Love (In Four Parts)

Love I

————

Eros and Aphrodite:
We pray to you when
struck by love
or lust or both

From whom we seek respite and
salvation and to whom we burn
offerings and seek guidance.

Some decide to turn
away from the old gods
who lust
to the new
more marketable ones
who prefer slow love
and condemn our animal origin.

Discard them all.
Let us find newer gods of
balance and care and energy.
Let us crawl out from these dark ages.

Lust without love:
Taking
Love without lust:
Sacrificing

We seek balance. God of
Amorous Love
Respectful Lust

Let me find a partner
in public and private
Someone to call my love
and be called your love.

Let our love be one
for the history books.

Love II

————

How did your parents
and their parents
fall in love?

Back to the beginning
when the Sky looked at the curves
of the Earth.

Her wide plains,
sharp mountains,
swamps, seas, and deserts.

Did he know desire? Or was
it an animal's inborn duty:
uncontrollable
unteachable
unlearned
unstoppable?

Or did they court each other for eons
as meteors filled the oceans,
and creatures caught between them
lived and died by the billions?

And when the Sky moves gently against
the Earth is that a caress? When
the wind strips the topsoil are we
witnessing a quarrel?

And we feel the tension, friction build
between our feet, and he sends hurricanes
which drench the land, gales which whip
the sea, and she quakes
and sighs
and then they are calm.

They are still together somehow,
depsite their differences.

Love III

————

Cupid: Armed, obese babe.

Your arm is improving!
Your arrows fly across lands and seas
borders both real and imposed.

May your arrows stay sharp,
pierce quickly and leave a small mark

May your arrows strike true,
between the third and fourth rib
on the left, two inches deep.

The kind of arrow which seals the wound
so that you must leave it in or
risk bleeding out.

I snap the shaft and apply pressure.
This arrowhead I will gladly take
to my grave.

Love IV

————

Love dies with the lover,
not the beloved.

We were sixteen and fourteen
and I want to live to one hundred
and eight. I have heard that it is
a holy number to some.

And if I've done the math correctly
that leaves ninety-two years of my
love for you.

Ninety two years of
your love for me.

That is, if you live to one hundred
and six. Or will you outlast me, and
become grandmother so great that it is
tiring to list your children's children?
And have many more years of love?

Or, will you

fall early and leave me here
with years of love left to give?

Which I already signed over to you
in the Eyes of God
and the State of Michigan.

Who will become a ghost of memory, first?
For a brief moment in time one of us
will be in the past
and the other still in the present.

If there are gods and they are just,
then I'll live to one hundred and eight and you
to one hundred and six.

Let it be the old gods and their lust and
their errors and their hubris and their
agony.

Give me their craft and their skill and their
undying furious energy in creating humankind.

This is the new world and the old gods are dead.
We make our own love from necessity. We make it
proudly, kiss on the corner and hold hands down
the street.

And from you I get that furious energy
seeping from my own bones. Dissolving in my own
blood. Ravaging my system with nowhere to go but
out, out, with you into the night and into
the earth where we'll fall apart together
and our remains will make up the next
generation of gods and humans alike.

Find me then and we'll take the fates together,
hold them hostage with their own string and
scissors and gather all the wool and weave
strong, taut rope
that cannot be cut,
so that the new lovers can love
forever.

And when those new gods come down to find us
we'll sit there laughing
drunk on the waters of divination.

We'll ask them if they would have done
the same thing.
And they'll nod
and say yes.