Lovers and Loves and Lovers

You think you’ve had them.

You know that there were times

you were excruciatingly obsessed –

that what determined your desire to live

was nothing more or less than the degree

to which he could be beckoned into loving you –

by which you never knew exactly what you meant.

Loving was a sort of shoving into or away from

something else. There weren’t words for it,

or couldn’t be until you could permit

existence to exist: until you could

be interested in what was really

going on. But that would take

so many decades to discover.

The dawn was coming, though. Today

you knew that it had come. You saw

the one you had resisted seeing: the one

whose being tortured you for so long with

its worn-out iconography that you no longer

had a clue what really “turned you on.”

You saw him and it wasn’t he, the last one

you had wanted. Now he was the first one

whom you didn’t want at all. People weren’t

things to want. Love was not a thing to want.

The dawn’s become a morning now.

Soon you’ll see your life’s first

afternoon. In four years you’ll

be seventy. It will be still be light.

Then love may come. Love may be the night.

.