Oh goddess
Let me kneel before thee
in supplication
Arms outstretched
the temple's forbidden smoke
burning in the brazier
is your perfume
How may I best worship thee?

In the summer we shall
paint your alabaster idol
Her lids be the color of bruised fruit
She is nameless in our tongue
but the people called the Greeks
name her Aphrodite

The farmers pray to you for wet summers
the masters beg you let them cling
the dregs plead for full bellies
They do not know you
They do not commune with you
in your temple
and yet they have the audacity to lament
when you turn your face from them

What brings the rain and corn
Is sacrifice and devotion
it is the doorway you enter through
But even that is meaningless
for your beauty is a mask
and you are not your face
or your idol
behind it
is your divine truth, secrets lie there
gods demand beauty in spirit
so if they be hideous to mortal sight
they will still be beautiful
to Aphrodite

So bring the oil
cloying to pillars our garlands
touch our forehead to the cold stone
and lift our spirits
to meet your painted own

What makes a hole in your chest
doesn't **** you
but
makes you feel like you're dying
over and over
again

Blurry eyed **** of paper
and memory
quicker
pull it open
oh
I love it
Bring me more

follow skinny white legs up
that slipshod hill
of cascading pebbles

sun filtering down on your hair
i wish i could run my fingers through it
and smell its flowers

my chest tightens when i peek over the edge
but you aren't afraid at all
balancing when you lean over an edge dropped rock

Ah! to see the flash of your eyes again
in our youth
when i close my own

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.

I am not jealous
of what came before me.

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your ******* and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth
to start our life!

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.