topic/love

I stepped into an avalanche
It covered up my soul
When I am not this hunchback
I sleep beneath a hill
You who wish to conquer pain
Must learn to serve me well

You strike my side by accident
As you go down for gold
The cripple that you clothe and feed
Is neither starved nor cold
I do not beg for company
in the centre of the world

When I am on a pedestal
you did not raise me there
your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare
I myself am pedestal
For the thing at which you stare

You who wish to conquer pain
must learn what makes me kind
The crumbs of love you offer me
are the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential
It is the shadow of my wound

I have begun to claim you
I who have no greed
I have begun to long for you
I who have no need
The avalanche you're knocking at
is uninhabited

Do not dress in rags for me
I know you are not poor
Don't love me so fiercely
When you know that you are not sure
It is your world beloved
It is your flesh I wear

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness —

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we’re to become part of it all,
won’t our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we’ve made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that’s me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that’s what there were to experience.

Perhaps that’s why she’s a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won’t be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see.
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground

Whatever cities are brought down,
I will always bring you poems,
and the fruit of orchards
I pass by.

Strangers in your bed,
excluded by our grief,
listening to sleep-whispering,
will hear their passion beautifully explained,
and weep because they cannot kiss
your distant face.

Lovers of my beloved,
watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,
how they wear her body like a rare shawl.
Fruit is pyramided on the window-sill,
songs flutter against the disappearing wall.

The sky of the city
is washed in the fire
of Lebanese cedar and gold.
In smoky filigree cages
the apes and peacocks fret.
Now the cages do not hold,
in the burning street man and animal
perish in each other’s arms,
peacocks drown around the melting throne.

Is it the king
who lies beside you listening?
Is it Solomon or David
or stuttering Charlemagne?
Is that his crown
in the suitcase beside your bed?

When we meet again,
you all in white,
I smelling of orchards,
when we meet—

But now you awaken
and you are tired of this dream.
Turn toward the sad-eyed man.
He stayed by you all the night.
You will have something
to say to him.

For the anthology Homewrecker, in which A had a story years before becoming an Adulteress herself, the editor, Daphne Gottlieb, wrote: “I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex because I couldn’t stand the way my heart was about to burst with happiness and awe and I couldn’t be that vulnerable . . . That waiting to have someone’s stolen seconds can burn you alive. That the shittiest thing you can do in the world is lie to someone you love; also that there are certain times you have no other choice—not honoring this fascination, this car crash of desire, is also a lie. That there is power in having someone risk everything for you. That there is nothing more frightening than being willing to take this freefall. That it is not as simple as we were always promised. Love—at least the pair-bonded, prescribed love—does not conquer all.”

“I don’t deserve you,” he used to say, before they were married. “Your goodness, your stability, how calm you always are — the way you just get on with things, and make it look so easy…”

Respect — that was what she’d taken his words to connote, but might they not in fact have been intended as a confession, that whatever it was he felt for her, it was nothing even remotely resembling love?

Sadness made Bradley look even older. Talking about any subject but the two of them was all it took—all it had ever taken—to illuminate their unsuitability for each other. What was best and most essential in her had been wasted on him. The converse was probably also true. She’d been too disturbed in Los Angeles to even know what love was. The real love had come later, in Arizona, and she was pierced, now, by homesickness for New Prospect. For the dear, creaky parsonage. Daffodils in the yard, Becky steaming up the bathroom, Russ buffing his shoes for a funeral. It was worth it, after all, to have aged thirty years. It was worth it to have taken the arduous steps to arrive in Bradley’s house, because the reward was clarity: God had given her a way of being. God had given her four children, a role she was skilled at playing, a husband who shared her faith. With Bradley, there had really only ever been fucking.

IT TAKES TWO REVELATIONS TO LEAVE A PERSON YOU’VE ONCE loved. There is the moment you realize you no longer love him. And there is the moment you realize you can no longer pretend. The length of time between the two varies, depending on your capacity for deceit, your tolerance for fraud. [...]

6/22/41

There are some people we like instantly, before they have even had a chance to flatter us (which is the greatest encouragement to liking a person), because they have that quality of seeing in us what we desire to be, what we are trying to be, and of not seeing that which we are at the moment. We feel that they understand us, we begin to feel that we have attained what we desire ourselves to be, and being made happy by this we inevitably are very fond of the people who can make us feel this way.

I remember the year Martha said she didn’t love me any more. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the landscape around us, and in which we live, reminds us to love one another. But that year that Martha flat out told me she didn’t love me anymore—that was a tough one. I suppose in their own way, each year is tough, just as each of them is beautiful, but we didn’t know what to do about that one.

You can’t manufacture love: you can’t build it back up like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates —it either gets stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It’s one of the dangers.

It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her— them —go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me any more.

But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.

A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.