Tag: love and relationships

“In Winter,” Michael Ryan

At four o’clock it’s dark.
Today, looking out through dusk
at three gray women in stretch slacks
chatting in front of the post office,
their steps left and right and back
like some quick folk dance of kindness,
I remembered the winter we spent
crying in each other’s laps.
What could you be thinking at this moment?
How lovely and strange the gangly spines
of trees against a thickening sky
as you drive from the library
humming off-key? Or are you smiling
at an idea met in a book
the way you smiled with your whole body
the first night we talked?
I was so sure my love of you was perfect,
and the light today
reminded me of the winter you drove home
each day in the dark at four o’clock
and would come into my study to kiss me
despite mistake after mistake after mistake.

“Self-Portrait in the Body of a Whale,” Frances Justine Post

We come upon the body of a whale, a fresh beaching.
      It smells like a thousand fishes.      
I crawl in on the carpet of its tongue, seeking the injury out.

      Outside, you cough and look away as I squint
            through the eye at you. I dig into the room
its ribs make and squat in the warm gloom. The heart,

a chandelier, hangs down, ringed with veins. Here and there
      the skin, thinned by hermit crabs, lets in the light
like a stained glass window with blood red panes.


      I lie down on the bed of its liver as the tide fills the body,
            each wave, higher. You give the whale a kick
I almost didn’t feel and gesture towards the dunes,

backing away, disappearing. Is this who you really are?
      This is where I live now like a barnacle,
stern and grumpy. If you try to move me, I will cut you.

“7:17,” Elijah Patterson

you come back to me in a memory
of frantic morning primping,
a hurricane of flat-ironed hair and unironed pants.
the bathroom mirror still fogged
by your shower and breath as you squintingly apply eyeliner, shouting
“time check!” every few minutes.

you are always late.

it takes some time to trace the memories
of women i have loved and not deserved
before i get to your name and face,
two words instead mean the essence of you.

i    have never been good with time.
i    have never been good with months or years.
i    looked after those hands with unblinking dedication.

and
sleepless tuesday mornings, i wonder
who it is that now attends
to the ticking of your clocks.

“Snowshoe to Otter Creek,” Stacie Cassarino

love lasts by not lasting
                       —Jack Gilbert 

I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings:    
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Stacie Cassarino, “Snowshoe to Otter Creek” from Zero at the Bone. Copyright © 2009 by Stacie Cassarino. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press.

Source: Zero at the Bone (New Issues Press, 2009)

“I Love You, Sweatheart,” Thomas Lux

A man risked his life to write the words.
A man hung upside down (an idiot friend
holding his legs?) with spray paint
to write the words on a girder fifty feet above
a highway. And his beloved,
the next morning driving to work…?
His words are not (meant to be) so unique.
Does she recognize his handwriting?
Did he hint to her at her doorstep the night before
of “something special, darling, tomorrow”?
And did he call her at work
expecting her to faint with delight
at his celebration of her, his passion, his risk?
She will know I love her now,
the world will know my love for her!
A man risked his life to write the world.
Love is like this at the bone, we hope, love
is like this, Sweatheart, all sore and dumb
and dangerous, ignited, blessed–always,
regardless, no exceptions,
always in blazing matters like these: blessed.