separation – a memory (for Lan)

drunken with your beauty I pass
night after night without rest
intoxicated with your love    I want not
the power to free myself from this longing
that tears me apart in sleeplessness
I wander through a desert of freedoms
consuming images of you:
hair of restless silk
eyes of dancing tigress
skin of nacre gilded
arms of secret charms
hands of comets of fire
breasts of sources hidden
belly of honeyed wave
strait sweet thing
of wild strawberries made
buttocks of lyrical wonder
legs of clouds echoing thunder
feet that bear a heavenly burden:
images of you that float
above the sandlike waves
of this arid sea the dawn wind
cuts from me  drunken with your beauty
intoxicated with love of you
each night far from you I die
in the high barren plains
of my wakefulness

*    *   *

© Gregory V Driscoll  2015

thought during snowstorm

like a forest path
our love’s led us to this place
the realm of wonder

*    *   *

© Gregory V Driscoll  2015

Updated nursery rhyme (for Mr. B. H. O.)

…twinkle, little star,
how I wonder what you are.
Oh, damn – it’s a drone!

*    *   *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2013

Exiting the ferry, or the sands of time

I step on the gangway.  Oil spilled somehow
earlier in the day, so the crew sanded the area.
I and others wearing leather shoes begin to slide.

Just how is it possible (wondrous thing!)
for tiny stray grains of silica to act
as rollers, bearings beneath our feet?

I look to my right as I steady myself
with a hand on the rail.  Then I see
dark gray clouds rolling over us…

*    *   *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2012

Joy

Oh my dear sweet lover!  All eye am I.
Your light fills me like fine sherry
that perfects the bold crystal of a glass.
Oh, I am drunk with you!  I see visions.
I hear voices.  I touch the body of true dream.
I sense the perfume of night’s bloom.
But my dear sweet love, I fear
we know not what the morrow brings,
save dawn that greets us with its ruddy joy,
save our waking with a kiss.

*     *    *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2012

Canción de Nombrar a una Niñita / Song of Naming a Girl-Child – a poem written in Spanish (1985) with English translation (2012)

Cuando abrazas a la niña de nuevo,
dile por mí, un desconocido,
que su nombre es vida por siempre.
Y cuando en la cara te toca
con manecitas de maravilla
dile por mí, un desconocido,
que su nombre es alegría también.
Mientras duerme ¡qué pequeñita!
y la besas, la besas, amiga –
dile por mí, un desconocido,
que su nombre es alma de sueño.

*    *   *

(c)  1985

(translation)

When you hold her once more in your arms,
tell her for me – one she knows not –
that her name is life forever.
And when she touches your face
with little hands of wonder,
tell her for me, one she knows not,
that her name is jubilation.
When she sleeps (how small she seems!)
and you kiss her and kiss her, tell her,
dear friend, for me – one she knows not –
that her name is the heart of dreams.

*   *   *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2012

To the woman on the morning ferry

These many months I have seen you, woman.
Yet not once before this did I truly see
those small-boned hands fluttering like doves,
or the dark enchantment of your eyes.
Perhaps it was night that misted my poor sense,
or the day’s worries breeding in my brain
that kept me from the wonder which you are.
Surely it was no defect in you
that held me in darkness all this while.
But now and, I trust, long hereafter
you shall be to me the wind at dawn
that fills the canvas of our dreams,
as I, like an ancient sloop, groaning turn
to breach once more the waves of time.

*     *    *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2011

Desecration

On the morning bus I gazed upward.
I saw a profanation:  above me
the Street Fare poem

To My Love, Combing Her Hair
~ Yehuda Amichai (b. 1924)

had been despoiled by some crude hand
trying to drag the erotic beauty of the poet’s lines
into the dirty corner of the profaner’s being
with clumsy, artless changes
that had no grace, only thrusts
of obscene images, gropings
of a mind with but one note
and that off-key.

I felt violated as if I were the poem
defiled by this wanton mauling
of a precious body of words,
this child of a poet’s senses and spirit and heart.

Then I understood that in truth
nothing can harm the wonder of a poem,
nothing can harm our very wonder…

*     *    *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2011

The Collector

Some collect rare gems or monarch butterflies,
their wings of color and grace forever stilled.
But I gather memories of lilacs
and roses and jasmine whose perfumes draw
rapture from wells of longing; of night;
of shadows, gently tracing
warm designs of wonder in the lamplight;
of flesh, naked, roiling,
a kaleidoscope of purple lust,
rumpled sheets, promise dawning;
of kisses; of eyes dancing in starlight.
These are my gems of rare esteem,
my butterflies still fluttering their wings,
wings of color and grace that are never stilled!

*      *     *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2011

On hearing, years afterward, of Roberta’s death

First met in our salad days,
she was one dearest, one most hotly loved.
First, time and distance sundered us.
Now, the fiat of death drops a pall between us.

Mind of wonder, voice of songbirds,
forthright heart open with untrammeled love
for all the world; mouth of red rose,
strawberry breasts, thighs lithe as wind –
now all for me mere memories.
Such images take their substance
from one who exceeded all praise.
To her they compare as would
wrecked petals, sere fruit, a desolate sigh.

Her youth and her beauty’s shadow
haunt the angry silence of my tired heart.

*      *     *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll   2011