Pure Love

By Joe Ceravolo The doll is sleeping Why is this home so hard? We run into the water Lice in heaven Ten o’clock—the class The show is stopping To tell us where to stop and eat and drink It comes out to us My pants are damp Is tonight treating us But not reaching through the window? Baby sleeps Sleeping on the cliff is dangerous See how her heart moves I stink and I know it Screw you. You’re right! I did drink my milk like a mother of wolves I love you No one should be mean They are Like a flower, little light You are open and we make believe Always holding you—because I love you And never stop

I am delighted with my heart Although my circus animals are all on show (Those crazy boys, the burnished chariot lions and witches—and lord knows what!) When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire aflame But something rustled on the moor And someone called me by my name She was a shimmering girl With little demons in her hair Who called me by name and ran And faded through the brightening air I will find out where she has gone And kiss her lips And take her hand And walk among long dappled grass And pluck—till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon The golden apples of the sun (Why, what could she have done being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?) Sometimes love letters was the name I gave her She. Slightly crazed—had given her heart away But my blue heaven had intervened to save her While the fairy queen that rose out of the spray Said—better to smile on all that smiles And show there is a comfortable kind of scarecrow What a star sang and careless muses heard Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird And therefore my heart—is driven wild She stands before me—as a fairy child And binding down before the glowing bars He murmurs a little sadly—how love fled And pacing the mountains overhead He tries his luck among a crowd of stars William Butler—Billy Yeats—paraphrased

The night attendant, a studious sophomore Rouses from the mare’s nest of her drowsy head Propped on “The Meaning of Meaning.” Your nurse could only speak Italian But after 20 minutes I could imagine your “finals” week And tears ran down my cheeks She catwalks down our corridor Azure day Makes my agonized blue window bleaker Crows maunder on the petrified fairway Absence! My heart grows tense As though a harpoon were sparring for the kill (This seems, at times, a house for the mentally ill …) What use is my sense of humor? Three months. Three months. Three months! Is Lily now herself again? Dimpled with amusing exultation My sister holds court in her bathtub Our noses rub Spring moved to summer The rude, cold rain hurries the ambitious Robert Lowell—Waking in the Blue, Sailing Home From Rapallo and Home After Three Months Away [paraphrased]