Sara Teasdale. Photo: Wikipedia
(For the poet Sara Teasdale)
Tonight, my heart is open, and yet
I’m feeling rough, this tough-bird,
I’ll forget you now when I open the
liquid-brown of my eyes, you are the
only man I can express my heart’s
war, my loneliness, to. You’re mine, love, but
you belong to another, and as a man
you belong to the world. Your smile
is angelic, and I know you feel it, too.
The unbearable loneliness in the
early hours of the morning, as the night breaks into
day, divine intuition, the passage of
waiting for intimacy on the exhale, calling
the love song between the lit flame, I
am here, but you’re not. You took your
love, took another, had a child, forgot
me, and now I’m waiting here for love.
I’m a voyeur, waiting for you, studying you,
loving you, while you love another.
And the moonlight, the stars, sing
your glory, your hair feels like soft
rain, Mishka, and your shadow is sore, in a dress
looking like regret. I’m in love with
my cousin, I’m in love with my brother-
in-law, a man who once was my film
lecturer, a man who taught me English
in high school, but they’ve all gone away now,
and all I’m left with is the spell they put
me under, Hemingway’s short stories,
female poets who collapsed and fell apart,
and because of the chemistry of their
brain took their own life. Think of me,
or don’t think of me, with my German
ancestry, sunbathing my pale-king-skin,
think of my sobriety, fake tan, and nobody loves
me, and that’s the truth. You certainly don’t
anymore. Mishka has Stuart. Stuart has
Mishka, and I, I have no one. No love.
I think of the street lights, when the
sun comes up. I watch the dark skies
turn into blue, the branches as-black-
as-shade, the night turns into a breakthrough.
The men in my life leave, leave, leave.
The males in my life have given me
paradise, worlds, opera and classical
music, words, and they taught me to be
myself, on my own. They call me love,
I call them love, or loves, or lovers, or
ex. Fire leaves at the end of the day, and
so does the flame of regret, snow, the
man in my life, the woman in my life, if
my mother had just loved me just a little, said she was proud
of me, instead of calling me “mistake”.