Old Love Poems
I used to write poetry. I don’t know that I ever had any special talent for it. I do miss it sometimes, as a way to express myself, but, also, I think looking through a poet’s lens on the world had some positive effect on my disposition that I can’t quite articulate.
Anyway, I was revisiting some old files, and I found three short love poems from my youth that I actually still like. (Do not ask me how many I found that I don’t like.) Since they’re no longer available anywhere, I thought I’d publish them here. I have made some minor edits to them, grinding off some of my youthful inconsistencies.
How I Long to Be Found in a Time Beyond Love
November when air is warm with climate change,
I pray for nuclear winter, another ice age,
a snow that falls soft and lovely and enduring.
You and I wandering the streets of Albany
and out to the beach, flakes of aftermath
dropping one by one onto our limbs
weighing down until we move no longer but only
sleep compressed under thousands of pounds of powder,
found millennia later by excavators
with tinted goggles and laser drills.
Our pictures on the news,
us kept below zero in a block of ice
preserving our perfect bodies.
An archeologist leading a tour points and says,
see their strange clothes, the way they wear their hair,
see the way their eyes light up at one another
and the way their fingers twine.
(2008)
Three Haiku of Longing
Winter, now:
Some nights, your hair is
the dark wood I am lost in.
I wake in cold sweats.
I am practicing
ways of saying I love you,
none right—
Sometimes, a window:
Pressing my warm lips
to the cold glass pane, I breathe
and you disappear.
(2012)
Winter Love Poem
For you, I am a small fire
burning through the dead winter.
(2012)