Skip to main content

"Love Song" by Joseph Brodsky

If you were drowning, I'd come to the rescue,
wrap you in my blanket and pour hot tea.
If I were a sheriff, I'd arrest you
and keep you in the cell under lock and key.


If you were a bird, I 'd cut a record
and listen all night long to your high-pitched trill.
If I were a sergeant, you'd be my recruit,
and boy i can assure you you'd love the drill.


If you were Chinese, I'd learn the languages,
burn a lot of incense, wear funny clothes.
If you were a mirror, I'd storm the Ladies,
give you my red lipstick and puff your nose.


If you loved volcanoes, I'd be lava
renlentlessly erupting from my hidden source.
And if you were my wife, I'd be your lover
because the church is firmly against divorce.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Kiss" by Frederick Smock

Since having to get reading glasses, taking them off has become my sign that I want to kiss you. Sometimes I call out, Honey, do you know where my glasses are? And you know, when we find them, I will put them on just so I can take them off again.
1 comment
Read more

"The Music" by Sharon Olds

When I first stand up to my mother, when I am fifty--and on a civic issue-- she changes, as if she's been waiting for someone to lead her. She does not mention the beauty of her blue eyes, but says she has been sorting her late sweetheart's clothes-- and it BREAKS my HEART , she cries out. and then she cries, as if she has been lowered down into a river of music. I'm not unhappy, she says, this is better for me than church, her voice through tears like the low singing of a watered plant long not watered-- and now it can be heard, her fear of tears, as if they might take her far back to something like the swimming of the flayed in the flay. Now she lets me hear the music of her self--I could be in a cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could be a young or an ancient mother. Now I hear the melody of the one bound to the mast. It had little to do with me, her life, which lay on my life, it was not really human life but chemical, and approximate landscape, trenches and rea...
1 comment
Read more