Poems that Manifest Warmth

This is going to sound geeky, but I swear there is nothing better than spending your Sunday cuddled in blankets, with a cup of tea, and some poems to read. It is definitely a day of the week I look forward to, as its warmth is constant. Here are some of my favorite warm poems:

“Carry” by Billy Collins

I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water.

Just this morning on the shore,
I could hear two people talking quietly
in a rowboat on the far side of the lake.

They were talking about fishing,
then one changed the subject,
and, I swear, they began talking about you.

“Hum for the Bolt” by Jamal Maay

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so

of the next closest thing to water to the touch,

or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood 

crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm. 

But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure 

of this town, it is the flash that arrives 

and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want 

to be in this moment, in this doorway, 

because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer 

against the curve of anyone’s arm, 

as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar 

from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man 

switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing 

compared to that moment when I eat the dark,

draw shadows in quick strokes across wall

and start a tongue counting 

down to thunder. That counting that says, 

I am this far. I am this close.

“Come Slowly- Eden!” by Emily Dickinson

Come slowly – Eden!
Lips unused to Thee –
Bashful – sip thy Jessamines –
As the fainting Bee –

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums –
Counts his nectars –
Enters – and is lost in Balms.

“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” by Billy Collins

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything –
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

“The Hush of the Very Good” by Todd Boss

You can tell by how he lists 

to let her 

kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it, 

is good. 

It’s good in the sweetly salty, 

deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged 

rain is good after a summer-long bout 

of inland drought. 

And you know it 

when you see it, don’t you? How it 

drenches what’s dry, how the having 

of it quenches. 

There is a grassy inlet 

where your ocean meets your land, a slip 

that needs a certain kind of vessel, 

and 

when that shapely skiff skims in at last, 

trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging 

left and right, 

then the long, lush reeds 

of your longing part, and soft against 

the hull of that bent wood almost im- 

perceptibly brushes a luscious hush 

the heart heeds helplessly— 

the hush 

of the very good.

And my personal favorite:

“Winter Solitude” by Matsuo Basho

Winter solitude
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

happy reading!

allow these poems to invite warmth into your bodies, and dig into more poetry!