Love Poem

by John Logan




Last night you would not come,

and you have been gone so long.

I yearn to find you in my aging, earthen arms

again (your alchemy can change my clay to skin).

I long to turn and watch again

from my half-hidden place

the lost, beautiful slopes and fallings of your face,

the black, rich leaf of each eyelash,

fresh, beach-brightened stones of your teeth.

I want to listen as you breathe yourself to sleep

(for by our human art we mime

the sleeper till we dream).

I want to smell the dark

herb gardens of your hair--touch the thin shock

that drifts over your high brow when

you rinse it clean, for it is so fine.

I want to hear the light,

long wind of your sigh.

But again tonight I know you will not come.

I will never feel again

your gentle, sleeping calm

from which I took

so much strength, so much of my human heart.

Because the last time

I reached to you

as you sat upon the bed

and talked, you caught both my hands

in yours and crossed them gently on my breast.

I died mimicking the dead.

again

Binghamton is a town in mid-state New York that you wouldn’t be familiar with if you hadn’t already been there. The rain is omnipresent, the cold is acerbic and time moves in a decades-long lag. Its strip malls and chain restaurants and dive bars are perhaps not that indistinguishable from any other mid-state haunt… its claims to fame to date have been more unpredictable: a great university, Rod Serling, a world-class opera company, spiedies. You’ll be forgiven for having driven through on your way to New York City, and not remembering much.

But I did think there was a chance it would linger on the front page of the papers, even if only below the fold, for at least five days after the largest mass killing in the U.S. since Virginia Tech. Thirteen people died on Friday; yesterday there was a story about a letter believed to be from the gunman in the New York section of the Times: page A20. Today: nothing at all.

So the reporter in me wants to know why that happens in the case of Binghamton, and not Virginia Tech. Sheer numbers? Location? Amount of scintillating evidence left behind by the shooter? Lack of controversy surrounding law enforcement response? The fact that most of the victims were immigrants? Or that Obama was in Turkey, or surprised the troops in Iraq? And why, always, does the murderer get more ink than his victims?

I heard from a dear old friend on Saturday that someone we knew was killed. The mother of a well-loved family of ten kids that grew up on the South side, like us…a veteran substitute teacher, wife to an ENT doc, apparently a grandmother of 17. Didn’t know that ‘til I went searching for news about her: Roberta King. A personality so distinctive, effusive, genuine and kind that after not having thought about her for a good fifteen years, I could see her face as soon as her name was mentioned – hear the halting, steady lilt of her voice. She is what’s made this entry so difficult to write. That such a golden person can be and is too often taken so quickly from this world is now viscerally painful. To tell other people about her, to think of her kids and what they must be suffering through… it’s a deep, tearful sadness that I wasn’t expecting somehow.

The stone I’ve been turning over in my mind is whether or not it should even matter that I knew her. Is it not the same tragedy that she was one of twelve people that shone brightly for their families, their communities, their countries? To take the full compassionate view, is it not the same tragedy that a man was so desperate and deluded and insane that he thought the way to happiness was murdering people he may not have even known? Or even that it’s so easy to get a gun that this story gets repeated over and over and over and over and over again. The disgusting, exhausting, inconceivable cycle that we cannot seem to break.

I’d like to blame my lack of ideas about breaking this cycle on the little time I have left to write this. But in truth, I’m just at a loss. I know in the cosmic web of our un-separateness, I am connected to this violence: we are all connected to, part of, responsible (?) for this violence. All forms of aggression vibrate at the same frequency; even what we turn only towards ourselves gets deposited in that mammoth swamp of destructive energy. I think my teachers would say to not give power to anger, not to run away: to send out love to everyone that’s died, everyone that will be affected by this for the rest of their lives. I imagine it’s most important to keep our hearts open at the very moments we’d rather shut down. It feels risky and vulnerable and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do it. But it’s worth a shot. I am unambiguously positive about that.

ever green

.i don’t want to go back. .i’ve spent too much time learning from the furious swings of feeling nothing to feeling everything, desperate to destroy myself but craving the experience of everything. .maybe it’s the tease of spring that makes me think so much of adolescence… winter holding on like that boyfriend you went out with for two weeks, who stalked you for the next two years because he couldn’t believe you broke up with him after such a deep love, spring playing like the shirt falling off her shoulder was an accident, and just because she talked to you for a whole hour yesterday doesn’t mean you’ll even see her in the hallways today. .so the frantic rocking rolls on, between a settled numb – a paralyzed hibernation of nothing doing, festering in guilt and lethargy, escaping into someone else’s stories – and a clamorous itch, like .i want to rip through my own skin, bust up through cement, be warm and fast and full again. .i didn’t respect it then, but when my thoughts were more reckless, overflowing, unhinged, what .i put down on paper (remember paper…) cut much closer to the raw.
.like this:

there was a kiss, sweltering, slow, under matchbook moonlight
on a warm spring barefoot jacketless night,
our hands and hands all over,
mine tangled in curls
from fear of falling down your neck,
our clothes on – but I can still feel you
hard, trembling, lunging, pulsing into me,
our tongues like simmered syrup rain
immersed and coming up for air, eels out of fog,
tasting salt wine and dandelion milk.
you can walk away and smile,
wiping my flower water off your damp chin
with your unbuttoned sleeve, but
i stumble to bed tasting you…
even if the kiss is a lapsing look
..i can feel it on my eyelids
like the moon stealing into my open window,
and too many nights I’m sweating, going to bed in love –
waking up thirsty


don’t worry mom and dad, it was a dream. .but it makes me think hard about everything that .i protect when .i write. .the best teacher .i’ve ever had shepherded that poem and countless others with a mantra .i knew was solid gold, but still with an innocent perspective: be true to yourself.
.be honest with, devoted to, expressive of all the murk and glow and flush and tweak of your multitudinous self. .there was a force behind that part of ourselves that ran full speed into idiocy – saved by luck and congratulated with hubris – there was a strength to the angst of forming and transforming, werewolves at nightfall, that .i’ve only started to appreciate now. .can .i be more at peace with who .i am, and still touch that nerve…? .can .i fucking write this thing in all lowercase letters without being corrected by Word or having to put periods in front of everything? .can .i rip the lid off all the theatres .i’ve built to show the world only the packaged and rehearsed?

.one step closer today. .already .i’ve had a recurring dream involving a life-or-death chase through a hospital with a little black girl in my care and an older woman, a reporter, who let me drive her truck but the pedals were so far away and hard to push down .i had to brake 2 minutes before each light, learned that spinal tap is going on tour again and that there’s a new uber-detailed book about columbine, eaten two bowls of cereal. .the editor brain .i was born with is currently refraining from deleting this paragraph because .i can’t fathom how anyone needs or wants to know any of that. .the dramatist, also an immutable presence, wants to end with a flourish. .like an idea that we could all have a moment of silence for those years that were marked by gimpy rituals and mystifying rules… we could all breathe in what it felt like to thirsty… we could look at each other and see the vulnerable parts that haven’t caught up to our ages and nod like we’re all part of the same secret society: misfits and seekers and rebels and gods. .worth all the trouble we are.