Anonymous

It will be some time
before I can talk of you objectively,
before I can whittle you into prose,
polish your corners into the hard,
clear edges of metaphor.
(My love is nothing like the sun...
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...
O the water of love...)
At this moment you remain as
water unto me,
a vast indescribable ocean that I can
only express by immersion,
by wading out up to my chest
until the waves pound directly against my heart,
a full force of tide.

The ancient poet said that
skin, touch, hands, speak the truth
but I only remember the half-truth:
your hand, in darkness, illuminated by the
flickering of the television screen,
(its distance seeming vast,
unconqeurable to my fingertips,
I needed an excuse...)
You must realize, I will love you only
in past tense,
a momument of syllables that I will
create; I will sculpt you as stone
into the ideals of marble,
but I will never be able to chisel your face
exactly as it was.

I will exaggerate, stain the page
with the spilled coffee of my leftover desires;
I will paint your eyes the wrong color.
For me you will become
a memory. A photograph.
(an abstract painting, defined by
your smudged colors, your faded lines
as Van Gogh remembered stars.)
See, I have already prepared for the
silence
that comes after thunderstorms,
when only the sighs of
waterdrops against wet pavement
indicate that the lightning ever sang
to the clouds.

It is not love that makes me dream
not of you
but of your absence,
that makes me remember the places
in my subconscious
where you should have been
but someone else showed up,
a stranger.
it is not love that makes me wake
with aching muscles, as if from war.
it is not love.

this must be something else.