WAGblog

Against Love Poems

Let Love Turn its Cheek

Love is a stranger, a curse, a gift
I have not given or taken,
neither in drabs
nor in abundance,
demanding soft collapse of skin on skin
flesh quickened, anticipation
I cannot parse or feel
but as a worm writhing in palms
of human curiosity
the parching sunlit desert
that sucks and kills.

I feel bereft
not of love�s sheer
agony, leisures, pleasures, joy
but of the touch
of earth�s crumbling warmth
wormy between my fingers
the sweetness of gravid loam
buttered with seed,
hopeful root hairs rooting in darkness,
star-nosed moles blindly
snuffling out the delicacy
within each clod.

Love is, if only, a word
twisted, double-tongued,
bladed to cut more than it cleaves,
an avowal of falsity and pomp,
of circumstance always changing,
like lies, rotting fruit,
an overblown cabbage rose.

Send me instead friends
of the aspens� quaking-yellow patience,
spruces loyal-true,
a dark, moon-drowned sky
prickly with stars that neither love
nor claim to know my name.
That will do.
While the earth still slides around the sun
they will neither die for me,
nor remember me when I�m gone.

Let love turn a moldy cheek
and over in its grave.

Posted by pamwagg at September 11, 2004 04:57 AM | TrackBack