1247 Love poems

Years later they find themselves talking about chances, moments when their lives might have swerved off for the smallest reason. What if I hadn’t phoned, he says, that morning? What if you’d been out, as you were when I tried three times the night before? Then she tells him a secret. She’d been there all evening, and she knew he was the one calling, which was why she hadn’t answered. Because she felt— because she was certain—her life would change if she picked up the phone, said hello, said, I was just thinking of you. I was afraid, she tells him. And in the morning I also knew it was you, but I just answered the phone the way anyone answers a phone when it starts to ring, not thinking you have a choice.

When you finally, after deep illness, lay the length of your body on mine, isn’t it like the strata of the earth, the pressure of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, all the years, uncountable wakings, sleepings, sleepless nights, fights, ordinary mornings talking about nothing, and the brief fiery plummets, and the unselfconscious silences of animals grazing, the moving water, wind, ice that carries the minutes, leaves behind minerals that bind the sediment into rock. How to bear the weight, with every flake of bone pressed in. Then, how to bear when the weight is gone, the way a woman whose neck has been coiled with brass can no longer hold it up alone. Oh love, it is balm, but also a seal. It binds us tight as the fur of a rabbit to the rabbit. When you strip it, grasping the edge of the sliced skin, pulling the glossy membranes apart, the body is warm and limp. If you could, you’d climb inside that wet, slick skin and carry it on your back. This is not neat and white and lacy like a wedding, not the bright effervescence of champagne spilling over the throat of the bottle. This visceral bloody union that is love, but beyond love. Beyond charm and delight the way you to yourself are past charm and delight. This is the shucked meat of love, the alleys and broken glass of love, the petals torn off the branches of love, the dizzy hoarse cry, the stubborn hunger.

No more alone sleeping, no more alone waking, Thy dreams divided, thy prayers in twain; Thy merry sisters tonight forsaking, Never shall we see, maiden, again. Never shall we see thee, thine eyes glancing. Flashing with laughter and wild in glee, Under the mistletoe kissing and dancing, Wantonly free. There shall come a matron walking sedately, Low-voiced, gentle, wise in reply. Tell me, O tell me, can I love her greatly? All for her sake must the maiden die!

When you are angry it’s your gentle self I love until that’s who you are. In any case, I can’t love this anger any more than I can warm my heart with ice. I go on loving your smile till it finds its way back to your face.

The first retainer he gave to her was a golden wedding ring. The second—late at night he woke up, leaned over on an elbow, and kissed her. The third and the last— he died with and gave up loving and lived with her.

Why should a foolish marriage vow, Which long ago was made, Oblige us to each other now When passion is decay'd? We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could, Till our love was lov'd out in us both: But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: 'Twas pleasure first made it an oath. If I have pleasures for a friend, And farther love in store, What wrong has he whose joys did end, And who could give no more? 'Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me, Or that I should bar him of another: For all we can gain is to give our selves pain, When neither can hinder the other.

We communicated by cheeses, unwrapping them gingerly, parting the crust with a fork, tasting dew, must, salt, raising an eyebrow, or we let chianti talk for us, rolling it in the glass, staring—it was dark and shiny as the pupil, and stared back— or we undressed each other; we took long walks hand in hand in the vineyards, the pastures, resenting each other bitterly for our happiness that excluded us as surely as the world did, mountain after mountain.

When the wind was right everything else was wrong, like the oak we thought built better than the house split like a ship on a rock. We let it stand the winter, spectral, shagged, every sky its snow, then cut it down, dismantled it in pieces like disease. Then limbs from the yellow poplar broke at will— fell from the heights like bones of the Puritans; even to gather them in bundles seemed puritanical. And the willow, by its nature, wept long tears of its overbranching, so pale they were autumnal. These we turned too easily to switches, mocking the bickering in the spruce's nesting eaves, which crows, then jays bothered all they could. The list, the list. The sycamore made maps of disappearance; the copper beech, parental in its girth, was clipped hard, by a car, with a wound that wouldn't heal. Doctoring, then witchery, then love—nothing we tried would work. More apple trees that grew nowhere but down. More maples spilling sugar. More hawthorns blazing out, telling truth.

Most of what happens happens beyond words. The lexicon of lip and fingertip defies translation into common speech. I recognize the musk of your dark hair. It always thrills me, though I can't describe it. My finger on your thigh does not touch skin— it touches your skin warming to my touch. You are a language I have learned by heart. This intimate patois will vanish with us, its only native speakers. Does it matter? Our tribal chants, our dances round the fire performed the sorcery we most required. They bound us in a spell time could not break. Let the young vaunt their ecstasy. We keep our tribe of two in sovereign secrecy. What must be lost was never lost on us.

1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs—inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is done with pain: ice on the wound, the isolating tourniquet— as though to check an open vein where the self pumps out of the self would stop the second movement of the heart, diastolic, inclusive: to love is to siphon loss into that chamber. 2. What does it mean when a woman says, “my husband,” if she sits all day in the tub; if she worries her life like a dog a rat; if her husband seems familiar but abstract, a bandaged hand she’s forgotten how to use. They’ve reached the middle years. Spared grief, they are given dread as they tend the frail on either side of them. Even their marriage is another child, grown rude and querulous since death practiced on them and withdrew. He asks of her only a little lie, a pale copy drawn from the inked stone where they loll beside the unicorn, great lovers then, two strangers joined by appetite: it frightens her, to live by memory’s poor diminished light. She wants something crisp and permanent, like coral—a crown, a trellis, an iron shawl across the bed where they are laced together, the moon bleaching the house, their bodies abandoned— 3. In last week’s mail, still spread on the kitchen table, the list of endangered species. How plain the animals are, quaint, domestic, but the names lift from the page: Woundfin. Whooping Crane. Squawfish. Black-footed Ferret. California Least Tern. Dearest, the beast of Loch Ness, that shy, broad-backed, two-headed creature, may be a pair of whales or manatee, male and female, driven from their deep mud nest, who cling to each other, circling the surface of the lake.