I WANT OF YOU
by: Michael Strange
- WANT of
you not this intellectual passion
- Always consciously composing its code
- Of liberties! considerations!
- Nor this reasonable loftiness,
- Treating each circumstance with oratorical gestures
- Toward some invisible public.
- Nor do I exact this fraternal fairness
- In sexual emergency--
- Nor even this cerebral impartiality
- In passional disaster--
- Phew, such attitudes savouring to me
- Of affectation masking depleted instinct,
- Or of egomania parading as a new charity.
- Listen! I want your mouth whispering over my heart
- "This complete moment
- Is moulding us eternally together!"
- I want our limbs, twisted, luminous,
- Crushing the physical into spiritual invocation,
- Commingling! Ascending!
- Nor afterward any slamming down of the lid
- Upon emerging spirit.
- Since I desire that consummation become a beginning,
- A beginning, stammering our souls with tenderness,
- Inflating us with moods palpitating--
- Disconcerting--mysterious--as dreams--
- Moods confessional--adventurous,
- Flickering our fancy with spectre forms
- Triumphant--transcendent--angelic--
- Since I admonish consummation to become a beginning,
- And so mortal love, the legitimate mediator
- Between God and Man.
"I Want of You" is reprinted
from Poems. Michael Strange. New York: Brentano's, 1919. |
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POEMS BY MICHAEL STRANGE |
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