Home > Work > What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems
1 " Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light. "
― Kim Addonizio , What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems
2 " FUCK There are people who will tell you that using the word fuck in a poem indicates a serious lapse of taste, or imagination, or both. It’s vulgar, indecorous, an obscenity that crashes down like an anvil falling through a skylight to land on a restaurant table, on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs. But if you were sitting over coffee when the metal hit your saucer like a missile, wouldn’t that be the first thing you’d say? Wouldn’t you leap back shouting, or at least thinking it, over and over, bell-note riotously clanging in the church of your brain while the solicitous waiter led you away, wouldn’t you prop your shaking elbows on the bar and order your first drink in months, telling yourself you were lucky to be alive? And if you wouldn’t say anything but Mercy or Oh my or Land sakes, well then I don’t want to know you anyway and I don’t give a fuck what you think of my poem. The world is divided into those whose opinions matter and those who will never have a clue, and if you knew which one you were I could talk to you, and tell you that sometimes there’s only one word that means what you need it to mean, the way there’s only one person when you first fall in love, or one infant’s cry that calls forth the burning milk, one name that you pray to when prayer is what’s left to you. I’m saying in the beginning was the word and it was good, it meant one human entering another and it’s still what I love, the word made flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one whose lovely body I want close, and as we fuck I know it’s holy, a psalm, a hymn, a hammer ringing down on an anvil, forging a whole new world. "
3 " Stolen MomentsWhat happened, happened once. So now it’s bestin memory—an orange he sliced: the skinunbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedgelifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thinmembrane between us, the exquisite orange,tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,the way he pushed me up against the fridge—Now I get to feel his hands again, the kissthat didn’t last, but sent some neural twinflashing wildly through the cortex. Love’smerciless, the way it travels inand keeps emitting light. Beside the stovewe ate an orange. And there were purple flowerson the table. And we still had hours.Kim Addonizio, What Is This Thing Called Love: Poems. (W. W. Norton & Company; unknown edition, August 17, 2005) "
4 " YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT LOVE IS but you know how to raise it in me like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to wash off the sludge, the stench of our past. How to start clean. This love even sits up and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps. Any day now she’ll try to eat solid food. She’ll want to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive to some cinderblock shithole in the desert where she can drink and get sick and then dance in nothing but her underwear. You know where she’s headed, you know she’ll wake up with an ache she can’t locate and no money and a terrible thirst. So to hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through. "
5 " To hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through. "
