The following love poems are the 3rd and 4th in my series of 49 Love Poems. I will be delivering the rest, chronologically and intermittently, as I present my other selections from The Kitchen Sink. Numbers 1 and 2 are in the archives, from about a month ago. Meanwhile, I appear to be building a steady little readership. If you have not already, why not subscribe and have my writing delivered directly to your email box? It is free and will remain so, though in the future I may introduce a way to voluntarily donate a few bucks a month.
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NUMBER 3 I wish I knew the name of love. I wish I could share my own attendance to the forms and shadows that make love. I would introduce you too as evidence of everything when we wonder: could this be love? And in the afternoon when you hold me like the most anticipatory vice of flowers when I can barely open my eyes to the soft lamps of your skin, your own sigh spun from the mistiness of yes… I am always willing to declare that there is something like love in our look, in those wizened half-sleep, half opened gazes. We have been waiting so long. Who are we to doubt the indescribable might indeed have a name? That it is ravaged so often we cannot recognize it for its bruises and its cries? Absolutely breathless I fight back and you pull me in, you push me away and I pull your most interior artfulness apart, open, alert and stunning in light into the air until I sip and plunge. Love, I have rejected any long march into the rivers of the damned or the elevated. We dreamt it in this song this song this slackened verse singing after the torrent, when the rain agreed, and the fire. ***
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Number 4 Today is the day the store-bought roses glow brought in through the dim intermittent rain outside our house, where blankets heap of their own accord and the dog’s lost toy is found again. Coffee, the smell of breakfast lingers. I have a cough and I linger too in the muted silence with its music remembering unbidden those who have loved us and left and the cool change from the muffling of snow to spring wars before little snowdrops must emerge from last year’s leaves and I consider you, under a lamp as you ask me to look at old photos you’ve unboxed because they are of your father your sister and your mother and you… almost everyone gone into a swell of memory. Why does this love turn so slowly under our dreams? Why do we wake in the middle of a movie we’ve wanted to watch together to find we are still touching, even then absently but full of what is to come even now, as old and with as many presentiments of the end as there are the older we become? We slide that aside for now, we laugh, we eat lightly skilleted perch and eggs, never hungry as we once were. ***
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