Category: Love

You can’t plan in the Antarctic. You can’t buckle straps
to your hips like a mountaineer and trek across the glass river
knowing for sure that the reflections of your feet are following.
The rain opens and closes as quickly as a showerhead.

Thick snow might touch your tongue before it cam tap out
the words you’ve decided on. The clothes you put on
are ludicrous in an hour: the Shetland jumper, wetsuit, khakis,

whatever people wear. You can’t even bang the door of the igloo
and run outside because you’re tired of your love,
and expect the same door to be there when you get back.

No picnics are ever held in the Antarctic,
even on the days that look sunny from the inside,
even on days when the foxes and the seals are dancing in the light,
even when you believe with all your heart that the sun will last.

It’s been said that a line can be straight,
or a street, but the human heart
is curved like a road through mountains.
If that’s the case I hope a row of horses
are walking over me on my way to you,
otherwise wouldn’t that journey be lonely?
And that same person said
when so many are lonely as seem to be lonely,
it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

It’s also been said that time
is the longest distance between two places,
does that mean our bodies have been three, near four, months apart,
which seems so much greater than the few miles between us,
but you’re as real to me as the ground I’m walking on
and the trains I ride to town and back?

And if in memory,
everything happens to music,
what would have been playing as you drank a Dr Pepper
with your legs entangled in the blanket?
Two new fish in a vast ocean swimming side by side,
sniffing out a new continent. I have no idea.

The flowers in the mountains have broken through the rocks.
I don’t know how they did it,
but I’m happy for them,
for gentle things to be victorious
even in the name of destruction.
If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.

Romantic love is beautiful. How easily it is broken.
All cruel people describe themselves
as paragons of frankness. They shout
We don’t want or need you any more! as the rest of us
run into the sea. What else are you supposed to do
on this earth but catch whatever comes to you,
with all four fingers, until your fingers are broken?

I am looking at you through music again.
Add to that the distortions of my own ego.
How cloudy the glass has become.
I tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth,
to myself as much as to you.

It has been said there’s a time for departure
even when there’s no certain place to go.
We all live in a house on fire
with no fire brigade to call.
I suppose that just leaves a top floor window
and a queen-sized duvet to break the fall.

And since we’re all sentenced to solitary confinement
inside our own skins,
and since physical beauty is transitory,
we should all learn to live with it.
Then close the door on it
when the time comes that you look in the mirror
and realise that what you see is all you will ever be.
And then you accept it.
Or stop looking in mirrors.

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,

or did the gears while the other was driving.
How he never raised his fingertips

to stop the segments of her lips
from breaking the news,

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said, ‘I do’,
and put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
or worked a comb where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I love you.
I just do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and didn’t mean them –
easy targets anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

(after Simon Armitage)

You said I let you get away
with things
and that’s what can turn kindness bad.
I would apologise,
but love is the soft parts of us.
*
There is a Japanese word to describe
the sense a person has upon meeting
another person that future love between them is inevitable.
This is not the same as love at first sight.
For example,
your smell was never unfamiliar.
*
You noticed
my veins
which are blue and desperate
to find each other.
There is a German word
to describe the blue of veins,
which is also grey metal and green
and the colour of haunted houses.
*
There is a Japanese word meaning
to repair broken pottery with gold.
*
The sky is darkening.
How to explain the sadness
I feel in the dark, which is a sadness
inextricable from the darkness.
A sadness specific to the cold.
Dark-sorrow,
when the bed is an iceberg at sea without you.
*
Of course your preferences present
themselves quietly in the layout
of the kitchen. The few things you placed
are shadowy objects at
the edges of a Renaissance painting,
waiting to catch the light
when I’m weak.
*
There is a Cheyenne word for the act
of preparing your mouth to speak.
When I ready mine now
it tastes like metal,
food is unpleasant to chew.
*
I look at my cactus
and even its refusal to grow alone
is nature’s unwavering bell clanging out
when I’m trying to sleep
in the afternoon.
*
The feeling of remembered love
is so easy to put in the oven and heat up.
It’s your hair I long for
when my hands are empty.

 

As glass
from the moment it is born
knows this shade of grey
the uncertain light that catches it

so your hands
knew in advance
they were the scales that weighed
the fullest of our hours.

Look, a postulate. Did you make a wish?

I did indeed. Did you make one too?

Yes.

It doesn’t count.

As was my custom, I’d risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practiced in this chore
I’d counted maybe sixteen weeks or more
since last I’d felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child’s voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door.

– Don Paterson (adapted)