from Hiraeth: 17 Love Poems
For M.
No one is fated or doomed to love anyone.
Adrienne Rich
Us, alighted, in the bright paralysis of day. My
knees a harp, tuned to the key of you. Our
conversation begins, our conversion
begins. The suburban sky is a blue slate above
us. You comment, what a pretty town. You order
coffee, you, ungloved, explain the stock market.
All this time you are looking at me, textures
nesting in your face, jaw hooking into the slow
release of winter. All this time I am a crooner’s
ringleting breath, two tired children
in a trench coat, thirteen blackbirds looking one way.
Matthew, I cannot focus on your words, and for
this I am sorry, because your words are the
easiest part of you, but in this moment I am
looking at you, too, and that is all. I am
thinking of agate and skyline, superimposed, a
painting viewing its viewer, our soft momentums
in the dark. I wonder what the world
would think of us. None of this is what I want to say,
and none of this is what I said. You give me back
the book I lent you, and later I flip through it to make
absolutely sure that you haven’t left me some
kind of note. Through it I felt where your
hands and mine had been, at the same
coordinates again. My horoscope says, You
know how to create beauty. Meanwhile, the plaster
on my ceiling shapes itself into faces in the light.
Meanwhile, says an old friend, meanwhile, I’m
nothing but a banshee over a weak
ridge of sea, a diminution; I am twenty-
three, glossology of girl, formless and wanting
under the apse of your body. I know that
thinking you’re in love is a kind of love,
the only orientation many of us know. You reach your
hand around the back of my seat and I am not
looking at you anymore. Matthew, my body hurts from
all this belief. I am saying, open mouth, uneven sky.
I am saying, trouble has found me. In another world,
this is what I’d say: if I don’t do this now I’ll forget.
