Hemingway wrote best when in love.
He’s dead now, and the women
who had stopped loving him
many years before (though they had the decency
to not make such a mess of it)

~

I am chasing a very narrow form, each word
bending for its perfection. The peculiar stream
just before sleep, its polished stones of nonsense.
Between tangible and ineffable. Yet it seems,
more and more, I can barely see my form
beyond the high swells and the ethereal fog,
and each plunge steals my breath,
inundates me with fear: when I emerge, nothing
will break the monotony of the horizon.

~

I have loved three women enough that they
strike against my heart unexpected blows.
One tells me, I often dream of us making love.
But recently, I wake up and we have been dancing.
Some place dim and steamy and hot.
Our bodies overwhelmed with sweat
so we slide off each other. She tells me a little more
but we have vacated the other’s life. We never speak again.

The first haunts every word with her disapproval.

The last sees me for coffee every so often.
She has eyes like obsidian, alabaster skin, and
on very rare occasions she will let me walk
beside her and feel like we might possibly
become lovers. She will open briefly, allow me
to plumb about on her thresholds with my
clumsy hands and heavy feet so I think the world
has become swollen with grace, almost bruised.
Then, she gently rebukes, until we are both weary
with the weight of coincidental lives
that casually allow love to oxidize and fail.

~

There was a girl I did not come close to loving.
She was much younger, and we played basketball
beneath the petulant summer sun for one season.
Saying little, letting her form press unnaturally
into mine, fitting poorly. One night I wrote her a
poem. Something fallow, easy, that she found beautiful.
Because mostly, our hearts find beauty in things inadequate
or communal or trite. Our subjectively beautiful world.
My extent of knowledge is that surreptitious glimpse
as she bends forward to anticipate my body’s motion:
the concave hollow of her breast bone, slick with
perspiration, some color nearly scarlet. Very warm,
so in that moment I feel the strength of our transgressions.

~

The thought of Updike in church,
scribbling notes on the program. Plotting
some sexual fancy of his
in between the sermon and the benediction.
(He is right. We have our dichotomous
selves. There is the me who watches
sweat fall between a girl’s small breasts
and there is the me who writes about it)