Photo By Santosh Kumar – https://www.flickr.com/photos/sntsh/36382208006/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=94604550
Eros
Louise Glück
I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.
I was in a kind of dream, or trance —
in love, and yet
I wanted nothing.
It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.
I wanted only this:
the room, the chair, the sound of the rain falling,
hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.
I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.
My heart had become very small; it took very little to fill it.
I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city —
You were not concerned. I did the things
one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,
but I moved like a sleepwalker.
It was enough and it no longer involved you.
A few days in a strange city.
A conversation, the touch of a hand.
And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.
That was what I wanted: to be naked.
Rain
Carol Ann Duffy
Not so hot as this for a hundred years.
You were where I was going. I was in tears.
I surrendered my heart to the judgement of my peers.
A century’s heat in the garden, fierce as love.
You returned on the day I had to leave.
I mimed the full, rich, busy life I had to live.
Hotter than hell. I burned for you day and night;
got bits of your body wrong, bits of it right,
in the huge mouth of the dark, in the bite of the light.
I planted a rose, burnt orange, the colour of flame,
gave it the last of the water, gave it your name.
It flared back at the sun in a perfect rhyme.
Then the rain came, like stammered kisses at first
on the back of my neck. I unfurled my fist
for the rain to caress with its lips. I turned up my face,
and water flooded my mouth, baptised my head,
and the rainclouds gathered like midnight overhead,
and the rain came down like a lover comes to a bed.