That terrible feeling of not wanting someone to hurt
On a chair in the middle of our lawn,
Nervously rocking as I tried to explain,
Under her cross-examination, what a heart is
— Instead of asking, for example, why
We’d been divorced for six months without my knowing.
I should have seen, in holy hindsight,
She’d been free of me the whole time,
To tour the jewelry stores of
Europe on my dime
While I cleaned up after the cat
Who'd long ago replaced me in her bed.
My love was real, it turned out, how could I have doubted?
I felt her pain and tried to ease her disappointment,
In that only way that love can be responsible,
But my love was strong enough, in the end, to exist
On its own, with only shadows to sustain it,
But the somewhere else that was she used to maim me
With words from which there would be no recovery,
For I expected them to turn true, eventually,
When the heart she lacked had had a chance to grow,
What I stuttered to provide her as I shuffled in that chair,
Her cold raised brows as close as another can be ...
There never was a mirror, only a dark obstacle
In another's eyes, and an insatiable need to please.
I couldn’t bear, in that chair, to see her leave, somehow,
And soon I helped her move away, made promises
She’d never keep, signed her attorney's release
And, when she started to cry, after she'd attached
My last material connection to this planet
In the name of love, I knew that nothing left to steal
Meant there was nothing left of me, and it was sad
Equally, on this side.
I chased you, Susan, through the ruins of many lifetimes,
But you did not seem to recognize me
When I found you, and saw the scars
You didn’t need to pretend not to have,
And you preyed, as if a moment had passed,
On my compassion again, and through the cracks fell
Not the shiny new coins of this abundant realm
But my hope, the thing that sustained me
Through centuries of unredeeming fate,
It’s a wound not just in me, but on the face
Of all I see, the wound that I was born with,
Sent to find you in the billion peopled world,
Not to heal, I learned too late, but to tolerate
The truth of pain, the endlessness of feeling.
