Haha

It's Raining In Love

I don't know what it is,
but I distrust myself
when I start to like a girl
a lot.

It makes me nervous.
I don't say the right things
or perhaps I start
to examine,
evaluate,
compute
what I am saying.

If I say, "Do you think it's going to rain?"
and she says, "I don't know,"
I start thinking : Does she really like me?

In other words
I get a little creepy.

A friend of mine once said,
"It's twenty times better to be friends
with someone
than it is to be in love with them."

I think he's right and besides,
it's raining somewhere, programming flowers
and keeping snails happy.
That's all taken care of.

BUT

if a girl likes me a lot
and starts getting real nervous
and suddenly begins asking me funny questions
and looks sad if I give the wrong answers
and she says things like,
"Do you think it's going to rain?"
and I say, "It beats me,"
and she says, "Oh,"
and looks a little sad
at the clear blue California sky,
I think : Thank God, it's you, baby, this time
instead of me.

Richard Brautigan

More Poetry

It's fascinating how so few poems feel like they apply to me lately, but still are very lovely and feel good to read. Usually I like them to have some sort of a ring that echoes my situation, but I think my current situation is too comfortable for most people to like poetry written about it. It would need to be something strongly imagist, about apples and sunshine and cats and someone cooking dinner in the background, or the way the house feels when you wake up at 3am, still clothed and tangled with someone you love, and switch the laundry and turn out the lights before crawling properly into bed for the rest of the night. Maybe something about weekend mornings, too, walking hand-in-hand through clear sunlight like cool water and drifts of leaves on the way to the corner store to get coffee and a custard tart; sometimes there are girls playing badminton in the brick plaza in the park.

Greatpoets is producing, but none like that. Here's one that resonates a little:

IX
from Twenty-One Love Poems

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It's not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key . . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.

-Adrienne Rich

This one is so evocative of nostalgia that I'm not sure if I've been here, or if the poem just makes me feel like I remember it.

On The Table

I would like to make it clear that I have bought
this tablecloth with its simple repeating pattern
of dark purple blooms not named by any botanist
because it reminds me of that printed dress you had
the summer we met - a dress you have always said
I never told you I liked. Well I did, you know. I did.
I liked it a lot, whether you were inside it or not.

How did it slip so quietly out of our life?
I hate - I really hate - to think of some other bum
swinging those heavy flower-heads left to right.
I hate even more to think of it mouldering on a tip
or torn to shreds - a piece here wiping a dipstick,
a piece there tied round a crack in a lead pipe.

It's all a long time ago now, darling, a long time,
but tonight just like our first night here I am
with my head light in my hands and my glass full,
staring at the big drowsy petals until they start to swim,
loving them but wishing to lift them aside, unbutton them,
tear them, even, if that's what it takes to get through
to the beautiful, moon-white, warm wanting skin of you.

-Andrew Motion

One More

Where Lesbians Come From

It is true that lesbians do not have families; we have pretend family relationships.
We do not have mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters; our sons and daughters do not count at all, having no families within which to rear them.
And our lovers - there's nothing in that but something mocking truth; for you know it's true that lesbians do not have families, like you...

We emerge, instead, complete from some dark shell, beds and beds of us (like oysters, what else would I mean?) sea-born on stormy nights with the wind in a certain quarter.
We rise and wiggle, all slippery and secret, curling and stretching and glad to be alive, untangling our hair from the wind and salt and seaweed.
We steal clothes from washing lines,
and once it's daylight, almost pass for human.

Glowing into warmth in the sun or a hard north wind we lick the salt from our lips, for now. And smile.
We live for a while, in the light,
despite your brutal laws
and your wish that we were not here;
we return to our beds by moonlight
to nurture and foster the sweet salt shells that give birth to our lesbian futures.
And there we plot, in our dark sea beds, the seduction of your daughters.

-Jan Sellers

I really like this one, not sure why. Probably it's the ocean/bed/salt extended metaphor, which is so well used.