Considering that two of my favorite Livesay’s poems from the collection 15 Canadian Poets x 3 were love poems, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that some of my favorite poems in her collected poems are also love poems, though I didn’t find any I like more than “The Unquiet Bed“ and “Sorcery.“
Another of my favorites is “Aubade?
Not what you are
but what you are to me:
a stranger who’s at home
inside my eyes
shoots rainbows
down my spine
laughs at my absurd
long second toe
and wags the world away
upon my tongue.
You are the one
who when I leap to leave you
for the sun
can pull me back to bed:
“Woman, Woman, come.’
It’s lines three and four that initially grabbed me, but I think true love is best shown in the kind of intimacy where one “laughs at my absurd/ long second toe.?
Which is not to say that that kind of intimacy isn’t also intertwined in the sexual intimacy of that last line.
Livesay‘s best poems are seductive without begin pornographic as in “Let Your Hand Play First:?
Let your hand play first
fanning small fires
over the arms, the breasts
catching responses all along the spine
until the whole body flowering
‘s enveloped in one flame
that shudders wildly out
to meet your thrust —
Then burn, my fire
burn with a flame so tall
it unshape the shaping clouds
unearthly move the sphere