Riffing on Neruda
With due regards to XX (Tonight I Can Write…) from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
Dichotomy
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To feel that I have lost you
but to know that I never really had you;
Each soul-deep kiss as one-sided as the dawn.
Your physical distance so much smaller
than the emotional:
fingers slower to hold,
phone faster to hang-up,
orgasms sooner faked.
I see your silhouette in the clouds
passing before the moon,
Love is a skewed perspective
where the day we met is as clear
as the day the you left
but the hours in-between,
a microcosm of agonies and bliss,
are smoke in the wind,
like the smoke when in a sad hatred I
burned our wedding album
so there would be no trace
that, once, we looked at each other
and smiled.
The night’s wind carries my lament:
one minor-chord dirge for each
second our marriage lasted.
In losing you I have lost myself,
racked with legs tied to devotion
and arms stretched with
cords of hatred and resentment,
the levers cranking hard.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines:
I hate you, my love
And I wish you were here.