Side by side, their faces merged, jointed armour with a faint hint of the absurd— and little dogs under their feet.
With a sharp tender shock, his hand withdraws to hold hers.
They never thought they would last so long, such faithfulness in the world’s soundless damage.
They persisted through lengths and breadths of time, all the undated snows that lightly fell, the bone-riddled ground, the endless altered people that came washing at their identity above their scrap of history,
Time has transfigured them into the truth they hardly meant but has come to be:
their almost-instinct almost true and what will survive their love.
2 (After The More Loving One BY W. H. AUDEN)
Looking up at the stars, he knew quite well, he said, "For all I care, they can go to hell. Their indifference is the least we have to dread from God or beast.
Let the stars burn the passion they cannot return.
Were all stars to disappear or die, I should not rue to look at the empty sky and feel a total dark sublime.
But if equal affection they cannot see, let the more loving one be me."
3 (after Marriage by Louise Glück)
He’s turned away. All week she been by the sea again.
Blue sky fills the window, but the only sound is of waves.
He never said a word, just arranged them in his mind to suit his business.
There was the sea and the gray clouds suddenly rising above it.
The smell of sun and wind. The smell of the sea in the sheets,
the fresh and sweet hotel smell of sheets changed everyday.
And suddenly she strokes his back, she puts her face against it.
He is a wall, an ancient wall.
He breaths out fast, silent.
And, beneath the silence, the sound of the sea
spreading everywhere,
not finished not finished.
4. (after The Skunk Lyrics by Seamus Heaney)
Night after night he expected her like a visitor.
The refrigerator whinnied into silence. His desk light softened beyond the verandah.
Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.
After eleven years he was composing Love-letters again, broaching the ‘wife’.
His slender vowels had mutated into the night earth and air.
The tang of eucalyptus spelt her absence.
And, there she was, the intent, glamorous, ordinary, her,
standing by the boards five feet beyond him
stirred in the sootfall of her things at bedtime:
the black plunge-line nightdress in her bureau’s bottom drawer.
5. (after Love after Love by Derek Walcott)
The time will come when you and her will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror
Each will smile at the other’s welcome, And say
“Sit here. Eat.”
Give her wine. You give her bread.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast.
6. (after From a Survivor by Adrienne Rich)
He: The pact we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days.
I don't know who we thought we were that our personalities could resist the failures.
Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know that we were going to share them.
We thought of ourselves as special
Your body is as vivid to me as it ever was.
I know what it could and could not do
It has been 25 years. We have made the leap we talked of making
We live now in a succession of brief, amazing movements
each one making possible the next…
7. (after Love Sonnet: XVII BY PABLO NERUDA) Her: I don’t love you as one loves certain obscure things: secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers,
Thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I don’t know any other way to love, so close your hand upon my chest, so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
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