Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Love Poem Exercise # 197: Loss

Here I am on the moon,
transported by loss,
to the place where all lost things,
misplaced, lamented,
discarded, forgotten,
converge.

They litter the silver landscape:
such odds and ends
as names and faces,
a few measures of songs,
bits of jewelry, some tarnished
some not, handkerchiefs,
single gloves,
socks searching for their twins,
dark events in private rooms,
remnants of trysts, laughter
separated from throats and hearts.

Here I am on the moon.
Here there is no air.
My skin makes do
as a makeshift spacesuit,
transformed by loss,
it shields me from meteors
the size of earrings.
The ultraviolet rain
cannot burn it
but now it cannot feel.

Not quite weightless,
I float, but soon enough,
I fall. Here there is no air
so I subsist on sighs
and remembrances of scents
of traces of cologne
on a pillow in Tokyo,
of the smell of you
rising like Venus from her bath,
first rain after summer’s dust.

I pick a path through fragments of bliss.
Here footfalls make no sound.
The lunar dust yields and keeps
what it suffers to itself.

There is only starlight and the Earth
from the wrong end of a telescope,
funneled by distance
to the size of a button
on your black cotton blouse,
the blue Earth and her mute
incessant glow.

I inhale your eyes,
the taste of your mouth
early in the morning,
the countless sonatas
of your voice.

Here, on the moon,
no water flows.
There are no teardrops
to dissolve the pillar of salt
you have become.

Here I am on the moon.
You do not know where I am.
Here I am on the moon
and I am thinking of you.