I love poetry. I used to write it constantly, but the words don’t, to misquote Anne Sexton “Swim back to me” in quite that way anymore. Sometimes. I wrote a love poem the other day.

I swing back and forth between writing two books right now — one about a Fairy Godmother with PTSD who needs to solve a murder mystery before it happens, another a ghost story which is also a love story between two women, one alive and one…well. I said it was a ghost story. And Sabine (There is a point) was a passionate English Lit major in life, who loved poetry, and who keeps reciting snippets of it to Constance, clueless but hopeful.

And in searching for out of copyright things for Sabine to say to Constance, I fell in love with poetry again. So, every day I may…I hope…present you one of my favorite poems.

Today is “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” — it’s a sad, brutal, sometimes confusing poem. The final lines linger in my own life. I’d read the poem for YouTube but can’t confirm that it is out of copyright, so that is an hour of my life wasted. I will, instead, point you to the link below and copy the poem from there. What’s the difference? I don’t know. Trying to stay on the side of the angels while not making you click all over the place, I guess.

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/for-my-lover-returning-to-his-wife/

She is all there.
She was melted carefully down for you
and cast up from your childhood,
cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies.
She has always been there, my darling.
She is, in fact, exquisite.
Fireworks in the dull middle of February
and as real as a cast-iron pot.
Let’s face it, I have been momentary.
vA luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor.
My hair rising like smoke from the car window.
Littleneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter’s wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in the chapel.
If you glance up, the children are there
like delicate balloons resting on the ceiling.
She has also carried each one down the hall
after supper, their heads privately bent,
two legs protesting, person to person,
her face flushed with a song and their little sleep.
I give you back your heart.
I give you permission –
for the fuse inside her, throbbing
angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her
and the burying of her wound –
for the burying of her small red wound alive –
for the pale flickering flare under her ribs,
for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse,
for the mother’s knee, for the stocking,
for the garter belt, for the call –
the curious call
when you will burrow in arms and breasts
and tug at the orange ribbon in her hair
and answer the call, the curious call.
She is so naked and singular
She is the sum of yourself and your dream.
Climb her like a monument, step after step.
She is solid.
As for me, I am a watercolor.
I wash off.