EMOTIONAL
by: Michael Strange
- EAN your
mouth well over into the moonlight
- So that I may kiss it full, O chance--
- Press me into your pungent arms
- So jagged with nightmare--so rent with spasmodic glories--
- So pliant with momentary relaxing--
- O your arms so compact with variety--
- For no strident with triton freshness
- And glossed as if by spray shaken off a burst of godliness
- Out of glacier streams--
- And now slippery-darkened with that moulten calm
- Preceding some sinister extase--
-
- O chance--stinging--refreshing
- Like a sudden rain of flowers across my being that is ever
held
- So deliberately accessible--
- O chance teasing with evasive glimpses of some further road
- Ever lightening towards breathless eventualities--
- Aye, for ever alternately veiling--disclosing--
- That face approximate of Heaven--and hell.
-
- I am resting by the edge of the sea--
- But in my arm is a curve imperceptible
- For the weight of your head--lover--comrade--
- My feet are damp with the vigorous jet of the sea--
- My body is splashed in a sudden pour of sunlight
- Spreading down now in widening--blazing torrents--
- From behind the pushed-away clouds--
- Yet I long to be chilled--warmed--and surpassing these--
- And by our limbs co-mingling--lover--comrade.
-
- Sad, we must find each other--ourselves--life--out
- Through this impediment of love--
- (With its billion toe-stubbings along the Olympian track.)
- Pathetic we must exercise by falling out of the sky
- And chasing our own tails for awhile--
- Instead of feeling our manes tearing out behind us
- Along those freezing spiral vapours of the Continuous Ascension.
-
- O You and I have stood poignantly close upon the edge of
perilous slanting--
- And with sublime sunbeams bouncing from upturned face to
face
- And measuring upon each utter equality of dazzle--
- O you and I have leant fraternally together in a light
- Reducing to proportionate form at last--
- All those melancholy grotesques of conscious life--
- Yea and together heard a conclusive goodness affirming
- Through vast harp-sweet spaces--
- Then--then--the reverential swoon of our knees
- Before this momentary shining out of the beyond
- Has been cause for a touch between us--
- Ah, what union in this accidental knocking of knees
- Before a Shared Presence--
- When suddenly--suddenly--
- The thrown-back hood of vision clamping down precipitant,
- And a sadness in the air as of some Divine Retreat--
- When my claw stirring--waking--reaching out--
- And in your answering motion a gracious shoot of reverberating
"yea"--
- Then your eyes becoming a liquid gale
- Importunate--parting--pressing aside my branches--
- And your mouth a distortion of fire skipping--falling--
- Clinging strangely among my blossoms--
- My blossoms opening--shedding for you in ghastly broad abandon--
- O love--love--unequipped--unaware
- Of the subtle fatality in your own repletion.
"Emotional" is reprinted
from Resurrecting Life. Michael Strange. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1921. |
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POEMS BY MICHAEL STRANGE |
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