Love Hurts

How can I write a love letter to you
when that love was lost a long time ago?
I wear that love, which you once declared a true love,
around my neck like a putrid, rotting carcass.

Tears were never cried for that love.
In fact, 'tears' and 'cried' are not strong enough words.
Howling tempests of grief never swamped and battered
my body for that love.
The loss of that love never burned me,
never consumed me in a great conflagration,
never reduced me to a pile of cinders.

This is a love poem of mourning.

How can I say what you once meant to me
without regurgitating every painful literary cliche
of the last five hundred years?
I will not compare you to a flower
or the sun, moon, or stars.

But goddamn, you were beautiful!
And you trusted me to carry you under my wing
like the wounded gosling that you were.
I think that's what I loved about you the most;
that even though you'd been abused, raped, mistreated,
beaten, neglected, abandoned and betrayed,
you still had the ability to trust.
And you trusted me.

I remember entire afternoons
spent lying with you in a warm, fleshy pile,
like a litter of pups,
our only language that of skin on skin.

I never grieved over the loss of that.
Never grieved over the nourishment
that our touching gave me;
the pure mother's milk of it,
the safety and utter relief
after years of living disconnected,
like a man under glass, my body starving
for fingers and arms and legs and lips.

Shall I grieve now? How do I do that?
By writing a poem?
How do you let something go
when so much time has passed
that it's turned into a scab, a crusted booger?
Do I rip off the scab and let fresh blood flow?

And I never mourned the loss of our passion.
How being together was like a cure for cancer.
How you were the first thing I thought about
when I woke up in the morning,
and the only reason I got out of bed some days.
And how spending a day with you
was better than winning the lottery,
better than anything I could possibly think of.
The way our hands and eyes hungered for each other
like junkies needing a fix.

How do I mourn the loss of that passion,
now that twenty years have passed,
and the anesthesia is starting to wear off?

How do I grieve for the intertwining
that was severed,
the raw flesh left behind
when our hearts were brutally disengaged,
like siamese twins ripped apart
by horses running in opposite directions?

What about the time you told me
that you couldn't live without me;
not like some cheesy lyric from a country-western song,
but with the truth of your bones and blood.
And I realized that we had both jumped into
the deep end of the pool together.
How do I say goodbye to that moment?
Am I still walking around with scar tissue
and bits of dried-up, dangling heart-cords,
like forgotten umbilica?

How do you begin to repair
a delicate piece of machinery
that's been neglected
for half a lifetime?

You once wrote a poem about me
entitled "An Evening With My Beautiful Lover."
What do I do with that?
Do I burn it? Do I tear it up?
Do I put it in a drawer and try to forget about it?

Those words were never given a proper burial.
Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.
Our love is dead,
and it's corpse has finally surfaced,
like a soldier missing in action.
And it's time for me to dress in black,
and weep.

David Aronson
March 2007