No Great Illusion

For so long I had been looking hard into every person I met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts and feelings I hoped life would give me, but hadn’t. There are some people who say you have to find such things in yourself, that you cannot count on anyone to supply even the smallest crumb your life lacks.

Although I knew this might be true, it didn’t prevent me from looking anyway. Who cares what people say? What people say has no effect on your heart.

To think of gratitude and to think of thank you cards
instead, the small panic of them, the pressure
to buy the ones with black and white Parisian photograph
covers and the blank insides, ready for your profound message,
you writer, you beautiful liar; you are supposed to be good at this.

So you write, Thank you for the flowers. I don’t know
what to call them, but they are pink and I plan
on taking them to bed with me in your absence. You write,
Thank you for the reminder you’re eight hundred miles away.
You draw pictures of hot air balloons and trolley cars and
inaccurate maps of the United States with dash dashed arrow
routes that point from one stick person holding flowers
to another stick person empty handed.

And when it is too hard to be thankful for anything
other than the fact that at least the two of you aren’t dead yet,
you call, despite the time zone difference and impossible hour,
to say, Walk west so that I can hear your footsteps better.

I say that I love you, and maybe I do, but it will always pale in comparison to the aching, complex, ultimately rewarding love I have for myself. Over the past 20-something years, I have learned to grow comfortable with myself. There are parts of me I would change, but overall, I think that I’m a good person. I touch myself with care. I forgive myself. So many people who have claimed to love me have not afforded me the same courtesy. It’s not that I’m skeptical, it’s just that I’d rather depend on myself when it comes to affirming that I am a good person.

You are nice, but I don’t need your compliments.

The trees of my childhood
are not the trees of your
childhood.

Let me tell you about my
cedars; my forsythias
and honeysuckles;
the way I used to plant
cherry pits in the front lawn
because I was greedy for their
blossoming.

Lift up my skirt and I’ll show you
where the blackberry brushes had
scratched me.

Lay me down in a hammock
hung between your childhood and the
man you have become today.

And we’ll kiss once, twice,
and a third time for luck

beneath the cherry blossom petals
that I had fallen asleep beneath
when I was too young to know anything
but innocence.

And the dark bark will be a darker midnight
against the spring it blossoms.

Skeletal. Moonless.
So heavy from the
rain.

And your hand will fold a flower
behind my ear.

The petals will be
so extraordinarily
pale.