A Love Poem

In the folding chairs beyond the levee

I looked up at dusk in the stars

The question compelled in my chest

Like the energy from the ground that pulls a bolt of lightning from the sky

To meet half way and ignite plasma fire

The words surfed off my tongue, “Do you love yourself?”

She stared in shock of so personal

And did not answer, but she did

She says, “I have accepted who I am.”

She spends her life

Professionally

Not letting people know who she is

No clipboard, just a look listening asking one way conversations

No address, no family photograph, no identity, but a pair of blue eyes

No quid pro quo with a second cell phone

Depending on the ring a different voice greets, but never answers

Alter ego and a trade name

A Louisiana city and an opposite gendered saint

Pearl white oyster shell sealed lips in liquid night

The tide washes in but never out

She hath chosen prison walls in concrete bars of an enigma’s call

To be seen and never touched behind the curtain of thy crutch

To keep the stain of love away inside a prism of a rainbow’s fade

Jarred and moored to a bastion rock that she need not the keeper’s stock

He can have thou love in spades, she wishes not to play thy game

But to buttress the battens down to diminish love as a beguiled crown

For thy lady she mocks love like a muse who can inspire

But cannot feel.  She cannot sip the grand chalice for its nectar.

She can drive men to ink sonnets of love’s exploding suns

Yet a ray cannot dare touch her cheek for it will bleed

The flowers upon her skin grown not in day, but in candlelight

Tempered by what she sees as possible must be constrained inside thy self

Like a wick of burning wax years upon thy stack

She hath brazenly mocked love for its kiss

She gives a man therapy but it cannot be her

She gives a man dance, but he can never be her partner

She controls the steps and the moment of thy song’s terminal note

She hath found refuge in what she can never be

Yet like Shakespeare’s wisp thy lady doth protest too much

“Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs

Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes

Being vex’d a sea norish’d with lovers’ tears

What is it else? A madness most discreet

A chocking all and a preserved sweet”

I see her at the top of my stairs resting head

Debating disclosure like a guardian at the gate being told to stand down

Vulnerability is the ultimate bravery

To lay a heart at a sword is but to risk death, a body slain is but blood

A heart of spread sternum given freely to a spirit’s kiss

Risking unrequited measure in exposing the darkened side of one’s moon

Is to ask eminence of love’s acknowledgment

Love me not as bones and flesh, but as a being eternal

She is here bowing down to love’s grace in a moment of the changing guards

She guides my hand to brush her hair back in a stroke of recognition

I see her name most true written across her body

Like a thousand tattoos in every language of the Earth  

She cries, “This is me. This is me. I am going to be vulnerable in this moment

I do not know how long I can hold it, but this is me and do not forget this face.

For I will cover her in sheets of scorpions and sirens.  I will sing to you and sting you.”

“I will forget my name and cast yours against the rocks. 

I shall not forget yours, but I cannot help what I am.

I am a prisoner with both lock and key and I choose not to leave.”

“I have seen the audacity of love’s promises quake the Earth and swallow cities.

I mock love most vile.  I sting love.  I sting love with the malice that sails ships to war.

I have seen what men and women can do.  I, I shall sail mine own. I shall captain my ship.”

“Love shall cast thy gale.  Love shall call.  I shall learn the siren song and sing it back to them and vex their ears most dizzy.”

First she said we were to keep clear of the Sirens, who sit and sing most beautifully in a field of flowers; but she said I might hear them myself so long as no one else did.  Therefore, take me and bind me to the crosspiece half way up the mast; bind me as I stand upright, with a bond so fast that I cannot possibly break away, and lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself.  If I beg and pray you to set me free, then bind me more tightly still.

I hear her sing to me as she steps away from the top of the stairs

I see her name dance across the stars like Andromeda to Perseus

I see her pick up her glittering mask in the distance as she falls into her ancient gravity

She scowls at love once more as a temptress in her sanctuary

She hath laid a query in my bed asking what I am looking for though my telescopic glass

I speak in distant futures upon fated breath of a partner for life’s silk

Before the fate’s clip, she hath seen herself behind varnished names

She sings the siren song, “I knew that would never be me,”

As if when I responded to the question phrased she pictured herself, where I did not

Yet wishing it was a place she could one day be

With someone

Sharing more than a fleeting seed pod of days in a surface of fallow soils razed

Leaping in and out of men and women trying to tie her down

Thinking they ask her to make promises to herself she feels she cannot keep

For she hath known her heart an oyster sealed, walls ensconced, parole repealed

Thy lady has cut out her heart, she turns her back to me and dare not show me

What beats beneath her breasts, I see the field of flowers growing upon her back

In a candle’s flickering stare, I stroke a gentle stem

And she knows her love doth beat, and my lady wrestles, she wrestles not

In thoughts of me, but in her alone compelled to be what she cannot face

She owns her place upon the stage beautiful and frail

Her legs strong, her mind an acerbic wit and ear a panel of the sage

I feel my blood swallowing hope speaking,

I know you do not want an answer, you do not want to change

I thought maybe you could not admit to yourself how much you felt you did not deserve love, love for who you are vulnerable and dark, personal and love unconditional like a ghost that does not exist, a chase for the mad yelling at clunking bottles in alleyways

I thought I was supposed to help you see that.  I don’t know if it was for us to ever be or love or stay together but I thought I was supposed to help you to let love in and feel its warmth in the confidence of my poetic stair.  I felt a moment of God’s kiss in the gift of my words to see you as you are and call you by name that you are worthy to be you without guardian at the gate.  That no one will drag you to the stables for labor or fold you into a paper doll.  You are worthy of a blinding love, to be held in the essence of the universe and cared for as a sacred being.  You are worthy to love yourself as you and scream your name to the heavens saying, “I hath been seen by love and love hath smiled.”

There was a moment on the folding chairs beyond the Algiers levee where I looked up in the dusk sky and I asked you if you loved yourself.  I remember feeling the inclination not to ask you, but I felt compelled in that moment.  I surfed it off my tongue. 

You said that is so personal and didn’t answer, but you did.