It has been many years since I have written a love poem, and when I did write them, I did so anxiously and quite badly. Likely I abandoned the form to salvage the craft. But lately the daily exercises of devotion have begun to speak to me in this language, in the interplay of universal and particular. Love poems are always composite portraits of our encounters and cravings, cross-sections of layered experience. Even so, their power is that they unapologetically fixate on a moment in time, as if the whole of creation hangs itself on that delicate hook, that sacred, singular exposure of soul to soul. Because, truth be told, it does.
“Then, when she felt wasted by love,
Broken by her passion’s intensity,
Despondent, haunted by Hari’s
Response to her quarreling,
Her friend spoke to her.”
~Gitagovinda of Jayadeva
It must be vanity
that rises up in me and begs for you
to say something beautiful,
something hungry,
with contours my fingers can trace
in solitude,
with a soft, liquid body
shaped like my thirst.
Why else would I need you
to tell me what I very well know--
that my open soul,
its shy flesh bared under your gaze,
deserves nothing less than wordless awe?
There have been enough words
put to that.
Each time my heart is wrung out
by virile hands,
clenched in cruelty or desire,
a verse drips out,
just one.
Not much to build a life on.
(I am lately infatuated with my one grey hair. I saw it today, while I waited for you. It finds its way to brush my temple and whispers the story of our winter years. I am writing these words for you in a one room cabin, by the wood stove, in the lengthening afternoon light. The heart still fractured but no longer a yawning wound. Somewhere it became an anemone on the sea floor, settled in the deep, weightless, its storied body caressed by current and the familiarities of long love.)
It must be vanity
that wants you to tell me
how loveless certainty is burning--
all of it destined for ash, and soon--
when I am making it so,
when my every conscious breath
fans the flames.
