Poems by Maxwell Bodenheim

Your mind is a little, clandestine pastel
Shaped into a posture of rigid grief.
Its colors hud...

The wrinkled grimaces of eastern skies
Are caught on the Chinese mirrors of your eyes
And lie, ...

You are a well sprayed with cool rubies of sound
In which I bathe and rise with another skin
Li...

You draw my heart about you, as a cloak,
And your words steal over it like a reluctant color: ...

You have a morning-glory face
Whose edges are sensitive to light
And curl in beneath the burden...

The grinning clamour on your face
Dies abruptly, for moments:
Boldness and timidity
Are swep...

So we have a face
Cupped by tender insolences,
Half repenting insolences
Teasing their own an...

Your body is a closed fan
Holding long brush-strokes of glowing repose.
Your words clumsily unl...

Your arms, in faltering crescendos,
Wander through the room
Tinted with expectation of night....

Your criss-crossed ringlets of hair
Are tipped with faltering opalescence.
At dawn a lost smile...

Your cheeks are spent diminuendos
Sheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips.
Your eyes...

Your body was puzzling, like a half-made figure
Till the final shaping of your voice came
And ...

Your breast is the bridal couch of our stillness.
The restless beggar of our breath
Leaves the ...

The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The l...

Smiles are the words beyond the words
That thoughts abandon helplessly.
Upon this nervous shop-...