eren_reads's reviews
428 reviews

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them.

I was called bois d'ebene
I am dismembered 
I look for the different parts of myself
 
in the world's oceans 
in the black blood of Europe's 
monuments

dare I believe
 
that I was no fetish, that this 
my body was real to you?
As faith crumbled
 
I thought you loved my storytelling 
more than me,
Mandinka warrior della Guinea
 
and the demon became my own face.

We have all seen the hunting trophies
set against shields, the wavy pointed horns
of blackbuck or impala or the magnificent 
branched antlers of the red deer stag.
 
...

But when a slaver so loved his servant slave
Fanny that he removed her hand for taxidermy
and it became a cherished heirloom passing 
from generation to generation to generation -
 
the dark skin of her hand with its pink 
nails with crescent-moon cuticles on her thumbs
hanging from the picture rail above the dining-room fire,
it's knuckles knobbly and blackened,
 
while they ate their wild pheasant and wine,
from family to family; children growing old
knowing the Black slave hand they thought
they loved; in this act of preserved mutilation
 
how the children in their pinafores and frilly bonnets
who never knew her played with her hand;
how her hand remained a slave in the way 
it remained captured in service against her will -
 
I have never wished so hard that her long
lean fingers could make a firm balled fist,
perfectly clenched, with the veins in her hand
bulging, overlooking their bland pea soup starter.

I wait for your step.
A jay on the cherry tree
trembles the blossom
  
I name you my love
and the gulls fly above us
calling to the air.
 
Our two pale bodies
move in the late night, slowly
as doves do, breathing.
 
And then you are gone.
A night-owl mourns in darkness
for the moon's last phase.

The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love.
 
And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes.
 
If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor have heard you say.
 
But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
and the endless nights.

Yes, I think a poem is a spell of kinds
that keeps things living in a written line,
whatever's lost or leaving - lock of rhyme -
and so I write and write and write your name.