets her and a lot of other people into a lot of trouble. Yet, while she puts herself into situations where she must be saved, she does an equal amount of saving herself.

Still, the characters are nuanced and complex, including the villains, and the plot turns in unexpected ways that add the depth and substance I was seeking. And the romance that blooms between Claire and Jaime is not only steamy but sweet and tender and, yes, soulful, in the way that Whitman writes with such lust and love for life in all its many intimate and erotic forms.

The Outlander series has been around for a long time and has a large, devoted following. I’m surprised I hadn’t come across it before.

How about you? Have you read the books or are you watching the Starz series? If you’ve read or watched Game of Thrones, chances are you will enjoy these as well.

Here’s a fun and sexy music video that will get you into the mood for romance.

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Speaking of Erotica . . .

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by deborahbrasket in Culture, Fiction, Love, Spirituality, Writing

≈ 35 Comments

Tags

books, Erotic Romance, Erotica, literature, Reading, Romance, Seeking the Beloved, sexual tension, Union with the Other

320227916_e6d5fc518e_ocreative commons. . . have you read anything hot lately?

Perhaps it was the convergence of Valentine’s Day and the release of Fifty Shades of Gray (the movie), but I’ve been on the look-out for a really hot romance. Something literary. Not the so-called mommy-porn “Gray” aspires to. Nor the BDSM that seems so popular these days. But a straight, steamy love story that has depth and substance. I have yet to find what I’m seeking.

It hasn’t been from lack of trying though. I read “Gray” back when it first came out just to see what the hoopla was all about. But I couldn’t get past the first three chapters–the writing was so silly, the characters so unbelievable, and even the sexual tension between the two seemed tepid at best. Nothing to keep me turning pages.

Since then I’ve revisited some “steamy” romances I read in my youth, only to find them sadly lacking. I’ve surfed through pages of reviews of erotic romance and downloaded a few e-books onto my Kindle (thank God for Kindle—this is what it was created for!). While some were fun reads, and others hot enough to steam up my reading glasses, all left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

I am seeking something that stimulates and satisfies in a deeper way than what I’ve found so far. A story that explores, perhaps, at least to some degree, both the sensual and spiritual nature of desire, arousal, and consummation. After all, sexual and spiritual pleasure, power and transformation are parallel journeys on the road to fulfillment. Both are precipitated by strong human desires for union with the Other. Both, arguably, are what shape us as human beings.

Each journey involves deep longing for something beyond the individual self. Each requires trust and receptivity, surrender and self-sacrifice, tenderness and devotion. Each gives way to passion and delight, awe and wonder, ecstasy and bliss, love and transcendence.

Each seeks the Beloved.

I can’t help thinking that the first journey, that’s seeded in sexual desire for oneness, is what prepares us for the second, to step outside ourselves into something that subsumes us. And I can’t help believing that the two journeys can overlap or coincide. That the parallels between them have deep significance.

Maybe this kind of recognition is too much to ask for in an erotic romance. But I’m still looking.

How about you? Do you enjoy reading hot romances? Anything you’d recommend?

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Celebrating Lasting Love

28 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Culture, Love, Memoir, Poetry

≈ 180 Comments

Tags

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Kahlil Gibran, Love, Marriage, memoir, poetry, relationship, Romance, Soul Mates

Love Charles_Dana_Gibson_Turning_Tide_1900They say opposites attract. That was true when my husband and I first met. I found in him everything I felt missing in myself—he was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident, practical, capable, a man of the world. I was shy, timid, uncertain of myself, a romantic, an idealist, inexperienced. I was a senior in High School. He was a marine returning home from two years in Viet Nam. I thought I had found my soul mate, we seemed to complement each other so well, like two halves of a whole, yin and yang.

The truth is, we were just what we needed at the time. This dark, moody often angry young man who could also be so sweet and loving fulfilled a romantic yearning in me to sooth the savaged soul—Beauty and the Beast, after all, had always been my favorite fairy tale. And he was sorely needing the sweetness and innocence he saw in me, after the things he had witnessed in war. We fit together perfectly in each other’s arms. We still do.

Virgin Islands27But now I no longer believe in soul mates. I discovered that all the things I was attracted to in him, that seemed to be missing pieces of me, were really undeveloped parts of myself, and a sense of “completion” could not come from outside me but from within. Once I realized that and began to discover that I too was strong and brave, adventurous, self-confident and capable, I no longer yearned for a soul mate. I could stand upright and free even while fully committed to our marriage. We did not need each other, but we chose to be together. We were committed to creating a life that we both could love and enjoy together.

I had always loved what Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet had written about marriage, and came to see the wisdom of his words:

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Kuta_couple_creative commons (2)I also came to realize what Anne Morrow Lindbergh in Gift From The Sea” wrote:

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

And finally, I whole-heartedly embraced what Madeleine L’Engle in “The Irrational Season” wrote:

“To marry is the biggest risk in human relations that a person can take . . . . If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession, but participation… It takes a lifetime to learn another person… When love is not possession, but participation, then it is part of that co-creation which is our human calling, and which implies such risk that it is often rejected.”

IMG_4093 (4)My husband and I celebrated our 43rd anniversary last week. Here’s what I’ve learned about lasting love:

That marriage is a journey, not a destination, and the way will be hard, and filled with obstacles and challenges and heartache. That real love is not “true love.” It’s not a given. It doesn’t come ready-made. You have to fight for it, you have to work for it, you have to shake it out from time to time, and mend it and keep adding stitch after stitch, row after row, if you want to make it big enough and strong enough to last a lifetime.

Our marriage quilt is a tattered thing, but beautiful in its homeliness, in the places where its obvious rips and tears have been mended over and over again, the places where it’s grown thin and threadbare and had to be reinforced, as well as the places where it’s warm and soft and scented with memories that bring deep pleasure.

Loveliest of all are the stitches we are still sowing day by day, moment by moment, hand in hand, together.Virgin Islands19

I will end this series of posts on love and marriage with the last love poem I wrote my husband, a few years after our marriage had almost ended.

It is a simple, playful poem, meant to please a man who is not a lover of poetry, but loves the woman who writes it.

To Dale, On Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary

Sometimes you ask me if I really love you,
Like the answers hid behind a lock and key
You are my love and all the world must know it
For it’s scattered ‘cross the land and half the sea.

There are winds and waves much sweetened by our pleasure,
Rocks and sand well smoothed by hips and thighs,
Grass that grows much greener from our nearness,
And trees that rustle still with sated sighs.

If you climb a certain stream that flows near Big Sur
You’ll find a rock well made for lying on,
It knew our love before it was made sacred
And longs to feel our lover’s urge again.

While high along the rugged spine of Baja,
Where boney cliffs fall far to find the sea,
We saw the world stripped bare of all but beauty
And we alone like Adam and his Eve.

The moon once tipped the hills beyond Coyote
And laced Conception Bay with fluorescent light,
We swam out naked through those silken waters
Where you wound me round your hips and held me tight.

And cupped within the palm of Virgin Gorda
Lies an island and a secret, sandy cove,
Where we waded from the sea like mating mermen
And stretched upon the sand to prove our love.

The wind once made an early morning visit
As we rolled upon a hook in Carib Bight,
While sweeping down the hatch it caught us naked
And added its cool breath to our delight.

Now wind and sea and rock and tree can tell you
The answer that you say you do not know,
You are my love and all the world’s a witness
For its sung wherever winds and waves do blow.

NOTE:  This ends a series of posts that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are the first four posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. 

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

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Love Lost, and Renewed

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Creative Nonfiction, Culture, Love, Memoir, Poetry

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Love, Lovers, Marriage, relationship, Romance

Love Edmund_Blair_Leighton_-_The_questionNot long after I decided to leave my husband I met someone new. I was working part-time at a book store and he was a publisher’s rep. We would go for coffee or walks in the park and have long, stimulating conversations. We spent hours on the phone talking about literature, philosophy, the arts, religion—things I loved but my husband had no interest in. I could feel myself falling in love with him, thinking perhaps he was the “soul mate” I’d always longed for. He seemed to feel the same way about me.

I had already asked my husband for a separation, suggesting he move out. He only laughed and said he wasn’t going anywhere. I knew I would have to be the one to go and began planning my escape. Soon, I thought, terrified by what he might do if he knew I was already seeing someone.

Then he found out. When he confronted me, I told him the truth, that I had fallen in love with someone else. I was astounded by his response. It was so unlike anything I had imagined. He said he did not blame me. He had always known that I was “too good” for him, and if this man was better, he’d step out of the way.

But after confronting the man too, after meeting and talking with him, he said the man wasn’t good enough.  He was the better man, and he wanted me to give him another chance. He was sure he could make me fall in love with him again. And while I knew that was impossible, I felt I had no other choice but to let him try. After so many years together, I knew I owed him, and our marriage, at least that much. Eventually he’d realize it was futile, and then he’d have to let me go.

It was hard at first. I felt I had put my real life in limbo, and was living a lie. I mourned my lost love. The life I imagined spending with him was like a shadow that followed me everywhere. I feared it was a life we might never realize together—at least in this life time. That’s when I wrote the following poem.

The Other

It’s amazing how you multiply as time moves
 Everywhere I see your face appear
 It grows more clear the longer we are parted
Like time itself conspires to bring you near.

Sometimes I feel your presence close behind me
Where I could turn to find you standing there
Turn toward arms pressed close about me
As if mere motion was the answer to my prayers.

Sometimes your presence seems to float before me
Upon a sea of bright tranquility
I watch my soul swept out to meet you
And marvel at mind’s sweet complicity.

Sometimes I feel as if I were a twosome
And one of me moves never far from you,
The other is mere exercise in motion
Eclipsing everything in me that’s true.

Someday I pray that we shall sit together
Before a sea resplendent in the sun
We’ll eat a little morning meal together
Before we rise into new life as one.

Love Edmund_Blair_Leighton_-_A_summer_showerEventually this sense of sadness faded. My husband and I began “dating” again. We spent long leisurely weekends together going to concerts and museums and strolls along the beach. We began cultivating a taste for California wines and listening to jazz music together. We chartered sailboats in the Caribbean and renewed our dream to sail around the world together.

Little by little I began falling back in love with him. It began with a deep respect for how he had reacted when I told him I’d fallen for someone else. There was no anger, no accusations, no recriminations. No jealousy or hurt feelings that I could tell. Never did he hold it against me, or try to make me feel I had wronged him. He absolved me of all blame. All he wanted was the opportunity to prove he was the better man, prove he could love me enough to make me want to stay with him. How could I not love that?

I realized I had deeply underestimated him. He revealed a strength of character and depth of love that I hadn’t realized he possessed. A dignity and humility and gentleness I hadn’t seen before. This was the foundation upon which the renewed love I felt for him grew. And it was the stronger and richer for it.

Now looking back, that period in our marriage seems like an aberration, a mirage almost. I barely remember the name of the man I thought I’d loved, and his bitter assessment of the whole affair—that I willed myself to love him to have the courage to leave—may have the ring of truth.

Despite this happy ending to that episode in our marriage, it wasn’t the last time our love was tested and bent near breaking. But never again without the hope that this too would mend in time and make us stronger. And it did.

Love is the hardest thing we can ever do—love for our spouses, our children, our parents, ourselves, each other. Love for the world we live in. Love for that which created all of this. If we think love’s easy or should be easy, that it won’t have radical mood swings, won’t lift us up and throw us down, won’t drift away when we’re not attentive, won’t wither if we’re not feeding it, or spring back, full and fresh, when we water it with patience and kindness, then we don’t know love at all.  And maybe we can’t know it, until we live it, and let it live in us.

NOTE:  This post originally was supposed to be part of a series of poems I’ve written to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.  A way to let a few love poems I’d written long ago see the light of day. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are all five posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. The last one was Freshly Pressed.

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

Celebrating Lasting Love

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Love’s Duplicity

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Art, Creative Nonfiction, Love, Memoir, Poetry

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

Deborah J. Brasket, Duplicity, Love, Marriage, poetry, relationship, Romance

Leighton-The_Fisherman_and_the_Syren-c__1856-1858 CCWhen 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.

A Personification Of Geometry. Dosso Dossi (C.1475-1542). Oil On Canvas.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?

Sweet_Nothings_by_GodwardEventually 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.

Godward_A_Grecian_Girl_1908A 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.

After a while, I knew that I could no longer live like this. It was time for me to leave.

(To be continued)

NOTE:  This post was part of a series that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are all five posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. The last one was Freshly Pressed.

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

Celebrating Lasting Love

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

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Some Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

14 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by deborahbrasket in Memoir, My Writing, Poetry, Writing

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Love, Lovers, Marriage, National Poetry Month, poetry, Romance

320227916_e6d5fc518e_ocreative commonsIn celebration of April as National Poetry Month, I will be releasing over the next week or so some poetry I’ve written on love that has lain too long in my drawer.

The first few, shown below, are short and simple, written as a young bride.

In time they grow longer, darker, deeper, exploring the many faces and shapes that love takes as it grows and strengthens, wanes and darkens, matures and celebrates new beginnings.

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.

Lovers

Gone

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

Lovers1 (2)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?

blog pics1Would 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.

NOTE:  This post began a series of posts that originally were supposed to be part of a series of love poems to celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Eventually it morphed into something else–a memoir of our marriage, or an anatomy of love as it evolves over time. Below are all five posts in the series, which seem to cover  married love in all of its manifestations:  Innocent love, erotic love, disappointed love, love lost, love renewed, and love that lasts. The last one was Freshly Pressed.

Silly Little Love Poems, Unloosed at Last

The Geometry, and Geography, of Love

Love’s Duplicity

Love Lost, and Renewed

Celebrating Lasting Love

Other Posts that Include My Poetry

Wheeling away on the Isle of Pines

A Scattering of Rocks – Zen in the Garden of Eden

Touching the Wild

Hot Hills in Summer Heat

Walking Among Flowers

Night Howls

Swimming Among the Stars

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