Couplets: A Love Story

In poetry then, let me say that love
has been, above all things, the engine of
self-knowledge in my life—and even after everything
is still what makes the rest worth suffering.

The proof of life is in the aching.
It was long and torturous, our breaking,
like our beginning, torturous and long,
gored by fights and scored to every song
from Diamond Life

When she turned her face toward mine, I saw my need
vibrating out of me to meet
her own, and the point of their connection
was a minor star, a nuclear reaction
all I cared about was trying to maintain.
Then she’d turn to someone new and kill the flame,
and I would have to wait there in the dark,
pitying myself, my stupid heart,
or chase her down and pick another fight
to get our little spark to reignite.

she wanted it from everyone
and always slightly more than what was given.

Just be grateful you didn’t
have children, everyone said. I wasn’t
grateful, though in some moments
was relieved to think that nonexistence
meant for them no suffering. Still, my private devil craved
their suffering, which would have made
my own more real, more sensible.
And our love.

So much from childhood was perfectly
preserved in her: the habits of hyperbole
and spilling food, the love of pranks, the madcap
laugh, the tendencies to overshare and nap
most days.

And an uncanny sense of unity,
to love in her what had always seemed deformity
in me.

The only moral was the pressure of her hands,
the grip of leather tugging at my wrist
where the cuffs that were her birthday gift
to me etched sallow, scar-like creases
in the flesh.

And I can still feel the invisible
moat we both believed in, on the other side of which
we knew lay torment, exile, wreckage,
the anarchy of singledom. Loss upon loss.
I remember testing it, the moat: throwing across
a rope to check its breadth, twice to the waist
wading in before retreating, shamefaced,
reining myself back.

I told my boyfriend immediately;
I’ve never been too good at secrecy.
It was the final straw before we parted.
She’ll make you suffer in the end, he said—
not meanly, but as if reporting something true
about women in love and what they do.