Linda Gregerson
LOVE POEM I
Once, my very best darling, the sea
and the land were all one mass
and the light was confused and hadn’t found
a place to rest. And Emma, love,
my sister’s eyes were not yet there to hold it all
together since she hadn’t yet been born and I
imagine though I never thought to ask them
I believe they must have been afraid,
my own poor bid at being born so nearly having
killed her, not my sister no our mother though
I see looking into your own two eyes that one
as a matter of course entails the other. And
I don’t even think I can properly call it love
what I demanded what I had in mind I
wanted something mine and what you wish for if
the gods see fit to grant it marks the limits
of your soul. And though the years have scoured
the worst of what made me unfit for the gift,
had even then, when you were new, improved
the odds, if all I could think with you
in my arms was taste of bile the thousand ways
of harming you lest the world
should do it for me what’s to become of me now
she’s gone. My sister, love, my one
and longed for only. You said
because it has fallen on you to be my
comfort that’s your daily job you said there’s been
science, the people in labs have done
brain scans and the thing we take for this-
I-am-about-to-do is really just the flash
of the neurons in fear which has evolved to keep us
safe. I didn’t keep her safe. I left
her to the daily harms I might have seen them
coming some of them one of the worst
in any case and then but that was different then
the illness that had only left me bitten
took her altogether in its jaws. I thought sometimes
that she had turned away from me,
I am frightened for you till you do.