Autumn House Press

Mercury

This morning I think about the men I’ve loved
so differently, about the one’s salty hands
and another who held his tongue
to the edge of his own lips at every moment
of concentration. And the one with all the cats,
who appeared only to love cats and nobody
else. And I think about the cats I’ve loved
so differently. The blue Russian who jumped
from a sidewalk into my arms the first time we met.
The Siamese who suckled any soft bit of me
he could draw into his hot pink mouth.
And this one — with loose and gorgeous belly
all flab and sunshine watching me now,
watching me try the same poem again and again:
thinking each time I am writing something new
the way we think each love is new
when really it’s the same love again and again
squirting sideways between our fingers, rolling over
a tabletop, beads of mercury breaking and rejoining,
traveling the floorboards to settle and tremble
and wait in the cracks. There is no end to the matter
of love, no dissolution — and this is the poem
I’ll write again tomorrow. Although you may read it
so differently, I think we all bear the same message
of enduring     changing    love