I am so in love although I have never seen;
my eyes are full of things my heart denies me:
colored visions wrought in the language of amour,
the word made flesh in the weak metaphor
of wretched, babbling men
whose hollow shoulders form the bowl of tears
in which my true love’s face is drenched
(the ablution of loneliness).
The street, narrow and ill-lit, covered windows
blinderized as animals of burden,
where we first met; the oceanside cafe
(do you remember our first vows of constancy?)
where bread and wine were defined and then shared;
the desperate bed that lead our wrung hands
to cartography;
the tiny chapel in the woods we gaily toured
and in our fancy, pretended,
like small children will,
to celebrate our nuptials –
oh, how memory serves its aweful dregs
like bitter, rousing tea.
Remembrance is the greatest tool in love’s mad arsenal!
Yet even more wrenching
is the memory of the future,
the once upon a time that hasn’t happened yet;
like all loves will, I see my love
in everything around me.
Unlike the simpering, weak, whines
from other lovesick swains and paramours,
who find their ‘true love’s countenance’
in such a narrow spectrum
of their world
(bah…I laugh at their enfeebled similitudes)
there is no limit to the specters that remind me
of my other half.
‘Tis but a rose, you hopeless suitor,
it may never be the cheeks of the sweet face;
only an odor carried on the wind,
a breath of carrion or the opinion of swine,
it will pass for a scent of the alcohol and water bath
which lingers on love’s neck,
a neck supporting the fairest visage
since the “real” contests were spawned:
Olympus has been redeveloped,
Atlantis has been drained and reclaimed,
the heartless shores of Troy
have become a resort community
for lost and half-found converts
to the order of a new world.
Oh, pale would-be conquistadores,
your weak and gutless vision of your beloved is nothing.
Would you, as Lucifer once dared,
refuse to bow to any but your true love,
and suffer
the banishment,
the desolation,
the yearning to live
only to remember your lover’s sweet “Go to Hell”?
1993
Thinking of Dante, thanks to fool_in_spirit, I dug through the archives and pulled out one of my favorite older poems on the subject of Love.
There is a Persian story that posits that Lucifer loved Jehovah above all things. Lucifer lived to be in the presence of his love, and would accept no substitutes. Then, Jehovah created humankind, and asked all the angels and such beings to pledge allegiance to this new form. Lucifer, distraught, swore that he would not; his allegiance, he proclaimed, was due only and exclusively to his one true love, Jehovah. As punishment for his imprudent action, Lucifer was given the most cruel punishment that Jehovah could think of — to banish Lucifer forever from the presence of Himself, to never again hear his voice, to live only thanks to the memory of the love that was (and is) his sole sustenance.
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