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Love, If I Dare Say
My younger self, my inner
child turned out – how quick
you are to mimic, to mock
You seem to think I blaspheme
my pen, this page, your eyes, our time
by conjuring a four letter word: love
You squirm in your chair, unable
to forgive the cliché of my romance
so even seduction is not enough, even
voicing desperation is too paltry a guise
to sugar the pill of my earnest honesties
But you are simply spring-green, unbreakable
judging love as a pastime for the elderly
and it can be genteel and comforting --
as plush as the art of the bourgeoisie
It’s risks are trivial to the reckless;
it promises no wealth or notoriety;
it threatens no snapped bones or ransomed pockets
if, in error, just an emptied body racked
by the fever pitch of memory
What consequence is that to a girl
who is full of fire and verve?
What chill is there in solitude
to youth swaggering with nerve?
Yet, as graveyard etiquette grows familiar
and debts bedeck us (our proud ornamental anchors)
the heart turns shrewd as a stockbroker
calculating a dark deficit in time
Age, that monster, muddles caution with virtue
trims down dreams with a practical knife
into smart checklists, manageable goals; never satisfied
dims vision’s largesse with spendthrift chiding
A tongue touched by the vinegar
of loss (real loss, which sears in “Never again”)
becomes too blunt to muffle curses like love
Yet, what a happy hell to be tamed by affection --
how trivial is the new, when I do not want
to die in a museum, I want to die with just a few
established companions surrounding, one familiar
hand in my own – a simple, needed touch unguilded
by anything but a sense of belonging, of what is meant by “own” –
the sweet, heavy pang of having known home
You are young, there are untamed wilds
whole continents of thought ahead of you
There is no mystery in the lack of translation
between my lexicon and yours..
No, I would not dream of boring you more
with my prattle of age and placation
So run outdoors and play at veneration
while I sit by a closed window and sigh
at the faint echo of my reflection and my
impassive, vexingly moderate damnation…
my feeling feminine heart’s slight starvation
my cultured sensitivity, to laugh and nearly cry
------
"All the darkness in the world
cannot put out the light
of one candle"
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Sun on a Mountain
