Love in the Morning
By Annie Finch

Morning’s a new bird
stirring against me
out of a quiet nest,
coming to flight—

quick-changing,
slow-nodding,
breath-filling body,

life-holding,
waiting,
clean as clear water,

warmth-given,
fire-driven
kindling companion,

mystery and mountain,
dark-rooted,
earth-anchored.

About This Poem

“‘Love in the Morning’ was written in a spirit of sensual gratitude. The poem unites the four elements to celebrate male sexuality.”
—Annie Finch

Annie Finch is the author of Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). She teaches online in the Poetcraft Circles and lives in Portland, Maine.

Antique
Arthur Rimbaud, 1854 – 1891

Graceful son of Pan! Around your forehead crowned
with small flowers and berries, your eyes, precious
spheres, are moving. Spotted with brownish wine lees,
your cheeks grow hollow. Your fangs are gleaming.
Your chest is like a lyre, jingling sounds circulate between your
blond arms. Your heart beats in that belly where the double
sex sleeps. Walk at night, gently moving that thigh,
that second thigh and that left leg.

Verge
By Mark Doty

A month at least before the bloom
and already five bare-limbed cherries
by the highway ringed in a haze
of incipient fire
—middle of the afternoon,
a faint pink-bronze glow. Some things
wear their becoming:
the night we walked,
nearly strangers, from a fevered party
to the corner where you’d left your motorcycle,
afraid some rough wind might knock it to the curb,
you stood on the other side
of the upright machine, other side
of what would be us, and tilted your head
toward me over the wet leather seat
while you strapped your helmet on,
engineer boots firm on the black pavement.

Did we guess we’d taken the party’s fire with us,
somewhere behind us that dim apartment
cooling around its core like a stone?
Can you know, when you’re not even a bud
but a possibility poised at some brink?

Of course we couldn’t see ourselves,
though love’s the template and rehearsal
of all being, something coming to happen
where nothing was…
But just now
I thought of a troubled corona of new color,
visible echo, and wondered if anyone
driving in the departing gust and spatter
on Seventh Avenue might have seen
the cloud breathed out around us
as if we were a pair
of—could it be?—soon-to-flower trees.

About This Poem

“Often we don’t seem to know when something new—maybe something major—is beginning. ‘Falling in love’ is, in truth, a recognition of something that’s already happened; when you know you’re in love, you’ve already arrived there. But can you ever tell when you’re just on the brink of something exhilarating, disruptive, lovely?”
—Mark Doty

I think Doty hits the nail on the head. You never know when you are on the brink of something, whether it is exhilarating, disruptive, or lovely. Sometimes it takes time to realize where a relationship is going; sometimes you might know from the beginning; and other times the journey can be incredibly confusing.

About Mark Doty

Author of several volumes of poetry and two major memoirs, Mark Doty, winner of the National Book Award for poetry, is one of the most celebrated American poets to emerge from the 1980s and 1990s. Doty helped bring the AIDS narrative and the experiences of gay men to a wider audience through emotionally resonant stories, a richly stylized poetic voice, and poems characterized by brilliant language and a polished surface. His work universalizes themes of loss, mortality, and renewal.

Doty writes poems of sumptuous detail and imagery while at the same time embracing emotionally raw subjects such as mortality and loss. His poems also explore art, beauty, and beauty’s surface, as well as the flaw, the wound, and the limit.

Doty is among the most prominent gay poets of his generation, and he has earned distinction as an AIDS memoirist. He has also managed to transcend the category “gay poet” and to find a wide audience and commercial success. As Robert Martin suggests, if Doty’s work endures, it will be in part “because he has understood the need both to record the suffering of AIDS and the desire for human gestures to transcend all loss and to write in a form at once delicate and powerful.”

“Sheathed”
By Sabrina Miller

Sometimes I forget to breathe.
What will not reach my voice
Shimmers with fury in my eyes.
I open the dusty cupboards
Holding thoughts upon their shelves.
Inward. Incessantly inward.
The fulcrum of confession
Keeps the ingredients in place.
I dare not move them.
It is but illusion.
I start again.

The roots of this emotion
Dig deeper and deeper,
Pooling in chasms of liquid;
Just because I want it.
Just because I let it.
It reaches the very core of me.
I confront the frustration
Of what I cannot speak
As reason imprisons my words.
Not yet…

It takes me by the trembling hand
Teaching me to understand.
It validates the prior view
Before I could conceive of you.
Depth synchronized.
Veiled and shaded,
Over anticipated,
It snapped in loaded tension.
The resplendent flight
Of this will, this light,
Builds a bridge across the fracture.

You crawl upon the chambered web,
Closer – quieter – closer.
What awaits the center?
The silvery fibers;
Distortions of age;
A poet’s cognitions
On an intimate page?
Pointing at my picket fence
While your fortress casts its shadow
Across the untouched valleys.
Inward, deeper still,
I forge my way across the hill.
In constant quest;
My truths – undressed,
Returning silence to its sheathe.
And sometimes I forget to breathe.

About the Poet
Love is the essence of pure thought.
There is nowhere that this thought is not.

Sabrina Miller is a dreamer and a poet navigating the creative waters of inspiration. She grew up in a small, conservative community in Oklahoma, just beyond several gypsum plateaus and miles of desert sand. Miller began writing poetry when she was 11 and never stopped. Words formulated a stream of consciousness that acted as a mental and emotional schematic to help her sort out and understand her experiences. Braving snakes, aggressive dogs, religion, homophobia, isolation and renegade tumbleweeds, she decided to make a major life change. Miller relocated to the Catskills to answer the call of creativity. With a deep sense of appreciation for the therapeutic and consciousness-raising qualities of art, she hopes to help others by documenting her experiences through words and imagery. She has been working with a group called Inspire Art (created by musician, Sarah Fimm) for a few years and am currently expanding poetry into video projects.

You can find more of Sabrina Miller’s poetry at her Tumblr blog, Sparkled Poetics.

Calamus [In Paths Untrodden]
Walt Whitman, 1819 – 1892

In paths untrodden,
In the growth by margins of pond-waters,
Escaped from the life that exhibits itself,
From all the standards hitherto publish’d, from the
pleasures, profits, conformities,
Which too long I was offering to feed my soul,
Clear to me now standards not yet publish’d, clear to me
that my soul,
That the soul of the man I speak for rejoices in comrades,
Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talk’d to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abash’d, (for in this secluded spot I can respond
as I would not dare elsewhere,)
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet
contains all the rest,
Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly
attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing hence types of athletic love,
Afternoon this delicious Ninth-month in my forty-first
year,
I proceed for all who are or have been young men,
To tell the secret of my nights and days,
To celebrate the need of comrades.

Thomas Eakins’ The Swimming Hole

Thomas Eakins made several on-site oil sketches and photographic studies before painting The Swimming Hole. It is unknown whether the photographs were taken before the oil sketches were produced or vice versa (or, indeed, whether they were created on the same day).

By the early 1880s, Eakins was using photography to explore sequential movement and as a reference for painting. Some time in 1883 or 1884, he photographed his students engaged in outdoor activities. Four photographs of his students swimming naked in Dove Lake have survived (one is at the top of this post), and bear a clear relationship to The Swimming Hole. The swimmers are seen in the same spot and from the same vantage point, although their positions are entirely different from those in the painting. None of the photographs closely matches the poses depicted in the painting; this was unusual for Eakins, who typically adhered closely to his photographic studies. “The divergence between these sets of images may hint at lost or destroyed pictures, or it may tell us that the photographs came first, before Eakins’ mental image had crystallized, and before the execution of his first oil sketch.” The poses in the photographs are more spontaneous, while those of the painting are deliberately composed with a classical “severity”. Although no photographic studies have survived that would suggest a more direct connection between the photographs and the painting, recent scholarship has proposed that marks incised onto the canvas and later covered by paint indicate that Eakins made use of light-projected photographs

I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons,
And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons.

This man was a wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person,
The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and
beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness
and breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also,
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were
massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome,
They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him,
They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal
love,
He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the
clear-brown skin of his face,
He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he
had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had
fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him,
When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish,
you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of
the gang,
You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit
by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.