Cento for Still Being in Love After All These Years
Dearest husband,
Other loves I have known. One
an impossible song of desire,
lush and electrified.
Another —
the heart within its glossy feathers.
I have known
so much of vagrant love;
a pile of fur and feathers, leather and oilstain,
bejeweled heartbreakers.
They went away.
* * *
Beloved husband,
Good people do terrible things.
I am always going to drag my heart into the ring,
with red-rimmed “loves”
stubbornly ready
to burst into flame.
* * *
My red circus,
Sometimes, I think you get the worst of me —
my piques, and ups and downs,
the tears,
jagged cutthroat questions,
how depression wakes with us.
I am a boat that is capsizing,
but we cling to each other.
* * *
Darling darling darling,
I remember what happened the day we met.
We rolled up the carpet so we could dance.
The blue mountains sloped down
with poppies orange as crayfish all the way to the Pacific.
Our first kiss was also our seven thousandth.
The love we made leapt to life like a cat in the space between us.
* * *
Dear unimaginable piece of husband,
Screw poetry, it’s you I want.
To kiss you with tongue, with gusto.
I want your arms and legs to be happy.
I am saying “I never want to be without you again.”
* * *
Dear Body of My Other,
I become the cigarette and you the match;
we burn like the end of a party.
We are together in the whole night,
lying together, our bodies slipping into love.
We’ve pushed our flesh a bit too far
and will arise tomorrow chafed
and raw and slightly dazed.
* * *
Valentine, valentine, my heart,
I need to move next to you,
drink bourbon —
(not that we need liquor, we just like it.)
While these old bones are still working,
my darling, let’s dance;
a pirouette
between ourselves and
Coltrane’s “Favorite Things.”
* * *
My one,
I thought I knew love.
Loving you has taught me
there is no way to express
that bird or holyghost,
more blood-letting than blood-wedding,
more monstrous than I ever believed possible.
* * *
Dear,
The sun will come back
at midnight.
I’ll keep coming back —
Maddened. A little hopeless.
Tell me that we will never
want from each other what we cannot have.
Tell me how all this, and love too,
will ruin us.
Here is the deepest secret nobody knows:
I shall love you always.
No matter what party is in power;
I love you forever, even in the ruins.
—
Lines from: Emily Berry, Bessie Calhoun Bird, Carol Ann Duffy, Brenda Shaughnessy, Jen Campbell, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Landis Everson, Katie Ford, Clementine von Radics, Andrea Gibson, Ron Padgett, Megan Falley, Ada Limon, Diane di Prima, Mindy Nettifee, Robin Becker, Kenneth Rexroth, Linda Pastan, Richard Siken, Margaret Atwood, Traci Brimhall, Sarah Ruhl, Bob Hicok, Ryan Patrick Smith, Nate Slawson, W.S. Merwin, Lenore Kandel, Robert J. Levy, Lynda Hull, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Crocker, Lana Bella, Donald Revell, Saul Williams, Wendell Berry, Nate Pritts, Ailbhe Darcy, ee cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Matt Hart
Note: I wrote this for my husband, then printed and bound it as a one-off chapbook for Christmas 2020. It has not appeared anywhere else until now.
