Relics of a Firestorm

Note:
This poem traces love in the language of autistic recognition: spatial, historical, and oceanic.

It may feel quiet, even indirect, but for me, love lives here — in noticing the remnants of presence, the persistence of pattern, what remains — no less felt — the weathered architecture of feeling.

❧

Relics of a Firestorm

From behind in the light past

shadows by window where you sit arms
stretched on the charred upholstery of our
last piece of furniture and the first.

Then when hot air passed through and emptied
us of our possessiveness we said that it was

a struggle against science and self-brilliance.
And when a scream floated by

just loud enough for me to notice.

And when I pretended to listen
you left for good.

Only recently your grandmother
spoke stories to you walking down
pale suburban streets

(conditionally American)

greeted with well-intentioned smiles
by loving neighbors who know
only that they must love.

And what interested you was the “radical politics
of love,” the history that reconciles with itself
from 68 years of marriage and children.

Your grandmother, her husband, lover,

father, how they endured hardships,
displacement, distance and shifts in

the mind as harsh as choices of which fork
to take in the road and which burdens to bear.

To our backs wind arches and rubs raw

the persistent edges of the living room, as watchful eyes,
as I am, for your naked arms, thin breasts,

the wrinkles in your neck so like your grandmother
whom you invoked I remember when we first

met talking furniture, books and dangling feet.

October, 1992, 1st Anniversary

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