About Love Notes
Love shared, love in secret, celebrated, exploded. Unrequited longing and love that’s mellowed through the years. Love at long distance, across continents, so close there’s no space to breathe, or never quite close enough. Love lost and love found. Love from the inside out and love from the outside in.
Love Notes has it all: a collection of poetry as diverse as the experience of falling in love itself. A shared candied apple, a farewell at Paddington Station, a name scribbled in a notebook, a face that leaves us breathless, a single word that changes our life forever. Love Notes is a rich tapestry of verse woven from fragments of life and those moments that make falling in love so irresistible. And so ineveitable.
Love is unique, love is universal. Love is everywhere.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. This book, and parts thereof, may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without express written permission. For information, e-mail info@vagabondagepress.com.
Love Notes
© 2012 by Vagabondage Press
Vagabondage Press
PO Box 3563
Apollo Beach, Florida 33572
http://www.vagabondagepress.com
First edition printed in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, February 2012
Front cover art by Kimi Kodate. Cover designed by Maggie Ward.
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Love Notes
A Collection of Romantic Poetry
Vagabondage Press
Chaitali Deepak Gawade
Beginnings
There will be many
beginnings,
no endings,
on this eternal journey
that we begin.
Dreams are made of
golden beaches,
sun-kissed skies,
dreamy eyes;
but mine are
made of you.
You gave out
rainbows
from your purse,
made paper boats
with hues of moon.
Tempted—
rivers turned course
to look at you.
I am just a mortal soul
powerless to resist you.
So here I am,
unable to stop
writing poetry for you.
Brigitte Goetze
Overheated
A late afternoon sun covered the audience
like an electric blanket turned on too high.
The low rumble of the lecturer’s voice,
slow and circulatory as a clothes dryer,
mesmerized. I, with my fountain pen,
blue ink spurting like steam
from an overheated pressure cooker,
wrote just one word
over and over and over again:
slanted, straight,
curved, upright,
plain, embellished,
underlined, encircled,
small, tall,
horizontal, vertical,
diagonal across the whole page
in big capital letters!
My neighbor’s gray head bent
over my young shoulder. Reading,
he whispered conspiratorially,
“So, his name is Stan.”
Julie Catherine Vigna
First Kiss
Their love is tremulous, fragile in its infancy. Honeyed lips brush with breathless longing, the instant of ethereal sweetness causing their hearts to tremble with timid promise. Peering through the gossamer veil of years, I still remember.
Frilled wafer enfolds
Virginal essence of snow
The blush of first kiss
Kayla Bashe
Poet in the Rain
Lost boy with blackboard eyes,
Itinerant poet subsisting on free food and latte fumes,
Neon ski cap pulled low over uncut bangs, hallway-bound.
Cold shade in a digital Hades of ambient guitars—
Don’t look back.
I’d like to grab your pale wrist,
Offer you a riotous scarf,
Pull you to a warmer land
Of cherry trees, cartoonishly blue skies, big-band parades.
You’d find plenty to write about.
Cook you soup.
Who’s the lush-haired, chattering girl who bid you
Wait outside in the rain,
Hands in pockets, brick-wall-slouched?
She is false sunshine.
She is no muse.
Your eyes are blackboard-dark.
I’d paint rainbows there.
Natalie McNabb
As I Am
How do you look inside me this way?
See the things hidden? Or so I’d thought.
The things I didn’t expect you to understand.
How do you caress them? Put them back,
One-by-one? And love me just as I am?
Caitlin Meredith Walsh
Thief
The moon’s bright tonight.
Is it full yet?
Yeah. It’s like silver glass.
Like a mirror. I could just
reach up and snatch it.
No one’s watching me.
You could wear it on a chain.
You sound like you’re
going to steal it.
Is that why you called?
Are you going to
steal the moon for me?
Maybe I am.
(I wish he wouldn’t do this.)
(I bet she thinks I’m kidding.)
------silence on the line------
Hey, where did the moon go?
I was looking at it,
and my mind wandered,
and now it’s gone.
See? I told you I’d do it.
Manda Frederick
Your Confession
When your confession
I have to push you away
now toppled so far down
from you like a small
nested bird, I clutched
that shaking admission
strong against my core,
terrified to crush that
rapid-beating honesty.
Bradley McIlwain
Cherub
So much to say about a bowl
of cherries
locked between lips—soft and
gushy
ripening years of our childish
love
unfolding over long summers.
John Byrne
And There You Were
A hundred thousand million seconds passed,
Close on behind a thousand million more,
When in the tightly, swiftly moving mass,
A second stepped aside and there you were.
And there you were, as ordinary as
A lightening flash. The second that revealed
You stayed aside; the others ceased to pass,
And all was still except a heart gone wild.
My heart gone crazy wild, you must have heard;
You surely saw I stared a million years;
I never saw enough and time concurred,
For it stayed stopped as everything came clear.
Yes, everything came clear, quite obvious:
No further need of time, once it made us.
Sharon Lask Munson
August Night at Crater Lake
Perhaps it is
the full moon,
or the wind
as it whispers
through spruce
and fir,
or the clouds
as they curl
over Wizard Island,
or the stillness
of this one starry night
that makes it ours for the taking.
Martin Willitts Jr.
First Love is Best Love
First love is best love.
The winds are carefree women with baskets of white daises.
The elegance of the sudden ledge,
straight-down-dizzy,
where wet surface flat shale rock
and spongy-moss
makes us almost lose footing,
like love
reminds me how dangerous it could be
to miss what is in front of you.
And if you look, into the abyss,
you will find a longing
calling out to you.
Jennifer Smith
Water Series
Water #0
the girl who loves you,
white curves of a wave in her
face, trouble to love
Water #1
underneath that blue
you could swim forever—if
you didn’t drown first
Water #2
your bodies hidden
and revealed between water,
arms, here you are formed
Water #3
this love is the moon,
tide, superstition, blood red
waters cover you
Water #4
you cannot see your
reflection in that water;
she can’t love that moon
Len Kuntz
Teenage Summer
The good thief watches while
we soak in a night-blackened sea of shimmering oil,
water that makes us weightless
even as you kick and paddle.
We’ll be old soon enough.
Now the stars urge us to write songs or
yodel so that our laughter rifles through the sky.
The waves rock us like babies.
They slurp across our slick skins
and beckon us to kiss,
kiss deep and long
as lovers do.
Louise Blaydon
At Paddington Station
There is no question between us, any more, of wanting:
I watch the way your lips move when you speak, your
accent falling sharp as shattered glass.
There is a foreignness to you, compelling,
in the consonants clipped off briskly behind your teeth,
that single crooked incisor imperfect and beautiful.
I want to learn the feel of it under my tongue.
There are no words for the press of you in my chest,
the swelling rise and fall of this elemental feeling
behind my diaphragm, over my heart.
Your hands, your hands, the strength of your fingers in mine,
The suggestion of freckles over the ridge of your cheekbone.
All these things I catalogue, remember.
I want to learn you.
Sweetheart—I use endearments without thinking—
there is no edge to this, no clean division
of what we were, and what we are becoming.
The buttons on your coat, your soft-tossed hair,
grass in our pockets on a London afternoon.
The echoing cavern of Paddington Station,
the sunshine:
these fragments line the lining of my heart,
this fierce light that threatens when I would speak.
I would have kissed you on the platform's edge
Had I known then, as now, you would have let me.
James H. Duncan
No First Kiss
I stopped before my hotel and
I turned to her, standing there with her dog.
I remember that this was the moment when
I should have told her that
I was in love with her, but
I didn’t say a word.
I only stared into her wide beautiful
eyes and continued to be a moon
hovering over her
Cooper Sy
Summer Poetry
Her voice is soothing regardless
communicating things that she knows
and I do not.
I want to enroll in her class
to sit on the first row and
stare at her face. I want
to show up at office hours
asking dumb questions
about Seymour Glass
and Paige Bergman.
My notebook is filled with lyric poetry
describing more accurately than prose
what it's like to find loveliness, smartness
hard-edged sarcasm, irony that burns
glaring resistance time and practice
have conferred on J.S. the status
of an expert.
Maybe I’ll always be a student believing
there’s time left for promises, forgiveness
two faces in the mirror that do not always
trigger the memory of Persona
And somewhere in the world
four feet, instead of two
are making tracks
in the sand.
Doug Mathewson
Breathless
you exhale long
and I, in your arms,
inhale deeply of
oxygen-depleted exhalation
and get so dizzy
lying close.
Maggie Westland
Fallen
I climb a tree.
In the grass of its leaves
I sit,
And watch you below.
The wind of your voice,
Unbalancing,
Pulls me downward.
Falling,
I fear hard earth,
And wonder!
I find your touch
Is soft grass.
Justin Blackburn
Deepfreeze
As we in different houses fall asleep,
Our toothbrushes sneak out
And meet down by the train tracks.
They kiss passionately
And create a glowing orange mist
That makes the ghosts forget they are deceased.
They spend the night together,
Our saliva they seek, bristle to bristle,
As we dream of the grapevine grudge
That refuses to let our missile explode in peace.
To think everyday we wake up
And the first thing we do is brush our teeth.
Aunia Kahn
Sweet Smell
I laid on the edge, of the table
Watched the smoke rise across the room
The oven would sizzle, and make sounds
Although the light was broken, inside
He knew how to bribe me, many ways
A kind of sweet, smell that I adored
That of licorice, and dandelions
Embracing the table, dropping leaves
Encircled by the late ladies doilies
Stirring the pot, and air quickly
Catching the breeze, placing it inside
In table cloth patterns, eye focused
Hands manipulating the ingredients
Taste testing, heaven
Freshly washed hands, and cool lips
Handing me spoons to lick
Clean
Jennifer Hollie Bowles
Tokens
As a child, I held your silences
close like best-friend tokens,
cherished the laughter of mercy-
playing, and delighted in the surge
of creek-jumping.
When you asked me to flat-top
my long-blond hair to match you,
I almost did because your voice
brought the tokens alive.
Hot tears galloped down my
face when you shot me in the foot
with your BB-gun ... the sting painful
like an omen of distance and years.
As a woman, I hold your silences
closer still, while the little heart-
shaped peach stone you gave me
rests in her wooden box, and the
memory of the sting becomes sweet.
Sara Harman-Clarke
Little Love
To look down on your face from above,
to hear your tongue speak in a language
of love. You look up to a billowing sail
full and fat with content, and at that
moment when our eyes lock and I am lost
to all, I know that our love is forevermore.
John Oliver Hodges
Somewhere in Georgia
Somewhere in Georgia, she pulled over. We
stepped through the wildflowers to stretch
our legs, share a candied apple, a kiss,
a hug; then on my knees, my face
in the needles, around my ankles my blue
jeans, I felt her pretty renegade lips,
and the long blond hair, somewhere
in Georgia between the needled earth
and lights of the skies. Did the faces
passing by see her sleight of hand?
In traces she held me. I was helpless
in the wet grace of her tongue; and I
drooled into this place, this carpet
of pine, this lair, somewhere
in Georgia. In this posture I was bound,
a tethered beast, dogified youth
of willful surrender, to her body
married by the fire of her mouth. We
tarried here amongst blue-striped skinks.
She bore me far into the woods
where, as I died, once more I was born.
Gabriel Valjan
From the Book of Love
Because of you I cannot read
The lines of my face
The curves of your body
Because of you there is a new language
Water is not wet
Air is not invisible
Earth is not solid
Fire is not hot
When you say nothing and everything
When you let me read your kiss with my lips
The one kiss that rewrites all my poetry
Joseph Wade
Swept
Hey Love,
I want a little sip
Of your sunshine,
A little nibble of your lips;
wanna crash in the waves
on the horizon of your eyes
and float in the clear blue warmth
of your soul ‘til I’m wrecked
on the soft sands of your island.
I’m gonna build a fire there,
Keep it hot and high,
Name it—ours.
H. Edgar Hix
Why I Never Became a Landscape Artist
When you smiled, and the teeth that lined your tongue
were brighter than any trees down any lane;
When your breasts were taller than any mountains
above any lake not so smooth as your belly;
When I found that the valley of your love
was brighter and darker than any canyon;
When we dressed, I heard words
tinkling out of my pockets and knew
I'd never be happy with dry, painted leaves.
Joanna M. Weston
Daily Planner
when you say goodbye
in the morning
day breaks in my hands
I divide morning
into neat segments
work them carefully
to completion
afternoon slides
down a green slope
into your arrival
then time
is whole again
Isaac James Baker
Explain
I wanted to tell her I
love her this morning,
but she was sleeping
so soundly.
I’ll go to work, I thought,
and think
all day long
of a way to
explain how she sustains me,
how I remember every single day
that’s included a smile from her,
and how it seems all the
others simply never
were.
I’ll try.
It would be easier
giving driving directions
to the moon.
Robert Scotellaro
A Brief Description of Heaven
I am waiting in the car,
a favorite tune
in my head. It's hot
and the top is down.
You're right on time.
First your smile,
then a pink pastry box
swinging from a string,
then your red dress
fill the side view mirror—
in that order.
Nikesh Murali
Today I Saw a Yellow Flower
Today I saw a yellow flower,
Shivering in delight as the rain ravished her mane.
Naked leaves smiled mischievously
As the sky hid her blue eyes behind dark eyelids.
It reminded me of the first time I saw you…
You were standing on a sheet of dancing pearls
As the rain washed the colours off weeping willows
And dyed your feet lilac.
You smiled as cold streams of monsoon
Raced down your forehead to places of pleasure
And your lips red as blood, aroused by the insane downpour,
Opened to greet the love of the clouds.
Your eyes closed slowly as if to shelter this moment of passion,
Shielding it with your eyelids,
And your arms ran down your body searching for the arms of your lover.
Today I saw a yellow flower
Shivering in delight as the rain ravished her mane.
It reminded me of you
And the rain that brought us together.
Leila A. Fortier
~Like Rain~
To
Read
You is like
Standing in
The downpour
Of a steady summer
Rain~ The kind that you
Want to dance in…Soaked in
Metaphor ~ Your stanzas cling to
My body and streak my face like the
Tears I dare not cry in splendor…And as
I spin…You stream and cascade whispers
Of revelation with sounds that resound like
Fingers tracing crystal and spoons tapping
Glass ~ Street lights shine iridescent flecks
Splaying off of me…As I whirl and as I
Dance in this trance ~ To the music
You make that I dare not
Sing ~ Reverberating
…Within me…
A
Rising
Crescendo
Of momentum
Breaking stillness ~
Splashing in pools of
Verse rising…And puddles
Are becoming like ocean’s high
Tide ~ And I just want to be swept
Away by that wave ~ Pulled under
By the current and drawn into that
Place where your inspiration is born
And moment by moment ~ Breath by
Caught up breath is released once
Again beneath the light of a
…Milk white moon…
Gary Beck
Mon Amour