What was unforeseen is now a bird orbiting this field.

What wasn’t a possibility is present in our arms.

It shall be and it begins with you.

Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous.
How it frightens and confounds and enrages.
How strange, unfamiliar.

Our love carries all those and the contrary.
It is most incandescent.

So, I vow to be brave.
Clear a path through jungles of shame and doubt and fear.
I’m done with silence. I proclaim.

It shall be and it sings from within.

Truly we are enraptured
With Whitmanesque urge and urgency.

I vow to love in all seasons.
When you’re summer, I’m watermelon balled up in a sky-blue bowl.
When I’m autumn, you’re foliage ablaze in New England.
When in winter, I am the tender scarf of warm mercies.
When in spring, you are the bourgeoning buds.

I vow to love you in all places.
High plains, prairies, hills and lowlands.
In our dream-laden bed,
Cradled in the nest
Of your neck.
Deep in the plum.

It shall be and it flows with you.

We’ll leap over the waters and barbaric rooftops.

You embrace my resilient metropolis.
I adore your nourishing wilderness.

I vow to love you in primal ways.
I vow to love you in infinite forms.

In our separateness and composites.
To dust and stars and the ever after.

Intrepid travelers, lovers, and family
We have arrived.

Look. The bird has come home to roost.

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 skillfully, 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

^{translated from the German by Edward Snow}

Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape
and the little churchyard with its lamenting names
and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others
end: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again
among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
                                                                                                              I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                               it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Better a deceiving god than no god at all.

This is experience in a certain mind

—not any mind—but one specific mind

with a particular history like yours

or mine, but other than yours and mine

—distinct, utterly unknown to both of us,

entirely other, and yet of the same kind

as your mind, or my mind, or any other.

Here we meet who are otherwise nothing

to one another, neither brother nor friend.…

Our minds wander off.—Look! This piece of wax

has not yet lost all taste of its honey.

It retains some odor of the wild flowers

from which it has been gathered by the bee.

It is hard. It is cold. It emits a sound

when stricken. It may be any shape.

But it remains still the same piece of wax

No one denies that. And I perceive it.

It is not accidental to the mind

to be united to the body. Yet how

prone to errors my mind is. If I had

not now looked out the window and seen

a human being going by in the street,

I would not believe it emits a sound

when stricken. Yet I am. I exist. I have

a body which can act and also suffer.

As your highness is so clear-seeing, there

is no concealing anything from you.

—You are not one of those who never philosophize.

The piece of wax is moved toward the fire.

But the piece of wax remains, because

this wax is not perceived except by mind.

But my essence consists wholly in being

a thinking thing. Right now, in bed with Helene,

the natural light of reason makes known

to me what is to be known. So I say

“Helene! You are a pure spirit. You represent

truths such that they bear their evidence

on their face. As for me, I visit the butcher

to watch the slaughtering of cattle. There

I dissect the heads of the animals

to learn what imagination consists of.”

—Francine lies beside me in her box. But

whether she sleeps or wakes I don’t know.

“Francine! Here are my dreams. Pay attention,

Francine/machine. The world is light, light-rays.

Love is a theory of light which intends light.”

I know what I am for. But do I exist? 

Although nothing imagined is true,

the power of imagining is real.

Certainly I seem to see. I seem 

to hear. I seem to be warmed. To imagine 

is nothing other than to contemplate

the image of a corporeal thing.

That is what you must assure me of. What

you are for. But you do not assure me.