Love, Perhaps

I choose to exclude ugliness,

Pettiness, spite whenever possible.

My own such contributions surely

Are enough and might suffice.

No, I may be able to keep my eyes

Gazing into your eyes, days or weeks

Of longing splintered uneven, hours

Of daydream fading, folded into you—

But your kindness lets the nervous

Pace (tending toward a foot race)

Relax, so we walk hand-in-hand

Instead. The heat of your damp palm

Against my skin; the alternating tug

(hoping for your hand back one more time)

And soft settle of our cupped hands,

Small in large, then tug and settle,

Tug and settle. This rhythm is a gift

Made possible only by your grace—

True beauty is potential, freedom

From the need to fit a form oneself.

The most beautiful sculpture may enfold

All the viewer’s ugliness—embrace it—

Or on the holiest day of the calendar,

It may join love and beauty in a brief,

Exquisite momentary gaze.

And thus tomorrow morning when you smile

And I smile at you upon waking,

And the taste of your upper lip is nothing

Like I ever guessed or knew—then

You’ll close your eyes, for the length

Of a sunbeam, perfect in your place.

And after a moment of joy, the dusty

Imperfection of the sunbeam bought,

I’ll pocket one more memory of grace

That’s freed me to remember love

As love, perhaps, was not.

EJR

The Boat

Stay with me

Today—

So that even when

You are not in my eye,

The pasts before you

And the futures

After would trouble us no more

Than the ocean

Surrounding my peculiar,

Leaky, slow and

Rather unseaworthy

Boat.

Whether you perch at the

Helm, vigilant steering—

And I love you there,

Bright in command,

Finding our way toward

That future

After, inevitably,

we both land.

You need me to navigate,

To rearrange the past

Preceding us,

Make a safe path.

Or near the glowing sunset

If you choose to guard

The forecastle,

To gaze back

across the bow

With your palm edge

Shielding the setting sun,

And suddenly I am able

Silently to look

At your face,

And finally know

The true color of your brow.

And noontime

Perhaps we stand along

The side rail,

Hand in hand,

And count the hours

As hills and valleys,

Portraits, not chalk

Marks on our cabin wall.

But still, I understand,

And hope you might as well,

That love is not an ocean

Or a plotted course,

Not the telltale wake

That dogs a ship,

Not even the salt spray

Beckoning us ahead.

Love is a peculiar,

Leaky, slow and rather

Hasty cobbled boat—

Mine happens to have

Virtually no crew.

The only rules that govern there,

That half (whichever gleans my mood)

Puts up with me today,

And half belongs to you.

EJR

Potter's Lake

The path was concrete,

Following some old idea of a slope

Down from gravel road

Over grass—lush to the threshold

Of overgrown, or perhaps

Neglected to the edge of overmuch—

Stuffed with such a bunch of snowdrops

And the occasional half-felled elm.

But the foot-worn secret track

Paced through a colonnade of thick-

Bloomed apple trees that had thrown

Their arms (or were they legs or lips

Or wings) agape, naked, buttery

Yellow-white, droplet-moist

With dew, with careless stickiness.

As I wound down again, again

I felt (and not unpleasantly)

The morning melt into a humid hum

Of birds and insects, blunt breeze

In this tree and that, wet leaves

And buzzing things tuned to a sleepy

Ceaseless mumble by the sun.

I would sit beneath the apple blooms,

And strum the grass with my feet,

And imagine that the pale white

petal-skin boughs, by bloom weight

Spread apart, were like my secret

subject, almost flesh and blood—

Hid by incompleteness in the

Pregnant space between desire

On that naked afternoon (sweating,

Breathless as one can only be alone)

And the few real visions in the grass.

For like the ripple, up-down, in a pool—

The slapping of a rock thrown with the wind

Into a waiting pond—there were two

Trajectories, opposing eptitudes:

   The dream I kept like a well-

Worn journal in my belt, borne

From one orchard to the next

To add a word, adjust a phrase,

Yet sound as constant as a sacred text.

   The waking held its humid sticky damp

Just out of bounds—too high a branch

However high I learned to reach.

I came day after day, awake, asleep,

To hunt until I found the apple root,

While summer after summer passed

Like damp and naked skin

Beneath my hands.

EJR