I Have Loved You

I.

I have loved you for generations my tears, rivulets carving your body’s mountains water seeping in slick caverns hollow inside, like the space encapsulating your heart that my fingers have ached to cradle before their deaths My love knew no infancy it preceded my birth, drenched and shivering more ancient than stone its blood the sleek stream that caresses rock, that drowns wood ageless as the claws of fire it churns me, swirls me like the sea sets me adrift in vast waters of endless, sinking dusk What will I be left with at the end of life? A child, a few poems, memory of song and this love that has chiseled me, sculpted me passed through me haunted me like rain II.

We are built for love what hidden architect molded the clay of our hearts most coast on the surface settle in and are satisfied, or perpetually not why are we the victims of the aching, of the scarring of the relentless, brutal tenderness? it courses through air, through stone and sand eluding form or name makes sky and soil yearn for each other with wet embrace attacks the body as a malignancy multiplying in bone and blood in mind’s liquid clouds soaks into my bark, pools in my throat it swallows rivers, ingests mountains traces the ore of my body gives birth to seeds of rain its wind clutching the spirit of my hands my form is porous, absorbing images of your face, echoes of your voice my skin is a blanket of longing welcoming your touch souls linked with sinews of desire useless we are, except for loving our mouths hollow receptacles of reverberation eternally reflecting the beloved this ardor, careless, indifferent to our wishes— does it know whom it haunts in whose home it lodges whom it stretches with thirst creases with hunger in whose reluctant body it journeys?

III. It leaves no trace.

You will find no scar on my corpse

to mark its home, or its exit.

My veins will show no sign of its viscous pulsing.

Through my limbs it roamed like water,

a flock of birds—restless, skittish.

As a river, searching and unsatisfied.

Tormented and lamenting, like the seas.

Into my cavities it burrowed,

lying dormant until adolescence.

My form will be left without indentation –

you will not see where it gnawed me

for decades. The flesh looks whole.

When young, it sliced me raw.

I bled pulp and seeds of sorrow.

Later, I was left with the dull ache of lilacs.

At my funeral, you will kneel perfunctorily

paying respects to my withered body,

ignorant—

that it was a battlefield of passion

an arena of lust, of carnage

a cage of craving

a vessel of fire

a locus of ecstasy.

Published in Lullwater Review, Spring 2024