3 poems

EMILY DICKINSON

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!

Were I with thee,

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a heart in port, --

Done with the compass,

Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden!

Ah! the sea!

Might I but moor

To-night in Thee!

***

EE CUMMINGS

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. don't cry

- the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other; then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

and death i think is no parenthesis

***

PABLO NERUDA

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,

your hands the color of a savage harvest,

hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,

I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,

the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,

I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,

hunting for you, for your hot heart,

like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.