austere and lonely

 
 
I’ve written poems for women who have almost loved me,  
until it suddenly occurred to them,  
you can’t make love to man who’s a thousand miles away.  
 
I so admire your charming verses, Ladies, your gamboling  
lyrics designed to sing away your encrypted passions.  
but if you want to be hurt, come & stay with me,  
I’m very good at it.  
 
just ask the melancholy Beauty who told me ‘you’ve broken  
my heart for the last time, I’m done with you!’ but two hours  
later she’s back on my doorstep saying ‘Forgive me, Darling.’  
 
lingering in my thoughts is the pensive girl, whom I met on  
the other side of darkness, my first attempted seduction.  
she shot me down with the gentlest tongue: ‘you’re a good  
man, John.’  now that was cruel.  
 
if you’ve reached out to me, lured by some faint echo of  
romance in my brooding tales, & I was politely inaccessible;  
if you suffered a moment or two of discontent,  
do not despise me, because I suffer too.  
 
is this a black forest that we come to, a place of dream &  
fantasy, a land that never was? we are not specters, we are  
not revenants; we are real men & women with real emotions.  
it has been said that the offices of love are austere and lonely,*  
& it is  very likely that most of us, perhaps all of us, will spend  
more time weeping than writing.  
 
 
* Reference to ‘Those Winter Sundays’ by Robert Hayden  
(Art by Alexander Gunin)