I long to hold some Lady

I'm into poetry.


Yesterday in a literary conference at the Salt Palace there were several moments that could have been composed into poems about my life. I was sitting alone on a pea green bench during a break and a small, doe-eyed girl from India came up to me. She had a pink balloon tied to her wrist, and she looked at me with more boldness than I have seen in a child. There was no shyness there. We stared at each other for a long time. Longer than was probably proper for a stranger and child to stare. Her parents were about 20 feet away caught up in a conversation about medicine. She pointed at my hair and then she held up her wrist to show me her balloon. Before I was able to speak, her father whisked in and carried her away, the pink balloon bobbing like a bird on waves.

There were two other events, one involving a teenage boy and one involving a Hispanic woman...maybe I'll save those experiences for another post.


At the conference a world renown poet explained the interaction of the poet and the reader with a metaphor (dare he use anything else!) He said that when you read the poems of a poet, it is as personal as sharing a kiss. This quickened me and I was full of visions of kissing various poets. As poets faces flickered across the gray coils of my brain I shuttered a little when Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson flashed there, but the the images stopped and rested on Mr. Cohen. I pictured having a long, drawn out, soft French kiss with Leonard Cohen....and the metaphor came to life with piercing imagery.




I Long to Hold Some Lady from The Spice Box of Earth

I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.

There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady's bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:

As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.

Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.

But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.