Love Compared

     In my funeral shoes I watched
     the young men dance, drugged in their finery.
     There was a way out; you had found it
     though you labored there in the silt of
     things undone.  What was it, the sand
     that slowed your step, but all the music
     you hadn’t moved to?  I feared it.
     I wanted to watch you fly.

     The man who bought my gin said he’d lived in Paris
     and I remembered you promised once I’d get there.
     He was bitter-mouthed and sorrow-eyed.  O he
     was perfect, Susan, soft and coming off as hard.
     I took him home.  When I touched his face
     his grief broke open into the white cloths of my hands.
     His tears burned hot as fever-sweat.  I thought
     of my new black shoes.

     I thought of the picture of you taken decades
     ago, your young face smiling in a high-windowed room,
     sun streaming through.  I thought of your other
     face, the one that flushed to a rash as tear-sick
     you told me what they’d found breeding in your breasts:
     shadow carnival of the crowd, the teeming flies.
     I held you.  I said "You’ll be fine.  You’ll be fine."
     And you reared back, startled by the necessary lie.
     Of course, Susan, you would die.  But I couldn’t
     be as brave as the woman you were becoming,
     the wire-crowned one mortality grew.

     There was the afternoon you took off your hat.  Strangers
     stared.  I saw what was becoming of your body’s dim
     architecture, the ghost city your hands were building
     out of rot and sinew.  A scrim was dissolving to show
     the steel underneath.  And I was weak.

     You read for me Qabbani’s poetry.

            I do not resemble your other lovers, my lady
            should another give you a cloud
            I give you rain 

     You read breathless as an old woman who has hauled herself
     to a high landing for a vista of sun-streaked orchards
     and fruit that hangs in an opal-sheen.  Just for the view,
     and for the voice of air muttering love in your hair

            And if another gives you a ship
	    I shall give you the journey.

     The day you died I heard you pass, and raised my head 
     and spoke your name.  Your hair streamed
     like water, lashes around the eyes of that morning
     as the morning closed its eyes.  Move

     like a wave, Susan, reaching outward from your center, carrying
     no other notion on your tongue than gravity or motion.
     I held him the way I failed to hold you.  
     I mean I let him have his grief.


     Jeremy Spears  (Click for bio.)


      


            Current Issue | Mystic No. 3 Contents |