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Even as I Hold You


Even as I hold you
I think of you as someone gone
far, far away.  Your eyes the color
of pennies in a bowl of dark honey
bringing sweet light to someone else
your black hair slipping through my fingers
is the flash of your head going
around a corner
your smile, breaking before me,
the flippant last turn
of a revolving door,
emptying you out, changed,
away from me.

Even as I hold you
I am letting go.

- Alice Walker

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Black Maps
 
    Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know,
you have arrived,

not the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you're never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its map are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
it's emptiness,

the bleak, temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked on any of them,
nor are your friends,
waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

- Mark Strand

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Pain

More faithful
than lover or husband
it cleaves to you,
calling itself by your name
as if there had been a ceremony.

At night you turn and turn
searching for the one
bearable position,
but though you may finally sleep
it wakens ahead of you.

How heavy it is,
displacing with its volume
your very breath.
Before, you seemed to weigh nothing,
your arms might have been wings.

Now each finger adds its measure;
you are pulled down by the weight
of your own hair.
And if your life should disappear ahead of you
you would not run after it.

-Linda Pastan

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Jealousy

It is not the tilted buildings or the blind alleys
that I mind,
nor the winding staircases leading nowhere
or the ones that are simply missing

Nor is a walking through a foreign city
with a ring of a thousand keys
looking for the one door the worst of it,
nor the blank maps I am offered by strangers.

I can even tolerate your constant running
away from me, slipping around corners,
rising in the cage of an elevator,
squinting out the rear window of a taxi,

and always on the arm of a tall man
in a beautiful suit
and a perfectly furled hat
whom I know is carrying a gun.

What kills me is the way you lie there
in the morning, eyes closed,
curled into a sweet ball of sleep
and that innocent look on your face

when you tell me over coffee and oranges
that really you were right there all night
next to me in bed
and then expect me to believe you

were lost in your own dream world,
some ridiculous alibi
involving swimming through clouds
to the pealing of bells,

a transparent white lie about leaping
from a high window ledge
then burying your face
in the plumage of an angel.


-Billy Collins

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Sky Diving