Month: October 2017

Love Sonnet VII

~ Ryan Dowling ~ Leave a comment

Love Sonnet VII
after Pablo Neruda

Ten buds blossom on my fingertips and twitch:
like a doe you nibble them, grow delirious in my arms,
and passion twists the tangled smoke of our faces,
contorted one minute with joy, the next with agony.

What kind of a world is this?—half-heartedly
mad for its other half, stumbling through the brambles
like a stampede of lepers, of chained evenings,
of hunchbacked matadors with their sluggish hooves?

I stand in open fields, open-hearted, offering myself—
but to whom? A spirit promised me eternal love
and left me more alone than if I’d slept with a whore.

“Until death do us part,” say the priests, but I say
death is the kiss that sends the mountains floating east
on broken seas, and bruises the Book of the west.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet VI

~ Ryan Dowling ~ Leave a comment

Love Sonnet VI
after Pablo Neruda

First-born, a babe newly mooned in my mother’s arms,
I pronounced my first love upon her breast
and she gave me breath. Lullabied years of tribulation
ached over my crib, and I awoke already a man.

Then my mother’s love was divided a hundredfold,
and I, like an insolent child, went around town
looking up every skirt I saw, asking:
“Are you my woman? Am I your man?”

The crescent moon was a hook or a cross, or else
it was the artful enemy that arms the suicidal.
And though I tried again to love only one woman,

others arrived—nightly criminals, excitable panthers—
and I was forced to weep between their legs.
This is the story of how I became alone.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet V

~ Ryan Dowling ~ Leave a comment

Love Sonnet V
after Pablo Neruda

Love, how like a winter we are. You bury me
in white solitudes—under many snows, you keep me.
Love, you regard me coldly, and the one I love
is a wind that howls in my ear its frosts, its ghosts

as stoic as Eskimos in the glacier-faced North.
So my mouth, like a trap, opens to sing;
and in the jaws of my song is your paw, my lynx.
Quit gnawing yourself! I want to set you free.

Botched surgeries, razors, worms, cancers, aches:
we undressed and paid violence to our vulnerabilities;
you made me want to live like a cold planet,

to ice my doubts in enormous winters of space.
My kiss would only bloody your snow. In your arms,
I grow so old. Look, a chill has taken the moon.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet IV

~ Ryan Dowling ~ Leave a comment

Love Sonnet IV
after Pablo Neruda

Do not leave us like a rose in a vase,
with its roots in the sunset, a slow-dying thing.
Away with you once and for all! Leave me swiftly
as a bullet, a flash at the fall of a guillotine,

a sudden autumn, but no more a rose,
not the stalk of my body nor the petals of your eyes.
See how I set you seaward on a flaming skiff,
pale and without a pulse, your face no face at all?

So wherever I have planted myself, burn it down;
wherever our vines intertwine, burn it away.
Is it true, my love, you’ve swallowed my life seed?

As it swells in your belly, my wheel turns in yours,
inextricably, and you must burn even this
and turn with it in the winter wind.

by Ryan Dowling

Love Sonnet III

~ Ryan Dowling ~ 3 Comments

Love Sonnet III
after Pablo Neruda

Your love is nowhere except where my feet are.
If I dance in China, love; if I climb the Andes, love;
along the bridge between us, every step is love.
While crossing the lily pads of your kisses

in a dream, I could sleepwalk to Paris and back,
and you’d never know I left your side in bed.
You unravel your yarn in this damnable labyrinth,
and the flight of your skirt lights the torch

in my heart as you whip around another corner.
I refuse to take another step without it.
Anywhere I go is only the echo of where you were.

Barefoot, I’ll walk across these bridges ruined
by walking and across your stem of endless thorns,
I’ll walk until I die of it inside your rose.

by Ryan Dowling