Millennium Love Poem


1.

It’s nineteen ninety-nine, and two strangers talk
via computer,
                     arrange to meet,
                     to fuck.
Four heads of mountain goats, their fantastically curved horns,
impassive faces, marble eyes
calling the light to places on the wall
in the Wild Game Inn,
                                 where our two are practicing
a different sport. Bodies bodies bodies say the newspapers,
but they mean the dead —
                  Kosovo, Sarajevo,
                  Palestine.
Here in Cleveland, we’re still fucking
as if it could save the world,
or us within it;
we want everything
and nothing, digging through the body
like an earth, with our naked hands.
                 Outside, Spring takes over
with a great thick chirping, ecstasy
of building, feeding, dizzy twirling
mating of the birds
in the still-bare trees.
                 I sell lumber, says the man. Hardwoods.
Oak, birch, ash...
                 And the woman thinking: Ash, after all
is what we come to.
They are not young, have learned to navigate
this maze which is their flesh.
They know the curves, the pace, position
of the fingers which will make them feel
                 what they long to feel;
earnestly they try to teach each other.


2.

Strangers arrange to meet, to fuck,
except they call it making love —
                             as if love could be assembled
from materials at hand,
the way a sparrow builds a nest,
beaking bits of twig
and plastic, threads and grasses
to the chosen place,
                 which shudders now, in the wind,
on its old hinge...

                             A man enters a store
from the gusting street,
muttering about trust,
how there isn’t any,
and ‘cause of that, he says, I’m gonna have to
murder all of you,
in your beds —
                 and then leaves again.

Jesus, how we hate and crave
this clanking of one awkward heart
beside another.

3.

And then the frogs gone mad with longing
in the first damp, after months of drought,

frogs on every inch of ground,
mating and singing and dying, and others
                             mating with the dying,

we have to move them with shovels
just to step outside,

                 still they keep on singing.


4.

Suddenly, without warning,
                             the daffodils spring up,
rows and rows of buttered swaying,
fluted cups held to the light;
the trees erupt in blossoming,
                             every flower an explosion!
                             every flower an explosion!

— after every disappointment, every failing of the shattered
will, the nerves, the tongue, the brain, the heart

5.

Sometimes our bodies melting together, your legs, mine,
your big head against my chest, next to the hole the universe
keeps rushing into and out of, I remember a friend said,
after her failed suicide:
It isn’t happiness which saves us,
only curiosity.
                             I wanted to see what came next.
Sometimes we hear a shot, then a scream,
then, seconds later, the chiming bells
from the old clock tower,
then, for whole moments,
silence.
                             Now, through the window,
a woman folding sheets,
bringing the clean white corners together,
holding them to her chest.
Through the floorboards, someone else’s
sweetness — two human voices together,
                 rising, rising.


6.

The sheets, in yet another bed
in another motel, on another highway,
always white and stiff, as if to scold the pliant,
     sweating flesh
of the ones who rest, or try to rest,
love or try to love, enclosed by these four walls,

this fabric bleached and starched and dried, ill-
fitting as the body, stretched to house the soul
through all its wanderings,

the clock ticking beside the bed,
no, not ticking, glowing, its implacable lit face
like a smaller, fallen moon,
disappointed, but still keeping time,
the way we always keep it, leaching out
invisibly inside us,

the Vacancy sign flashing on and on,
the Bible, always the Holy Bible,
the way the human heart still beats.
Still we twine our bodies, letting them say love

and you and now,
placing one hand on the crook
of the other’s elbow, angling one cheek
toward the other, wide and tender blade,
still we move like magnets toward the center
of each other — we do this over and over, we can’t
                 stop doing it —

between the simple crosses of the old graves,

against the lonely ocean of horizon

from Edgewater, HarperCollins, 2002.