A poem by Maggie Millner: ‘Forbearance’
We’ve stopped talking againso the earth has no color.Everywhere the chlorophyll has paused,light burning over the day’s lessonsas hunger burnsthe mouth I can’t make eat.A little rice? A little soup?I’d rather diereading the early textsyou sent about my breasts.I wouldn’t take a picture—infidelity!—and so instead had conjured themwith words,for which, with words,you gave me back a tonguewe dragged across the skinof common thought.Such is our lot,our shared disease or gift.Like Bernini’s angelspropped somewhere in Romeacross a navewe fetishize remove,which keeps the ideal possible,the possible ideal.So why is life so dull without your veins?Today on Twelfth the drugstore glassreflects a woman bracedagainst a private wind:the wind of her conscience, maybe,spinning on the mandrel of desire.Later, she opens mail.She shops for artichokes and squash,fingering their groovesfor information from the flesh.The life I love cannot include you,she wants to say,but because we are not speakingshe must say it into the poem,whose possibilities contractwith every word.Watch it narrow even as it grows.This is the terror—granite, pixels, blighted grass—this is the terrorchoices make of lives. Source link
