What is greater than you?
Everything. Marriage vows: saying you may not love,
Circumstances: loveless and sure of it, too,
Choice: preventing your children,
Your childless death sighing in you,
Melancholy: because these things have won,
Beauty: in you, now, a setting sun,
Heaviness: your thighs drag through your day,
Dreams: pointing to everything gone.
There on that great height
Of a cliff, tall in its failings,
You sleep, bereft, and slowly breathing
Towards morning when all that conquered you
Comes to life dully and rudely again.
We are blind. We are not gods, love.
Do we secretly love? You don’t know how I am,
What I see, or how much I love you,
Or that I search for you in old books,
Going to you as a poet, listlessly,
For I have been enlisted by poetry
To witness lovely, lyric poems like this:
Marking your melancholy demise.
Your poem has no irony, no surprise.
Once we were fools enough to kiss,
To bring hectic hell down upon us,
Everyone else turning into a dream,
And now, also a dream, ourselves,
Ourselves observed as not ourselves.
The past regret of present doubt
Seeks you in me, driving you out.
My whole world my whole world hates.
With dry, small steps I ponder you,
When here with another, a life waits,
But I don’t love them, so what can I do?
So disproportionate is my love for you,
Even the present is a memory.
I could lie beside her; she is right here,
But I am pining, against all hope, for you.
No, we are not gods! We don’t guess
The right thing to say, so by accident,
By chance—(fate’s children, cupid is one,)
We might come into each other’s view
And not turn away. I am looking
For any excuse to love you, again,
A child and a child. But fate has taken
Your children. Children don’t like you.
Frowning, heavy thighs and handbag:
Paperwork and lipstick of the lone professional,
The small, beige office, those duties to fulfill,
A life no one really wants, but you will,
Since there is just enough pay
To justify the cost of the commute each day.
Sigh. And barf. To be left alone: that’s how you pray.
We are not gods. You have to do
What the world wants, and the world
Has everything. Everything is greater
Than you. I could put you in a play.
When it ends the audience could leave.
And the sensitive, perhaps, would grieve,
A bookworm like me, feel sorry for you.
But you don’t warrant a play.
Just a beautiful poem. Have a nice day.