Submissions by Baldwin

I wonder how the quality
of things I write would be assessed
by writers in the know
(those truly educated in the elements
required for lyrical felicity
like Pound and Eliot, and Pope,
with Yeats and Hardy, too)
if I engaged in messing with,
ignoring so,
the places where some articles
were needed by grammatical
and sensical necessity
to go,
and then, as well, with regularity,
inverted words to get a rhyme,
or wrenched the syntax of my lines
quite out of joint to score some points
(in my own...

I send you all the poems
that only some few days ago
you said I won you with –
an eager time for both of us,
a shining time,
a time before I,
senseless to my senselessness
made you think my caring centered
only on myself.
I send them
hoping they will mold you
like a small cry on your heart
into a softer memory of me.

She supply stood , arch'd back against the wall
with challenge and defiance and hard longing in her eyes,
and hair all darkly storming down her face, her neck,
a swirling stream all silking invitation,
one shoulder bare and glistening, a beacon to his gaze.

Her breath caught up inside a gasp, a sigh surprised,
to find him suddenly so near, to see him
half in shadow half in light,
adopting feral stance, himself amazed at how
the sight and scent of her had loosed his mind
had made him swallow hard
to batter down, to stand against ...

I shall pretend within this rough abandonment
that we never spoke,
never sent each other photographs,
never spent the evening hours entwined by telephone
sharing all the deeper secrets of our histories,
never saw our crossing path as miracle and mystery,
never mentioned love,
and never stood amazed at how
again and then again
at each unveiling of the stages of our pasts
we came to know that if we met
we’d fit together well
like the proverbed hand and glove,
never felt our hearts rise up
like morning mist to...