Three Love Poems And...

[greenstorm]

The Benjamin Franklin of Monogamy by Jeffrey McDaniel

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring
that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect

of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel.
Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt under the blanket

of your voice, said I guess there's two kinds of women.
Those you write poems about, and those you don’t.

It’s true. I never slid sonnets under the door, or served you
haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping

Jane's Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window
at three hundred a.m., whisky doing push-ups

on my breath. I worked within the confines of my character,
cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan

of your dark side. We don't have a past so much as a bunch
of electricity, power never put to good use. What

we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if
we caught one another like a flu, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex.
Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Ben Franklin

of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, haven't developed antibodies

for your smile. I don't know long regret existed
before humans hammered a word on it, or how many

paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean,
or why the light of a candle being blown out

travels faster than the luminescence of one that's freshly lit,
but I do know all our huffing and puffing

into the other's throat--as if the heart was a birthday cake
covered with trick candles--didn't make the silence

any easier to navigate. I'm sorry all the kisses I scribbled
on your neck were written in disappearing ink, sorry

this poem took thirteen years to reach you. Sometimes
I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out

of my ear, and when I slept, you'd press your face
against the porthole of my submarine. I wish that just once,

instead of joyriding over flesh, we'd put our hands away
like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered

the calligraphy of each other's eyelashes, translated
a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem by Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary

This space, externally imposed nights alone, is drawing to an end.

I've been thinking about what it means to be *with* someone. When I was with Kynnin for seven years, or with Juggler for ...can it be coming on three now? Maybe two? And you've spent so many events together, and so many words have passed between you, are you after all closer to who the other person really is? Or is all your knowing of them built up into a screen of expectation behind which you don't see the person at all? Certainly I feel close to many people lately-- close in many different ways, but close nonetheless. I've told you about Graham's facial expressions. I haven't told you about the kind of dead-certain predictable/intuitiveness of some of my interactions with Juggler. I haven't told you about so many smaller things-- a chance word here and there by Bevan, a fit of laughter and a shared glance with Beth, grooves of experiences with Tillie stretching into the past like the parallel ruts of wagon wheels in mud, the sound of two Chris's voices raised in the so-familiar sounds of not-quite-argument, the drape of a body in bed. These flashes of closeness are very intense, and remind me of, oh, the other times when my nights were full of solitude like this. I think one appreciates it more, when it's not always there.

I've been thinking, too, about what falling in love means for me. I've always done it easily, quickly and hard, as CrazyChris says, 'Greenie, you're long-term. Be careful.' I'm starting to max out, I think. I'm starting to have enough sticky-attachment-love-intrusive-entanglements with people in that part of my soul that there's nothing to reach out and get snagged on stray passers-by. Passing attractions and interests happen, but the click doesn't. Well, not as often, any rate.

G'night, y'all. Sleep well.

Comments

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

you seem to have 2-lover carrying capacity in general.

I think most of us do, in many ways.

[greenstorm.livejournal.com]

I was thinking here about a more general love. I've got four or five most-day loves, and maybe a half-dozen once-in-awhile-but-for-sures, and beyond that a cloud of less reliables/less oftens.

[estrellada.livejournal.com]

hrm, that makes sense. I notice that my life starts to 'feel full' after a while: Like, right now, I'd say it's fairly full, tho I only have a few 'every day' people, I have enough of the others shifting through so that loneliness only occurs in shallow, moody doses.