months of letters mid-air before
I knew her face, many more weeks before
I could look at it directly
one middle finger tracing
the back of a middle
knuckle a meditation an introduction
to touch if you listen
past breath, you can hear the sound
a woman’s skin makes
on another’s skin: a prayer a welcome
the luminescence of oil:
how she makes a body shine
even in its earthness
(still, sometimes,
I fear she’ll turn
or return
to ivy)
how I hold back
my breath, my pulse, the full weight
of my mouth, so she knows
my reverence and desire
in perfect balance
This is a poem in moments
kind and cautious:
each deliberation
a devotion, every exploration
a sanctity we cannot bear
to reduce to romance
I stand outside a New Orleans coffeeshop
in an Indiana town, my face all summer
sun, having just decided I will let my lover
love his wife. This is how I remember
romance: a rubber band. The longing
in its pull, the welt
left by its snap.
I left soulmate on a curb outside
an abandoned gas station, fate and destiny
its burned-out neon signs. I tucked god
in a bright white nativity
and walked away. I know there's no such thing as mine.
But reverence. Abandon. This hulking, dramatic beast,
roaring against its harness, my hands raw
from the leash. I know there's no such thingas mine. Still I seek a yard
where it is safe for him to play.
I keep trying to remove myself from love,
extract ego like a mass, irradiate
adoration to wither any lingering whiff of self
so I can see it clearly—what is facet,
what is fragment. I wore white shoes
to my confirmation and now I hold everything
to that standard of purity. I want love
so clean that when I put my self back into it,
I can forego fear. Peel off every edge
of need. Find love a fencepost, its root so deep
and concrete I could never bend it
to my aching will. If I could anoint
your feet with oil, would you find me right
after the resurrection? Would you love me
like a fencepost, manmade and immobile?
In all my mythology, there are only two
loves: selfish and selfless. Both
have fractured me.
Now sewing brings the pain back, eases it. It reveals holes in my own loving.
– Stephanie Sauer, Almonds are Members of the Peach Family
When I first loved, there were no holes, save for myself. I gave everything, kept nothing, a firehose emptying every well. I was the hole, and I wore it well.
When I noticed the whole of my emptiness and its longing, I found another firehose, and we collapsed together every night, soaked and wholly hollow.
I called this life without holes.
(It was not.)
There is no avoiding holes. I am a mess of holes, so there is a mess of holes in my loving.
I learned to love people who see my holes and see me through their own. The stinging bliss of love is seeing yourself through someone else’s holes—that is to say, an accounting of every lack, a negotiation of our respective failures.
I want to love both others and myself wholly and with minimal failing, so this accounting is a thorny gift we open tenderly together.
Loving reveals holes in my own loving. I cannot fill them. In my wholeness, I move them somewhere safer, and hold them somewhat gentler.
