If This New Love Ends
To love is to accept that one might
die another death before one dies one’s own.
Marianne Wiggins
Someone to follow him? I don’t think so.
It is like proposing a second heaven
as if it were attainable because you played
with angels in your childhood and believed
in the wings of their flesh.
A young girl strokes the tight braids
of her hair and thinks she is one memory.
A little eye gleams in the moonlight
hoping to be freed of its love of water, of
foggy nights, of wings, tangled
in the hair of celestial heads.
I would die again for that girl
who received everything the world suggested
as if each moment were an ascension.
But I have used up my deaths in loving him
as he died. And if this new love ends
it will have to go on in me
like a mountain behind a town
when the mountain is made to watch that town
enter flames and smoke
until it at last resembles the essence of love,
that impersonation of his heart’s heart
which, one day in the girl’s second memory,
became a little eye in moonlight
where he lived in her, imperishable
as anything offered to coexist
with the unreplaceable.
Copyright Credit: Tess Gallagher, "Love Poem to Be Read to an Illiterate Friend" from Amplitude: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1987 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press. All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org
Source: Amplitude: New and Selected Poems (Amplitude: New and Selected Poems)