The Best American Poetry 2014 by David Lehman

Author:David Lehman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

from The Literary Review

PATRICK ROSAL

* * *

You Cannot Go to the God You Love with Your Two Legs

And because you’re not an antelope or a dog

you think you can’t drop your other two limbs down

and charge toward the Eternal Heart. But

those are your legs too, the ones that have hauled

your strangest body through a city of millions

in less than a day, at its own pace, in its own pain,

and because you cannot make the pace of the one whom you love

your own, and because you cannot make the pain of the one you love

your own pain, your separate aches must meet somewhere

poised in the heaven between your bodies

—skylines turned on their sides—reminders

of what once was, what every man and woman

must build upon, build from, the body, the miserable,

weeping body, the deep bony awkwardness of love

in the bed. If you’ve kissed bricks in secret

or fallen asleep where there was no bed or spent time

lighting a fire, then you know the beginning of love

and maybe you know the end of it too,

and maybe you know the far ends, the doors, where

loved ones enter to check on you. It’s not someone else speaking

when you hear I love you. It’s only the nighttime

pouring into the breast’s day. Sunset, love. The thousand

exits. The thousand ways to know your elbow

from your ass. A simple dozen troubled hunters

laying all their guns down, that one day

they may be among the first to step

into your devastated rooms

and say Enough now, enough.

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