Poems from a Gallery Reading

First Read October 24th to a Modest Crowd of Writers

Sonnet for Longing

Never yet have I loved you as I shall
tomorrow, when the new day kisses us
again, and we are not so different
than small saplings asleep beneath the snow.

Never yet I've been but when with you, here
and simple; breathing your embrace, waiting
on the evanescence of our yearning:
my soul is untidy but patient, rapt.

Never yet, but again and once more, you
sink your feet into the snow, kissing seeds
and teasing the roots of the old romance
that only the trees will know after us.

Though even now I quake with love for you,
never yet have I loved you as I shall. 

— from Wolf: Collected Poetry of the 20s

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Recalling a Foggy Scene

Marking my way through a dense wood,
marking my way such that the loam underfoot
takes each step's impression and recalls my trespassing.

I am not a lone wanderer. I am not unfettered
with but the trees and ferns for company
and one step ever overtaking the last.

What greedy haze sifts through this wood obscures
what would be seen a quarter-dozen trees ahead of me
and I cannot see beyond the shuttered air that lies before.

All about, the trees quiver and creak in the breeze,
the same wind that roils the haze and obfuscates
and lifts from the earth remnants of days passed.

More and more, I cannot see, though deeper I am.
More and more, I wander again and lose what way
I had set before myself when the fog was less.

At any time, I could retrace my sunken steps,
sniff the ground and follow the breadcrumbs back,
but the true path leads forth, does not repeal or tarry.

Something there is in a lack of foresight,
that leads me to think I had led myself astray. Gazing behind,
I see the wood is quite ordinary, and there is no fog.

It is not a pleasure to reflect on where I moved.
The wood does not recognize the good or bad
steps coiling through the shady undergrowth.

What is left behind of me is lain bare, uncloaked
below the fog-less sun-dappled canopy above.
Unclouded are those former steps and their mark.

Knowing a place requires movement, not space.
I am the inheritor of my steps and their impression.
Accepting the choice of choosing, we tread into the fog.

— for a walk in a foggy wood.

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the love that dares to try

If you must love yourself then
first you must love spiders, understanding
loving spiders is the path towards self-love,
understanding also that you must love
the worms and ants and wasps and beetles
and the centipedes and the sea and death,
knowing that love is not the roots but
the soil and shit cuddling their frail wanting tendrils.

You will never attain love; love cannot be seized or taken
or held or purchased or sold or forsaken or even given:
love rests in the eaves of being. It is beyond you, love, it is
more than your petty heart could carry but if you wish
to know love then practice loving the spiders;
practice to love an eel, a thorny bush, a bad actor;
practice to love your lover beyond loving, beyond
desire, beyond needing, beyond intimacy, beyond
mirth and kindness and horniness and all the other
loving things you thought were love but aren't.

You will never know love; love cannot be comprehended
or attested or understood or reclaimed or lost:
even this poem knows nothing of love. It is beyond
the purview of thought and far less than our minds
could struggle to intercept or interpret but if you wish
to know love then practice loving the spiders;
practice to love the small things that terrify you;
practice to love the big things that consume you;
for, the love that dares to try and know itself
ought to be the only love that one considers.

See, if you must love yourself then
first you must love others (and this includes
all others you've refused to love beyond comfort;
this includes all the stone and water and muck of Earth).
And when you have finally come to love yourself
then you will realize that all you love is the freedom
of loving the spider; you will realize that the spider
is the love that dares to try and know itself.

— from willa beale

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