Tam Lin Found Me in Nederland, CO

I can't imagine losing you again,
outgrown like a buck sloughs off
the velvet from his spring tines.
I am not so melancholy as my words depict
but when I go looking
for a means to describe the depth
you reach within me, I must
push past my sorrow
& disappointments, years and years
worth of journeys that had nothing
to do with (except to make room for
the entrance of) you. You read
your queues with such elegant
and mirrored precision.
When the light brightens
upon your face, I see within it,
my myths and visions,
and so much of you as a child,
in your first beauty.

I want to feel the kind of love
that Keats knew. The kind
that, in another day and age
would compel you to write
in Shakespearean ink. A sonnet,
comparing my beauty to sunsets
and meadow and then acreage or pasture,
over run with sweet peas
and lemon verbena, before
the field-mouse or the whippoorwill,
before the owl took up
its aurora-houred bedding tree.
To describe you,
would take the down from the wings
of millions of moths,
so mortal, so filled
with the blistering light
that is why they willingly seek
their own emulsion into flame.
Light
attracts like, you know.
The red  ember that burns me to touch,
like Janet I will grasp you;
no matter how many forms you take
I will hold on.

I feel like I am living out mythologies
since you slipped into
the flinted pool
of all my self-deceptions.
With every step you take
closer, I spark.
It has the sapor of sweat, of cinema,
of sex and cruel unaccounted-for
obsessional objectionables.
Like Helen, who had no right
to sail to Ilium, pinned
on the heart of Paris, I fear
I'd risk Troy's burning,
the required expectation
of wooden horses
and Cassandra's madness,
for you.
I could pull your voice
across me, like the flannel
we embossed with sand and summer
beheaded dandelions & stolen
slips of the tongue.
Never betraying my intention
or my wonder, I will
hold on, no matter the roar,
the scar, no matter the burn,
I hold on like my skin,
as if my  moth-like life,
my loving so skillfully,
might depend on it.

 

 

Reviews

[Emily B]

epic and beautiful