- Woke up with The Cure in my head.
- Links while they're fresh.
- Fighting the abuse of women in New Mexico prisons.
- Stray dogs and stateless babies.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
- The New Inquiry's Sunday readings.
- On first lines in poetry.
- Stevie Smith, for those of you who do.
- What's left of my books.
- Also woke up with Kenneth Koch in my head.
THE MAGIC OF NUMBERS
Kenneth Koch
The Magic of Numbers—1
How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs!
I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two.
The Magic of Numbers—2
You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no and walked on.
I was nineteen, and you were seven.
The Magic of Numbers—3
Yes, but does X really like us?
We were both twenty-seven.
The Magic of Numbers—4
You look like Jerry Lewis (1950).
The Magic of Numbers—5
Grandfather and grandmother want you to go over to their house for dinner.
They were sixty-nine, and I was two and a half.
The Magic of Numbers—6
One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you and nothing happened.
The Magic of Numbers—7
No, of course it wasn’t I who came to the library!
Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, brown hair. I was twenty-nine, and you were sixteen.
The Magic of Numbers—8
After we made love one night in Rockport I went outside and kissed the road
I felt so carried away. I was twenty-three, and you were nineteen.
The Magic of Numbers—9
I was twenty-nine, and so were you. We had a very passionate time.
Everything I read turned into a story about you and me, and everything I did was turned into a poem.
IN LOVE WITH YOU
Kenneth Koch
I
O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,
Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still,
It is beautiful, when October
Is over, and February is over,
To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet
Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then
Reply (to no one), “Let’s go five or six blocks.”
Isn’t the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?
Aren’t my eyes bigger than love?
Isn’t this history, and aren’t we a couple of ruins?
Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun
What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!
Is love what we are,
Or has happiness come to me in a private car
That’s so very small I’m amazed to see it there?
2
We walk through the park in the sun, and you say, “There’s a spider
Of shadow touching the bench, when morning’s begun.” I love you.
I love you fame I love you raining sun I love you cigarettes I love you love
I love you daggers I love smiles daggers and symbolism.
3
Inside the symposium of your sweetest look’s
Sunflower awning by the nurse-faced chrysanthemums childhood
Again represents a summer spent sticking knives into porcelain raspberries, when China’s
Still a country! Oh, King Edward abdicated years later, that’s
Exactly when. If you were seventy thousand years old, and I were a pill,
I know I could cure your headache, like playing baseball in drinking-water, as baskets
Of towels sweetly touch the bathroom floor! O benches of nothing
Appear and reappear—electricity! I’d love to be how
You are, as if
The world were new, and the selves were blue
Which we don
Until it’s dawn,
Until evening puts on
The gray hooded selves and the light brown selves of . . .
Water! your tear-colored nail polish
Kisses me! and the lumberyard seems new
As a calm
On the sea, where, like pigeons,
I feel so mutated, sad, so breezed, so revivified, and still so unabdicated—
Not like an edge of land coming over the sea!
