I’d love to reprint the beautiful poems T sends me but alas WordPress sucks and I can’t put in paragraph returns, so instead – here they are in hyperlink: Emily Dickinson’s If You Were Coming In The Fall, Rilke’s The Archaic Torso of Achilles [after finding this printed and on the kitchen counter, I read it and it took my breath away and now it is taped to the window], and finally a poem made for me (us) – Lorca’s Casida de la Rosa. [Translation is here.] Who wouldn’t love a person who picked these three poems to send me?
Carajo! who wouldn’t…que cosa mas linda, que cosa mas bella…muchos besos para las dos.
You are our photographer! no te olvidas el foto famoso en mi oficina, mami!
I loved this poem before, but I think it has a new divine twist on it:
Courtship
There is a girl you like so you tell her
your penis is big, but that you cannot get yourself
to use it. Its demands are ridiculous, you say,
even self-defeating, but to be honored, somehow,
briefly, inconspicuously in the dark.
When she closes her eyes in horror,
you take it all back. You tell her you’re almost
a girl yourself and can understand why she is shocked.
When she is about to walk away, you tell her
you have no penis, that you don’t
know what got into you. You get on your knees.
She suddenly bends down to kiss your shoulder and you know
you’re on the right track. You tell her you want
to bear children and that is why you seem confused.
You wrinkle your brow and curse the day you were born.
She tries to calm you, but you lose control.
You reach for her panties and beg forgiveness as you do.
She squirms and you howl like a wolf. Your craving
seems monumental. You know you will have her.
Taken by storm, she is the girl you will marry.
Mark Strand